We know.
We promised a smoking gun – now this? Some mealy-mouthed Lee Harvey Oswald bullshit? For shame!
It's not a cop-out, promise. We'll conclude Jolyon's tale right on schedule. But while researching Part 2 we piled up mountains of evidence that just didn't fit Jolyon’s odyssey - he was a few degrees removed each time. There were mind-control morsels, though: maneuvers bearing his signature every which way you look.
We couldn’t leave it by the wayside. So we repackaged it into a sidequest tackling the perennial question:
Was Oswald mind-controlled?
Yes. Almost certainly. But not in the way you think.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s the first overall MKULTRA Draft pick that couldn’t - all the tools. Promising start. Just never panned out.
He checks every mind-control box: early interaction with the deep state.1 Induced to join the military as step one in a deep cover operation.2 Exposed to a remorseless pedophile.3 In all likelihood, hypnotized.4
Despite their suspicions of Ferrie Oswald's fam didn't put up much of a fuss: Robert signed seventeen-year-old Lee over to the Corps 10/24/56. Oswald completed radarman training in Mississippi,5 then shipped to El Toro, CA, and finally to Atsugi Naval Air Base, about an hour from downtown Tokyo.
Curious choice, Atsugi. Mr. Child Soldier being stationed there wasn’t an accident. It couldn't be – Atsugi wasn’t a random duty station like Berlin, where you played plinko waiting for Soviets to breach the Fulda Gap. Atsugi had a specialized role:
Aviation. In dark corners, you'd hear whispers that the base handled takeoff and landing for some kinda spy plane: the U-2. Which (officially) didn't exist.
We're tickled pink to report that’s also kinda bullshit. Atsugi wasn’t really a U-2 launchpad – at least not primarily.
Pull up a chair. Let’s correct the Atsugi Record.
THE CIA’S ‘FAR EAST HEADQUARTERS’
The CIA base at Atsugi Naval Station was, to quote one of its own, a “plush super secret cover base for Tokyo Station special operations.”6
The same guy - James Wilcott, former CIA finance officer for Tokyo Station - claimed that Oswald was a CIA agent7 and that he’d shelled out money for something called the “Oswald Project.”8 But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Atsugi’s notorious in JFK lore as the launchpoint for U-2 missions into China, which Oswald may have traded knowledge of during his foray into the USSR. Turns out, that may have been a transitory cover the Soviets saw right through.9 Atsugi apparently housed much bigger shit - big enough that the Warren Commission left Dick Helms’s testimony about Atsugi out of its report and questioned no one, and HSCA didn’t investigate at all:10
As early as 1964...Richard Helms had described the CIA’s Atsugi facilities - in particular JTAG [Joint Technical Advisory Group, which operated the U-2] - to the Warren Commission [as]
20 to 25 individual residences, two dormitories, an office area, a power plant, several Butler-type warehouses, and a club building used for recreation and a bachelor officers’ mess.
The Warren Report avoided mention of either JTAG or Detachment C.
A super-secret detachment operating a secret spy plane that basically never flew,11 “operating” (when it actually did) out of the same hangar Oswald stood sentry duty at. That’s odd - unless there’s more to the story.
A former Marine security officer thinks so. According to him Atsugi wore several hats: first as a clandestine training depot, then a weapons testing site.12 Perennial crank Fletcher Prouty claims below Atsugi there are caverns you can drive a truck through.13
Fascinating. Much to consider. Notice anything missing?
There's one dark art skulking unmentioned in the background here – MKULTRA. After all, this was the forward beachhead the biowar accusations of “brainwashed” pilots had emerged from. Atsugi's right there, the last bastion preventing Asiatic communism from breaching containment. It had been since the 50s.14 The Korean War ended in '53, but MKULTRA was just hitting its stride; they weren’t going to stop now. There was a Cold War to win. To that end Atsugi, along with Manila, played a third role:
LSD test site.
