We Found the MKULTRA Holy Grail
Suck it from the back, Al McCoy
PART I: MEET JOLYON WEST, MKULTRA’S FALSTAFF
Remember Forrest Gump?
He’s not the protagonist; America is. Surging Icarus-like to its JFK apex before hurtling headlong through interminable crisis thunderclouds. Forrest is Virgil, our guide through the inferno of the 20th century.
Forrest Gump’s real. But he’s not a simpleton traipsing from vignette to vignette - he’s a master of the dark arts with PT Barnum charisma. Working behind the scenes on every conspiracy from MKULTRA to Oklahoma City.
We’re talking, of course, about Jolyon West.
WAKE UP MR. DR. WEST
“From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort...a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, with costs that peaked at a billion dollars a year. Reacting to news of Soviet mind-control experiments, Washington’s secret research moved through two distinct phases. First, CIA in-house exploration of exotic methods (drugs, hypnosis, electroshock) failed in their aim of controlling the subject or extracting coherent information.”
- Al McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, p. 7
Conspiracy freaks have been sounding the alarm on Jolyon since Linda Thompson told the FBI he lojacked Tim McVeigh.1 Unfortunately, a lot of it was calculated misdirection or outright shitcoat.2 And it worked - aside from a few dustups3 West enjoyed a sterling reputation as a civil rights champion.4 From the 70s onward Jolyon was psychiatry’s Neil deGrasse Tyson, appearing on cable TV5 multiple times a month in between doing...psychiatrist things?
Anyway, the opprobrium never caught up: ol’ Jolly offed himself in 1999. After he croaked, researchers started digging. A few hit paydirt - unearthing the motherlode on West’s role as point man in the secret history of the 20th century. It’s too juicy not to share.6
Jolyon doesn’t seem to have crossed the spook Rubicon until he joined the Army. He started his psychiatric residency at Cornell’s Payne Whitney Medical Clinic in 1949.7 By the time he finished, in 1952, West was a skilled hypnotist,8 but he didn’t stick around - the year before young Thomas Pynchon came to town9 Jolyon ditched Cornell for an ostensibly cushy job as Chief of Psychiatric Services at Lackland AFB. He immediately got to work as a psychiatric hired gun, co-authoring a HEF10-funded study concluding Air Force pilots were induced to make Korea biowarfare claims because they endured evil Communist sleep deprivation.1112
Jolyon was already in good with the covert services, but the HEF agitprop rocketed him to clandestine superstardom. Around this time he started corresponding with an illustrious new penpal: Sid Gottlieb. Chief of CIA’s Technical Services Division, the MKULTRA piggy bank.
uWu Daddy Gottlieb, can we do mind control together ?
We’ll let Jolyon damn himself from his own mouth. Exhibit A:13
First, the salutation: West’s writing from Lackland in 1953, to “S.G.” (exactly who you think he is). And the opening line - hypnosis research project. Curiouser and curiouser.
The whole doc’s worth a read, but the cliffnotes:
West wants to determine the degree to which “amnesia can be inflicted and/or alter the subject’s recollection of the information he already knew.”
He wants to riff on techniques for implanting false information [i.e. fake memories] into subjects
the classic “coded sleeper message triggered by a codeword”
So Jolyon’s pitching Gottlieb classic MKULTRA. Great. There’s another layer, though:
West will require “drugs which are not on the Air Force list of standard preparations.” (Shocker.) He even has the ideal subjects picked out:
Basic airmen. Patients, especially those suffering from trances, fugues, or amnesia. And returned prisoners from Korea.
Paydirt. For those keeping score:
June 1953 Jolyon’s asking for a set-up at Lackland, to experiment on Korean War POWs, airmen, and mental patients, using non-standard drug preparations and hypnosis, to induce amnesia and/or false memories. (One could use such a potent arsenal to, say, induce the notion that a subject’s devastating biowarfare confession was itself false. If one were so inclined.)
Bear all that in mind as we turn to the tragic case of Jimmy Shaver, MKULTRA’s Beta test.
MKULTRA: BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY
[Dr. West] spoke of building a massive databank of consciousness itself, which would consist of bioelectrical recordings - gathered through electromyography, electro-oculography, rheoencephlography, and CAT scans - subsequently analyzed and coded, then stored in a centralized location such as the National Institute of Mental Health or the National Medical Library.
- Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, p. 221
July 4 1954, Lackland AFB. An hour after a three-year-old girl disappeared, “dazed” Airman Jimmy Shaver wandered out of the bushes, seemingly with no understanding of what was going on.
Then someone found the girl’s panties hanging from Shaver’s car door. Cue a constable showing up with MP’s orders to take him in - under interrogation Shaver swore up and down he hadn’t done it, then reversed course. OK, he did it...but he didn’t remember doing it.14
Base command called in the big guns. Ol’ Jolyon battered Shaver with psychiatric tests, hypnotized him, injected him with sodium pentothal.15 The assault yielded a David Lynch confession:
While Shaver was under...Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he had “visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.”
- O’Neill, p. 371.
Now get this: Jolyon was testifying for the defense when he told the court this batshit confession. And he insisted Shavers was insane the night of, but sane now - meaning he could stand trial.
We already know Shaver’s fucked. But his sequelae, as McCoy calls it,16 tell us more about MKULTRA than his judicial railroading. See, Shaver had all the stigmata of a soldier who’d been Fucked With: he suffered from debilitating migraines for which he’d repeatedly sought treatment; he was recommended for a two-year experimental program by an unnamed doctor; and...his medical records went missing.1718
A history of tampering, “special” project selection, and deletion of records. Shaver had been chosen for a purpose, and he’d served it - he was convicted, appealed, re-convicted, then finally executed in 1958.
Even before Shaver stumbled into his crosshairs, West wanted out. In the same letter outlining his MK method Jolyon closes with a sub rosa request to leave not just Oklahoma, but the Air Force, too. He wanted to go back to Cornell (where the good Dr. Mengele Wolff was having a HEF field day).19
His wish was partially granted. Jolyon got the sinecure job - not at Cornell. At the University of Oklahoma.202122 Jolyon had it made: his own department, civvie duds, and a cool $21,000 from the CIA Geschickter Fund for research into “dissociated states and hypnosis.” Or as it’s called in the biz, MKULTRA Sub-Project 43.
THE GREAT TUSKO SWINDLE
Of all the anecdotes in Jolyon’s CV, you probably know this one the best:
Jolly West. Didn’t he kill an elephant?
Yes he did. To be honest, we have no idea why. It’s possible he was using poor Tusko as a proxy for humans - if he could control the pachyderm’s musth23 with LSD, maybe he could control humans, too - but that’s reaching. In all likelihood, Jolyon was just high - on LSD,24 and on being MKULTRA Contractor Numero Uno.
By the numbers, the Tusko misadventure went like this:
They fired a hypodermic dart loaded with 2800mg of LSD into Tusko’s hindquarters. (The amount of LSD required to produce a “marked mental disturbance” in humans is ~2mg.) Over the next five minutes, Tusko shuddered and struggled to stand. His female mate tried to help him stand upright - nothing doing. Tusko fell over, shit himself, and seizured to death.25
The point of the Tusko debacle, if there is one, is that nobody at U of O really gave a shit about the animal or the affront to science. They were busy fretting over the money. Who was gonna foot the bill?
Not to worry, assured Jolyon. The check was in the mail. (“The mail,” of course, was code for another MKULTRA cutout.26)
What a town.
ASIDE FROM THAT, MRS. KENNEDY, HOW WAS THE PLAY?
You know the formula. You’ve seen it on TV:
A heinous crime. The perp comes to - confused, like he just woke up. Unsure how he got there. A blank spot in his memory that won’t quit.
Enter Jack Ruby, the patsy’s patsy.
Granddads have a conspiracy aphorism: “It all comes back to JFK.”
It should be bullshit - it’s too simple. Yet here we are. Jolyon’s beefy fingerprints are smeared all over the JFK coverup - intruding on Jack Ruby from the trial to his supposed psychotic break.27
We’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s correct the record on da Cherry.
Ruby’s a bit of an also-ran in mainstream JFK lit:28 jowly dipshit grows a conscience. Or maybe he had a death wish. Who can say?
