We Found the MKULTRA Holy Grail, Part 2: "You'll Never Think About the United States of America in the Same Way"
Blood, brainwashing, and synchronicities across a half-century.
This article is dedicated to the inimitable Peter Dale Scott, who showed us the way.
1. THE LONG, WINDING (AND SPOTTY) ROAD
So Jolyon dipped out of Oklahoma and made a beeline for San Francisco. Right?
We wish. During and after his Manson family escapades,1 Jolyon moved on up from the University of Oklahoma to UCLA, boy: bigger office. Better digs. Tastier victim pool Richer research grants.
Between 1963-1966 Jolyon cast a wide net. His trail ping-pongs from Oklahoma City to San Francisco to Oregon and back again. It’s pretty spotty, too - Jolly’s here, then there, then - surprise! In LA.
No rhyme or reason to it. But the few crumbs Jolyon left behind tell us a lot about what he was up to - what he was sent to Cali to do.
Take this little morsel:
Note the date - pre-JFK. Jolyon, the keynote speaker at an Oregon2 psychiatric conference, blabbed to the reporter about “producing mental illness” in otherwise healthy people, using...
Hypnosis, sleep deprivation, and good ol’ LSD.
Barely three months later he was assembling a team to do just that to Jack Ruby. Small world.
The second breadcrumb’s even more relevant to Jolyon’s work on Manson. Before leaving Oklahoma City, Jolyon supervised a multi-year MKULTRA sub-project. Its topic:
Mass Conversion. (Spooky, right?)
From O’Neill:
...by 1967 [West]’d “toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards,” too. Before he moved to the Haight, he’d supervised a similar study in Oklahoma City, hiring informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender “a fundamental change” in “basic moral, religious, or political matters.” The title of the project was Mass Conversion. [CHAOS, p. 348]
“Engender a fundamental change in basic moral, religious, or political matters.” Bit on the nose.
It’s too juicy to take O’Neill at his word. We ran his source down - besides the Jolyon archives, O’Neill consulted the spiritual granddaddy of MKULTRA exposés, John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. According to Marks,
in 1958 the Society [for Human Ecology] gave $5,570 to social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the University of Oklahoma for work on the behavior of teenage boys in gangs. The Sherifs...tried to devise ways to channel antisocial behavior into more constructive paths. Their results were filtered through clandestine minds at the Agency. “With gang warfare,” says an MKULTRA source, “you tried to get some defectors-in-place who would like to modify some of the group behavior.” [Marks, p. 170]
Just some hinky shit on an impressionable group of youngins. Nothing bad ever came of that.
It sounds like a slam dunk. There’s a piece missing though: where’s Jolyon?
The project definitely exists - it’s in the MKULTRA briefing book. Only “it“ doesn’t line up with any one MKULTRA project’s parameters.3 There’s Jolyon’s baby, project 43,4 but that’s on one-to-one mind control, not mass conversion (besides, it was funded through Geshickter). There’s Project 98,5 which is on mass conversion and funded through the Society for Human Ecology, for...
...$9,375. Shit.
For the record we believe Jolyon supervised the mass conversion project - O’Neill tends to pussyfoot around sensitive topics, not receipts. (The chronology and location line up too neatly for Mass Conversion to be anyone else’s baby - 1958. In Jolyon’s backyard. Bankrolled by HEF. Just an odd documentary gap.)
Even taking it with a pinch of salt, the score’s clear. 1958-1963, Jolyon was hypnotizing ‘em all - adults. Riffraff. Mobsters with secrets worth killing for. He spent the better part of a decade amassing research on altering the behavior of numerous populations.6 (Including veterans at the Palo Alto and LA VAs. As Jimmy Shavers and countless other veterans learned the hard way, soldiers were MKULTRA Test Population Numero Uno. Jolyon moonlighting at the VA was shooting fish in a barrel.)
One could call that “field testing.” If one were so inclined.
One final annoying nerd-note before we deliver the goods:
By July 1966, Jolyon had a book deal with McGraw-Hill. Must have been excited - put it on his résumé and everything. The title, we’re not kidding:
Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. Experimental Induction of Abnormal States. (The publisher liked it better.7) Both the OG and revised titles broadcast Jolyon’s future hanky-panky in NorCal - but then the deal fell through. Jolyon, sly as a fox, quietly deleted the salacious title from his résumé.8
Almost like he had something to hide.
KOWALSKI. ANALYSIS!
Three measly breadcrumbs shedding light on a sinister diamond: a how-to book on inducing abnormal states. Jolyon’s brag that he made people temporarily crazy. And in his own neck of the woods, proof-of-concept for using agents provocateurs to make impressionable youth do a psychic 180.
You see where we’re going, and you’re right - the timeline (nevermind the results) suggests Jolyon & Co. were working out kinks in the farm system before risking their method on a big league asset. That’s exactly what they did with Manson - but the how’s as important as the what.
You’ve done the homework. Now kick back and relax - time to examine what ol’ Jolyon got up to once he touched down in SF, smack-dab in the middle of the Summer of Love.
2. HELTER-SKELTER IN THE HAIGHT
Gotta hand it to him, homeboy could grind. Jolyon never stopped evangelizing on the benefits and detriments of mind control hypnosis. This little gem, for instance:
Cultism. Crackpots. Psychopathological disturbance in operator.
Sagelike warnings indeed. By 1968, California was overrun by all three - but Jolyon penned this paper in 1965,9 two years before Manson left McNeil Penitentiary. It was like Jolyon had a crystal ball...or was preparing the medical establishment to accept the next phase of mind-control’s sinister metastasis.
Jolyon couldn’t have had Manson in mind - in ‘65 Manson was still in the slammer. He didn’t get out until March 1967. But in typical MKULTRA fashion, the seeds for developing Manson into a cult leader10 had been planted years before:
It was while counting the days at McNeil Island [from 1961-1966] that Manson began studying magic, warlockry, hypnotism...especially hypnotism and subliminal motivation. He seemed determined to use it to effect control over others.
[The Family, p. 28]
Manson used to come around [to the Galaxy Club] in the mornings according to the club manager of that era [William Deanyers]. The manager was also a stage hypnotist who later opened something called the Hollywood Hypnotism Center. He and Manson used to talk about hypnotism. [ibid., p. 68]
So Manson, who’d already finished the mind-control cursus honorum - early sex abuse, Gibault School and Boys Town,11 sex trafficking - managed to learn hypnotism,12 finagle Universal producer Phil Kaufmann’s phone number,13 get hooked on Scientology,14 and hypnotize a young Danny Trejo,15 all while locked up. Then once he starts terrorizing Tinseltown in ‘68, Manson happens to frequent a club managed by a professional hypnotist, with whom he hones his craft.16 Somebody buy this man a PowerBalll ticket.
Deanyers isn’t a footnote. He’s a test case for the military-to-covert action spook pipeline: men with very special skills who “stumble” into our star-crossed protagonists time after time. O’Neill tracked it down:
I confirmed that Deanyer had learned hypnosis in the navy. And his daughter told me she’d seen her father teaching Manson at the club. [CHAOS p. 382]
The [FOIA] file confirmed that Deanyer...learned hypnotism while stationed in Pearl Harbor with the US Navy,17 between 1942 and 1946. ...he was indicted in 1956 on charges of sex trafficking underage girls. At his trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he’d used hypnotism to induce female students at his school to become prostitutes. ...when they interviewed the victims they still “appeared to be in a trance and would say nothing [redacted] and refused to testify against him.” [ibid, p. 564]
Manson didn’t pilfer the tools he’d use to wage helter-skelter. They were given to him over the better part of a decade - each encounter buffing another obscure (but vital) skill.