See, the CIA dosed lower-ranking GIs (natch) as a sort of test run for Agency recruitment - including at least one marine from Oswald’s unit.15 Listen to this:
Two CIA officials gave [the marine] a variety of drugs and apparently tried to recruit him for CIA service... “They wanted to find out how well you could stand up under pressure. Like what if the KGB agent drops a tab of acid in your drink?”...One of the drugs was LSD. In addition to LSD, the Atsugi-based marine was given mescaline, sodium pentothol, downers and speed.16
Now imagine you’re this teenage dipshit waltzing through the front gate:
So a sprawling spook base blankets 50 acres of Atsugi proper, employing about a thousand souls. Its operations were probably the thing the U2 launchpoint cover story was concocted to hide. Now remember Oswald's official job in MAG-11 (besides studying so much Russian his barracks-mates called him Oswaldovitch)17: radar operator. He stood sentry duty outside the U-2 hangar. His barracks was right next to CIA JTAG.18
Right place, right time. Platoon-mates being Frank Olson'd by the CIA for possible recruitment. Blend for 30 minutes, bake for 30 minutes at 350 and enjoy your Manchurian Candidate Cake. Rolling Stone again:
On another occasion, while Oswald was on guard duty, gunfire was heard. He was found sitting on the ground, more than a little dazed, babbling about seeing things in the bushes. His colleagues, unfamiliar with what in the Sixties would become known as a bad trip, walked him back to his barracks and put him to bed.19
One might even call such an episode...Shavers-like.
“THIS OFF THE RECORD, DADDY-O?”
We'll skip ahead, not because Oswald's sojourn through the USSR and back to the States is uninteresting,20 but because there's a through-line suggested by the Rolling Stone article:
It was a hot summer day in New Orleans in 1963. A young man walked into the office of Edward Gillin, an assistant district attorney. Gillin offered the visitor a seat, but the young man chose instead to stand across the desk from him. He had a question about a drug...this was no ordinary drug, Gillin was told. This drug would affect the social and economic history of the world for the next 200 years. The young man wanted to try the drug, and that was what had brought him to Gillin. He wanted to know if the drug was legal and if he could bring it into the country from somewhere else...[Gillin] also concluded that his visitor was probably a bit crazy. <add RS 390 citation>
Oh fuck yeah. Lee Harvey Oswald was an LSD trafficker?!
Well, hang on. It’s just one limhang source, right? Turns out there's corroboration.21 Which means as of summer 1963 – four years after he left the Marines - Oswald was still in on the government's drug game. Probably scoping out the feasibility of trafficking LSD stateside.
Or as the pros call it, on assignment.
Remember our good friend David Ferrie?22 Oswald may have been done with him – he'd graduated to Patsy-in-Waiting. But Ferrie wasn't done with Oswald. From the Warren Report:
Uh-oh.23
That all sounds...totally factual, given our other sources. “Fairy” was out on bail for a sodomy charge.24 Oswald had been hypnotized in Japan, at least pharmacologically - and he regularly hung out at the Carousel Club.25 Ferrie indeed owned an airplane.26
The pieces are all there. Each mind-control box checked. Oswald was groomed over a decade across three continents. One question remains:
Was he mind-controlled during the events of 11/22/63?
In our opinion, no, for a very simple reason - Oswald didn’t act like it the day of. He acted like a guy who knew he’d been burned, and was trying to get the hell out of Dodge. Hence the desperate bus-to-taxi transfer to his apartment, stopping just long enough to pick up the gun he shot Tippit with. Waiting in the Texas Theatre (probably in the vain hope of making contact with a handler).27 Surrendering to DPD. His cogency at the press meeting.28
It doesn’t wash. They didn’t cast the Manchurian Candidate Sharpshooter Spell on Oswald: they were incrementally tuning him up.
DIVIDED LOYALTIES
Twelve.
That’s the number of Oswald handlers JFK researchers usually settle on, give or take a few.
There’s a couple subspecies. The legend-makers - Priscilla Johnson, for one - and the handlers proper: James Hosty. Dave Ferrie, George de Mohrenschildt, Jack Ruby, Bill Shelly, Ruth Paine. Oswald was playing a slightly different character with all of them, each one inducing him to do different bad things.29 It was enough to drive anybody crazy.
How do you resolve the static from all those conflicting orders? Simple. You tell the subject it’s for greater good. As The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy puts it:
Spiegel explained, “Highly hypnotizable persons, when under the control of unscrupulous persons, are the most vulnerable” to commit acts they never would under normal circumstances. While some think that people cannot be hypnotized to do something against their moral code, they do acknowledge that the person can be convinced that what they are told to do, is actually for the greater good; a belief incorporates the action into their moral code.”30
A proverbial key-bump from the Svengali act at the Carousel whenever Ruby brought Oswald in to blow off steam - enough to keep him functional through the next step in the set-up. Oswald would be reset, mind at ease that he was on the straight and narrow. It fits.
DISAPPOINTMENT
Try as we might (and we really did) there’s no direct connection to Jolyon here. All the receipts suggest he was busy brutalizing pachyderms in Oklahoma, intervening only once Ruby bought the farm. What Oswald’s likely hypnosis in his absence suggests is almost more enticing, though:
Fucker set up franchises.