Even by JFK standards, it’s a little transparent. Ruby wasn’t a histrionic concerned citizen. He was a gun-runner29 high up in the Chicago outfit,30 farmed out from the Second City to help oversee Dallas’s booming heroin trade.31 By 1962 Ruby was one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s many handlers32 - after the JFK hit Ruby was coerced, or maybe brainwashed, into playing triggerman.33 The plan was simple: DPD would let Ruby in, and he’d do the deed.34
You know the rest. Pop goes the patsy - Ruby shot Oswald. Only now it gets weird(er) - depending on who you believe, when DPD pinned him to the ground Ruby snapped out of it.35 He’d been in a fugue state36 and couldn’t remember anything leading up to the shooting.37
We all know the cover story. What we don’t know is, before Oswald’s body was even cold Jolly had his fat thumb on the scales of justice. To demonstrate how we have to lay out the timeline - grab your calendars. Time to go deep on The Jack Ruby Ratfuck.
CALENDAR GIRL
Ruby killed Oswald 11/24/63. Before Christmas Jolly was doing his best Nick Fury act, assembling a team of very special hand-picked experts to weigh in on Ruby’s sanity. West’s pal Gene Usdin wrote on Jan. 6:
A few days after the assassination, Jolly phoned me to ask if I would be willing to have my name submitted to the court in Texas as a possible psychiatric expert.38
“A few days after.” A gentleman’s December 1. Before any details were public - even before the bond hearing39 - Jolly was working behind the scenes trying to stitch Ruby up. And according to West, he was told to do so.40
The judge turned West down. Not that it mattered: the fix was in -trial went off without a hitch. Ruby was convicted March 14. The death sentence short-circuited his earlier self-preservation instinct. Ruby started blabbing - he’d spill the beans. Just get him out of Texas. Ruby fired Belli and hired Dr. Winston Hubert Smith, a dual JD/psychiatrist (uh-oh), who rode the bench throughout the murder trial, as Belli’s replacement in late April.
Smith started ratfucking Ruby right away. The exams proving he was fit to stand trial were bunk.41 Ruby needed a whole new battery of tests - specialized ones, which only a select few could administer...say, a certain portly hypnotist with consummate skill in recovering lost memories.42 (For the rest of his tenure Smith did basically fuck all, cooling his heels until he could collect the quo for his quid.43)
West examined Ruby April 26 and emerged with grim news: Jacky-boy suffered an acute psychotic break some time in the past forty-eight hours. He’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Incurably insane.44 The hauteur of it was too much, though - the other psychiatrists spoke up. They agreed Ruby was crazy now, but hadn’t been before West showed up.
Judge Joe Brown (not him) smelled bullshit and ordered a third opinion from Dr. William Beavers (don’t you dare). Beavers concurred - yep, Ruby’s crazy. Beavers even wondered aloud whether, considering the acuity of his affliction, Ruby had been made crazy by “toxic psychosis,” but concluded it was unlikely because he was in a protected environment.45
Whatever Svengali shit West ensorcelled Ruby with stuck - when he was re-examined by Dr. Werner Teuter in 1965 as part of his attempt to wrangle a competency hearing, Ruby was still hearing voices. Teuter even ignored Ruby’s cogent last words:
I do not want to die. But I am not insane. I was framed to kill Oswald.
Nice try, Rubinstein. Exactly what a crazy person would say!46
That was pretty much it. Ruby got his new trial, but never lived to see it - Sid Gottlieb gave him cancer47 he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer December 9, 1966 and died January 3rd.
Pour one out for da Cherry, y’all. Yet another small-time casualty of a bigtime war.
Proud Mary kept on burning, though - up in the Golden State, Jolyon West had recently discovered hippie chicks and acid. And he liked what he saw.
Join us next time for Part 2: “You’ll Never Think About America the Same Way Again.” Stay golden, Ponyboy.
Dr. Wendy Painting, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh, p. 293. [Disclosure: we hit up Dr. Painting with some sawed-off shit about McVeigh’s possible travels to the Philippines pre-OKC. She was very gracious (and it seems McVeigh never actually went there, but The Manila Times wants us to believe he did).]
As ever, ruthlessly interrogate your sources. Thompson was the militia movement’s designated crazy woman, sure; but she also served a stint as Assistant to US Army Commanding General NATO (which required a SECRET clearance). Or her ten appearances on human glowstick Bill Cooper’s Hour of the Time. See The Washington Post 5/3/95, "The Spooky World of Linda Thompson." (Dabbing on us, I say!)
E.g. the Center for the Study of Violence fiasco, about which more in Part 2.