Manson got out in March 1967 - miracle of miracles, Jolyon was on a one-year sabbatical from Oklahoma at the time. He arrived in San Fran November 1966 and hung up his shingle at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.
Take a wild guess:
Whose PO told him he should move to the Haight-Ashbury to “soak up the vibes?”
The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was a CIA front.18
Sounds tinfoiled. But once you tally up the acts of God keeping the place open, funded, and staffed by certain spooked-up character there’s no other explanation. The clinic itself was technically illegal since it lacked licensing, but never got shut down. On the contrary - HAFMC got NIMH (National Institutes of Mental Health) funding out the ass for some far-out projects. Here’s one:
The Amphetamine Research Project.
It was exactly what it sounds like. Tracking response to amphetamines through extensive field research and its effects on the hippie population. Insult to injury, this spooky study on Manson’s drug of choice was run by his parole officer - Roger Smith, the “friendly fed.”
Look up “intelligence handler” in the dictionary and Roger Smith’s dweebish mug will look right back. Smith couldn’t have been a more obvious lawman if he tried. For one, there’s his and Manson’s long-term relationship:
Smith told her [Gail Sadalla, Smith’s research assistant] in 1968 that Manson became his charge because he’d already been his probation officer years earlier—in the early sixties, at the Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois. Admittedly, this seemed all but impossible. Manson had never been in the Illinois parole system, and he’d only been incarcerated in the state for a few days in 1956. But Sadalla was convinced that the two had met previously. When I told her that her former boss had no memory of meeting Manson before March 1967, she was stunned.
[CHAOS p.299]
For another, there’s the ludicrous way Manson got paired off with Smith in the first place. See, Manson wasn’t actually paroled to San Francisco - he was paroled to LA. And if he left the City of Angels without permission, they’d lock him up and throw away the key.
Naturally, Manson skipped town the first chance he got. He wound up in Berkeley and called the San Francisco Parole Office with nothing but a “my bad” an a smile - mirabile dictu! The feds didn’t throw Manson in the slammer; they hooked him up with his old pal Roger Smith, sight unseen.19 As a sweetener - don’t scream - they slotted Manson into the San Francisco Project, a “longitudinal rehabilitation” study headquartered at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. (We didn’t forget the Amphetamine Research Project. We’ll come back to it in a moment.)
The San Francisco Project sounds like something your granola-crunching aunt cooked up. Officially,
Manson had been assigned to [Smith] as a part of the so-called San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative progress of newly released felons.20
[CHAOS p. 298]
About the most flagrant make-work program for asset handlers we’ve ever encountered - but it doesn’t stop there. Remember the Amphetamine Research Project? They didn’t even bother hiding its criminality behind a humanistic veneer:
The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as [Smith] dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” [p. 313]
Naturally, the Project produced basically zero results.21 Which is odd. ARP had one staffer (Smith) and low overhead - it was housed in HAFMC, same as the SFP. (How ‘bout that?) After a couple annoying months of hoofing it to downtown SF, Smith propositioned Manson: why not just meet at HAFMC? Between parole visits and ARP/SFP check-ins, Manson spent all his time there anyway. Besides, his girls had the clap like crazy; the good Dr. (Dave) Smith could clear it up, gratis.22
The CIA-funded clinic only healed the great unwashed as a cover - its real job was giving MK-connected researchers 23 a safehouse to monitor Manson’s progress, and probably re-up him.24 Real sweetheart deal.25
Know any rotund researchers eager to horn in on that kind of action?
THE HOUSE ON FREDERICK STREET
Jolyon said it himself: “the house” was a laboratory in disguise.26
He set up shop a stone’s throw from HAFMC to appeal to tabbed-out neighborhood kids - perfect pit trap. Just needed some branches to disguise it. West redecorated hippie chic. You know, stuff the youth are into: posters. Flowers. Uh...bright paint? Hippies could stay as long as they wanted and do whatever, so long as they let the Totally-Not-Grad-Students take copious notes.
That, as West grandiosely called it, was the Haight-Ashbury Project.27 And just like its siblings San Francisco and Amphetamine, HAP did pretty much fuck all from the time it opened in June 1967 until Jolyon abandoned it at the beginning of 1968 - unless, of course, you count acting as a cover. In which case, its produce was bounteous indeed.
Business was bad. Jolly and his lackeys could sport beards and bell bottoms til the cows came home - didn’t matter. They still looked like feds. Nobody came in. One of the grad students even complained to her diary how bored she was. So Jolyon just had to stop by the HAFMC to rustle up some bodies - which Dr. David promptly provided (and of course gave Jolyon a complimentary office).28
Those who’ve been around the block may be feeling deja vu: wait. Wasn’t there another “San Francisco honeypot luring people with psychedelics but actually using them as lab rats” situation? Good memory - you’re thinking of the notorious Midnight Climax, MULTRA Sub-Projects 3, 16, 42, and 149. Climax isn’t relevant to our story, but something to stew on: it started in 1954 and ran simultaneously in San Fran, NYC, and Mill Valley29 until the CIA gave up - at least officially - on LSD in 1963. Then there’s HAFMC, and the crash pad. How many fucking mind-control/sex blackmail dungeons was the government running?30
Whatever Jolyon was up to at HAFMC, it didn’t require burning the midnight oil - he was never there. But the work was simultaneously so sensitive West shot down the grad students’ pleas to help out there.31 Jolly would show up once in a blue moon then dip again.
And that, in O’Neill’s opinion, is all she wrote.32
O’Neill’s investigation strands us at the one-yard-line. He’s able to place Jolly and Manson at Haight-Ashbury...but never the two of them together.
At this point O’Neill takes his ball and goes home. We think you’d have to be a complete idiot to conclude Jolyon and Manson weren’t in some kind of illicit cahoots. As we’ll see, it wasn’t just that they traveled in the same social circles. They used the same MOs.
It sounds like a cop-out, but we’re pretty much done with Manson - because Jolyon was done with him. The crash pad wrapped up in early 1968, having concluded nothing besides, “the hippie movement’s doomed to fail.” You know the rest. Bugliosi’s cleanup crew put the fix in, Manson and the Family got locked up, and Jolyon moved into his forever home at Satan’s Asscrack sorry. UCLA’s psychiatry department.
Jolyon had it made - a bona fide brainwashing method. Institutional backing. Bevies of veterans swarming LA’s streets, the ideal lab rats. We imagine him looking out his office window and smiling at the Hollywood Babylon spread out before him.33
Now the real fucked-up shit could begin.
3. “HERR PROFESSOR IS APPROACHING”
Once ensconced in his ivory tower Jolyon obviously rolled up his sleeves and Did Evil that put Machiavelli to shame, right?
Wrong.
Remember our half-assed farm system metaphor? (It’s OK. Neither did we.) It’s useful here. Jolyon didn’t quit his job as marionette-master by any means.34 But he did refocus - trotting out onto the field only when they needed to call in the big guns.