There’s Ferrie, of course. There’s also William Kroger, who claimed he hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan and later worked under Jolly at UCLA;31 William Bryan;32 George Estabrooks;33 and John R. Smith.34 A squadron of spook shrinks for all your brainwashing needs.
Small world.
THE STRAIGHT DOPE
OK, so Oswald was made ripe for hypnosis throughout childhood and likely - but not certainly - was hypnotized multiple times by Dave Ferrie & Co...but not by Jolyon, the subject of this article. So why retread old ground?
Great question. We’ll let Jolyon’s last victim answer it. His name’s Tim McVeigh, but we prefer to call him Lee Harvey Oswald 2.0.
...after the FBI questioned him in Perry, the U.S. Marshals transported him to Tinker Air Force Base for arraignment. As agents led him to a nearby black helicopter, McVeigh expressed concern for his safety, telling them he feared another Lee Harvey Oswald-Jack Ruby incident and requested a bulletproof vest; a luxury the agents declined to grant him. During the televised ‘Perry Perp Walk ,’ McVeigh’s cold blue eyes stared straight ahead, with “the hundred mile stare of the lost soldier – his tall, thin frame draped in orange prison clothing.”35
Join us next time for Part 2 proper, the conclusion to Jolyon’s whirlwind tour through five decades of American mind-control. Stay golden, Ponyboy.
Oswald joined David Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit (sort of the Hitler Youth for Operation Mongoose hopefuls) 7/27/1955, when he was fifteen. Ferrie even let him into his inner circle, “the Omnipotents.” (Yeesh.) Adler ‘Barry’ Seal, he of Iran-Contra fame, joined the Ferrie unit around the same time and started running guns for Ferrie. Cherry on top - Oswald, notoriously dyslexic, wrote letters in king’s English to the Young Socialist League asking to join. His brother Robert saw Ferrie’s hand in it. See Hopsicker, p. 31, 35, 38.
ibid., p. 41: "[Marguerite Oswald] said. “‘When he was in the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian, who was associated with the Civil Air Patrol, induced him to join the United States Marines.” Oswald never had a chance.
In our opinion Oswald wasn’t molested, but he probably saw something. It would have been hard not to: CAP cadet Collin Hammer claims Ferrie performed “unauthorized physicals” on the cadets. Ferrie didn't stop diddling when Oswald left town: he was arrested 8/8/61 and 8/11/61 for various flavors of pedo shit with five different boys. ibid., p. 42 & 50.
We’ll return to it later, but young Tim McVeigh was also sexually traumatized at an early age. According to his psychiatrists McVeigh's mother would arrange for him to burst in on her naked and have affair partners over while Tim's dad was at work. (Early sexual traumatization, as Dave McGowan taught us, is the single biggest contributing factor to DID.) See Painting, p. 954fn102.
This is actually the juiciest MKULTRA bit, and we wish there were more investigations into it than just Hopsicker’s. Ferrie utilized one of Jolyon’s marquee techniques on a wounded CAP cadet:
“The hypnotism thing with Dave Ferrie was the one thing about him that bothered me the most. ...this kid was twirling a guidon...and it got away from him and it cut his hand up pretty good. ...Dave walks over to him and puts his hand out in front of the kid’s face, like he’s giving him a stiff-arm, and says. ‘You will feel sensation but no pain.' ...and then Dave goes over to him again, and says to him, 'You will stop bleeding.' And he did. ...I learned all this can be done. But it can’t be done with a subject unless you’ve been working, hypnotically, with that subject for a long period of time.
- Barry & ‘the Boys,’ p. 57.
The last bit's debatable, but the conclusion's probably right – Ferrie regularly hypnotized CAP cadets. Deputies also found books on hypnosis in Ferrie’s apartment during the 1961 search and after his murder death in 1967. The HSCA even mentions him practicing hypnosis on his cadets: “Ferrie spent considerable time studying medicine and psychology, (28) especially the techniques of hypnosis which he frequently practiced on his young associates. “ [emphasis added] Available here.
There’s something there. It’s worth noting Hopsicker mentions eight instances of possible Ferrie hypnosis - three from New Orleans PD, one from a CIA agent, one from Jefferson Parish sheriffs, one from an FBI report, one from FOIA’d MKULTRA documents, one from former CAP cadet Ed Shearer, and one from an old wino. That’s 75% spook/cop sources. Hopsicker frequently relied on lawmen in his investigations. It got him access, but made him easier to steer.