Finding Aid for the Louis Jolyon West Papers: “He traveled to South Africa to testify on behalf of a group of Zulus.” Probably bullshit. Jolyon had an uncanny knack for showing up in places spooky things were going down to assist.
For instance, when he appeared on Larry King Live the night of April 19, 1995 just hours after the OKC bombing, to “discuss the ‘lone nut’ who had bombed the Murrah building.” Painting, p. 583.
We know you’re chomping at the bit to drink of the Grail, but good boys and girls will eat their vegetables first. Read on - Jolyon’s CV reveals much about the continuity of mind-control operations across five decades.
Itself a probable mind-control waystation for tortured creatives: Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, (maybe) Lou Reed, James Schuyler, and Marilyn Monroe all received some sort of treatment there.
He probably learned it from George Estabrooks. (The Estabrooks-West connection’s deductive and documentary - their hypnotic arsenal was almost identical. Jolyon also kept Estabrooks’s proposed 1959 study on hypnotizing juvenile delinquents, sans the cringey “Give Me Money, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover?” coda.) Another possible mentor is Allen Dulles BFF Harold Wolff, chair of Cornell’s neurology department and architect of first the Human Ecology Study Program, then the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology [hereafter HEF], AKA MKULTRA Sub-project 60 - see MKULTRA briefing book p. 172.
There’s no indication they ever met, but the synchronicity is jarring. If nothing else it speaks to Cornell’s preeminence in all things mind-control: Wolff, Jolyon, Pynchon, MKULTRA Sub-projects 48, 61, 65, and 81, Lawrence Hinkle, Timothy McVeigh. Probably just something in the water.
Frank Summers Ph.D. and ABPP, “Making Sense of the APA: A History of the Relationship Between Psychology and the Military,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives, 18:5, p. 623: “The fund [HEF] supported Harlow; Dr. I.E. Farber, a psychologist; and Dr. Louis Jolyon West, a psychiatrist, to do the definitive study on Communist psychological tactics.”
Farber, Harlow, and West, “Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread),” Sociometry, Dec., 1957, pp. 271-285, pg. 272: “After their world-wide propaganda campaign went into high gear with accusations of ‘germ warfare’ in Korea...a vigorous policy of coercive pressure was applied to a large number of American flying personnel captured during the Korean conflict. As a result, a number of flyers from the Air Force and Marine Corps signed false confessions of bacteriological warfare and participated to various extents in enemy propaganda activities.”
This model - debility, dependency, dread (or rather, inducing them) - was the paradigm for offensive mind-control from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Credit where it’s due, ol’ Jolyon was sly. Cf. KUBARK, the Human Resource Exploitation Manual, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib.
The “MKULTRA as reactive against false POW biowarfare claims” is itself a psyop two-step. As Jeff Kaye proved, the retraction was dialectical, stage-managed by Army and Air Force psychological warfare divisions via Project Repair: they provoked a media firestorm, then used the heat from it - “the Reds are brainwashing our boys into false biowarfare confessions. Imagine what they’ll do if we don’t catch up!” - to catch and kill the biowar story, and manufacture public consent for something they were already doing in secret. Kaye’s dissection annihilates the mainstream MKULTRA narrative. We all owe him a debt. https://jeff-kaye.medium.com/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-of-u-s-germ-warfare-in-the-korean-war-3e3cce505d35
UCLA Department of Special Collections, West Archive, Box 133, folder 4. Also online: https://archive.org/details/c-590-b-133-f-4
Tom O’Neill, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, p. 370-374. [Disclaimer: we solicited O’Neill’s help tracking down the Smoking Gun paper, which turned into a multi-month odyssey. He was very helpful. Take the book with a couple grains of salt, though - O’Neill makes suspect omissions (like leaving out Manson’s stints at Gibault School and Boys Town). Proving Manson’s hellish apprenticeship under West is still a bombshell.]
unusual choice for West, as we’ll see - ibid., p. 371.
McCoy, Torture and Impunity, p. 26: “Physical sequelae...can be photographed for forensic examination to determine, with surprising precision, the degree of abuse.”
McCoy twists the lack of sequelae produced by mental anguish to argue covert ops torture is almost impossible to legally prove. We agree. But by employing Scott’s negative image, we can construct an X-ray of the mind-control tools: what West selected for, and what he wanted to keep hidden.