When he wasn’t impersonating Mariano Rivera, Jolyon was sort of a mind-control general manager. Making key acquisitions, calling big plays - masterminding the Ultras’ rebuild, as it were. Whether he did more damage or less, we’re not sure. But we are sure Jolyon tore through America’s surplus population like an F-5 through a trailer park.
Jolyon broke the bank rounding out his roster.
He acquired William Kroger of Sirhan Sirhan fame outright, and traveled in the same circles as William Bryan.35 (Two confidantes with a deep love for brain implants. Uh-oh.)
CIA-funded experimentation in brain implants dates back to at least 1954. First implants in humans started around 1964, give or take. They started with the usual suspects - soldiers, mental patients, drug addicts.
But remember: there was a war on.
Vietnam became a giant proving ground for all sorts of Agency voodoo - brain implantation made a Great Leap Forward under the Phoenix Program, CIA’s grab-bag of asymmetric warfare projects.36 By the time Jolyon joined the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute in 1969, MKULTRA was (officially) caput - reconstituted as MKSEARCH. SEARCH firehosed money at every dystopian project under the sun: sonic weapons. Directed energy.37 Cybernetics worthy of Dr. Mengele. It paid off: by 1972 they had
electronic chips, smaller than a little fingernail, which can be implanted under the scalp to serve as transmitters/receivers for electrodes buried deep in the brain.
[Aberration, p. 451-452.]
Spooky shit, right? Jolyon (of course) was the face of its propaganda campaign, pitched as an alternative to shooting Vietnam vets chock-full of tranquilizers.38 Even before that, the Satanic wonkery paid off - by 1965 a particularly craven team had hijacked a GI’s brain. Painting again (buckle up. It’s a doozy):
The committee’s report did discus...an otherwise normal and functioning man named “Thomas” who had been hospitalized at a civilian hospital for depression in 1965. The committee did not mention that it was an MK funded hospital, as MKULTRA and similar mind control projects were not yet publicly known. Regardless, while Thomas was not psychotic and had never displayed violent tendencies, doctors Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin deemed him incurable and implanted “multiple electrodes” in his brain, telling his mother that he had simply undergone a “minor surgical operation.” The doctors removed the implants a year later (or so they said) and Thomas was released from the hospital. Weeks later, now exhibiting severe confusion and disorientation, he was arrested for a minor offense and sent to a VA hospital (where West happened to work). Thomas told the VA doctors that the civilian hospital he’d just been released from was “controlling him [by] microwaves [and] electrodes in his brain.” He said they could control his moods and actions, and could turn him “up or down” at will. After hearing his story, the VA doctors, assumedly unknowing of what had actually occurred, diagnosed him as schizophrenic, delusional and paranoid and declared him totally disabled. [p. 454]
The future was now. Cybernetics - elegant or crude, doesn’t really matter - were here. Some of Jolyon’s colleagues thought they were the future of mind control. Jolyon was ostensibly extinct, but our boy wasn’t about to be squeezed out of a growth market that easy. He had a man on the inside. You may have heard of him:
Ronald Reagan. The Governor of California.
LET THE GIPPER WIN ONE FOR YOU
January 1973, Smilin’ Ronny begged Congress for a piddling $1.5M to help him “rid society of this cancer of violence.”
Sounds good - only in classic Reagan fashion, he wouldn’t have been doing anything. Reagan was just the face. The real movers and shakers were already making moves behind closed doors. The money was going to subsidize Jolyon’s magnum opus:
The UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence.
Jolyon’s baby. He came up with it, drafted the proposal, and of course intended to head its staff.39 Governor Reagan was positively giddy.40 It was a big build - mostly the UCLA campus but sprinkled around various state hospitals. (Shocker.) Most of the moolah was slated to come from the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA).41
Even by MKSEARCH standards, Jolyon’s proposal for the CSoV was medieval. Among other tortures it would
test drugs and hormones that could induce or inhibit violence; conduct comparative studies of violence among certain ethnic groups and determine genetic factors...the Center also planned to assist law enforcement agencies develop a computer database containing profiles on “pre-delinquent children” who could then be tracked throughout their lives42...Methods of prediction, modification, and control included solitary confinement, electro-shock, mind-altering drugs, chemotherapy, “programming” individuals with audio and visual stimuli and bio-feedback devices, EEGs and other “electro-physiology” technologies. [p. 457]
In other words, Hell on Earth. (Those with sharp eyes will notice every single proposal was implemented at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Camp Bucca.)43
Remember Jolyon being kind of a hypnosis purist? Turns out that was the mind-control equivalent of learning to shoot with iron sights - hypnosis was Jolyon’s floor, not his ceiling. Jolly wanted it all. In the proposal he wishcasted for
...a test that could detect “violence-disposing brain disorders” before the perp acted on the impulse by implanting electrodes in his gray matter and lobotomizing him - congrats bitch. You’ve been pre-crime’d!
It wasn’t even limited to doing eugenics through cranium-sawing - they wanted to issue a combo APB-electric shock collar. Jolyon’s UCLA colleagues Barton Ingraham and Gerald Smith envisioned
put[ting a] “permanent radio receiver transmitter in the brains of parolees” linked to a computer. They could be tracked and monitored and if the computer detected the “probability of misbehavior,” an electrical shock would be sent straight to their brain and alert police to their whereabouts. As it stood, a number of prototype devices of this sort were already being field tested. [p. 458]44
Jolyon had other Dr. Frankensteins on his wishlist - Ralph Schwizgebel, Vernon Mark, Frank Ervin. All eager to crack open human craniums like watermelons. Pure and simple, Jolyon wanted control - his Center for the Study of Violence was the ultimate means of getting it. A prisoners’ panopticon par excellence, custom-built to decode the human mind and reprogram it at will.
He just had to get it rammed through Congress...
...but he failed.
We’re sad to say the documentary record’s scant - we don’t know who leaked the CSoV proposal. But somebody did, and a shitstorm ensued:45 Congressional hearings. Bald-faced denials by Jolyon that he’d ever proposed doing brain surgery. Revised proposals (nine of ‘em). Exposure of a graveyard’s worth of skeletons in Mark’s, Ervin’s, Ingraham’s closets.
Funding fell through. Jolyon’s grandiose designs met an ignominious end - splat.46 Jolyon was incensed. He blamed “the most frustrating experience of my career” on the goddamn liberals.47 But Jolyon was far from vanquished - he was still a king in all but name. Lord of the Neuropsychiatric Institute manor.
All that time and a bruised ego. What’s a sociopath to do?
You guessed it: invent cults.
LACUNA COIL COP-OUT
Jolyon’s work on the board of the Cult Awareness Network is legendary - using techniques he’d perfected on Shavers, Ruby, Patti Hearst to convince kids they weren’t actually trafficked. Satanic ritual abuse wasn’t real. Intelligence officers definitely weren’t involved.
All of that (and more) is true. It’s some of the gnarliest shit perpetrated by the deep state.
And we’re going to completely shit the bed on writing about it. Not because we’re lazy - because this chapter in Jolyon’s CV has been covered from every possible angle by some real experts. (To name a couple - @DanaDooDah on Twitter for Jolyon’s connections to the Process Church; Nick Bryant for everything cult, Cult Awareness Network, and SRA-related.)