Which, we're obliged to remind you, requires a SECRET security clearance. You'd think a rebellious young socialist with a mobbed-up bookie uncle would face an uphill battle getting that clearance. Unless...
ibid., p. 25-26. Available here. (According to DA Wade, Oswald’s CIA payroll number was 110669.)
ibid., p. 3.
Internal CIA report "EIDER CHESS," p.3:
The first overflight of the USSR from Atsugi occurred on 1 March 1958 and this flight was the only and last flight. This flight, as other previous flights by other Detachments, was tracked by Russian radar...
Kennedys & King, p. 7.
HSCA, SENIOR CIA OFFICER PERSONNEL ASSIGNED TO DETACHMENT C, 1957-60. “Detachment C” were the exclusive Top Secret-cleared CIA operators of the U-2. Available here.
Jack Swike, The Missing Chapter: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Far East,p. 8: “Department of Defense did not want any investigations conducted into military matters in Atsugi in the late 1950s because the Marine Corps Nuclear Weapons Assembly Team was located in MAG-11.”
Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 71: “'I went into Atsugi just as World War II ended, taking some of MacArthur's bodyguard in there,'” said Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a former Pentagon-CIA liaison officer (1955-63). 'A monstrous stairway went down into caverns, you could drive a truck into it. A huge underground base. The agency used it for a lot of things.' Ordinarily we wouldn't trust Prouty as far as we could throw him, but Swike managed to track down pictorial evidence of the Atsugi Morlock Tunnels:
As covered in Part 1. In all things Korea, we defer to Jeff Kaye.
Rolling Stone #390, “Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid?”: “Oswald served in the same unit as the source.” The story parrots HSCA’s limhang, but it’s got great color, and documents released by ARRB since have corroborated the relevant sections.
Sound familiar?
This one’s wild. First, the facts:
in 1994...a person claiming to be an ex-Marine stationed at El Toro in 1964, sold a library index card at auction showing a person named “Oswald” (no first name given) borrowed a book titled The Berlitz Self-Teacher: Russian.
Now the sauciness: Rosaleen Quinn, formerly of the Foreign Service and interviewed by the Warren Commission, may have acted as a honeypot for both Oswald and his commanding officers. She flew to California to meet them both, probably to administer oral examination. (Don't say it.)
Kennedys and King, p. 5.
Rolling Stone #390, pg. 22.
It’s anything but. If you’ve a hankering, The Missing Chapter and The Devil’s Chessboard are both great reads.
eg Henry Hurt, Reasonable doubt : an investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, p. 201. These accounts all trace back to Gillin's testimony, but the Warren Commission, FBI, and Rolling Stone versions all wash. Either Gillin's a shrewd operator or he's telling the truth.
Jefferson Parish apparently doesn’t: when we asked for records of Ferrie’s pedo bust they claimed "no records exist."
In New Orleans, not Dallas, at least as far as we’re aware.
Along with Rose Cherami and half the Dallas Police Department.
Actually an airline: United Air Taxi Service. Almost certainly a front for Ferrie’s gun-running. See Hopsicker, p. 56.
It’s tempting to posit John Hurt (or more likely, whoever his local contact was) given Oswald’s later sabotaged attempt to call him, but we’re not sure.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/oswald/
For instance, doing “reinvasion of Cuba” military exercises with Alpha 66 at Lake Ponchartrain. See Hopsicker p. 129:
The camera goes slo-mo to move to another group...One of the men in this group turns to the camera and starts to smile, or smirk, really, the famous smirk of Lee Harvey Oswald, caught on 8mm film training with the CIA’s renegade anti-Castro Cubans.
Cut to a daylight scene. Men shooting guns, posing with weapons. And there are several more long shots of Oswald wearing a black T-shirt and a ball cap, and close-ups of a round-face man with a “fright wig” and “impossibly thick phony eyebrows.”
“It’s Dave Ferrie,” breathed House investigator Robert Tannenbaum, today the mayor of Beverly Hills, California, when he first saw the film. “Nobody else looks like Ferrie.”
Or Ruth Paine getting him the Texas School Book Depository job despite a better one being available, which may have required smuggling weapons for the John Birch Society.
Quoted in Painting, p. 775.
ibid., p. 651.
ibid.
About whom more in Part 2.
Painting, p. 578.
We couldn't find a way to squeeze it in, but if you're looking for angles of the Oswald story you've never seen before, this 2015 essay from Lobster magazine is a real hot ticket: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/lob70-oswald-and-japan.pdf