Ahem. Assuming you’re still with us, it’s time for the pièce de résistance to our sordid odyssey:
Tim McVeigh. The face of white nationalism. Plastered over every TV screen in America for half a decade. A villain through and through.
As we’re about to find out, it’s not that simple.
4. COUNTRY ROADS, TAKE ME HOME (TO OKLAHOMA)
Tim McVeigh wasn’t brainwashed.48
Or so he told Stephen Jones the minute Jones sat down for their first meeting.
Jones had a lot to catch up on. He wasn’t McVeigh’s initial lawyer - from April 19 to May 5 McVeigh was represented by two public defenders, Susan Otto and John Coyle. They begged off citing conflict of interest, but before departing for greener pastures Otto threw Jones a bone:
When you know everything I know – and you will soon enough – you will never think of the United States of America in the same way.
Jones and McVeigh talked for ten hours. McVeigh didn’t bring up brainwashing again, but did confess his guilt and deny the existence of John Doe #2. Jones evidently didn’t buy it; in the press conference he compared Oklahoma City to the JFK and MLK Jr. assassinations and McVeigh to - no shit - Lee Harvey Oswald.
It says a lot about the deep state’s fuck-you power that after Iran-contra, they pretty much quit trying to cover their tracks. Jolyon took that tack in the OKC bombing. He and his protégés were all over McVeigh from before OKC up until Tim’s sentencing - so before we get to Oklahoma City, we have to rewind two years to the day before the bombing, to a place called Waco.
[Note re: identity of the assailants.49]
JIM & TIM & JOLLY & DAVID
We’ll say it up top. Waco was an intelligence operation.50
The whole thing stinks. Waco’s synchronicities with Jonestown are complete overkill: charismatic preachers who were probably assets.51 Nearby CIA facilities.52 Deliberate mass killing of cultists by commandos.53 Most importantly, an intelligence agent was present at both.54
Jolyon may have been at Waco; we’re not sure.55 But even if West wasn’t there in person, he was there in spirit, hanging over Waco like the Angel of Death - his “disease model” of cults guided the FBI’s siege doctrine.56
Waco’s barely a footnote in Jolyon’s résumé, but for McVeigh it was a gut punch - he didn’t shut up about it from the day it happened until deep into his trial. McVeigh was so incensed he accidentally exposed his FBI handler while complaining to Nichols.57 At least one of McVeigh’s friends feared that anger might make him easier to mind-control.58 Cui bono?
We won’t dwell on Waco. But Jolyon smearing the crusade against the Davidians with a thin veneer of academic legitimacy, then one of his victims making a guest appearance outside their compound, well...
As Hopsicker would say, small world.
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER…
It’s almost like Jolyon was psychic. He’d have to be, to know all that ahead of time.
The Murrah Building blew up at 9 AM on April 19. By 9 PM, before any details were made public (sound familiar?) Jolyon was doing damage control putting Larry King’s mind at ease on live TV.59 The bombing wasn’t macabre - just the work of some maladjusted lone nut.
Back in Oklahoma, McVeigh was cooling his heels in county, picked up on a gun charge on his way out of the city.60 He was transferred to Tinker AFB April 2. And now it gets real interesting:
McVeigh spent the night in solitary, and met Otto and Coyle the night of the 22nd. And, miracle of miracles...
Jolyon showed up. The good Dr. West trekked far from his UCLA backyard to coordinate an APA mental health triage out of (say it with us now) Tinker AFB.61 Only a couple hours after McVeigh’s next transfer to El Reno Correctional facility, resident patriot whackjob Linda Thompson called the FBI - McVeigh wasn’t alone. Jolyon was there too, hard at work brainwashing him. She was sure of it!62
Jolyon was about to accelerate McVeigh’s mind-control odyssey to Mach 5. He was only able to do that because Tim hovered around Mach 1 - the government got its hooks in early. Age fifteen, McVeigh was busted for trying to hack a DoD database.63 He was a career soldier, an occupation where the apprenticeship is a mass conversion ritual - but in McVeigh’s case, there’s more. McVeigh was in COHORT, an experimental unit binding him, Fortier, and Nichols together from boot to OKC. His therapist was John R. Smith, the sorcerer’s apprentice. And as the Jones team was about to find out, they weren’t representing one McVeigh - because there wasn’t one “Tim McVeigh.” There were several.
McVeigh had been psychometrically tested since at least trying out for Special Forces selection.64 During his incarceration at El Reno, McVeigh was repeatedly examined by a whole mental health team, and the results were...well, here:
The prevailing opinion of all the Jones Team mental health experts, including Smith, was that McVeigh possessed “dissociative" abilities” which, having seemingly taken on a life (or lives) of their own, led them to diagnose him with a “dissociative" disorder.” ...The Jones Team mental health workers’ clinical diagnoses...depict [McVeigh] as a narcissistic, fragmented, paranoid, delusional, psychotic, suggestible, amnesiac man suffering from PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder.65
Bad enough on its own. Remember McVeigh’s gun-show buddy fretting that he was highly suggestible? Turns out he wasn’t just whistling Dixie:
[McVeigh] was, Halleck informed the attorneys, “highly suggestible.”
Uh-oh. That tracks perfectly with clinical characteristics of DID.66 And judging from the receipts, McVeigh had the ‘extreme manifestation’ that tends to produce multiple personalities.67
OK. McVeigh’s a headcase, his mental health team and lawyers agreed he contained literal multitudes, and OKC was fucked six ways from Sunday. What does any of that have to do with Jolyon and MKULTRA?
Glad you asked.
By March 1996, the McVeigh thing was getting messy. Jones Team investigators were pulling on threads linking the White Power Movement to FBI instigation. McVeigh was spouting leaks, too: every once in a while he’d confide something about “the mission” or “the Major” who’d given it to him. McVeigh was also disintegrating right before his lawyers’ eyes, the result of PTSD after months of confinement. Or so Dr. Smith said.
They needed someone specializing in PTSD. Someone who’d treated POWs and understood their unique plight. Jones inquired after who that might be. Guess who Smith had in mind?
Nailed it. West was “interested in the effects of that [brainwashing] at one time...that’s how he originally made his name.”
Small world.
WHY DON’T WE PASS THE TIME WITH A LITTLE SOLITAIRE?
March 14, a Jones Team lawyer called Jolyon at UCLA. Despite this being his first interaction with Jolyon, the lawyer somehow anticipated his thoughts, remarking, “I understand you’re willing to come down and see Tim.”68
Well, sure he was. So long as they were willing to pay Jolyon’s fee, about double the going rate.69
And as tantalizing as that nugget is, the trail immediately goes cold - there’s no record of further Jones/Jolyon communiques.70 Painting didn’t give up that easy, though. As she divulged in 2023:
After Aberration was published...I was contacted by one of the members of that mental health team that had met with McVeigh. What they told me was that they had signed a non-disclosure and had never spoken about the case before, and they had checked with their lawyer, and because I had used their name in the book, I had broken the seal. I published it, because I found the names and I put it out there - technically that gave the person the ability to talk to me. They said, “I read your book.” No argument - they at no time said I was wrong, but they said, “I want you to come and I want to talk to you,” and they said, “I never even told my spouse this because I was legally not allowed to, but I want to talk to you about this.”
At that point, I thought I had taken the West-McVeigh connection at far as I possibly could, I was working on the second book...this person says, before you talk to me, I want you to sign something saying anything you publish using my name, you’ll run it through me first, and because I wasn’t planning on continuing to write about McVeigh specifically, and because I was like, “What the fuck, I have to hear what this person has to say,” I did sign this thing. So I went out and I did talk to them...eventually, I bring the conversation around to what I really want to know: “Do you know if a guy named Jolyon West from UCLA, did you ever hear of him visiting McVeigh?” And the person says no, but kind of flew past it. ...I bring it around again. And at that point, I am told to turn off my tape recorder. And I turn off the tape recorder. And they say, “I never understood why they kept sending him in there.” He was referring to Jolly West.
AT LAST
Painting’s book makes sense of the contradictory McVeigh narratives by organizing them into archetypes - the Lone Wolf. The Guilty Agent. The Pack of Wolves. The Experimental Wolf. Each archetype tells versions of the truth to varying degrees at varying times - when you piece them together it plays like a guy in bed with sinister forces barely keeping his head above water.
That addition game goes a long way toward solving the OKC Enigma, but not all the way - it actually fits worse than falling back on McVeigh’s alter egos, his intel connects...
And his brainwashing. Everyone who knew McVeigh agreed Waco made him snap (which might have been why he was sent there). He told a version of the truth to Otto and Coyle; but whatever happened between April 22 and May 5, when Jolyon was running “Operation Heartland” out of Tinker, it convinced McVeigh to flip the story on its head. Despite all that, Tim Tuttle McVeigh still felt compelled to blurt out “I’m not brainwashed!” to Stephen Jones out of nowhere.
And then this. During the trial, McVeigh repeatedly asked for Jolyon’s protégé John Smith, forsaking all other shrinks. The cherry on top: Jolyon dropped in every so often for a tune-up. Just to keep him on message.
Brainwashing, no matter how you slice it. It begs the question: how? How does something so outlandish even fucking work?
For once, we have all the answers. Step into our tent. All us to unveil the MKULTRA SMOKING GUN.
GUNSMOKE
It’s tempting to blow your load early - God knows we did the first few times. But this baby’s worth taking your time on. Stick around. We’ll break it down one page at a time.
Stick with us a little longer. We’ll take it page by page.
PG. 1
Fatigue may be worthwhile in overcoming the resistance of a subject who is attempting to keep from being hypnotized, but that it may actually interfere with the efforts of the fully cooperative subject to enter the hypnotic state.
West starts with fatigue, the Swiss Army knife of coercion. Turns out it’s bad for hypnosis. Or at least counterproductive; keeping someone awake too long saps their resilience, but actually makes hypnotizing them more difficult.
PG. 2
Chlorpromazine. A valuable adjunct in preparing a patient for hypnosis...the anxious, resistant, or hostile subject who is pre-medicated with chlorpromazine can be expected to respond favorably in a shorter period of time.
First up for review from Jolyon’s bottomless medicine cabinet: chlorpromazine. Basically has the same effect as Friday night happy hour - loosens you up, makes you more open to suggestion, but instead of flashing home hunk your hoots you’re ready to obey Jolyon’s every command.
PG. 3
Amphetamines. All caused [a] relatively uniform increase in the difficulties of producing the hypnotic trance...however, the use of amphetamine (or similar analeptics such as Ritalin) was of value in making more accessible to suggestion.
Ah-ha. Diligent readers will recall a huge part of the Manson case revolved around Bugliosi hiding what exact drug cocktail Charlie fed his children before sending them out creepy-crawling - our suspicions about Robert Smith were right. It wasn’t just LSD. Speed was part of it too.71 Whaddaya know - Jolyon tested out the same thing.
Amphetamines were apparently a mixed bag: they made actually inducing the trance way harder, but did render them more open to suggestion. Dynamite for a guy like Manson.
PG. 4
Lysergic Acid diethyl amide (LSD).
Hoo daddy. MKULTRA’s White Whale! At last! Can’t wait to show my...
...there was nevertheless a definite interference with hypnotizability. At least some of the effects of LSD can be overcome by hypnotic suggestions.
...friends. Shit.
Turns out LSD’s a fucking dud - it makes hypnotizing people harder. West could mitigate its effects through hypnosis, but the drug didn’t help get them there.
PG. 6
Painful sensations can be produced by suggestion alone. ...pains which are purely the result of hypnotic suggestion may lead to exactly the same responses of the autonomic nervous system as genuine noxious stimuli administered by various techniques. ...the reaction to a mild stimulus may be made to resemble the reaction to a severe stimulus if the mild stimulus is given together with hypnotic suggestions that it is severe.
Holy shit.
West can induce pain without even touching you - because he’s fooling your mind, and the mind calls the shots, he doesn’t have to. Like Indy being burned by the voodoo doll in Temple of Doom. What’s more, he can dial the pain up on a “mild stimulus” - punching someone in the face, say - by suggesting it’s something worse, like a sledgehammer.
...approximately one person in three can be trained to protect himself from the experience of pain...a subject who is suitably trained can protect himself from pain sensations occurring as long as one month subsequent to the post-hypnotic suggestion.
Pain don’t hurt. At least not if the good doctor tells you it don’t.
PG. 7
Current experiments indicate that false memories may successfully be inserted and true memories removed in suitable subjects. ...it has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.
There it is. MKULTRA.
West can cut out bits of memory film and splice in false ones - he can make you believe something that happened, didn’t happen.
At least in “suitable subjects.” More on that in a moment, but for now a hypothetical - if only there were some process for identifying suitable subjects. A multi-axial psychological battery, perhaps.
There’s more, though. Turns out West has power over time itself:
[It’s possible to] Progress a person in time in order to alter his relationship with the examiner. ...a person can be told that it is now a year later...so that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discuss.
West can snap his fingers and poof. Just like that - this strange portly guy’s actually your bowling buddy. You’ve known him your whole life, you’d tell him anything!
And last, maybe the most chilling:
...many of the expected reactions to certain types of stress may be brought about by hypnotic suggestion alone.
He doesn’t need a boa constrictor to make Indy panic; he can convince Indy the bullwhip is the snake.
5. POST MORTEM
If the paper’s a goldmine, the body of “respectable” conspiracy work getting out in front of it is the silvermine.
Our whipping boys McCoy and Kinzer insisted MKULTRA isn’t real in multiple books over three decades. Confronted with evidence to the contrary, Kinzer dipped; McCoy, though we haven’t gone to the mat with him, would likely hem and haw. Well, yes. But Jolyon was an outlier...
Before that happened, some choice nuggets slipped out. Kinzer, McCoy & Co. play the same shell game - McCoy doesn’t spare us the grisly details of Gitmo. Kinzer cops to Gottlieb’s exotic MKNAOMI poisons.
There’s no explanation big enough to explain their omission of MKULTRA’s success that’s small enough not to matter. So again: cui bono?
But he wasn’t. You’ve seen that - Jolly was the practitioner par excellence of mind-control, sure. But before, during, and after his tenure, a parallel network mind-controlling some of the twentieth century’s biggest criminals was hard at work. Dave Ferrie. Manson. Jolyon protégés William Bryan and William Kroger, who both claimed they hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan.72 Not to mention John Smith, sweet enough to charm the pants off old sourpuss Tim McVeigh. Put it like this: Tim McVeigh’s various archetypes all told various versions of the truth. With Jolyon’s help, the Lone Wolf archetype won out - I acted alone, white power, blah blah blah.
In light of the paper, it’s impossible to see Jimmy Shavers, Jack Ruby, Manson and his cult, or even Tim McVeigh as anything except Manchurian Candidates.
They all did something, or were framed to look like they’d done something - and they all denied it. But after a liiittle tinkering - the exact tinkering Joloyn bragged about in his paper - slap the cuffs on me, G-Man. I did it!
As you’ve probably noticed, these luckless bastards tend to fit a certain profile. And not the John Douglas bullshit either - significant mental similarities. Chinks in their psychic armor that Jolyon could ram a spear through.
“SURELY YOU NOTICE A PATTERN EMERGING HERE?”
Every patsy pulled into Jolyon’s orbit over five decades shared common traits and a common fate. Line ‘em up side by side and it’s even more blatant/obvious:
As the kids say, Jolyon had a type.
True lone gunmen will recognize this as a poor man’s Programmed to Kill: find the mentally-malleable early on. Steer them into jobs dialing up their suggestibility and deadliness, brainwash them for a specific task - then once the task’s done make them go away with some help from the cleanup crew. McGowan’s mind-control dialectic - MKULTRA to serial killers to Columbine to weekly mass shooters - is right here, in embryonic form. Jolyon pioneered it.
6. FINAL COUNTDOWN
Remember our tortured metaphor from the first article? “Articulation points of the state’s mailed fist?”
Jolyon and his mind-control franchisees midwifed its thumb - altering signal inputs to control the mind, leveraging that control to deep-six America’s milquetoast attempts at liberation. And they got away with it.
Vietnam magnified everything Jolyon pioneered a thousandfold; the Internet...hell. Ten thousand. A million, maybe. It’s all one conspiracy - MKULTRA blending seamlessly into strategy of tension, gradually escalating COG.73
That’s all she wrote on Jolyon - he didn’t last long after OKC. Plagued with metastatic cancer, Jolyon convinced his son to mercykill him. Hope it hurt.
There’s a question being begged somewhere in here though, an inverse of the niggling liberal OK but MKULTRA’S over now:
Why would they ever stop?
Exactly. They didn’t.
The deep state took what worked, discarded what didn’t, and whelped a whole new generation of Manchurian Candidates sleek with enough spit and polish to pass the eye test - T-1000s to McVeigh’s clunky T-800. Powerful infiltrators capable of completing the takeover.
But that’s a lesson for another day.
Join us next time when we tackle their Grand High Poobah in our ongoing series Thoroughly Modern Manchurian Candidate, Part 1: The Apotheosis of Barfsack Ocrumbo.
.من النهر إلى البحر
Stay golden, Ponyboy.
From ~1967 onward.
There’s no direct evidence that Jolyon was there to mind-control anybody, though the Beaver State stinks to high heaven. Vernon Plumlee was from Corwallis, about an hour outside Portland; Diane Von Ahn returned there after leaving the family. The most enticing lead is Diane’s boyfriend William Van Sickle: he was Manson’s jailhouse buddy, got Susan Atkins a job, and taught the girls to “creepy crawl” (sneak into houses unawares). So far as we know, there’s only one MKULTRA subproject located in Oregon, which was laser-focused on bombarding prisoners’ testicles with radiation.
John Marks, The Search for the Mandchurian Candidate, p. 170: “the Society” is the Society for Human Ecology, another name for the HEF.
there’s also this document, which at least one crank believes Jolyon was the supervisor of. We haven’t been able to make heads or tails of it.
The younger and more impressionable the better: Susan Atkins met Manson at nineteen. His trifecta of speed-LSD-hypnosis was so effective Atkins wasn’t able to slip Manson’s mental vise-grip even ten years later. O’Neill, p. 382:
When he’d evaluated Susan Atkins for a parole hearing ten years after she’d separated from Manson, she was still under his control. “I can’t get him out of my head!” she told him. “He’s still in my brain!”
(We can’t help mentioning that despite Manson picking up Atkins at nineteen, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey had already been working on her: according to Atkins she was LaVey’s Friday night dancing queen when Manson commandeered her services.)
Uploaded here. Worth a gander, if only to see Jolyon’s narcissism on display even when negotiating through snail mail.
O’Neill, p. 349: “By the early seventies he removed the title from his résumé and never mentioned it again.”
West, Louis J. (1965). Dangers of Hypnosis. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 192. Located here. AMA still paywalls it fifty-nine years later, which says everything you need to know about doctors.
Stupid term, but it’ll do. For the record we’re with McGowan on this one - Manson was one prong in a strategy of tension pincer move, an asset deployed to defame the antiwar hippies.
Dave McGowan, Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, p. 137 and passim.
Sanders, p. 28: Utilizing the prison radio station, Manson planted what his cell partner called ‘posthypnotic suggestions’ in all the prisoners at McNeil Island Penitentiary.”
The basis for his later association with Dennis Wilson and the rest of the Beach Boys, which O’Neill covers in detail. More here.
Sanders, p. 29: “‘Charlie was hooked on this new thing called scientology,’ says [Ma Barker Gang member Al] Karpis...’the kid tried to sell a lot of other cons on scientology but got strictly nowhere.’” More on Scientology in a moment.
At least as Trejo tells it.
It’s actually worse than that: the Galaxy Club was Grand Central Terminal on Manson’s journey to cult leadership. Sanders, p. 68:
Manson probably met the bike club, Jokers out of Hell, at the Galaxy. Some of Manson’s lesser-known girlfriends, with names like Mouse and Venus, were also frequenters of these establishments. Sunset Strip seems to be where Manson first made contact with the satanic variety of bike groups, with names like The Satan Slaves, The Jokers Out of Hell, The Straight Satans, The Coffin Makers and other snuff-oriented groups of young men...with some of the groups like Straight Satans and particularly The Satan Slaves Manson had deep associations during the following year of violence.
Remember, L. Ron Hubbard was also in the Navy 1941-1945, though he spent most of it in Boston. He’d also been a patient of navy psychiatrist Joseph Thompson in the 1920s. Yet Deanyers and Hubbard both practiced and taught hypnosis. Small world.
funded through a half-dozen MKULTRA fronts, in particular the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). NIMH was outed as a CIA slush fund in 1976. It functioned basically the same as HEF or Geschickter: inundate “our” guys with money for MK-adjacent projects, throw the mental-health people some shekels once in a while so it’s not too obvious. O’Neill, p. 484: “[HAFMC founder Dave Smith] clearly states in the book that Roger Smith’s ARP [Amphetamine Research Project] was funded by a $37,000 grant from the NIMH in May 1968, and several papers published by Smith and his colleagues at the HAFMC acknowledge the NIMH for funding.” [Emphasis added.]
$37,000 for studying the same drug Manson used to brainwash the Family into murdering Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas. How fortuitous.
O’Neill, p. 296: “When [Manson] called up the San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith.” This puts us around April 11 1967.
Bangup job on that monitoring, Roj. (NIMH gave Smith bookoo bux for this one - 275,000 smackaroos. ibid., p. 547.)
Unlike the San Francisco Project, which should have produced a few phone books’ worth. ibid., p. 307: “according to Smith, [the San Francisco Project’s] clients were to be tracked, analyzed, and recorded in a separate file. But it practically goes without saying: that file was missing, too.” ARP files also disappeared in a daring nighttime theft right after Manson was arrested for the Tate-LaBianca murders. Nothing else was taken. (Dabbing on us, I say!)
ibid., p. 314. We’re not kidding. Smith actually went there.
Dr. Dave and Roger Smith, who both did research work on - you guessed it - LSD.
We should emphasize Manson was Smith’s only parolee. (Average caseload per PO was ~70.)
In our opinion, Smith wasn’t doing much intelligence work with Manson. (That was left to his street contacts and possibly Jolyon.) Smith was there as combination rubber stamp/get out of jail free card/speed supplier for Manson’s ongoing mind-control program.
JR Allen, LJ West, “Flight from violence: hippies and the green rebellion.” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 01 Sep 1968, 125(3):120-126: “To study them in their natural habitat, we set up an apartment or ‘pad’ in the Haight-Ashbury district.” We shouldn’t be surprised, but throughout the paper West talks about hippies like they’re a different species. (RIP Tusko.)
funded by yet another CIA front, the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc.
We’ll get to why it’s important in a moment, but David Smith was doing the worst dumb himbo routine we’ve encountered in a long time. O’Neill, p. 346: “[Smith] assumed that West, like himself, was diagnosing ‘psychedelic patterns in the counterculture.’”
O’Neill’s summary of Midnight Climax is fine, but he doesn’t do it or its protagonist George White (who we’re convinced is the real-life Judge Holden) justice. Poisoner-in-Chief treats the White/Gottlieb Abbott and Costello act with appropriate detail.
Hundreds. Maybe thousands.
O’Neill, p. 350.
In our opinion, Jolyon was there in a similar capacity to Mass Conversion: watching junior practitioners put into effect techniques he’d pioneered, jumping in as needed. There’s also a metric fuckton of documentary evidence the Smiths were Jolly’s intellectual nieces and nephews, eg O’Neill, p. 326: “‘I happened to study amphetamines before they hit the Haight,’ [David Smith] said. ‘The Haight didn’t give me the idea. It’s kind of like a historical accident...I was studying LSD before LSD hit the Haight [too].’” (Even that’s underselling it - D. Smith’s grad work was on social response of rats when dosed with LSD and speed. Roger Smith, for his part, ran the ARP.)
O’Neill’s work tracing the come ON now! amount of overlap amongst Jolyon, the Smiths, and their almost perfect prediction of the Manson Family dynamic is some of his best shit. We just wish it had been written by an author more willing to draw conclusions.
Disclosure: we met Hollywood Babylon’s author, auteur filmmaker (and onetime Beausoleil pole-smoker) Kenneth Anger in our wayward youth. Unfortunately we were dumber than bird shit back then, so it was a big nothingburger. Anger opened his shirt, flaunted the LUCIFER tattoo (which had aged poorly), mumbled a hex at us, and left.
For example, his role in the Patti Hearst kidnapping, which we’re going to skip (not because it’s uninteresting; because we’re not in the mood for acute schizophrenia). Basically, Jolyon did it, similar to how he ‘did’ Manson. Take-home points:
DeFreeze was incarcerated at Vacaville 1969-1972. He joined an all-star convict roster (household names like Bobby Beausoleil, Edmund Kemper, Timothy Leary, Manson, and Erwin Walker).
Vacaville was the proposed site for the failed UCLA Violence Project, an original Jolyon production. Depending on who you believe, DeFreeze was or wasn’t electro-shocked into obedience - but as we’ll see, Jolyon didn’t need electrodes to program people.
During Hearst’s trial, Jolyon was one of three MK docs to testify (the other two were Robert Jay Lifton and Martin Orne). See Painting, p. 650-651.
Jolyon also interviewed Hearst for forty hours after her arrest, at the end of which he concluded (surprise!) she’d suffered induced disassociative identity disorder.
Both men alluded to utilizing an integrative mind-control method: hypnosis, electrical stimulation of the brain, and literal brain implants (about which more in a moment). Painting. p. 650.
Even for CIA shit, it’s brutal. Read The Phoenix Program if you have a strong stomach, but Painting summarizes it just fine. p. 450:
a CIA neuro-surgeon...implanted electrodes in the brains of Vietcong prisoners...CIA agents then placed them in a room, gave them knives, and then set about stimulating various portions of the brain in an effort to induce them to become violent. After the experiment ended, US Army Special Forces Green Berets...took them out back, shot them and burned their bodies.
2024-heads will feel a twinge in the small of their backs, because all these nightmares became real by 2020. It’s beyond the scope of our article, but sonic weaponry was the torture du jour for the entire Waco Siege.
ibid., p. 451 and passim.
ibid., p. 455.
There’s no hard evidence that Jolyon did any work on Ronny, but we have our theories. Reagan had been a deep state flunky since his days at MCA, and those thumbscrews only tightened as he climbed the political ladder. Cf. Dark Victory and Reaganland.
ibid., p. 456.
Grim to admit, but even though the CSoV was axed before they could pull it off, that’s exactly what they do now. Its most recent incarnation doesn’t even have the ‘human frailty’ excuse - it’s pure Skynet shit. We live in the world MKULTRA created.
All those GWOT establishments and tortures were Jolyon’s intellectual grandchildren. The “reverse-engineered SERE techniques” used by Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell is just gobbledegook for “MKULTRA torture.” (Remember, Jolyon et al. developed SERE to resist “Communist brainwashing” post-Korea. They would impose MK agony, then constructively brainwash soldiers to resist that stimulus.)
Tim McVeigh - whoever “Tim McVeigh” really was - is morally gray at best. But in light of Jolyon’s master plan, McVeigh’s repeated gifting of The Turner Diaries (where the protagonist destroys a supercomputer storing all white Americans’ biometric data) and his ranting about being microchipped can’t just be handwaved away. McVeigh was being tinkered with (as Painting goes on to prove, and we’ll discuss).
Painting, p. 457.
Or did they? It’s too big to do justice to here, but some choice highlights:
“The LEAA withdrew its funding...in reality, they dropped only 2 or 3 of the 537 ongoing ethically dubious projects.” [Painting, p. 459]
The whole “stick a chip in you” conceit never stopped, and in fact had a rocket booster strapped to its ass post-9/11, mostly through DARPA projects. Obama, for example, sponsored the creation of a Chilean project researching nanochip implantation in the brain.
Anything Whitney Webb has written on “neural rights” as the event horizon of techno-capitalism (NeuraLink, for instance).
ibid., p. 450.
Painting, p. 584 and passim.
probably Delta Force, as reported in the May 5, 1995 New York Times, “Investigators Puzzle over the Last Moments of Cult.” “Two-thirds of the bodies examined in autopsies so far had bullet wounds of some kind.” & May 18. 1993 Washington Post, “Koresh Wound Not Typical of a Suicide, Doctor Says.“ Something terrible happened at Waco.
One of many in PATCON, or Patriot Conspiracy. An FBI program to stage - or incite - sting operations as pretexts for proto-COG measures. Painting, p. 823 & 849: “[undercover PATCON agent] Matthews said Ruby Ridge and Waco were PATCON operations;” “The idea was that if several of these events occurred in the same time frame, the FBI could roll in and say, ‘we’ve got a rebellion going on.‘“ [Note: in her research, Painting cultivated Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City lawyer. Jesse’s brother Kenneth Trentadue was murdered by the FBI because of his resemblance to Richard Lee Guthrie, at that time lead suspect for John Doe. #2. Jesse’s quest for revenge is the reason we know about PATCON.]
Walter Browart, Operation Mind Control, p. 495: “David Koresh had an extensive CIA background.” For Jim Jones, see John Judge, The Black Hole of Guyana: “[Jones] told them he worked with U.S. Navy Intelligence. His son, Stephan, commented that he made regular trips to Belo Horizonte, site of the CIA headquarters in Brazil.”
In Waco’s case, the Leadership Management Institute, in addition to its long history of intel-connected slayings. For Jonestown, Judge: “The U.S. embassy in Georgetown housed the Georgetown CIA station. It now appears that the majority and perhaps all of the embassy officials were CIA officers operating under State Department covers.”
5/5/95 NYT & 5/18/95 WaPo for Waco. For Jonestown, Judge again: “at the same time, British Black Watch troops were on ‘training exercises,’ with nearly 600 of their best-trained commandos. Soon, American Green Berets were on site as well.”
Tim McVeigh at Waco. He arrived around March 10. For Jonestown, take your pick, though we’re partial to Richard Dwyer.
Painting p. 528: “West was rumored to have been present at the Waco siege itself. [While] the rumor remains unsubstantiated.”
ibid., p. 528-529: “By 1993, West had been on a ‘43-year mission to rid the world of cults’ and appeared frequently to offer his learned opinions about the events at Waco...the type of rhetoric used by West and his cult-busting CAN colleagues aided the FBI and ATF’s dehumanizing disinformation campaign against the Davidians and reinforce[d] the unfortunate perception that the events at Waco had been necessary.”
ibid., p. 561: “McVeigh, in a conversation with Terry Nichols, accidently let it slip during ’a fit of rage’ that his ‘high level handler’ was none other than Larry Potts, lead FBI agent at Ruby Ridge and the siege at Waco.”
ibid., p. 543: “[USMC vet Walter McCarty] had even watched his young friend cry while they watched a video about Waco. He described McVeigh as impressionable and opined that frustrated men like McVeigh make ‘great brainwashing material.’”
Ironically the “McVeigh” McCarty thought he knew was brainwashed material - Tim Tuttle, one of McVeigh’s many alter egos. Painting’s work demonstrating McVeigh’s multiple personas and his DID is some of her best.
ibid., p. 583.
not as innocuous as it sounds. The CIA (or possibly ATF) faction of OKC probably had eyes on McVeigh and arranged for him to be picked up, to avoid the FBI tracking him back to Elohim City, where our good friend Andreas Strassemir hung his hat. ibid., p. 577: “the FBI had a lead on Tim the day of the bombing or perhaps the next day, [had already] tracked him to Perry and they wanted to wait until Tim bonded out to follow him and see where he went.” At the last minute, however, the ATF tracked McVeigh to the Perry jail, which really ‘screwed things up for the FBI.’”
ibid., p. 583: “Dr. Jolly West, then head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, showed up in Oklahoma City to coordinate a psychological trauma team for survivors and first responders on behalf of the American Psychological Association. The trauma team, along with several other disaster relief initiatives, used Tinker as a coordinating and staging site.”
Shitcoat situation. As we’ll see, Linda maybe biffed the when, but she nailed the what.
Others agreed that something happened to Tim between his arrest and the perp walk. ibid., p. 577: “Terry Nichols’s ex-wife Lana Padilla told Diane Sawyer that the McVeigh she saw on television during the perp walk was ‘not the same person,’ there was something off, something unrecognizable about his face. A handful of other people made similar statements.”
Or claimed to be; McVeigh was doing WarGames feats of hackery before most even knew what a modem was. ibid., p. 189: “[His close friend Steve said] [H]e would say he had busted into other people’s computers and would get convinced he was going to get caught. He’d tell me ‘the feds have my house tapped; it’s just a matter of time before they bust me.’ & ibid.: “‘One day we were hacking around and a message came up ‘you are all on the system illegally and we will turn off your phones.’ [The] next day I was scared to take out the garbage. I thought the cops would come. [...] I got into White Sands Missile Range computer system.” (Other designated perps who crossed paths with the law early include Adam Lanza and the FBI shooter.)
ibid., p. 230: “A recruitment error however, landed [McVeigh] in the experimental Cohesion Operational Readiness Training (COHORT) unit. The COHORT program kept soldiers together from Basic Training throughout their entire three-year enlistment cycle, with the goal of unit cohesion, esprit de corps, advanced group training and commitment to the unit’s mission.” Recruitment errors feeding McVeigh into a small unit that would reunite after they all got out for one last government ‘mission.’ Small world.
“The Jones Team eventually obtained [were] the results of McVeigh’s psychological exams, which he took on April 5, 1991...The military records specialist retained by the defense team noted that the results of the SSCT were ‘of particular note’ but did not elaborate. In addition, here marked that he (for unstated reasons) was ‘unable to reevaluate’ the results of McVeigh’s Army ‘MMPI Profile Report.’” [emphasis added]
MMPI, or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, may as well be renamed “Spook Selector.” It’s used for CIA, NSA, and Special Forces selection, and was developed at the University of Minnesota, which also ran MKULTRA Sub-projects 5, 17, and 25.
ibid., p. 596: “In extreme manifestations, those who suffer from DID’s may ‘call themselves different names’ and ‘have different personality states,’ who appear and ‘take over’ the primary personality. Those displaying symptoms of DID tend to be highly suggestible and easily hypnotizable.”
Besides Tim Tuttle, there was Robert Kling, Daryl Bridges, Shawn Rivers, and Sgt. Mac (who may have been Strassemir). Each persona had its own mannerisms and affect. See Painting, p. 599 & p. 755fn 103.
ibid., p. 626.
ibid., p. 627.
Except Jones cared enough to lie about it: When Painting asked him in 2007 if Jolyon had any involvement with McVeigh, Jones claimed to have “no knowledge of first-hand involvement.” What a lawyerly response.
O’Neill, p. 263: “In a 2009 documentary, Kasabian contradicted her testimony, saying all the killers had taken speed on the night of the Tate murders.”
Painting, p. 650 & p. 784fn25.
Continuity of government. Plans include FEMA camps, martial law, suspension of the Constitution all catalyzed through deep events - think JFK, WTC93, OKC, 9/11. Peter Dale Scott’s "Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History" summarizes it beautifully.
It's a sad state of affairs that most readers of this material will completely fail to understand its significance. For me, I leave with a few important gaps filled: the name of the project between MKULTRA and MKNAOMI, and a few more perpetrator shrinks to add to my ever-growing list.
Have you ever read Wendy Hoffman's memoirs? They will open your eyes a bit more, if you can handle it.
https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/search?Keywords=Wendy+hoffman
This article showed up on my feed, so I'm Jumping into the middle of it... don't know if you've spoken to the topic, butb right off the bat I notice that UCLA, MKUltra, Psych Dept., and the dates (circa,1968) coincide with another Hippie Generation "cult" phenomenon, Carlos Casteneda.