This is, 3-for-3, the Tim McVeigh Trifecta, about whom more later. See Painting, p. 317, 319.
O’Neill, p. 371: “Curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with ‘Sa’ through ‘St’ had vanished.”
West archive, box 133, folder 4: “If I were back on staff at Cornell Medical Center where my previous research was done, there would be no problem. I could receive funds from you disguised as a U.S. Public Health Service grant.”
Much like Cornell and the entire state of Indiana, U of O is a sinister nexus of dark forces. We’ll explore some in our forthcoming series on 9/11.
There’s more twists and turns to the story, but they’re pretty boring - West beefed with his base commander; Gottlieb couldn’t get TS clearance for West’s preferred lab compatriots; etc. Finally a federal agent named “Hughes” (possibly another Gottlieb pseudonym) convinced Air Force brass to cut Jolly loose.
Cheat sheet for later: at U of O West took a favored protégé, John R. Smith. Smith was Tim McVeigh’s therapist during McVeigh’s time as a student at OSU and on McVeigh’s mental health team during the OKC bombing trial. He was, to quote McVeigh, “the only shrink [he] ever liked.” Must have been a real charmer. See Painting, p. 626, 636.
bull elephant mating frenzy.
Painting, p. 441.
or choked to death from a laryngeal spasm; accounts vary. Cf. The Guardian 8/8/2002 p. 60, “A Dose of Madness,” The Ottawa Journal 3/4/1969, “Elephant Never Had Chance After LSD Shot,” p. 19.
The Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry. O’Neill, p. 376 & 495.
Others have argued he also worked on Oswald. In Part 2, we’ll examine some of the evidence, but in our opinion: no. The timeline doesn’t fit.
Gerald Posner, if you’re reading this, your cheek-implant Skeletor face gives children nightmares.
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, p. 179: “After Ruby had been convicted of Oswald's murder, he reportedly told a friend in his jail cell, ‘They're going to find out about Cuba. They're going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.’” & p. 180: “One informant told the FBI that Ruby had been active in arranging illegal-arms flights to Castro.”
ibid., p. 152: “Jones and Ruby came from the same powerful Chicago milieu.”
ibid., p. 131: “[HSCA head Robert Blakey] ignored...a story from a reliable FBN informant, transmitted back in 1956 by the Los Angeles FBI to the Dallas FBI, suggesting that Ruby was, as many other witnesses had suggested, a payoff or liaison connection between narcotics activities and the Dallas Police Department.”
It would take a few phone books to recount the Ruby-Oswald relationship, but a brief sampling will make our point. Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War, p. 109: “after the Kennedy assassination but before Ruby killed Oswald, [Rose Cherami] told the house psychiatrist...‘that she knew both Ruby and Oswald and had seen them sitting together on occasions at Ruby’s club.’” & Scott, p. 291: “If the Warren Commission had looked more closely at McKenzie, it would have found...links between the world of Oswald and the world of Ruby...Robert Oswald assumed responsibility for choosing [William] McKenzie as his and Marina's lawyer. The Commission asked Crafard about Pete White but did not ask Robert Oswald. They should have. Pete White, who together with McKenzie had once served as an assistant district attorney, told the FBI that he had got Ruby's charge of pistol-carrying dismissed back in 1954 and that he "ran into" Ruby on November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination.” & Dan Hopsicker, Barry & ‘the Boys',’ p. 127: “Garrison charged that David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, and Lee Oswald were all involved in training paramilitary groups of Cuban exiles and American ‘neo-Nazis’ north of Lake Pontchartrain near the McLaney home.”
Point being, Ruby & Oswald were thick as thieves. Co-gun runners. Their original point of contact was either David Ferrie or Charles “Dutz” Murret, a mobbed-up New Orleans bookie.
There’s strong arguments for both. We’re inclined to believe the latter due to Ruby’s pre-assassination legend-building, E.g. Hopsicker, p. 330: ”Two days before the assassination Ruby was passing out cards hawking Jada [Conforto, Ruby’s prima stripper & sometime-girlfriend]’s appearance at the Dallas DA’s office. There, he introduced himself to assistant Dallas DA Ben Ellis, telling him ‘You probably don’t know me now, but you will.’” [emphasis added] cf. 7/25/1974 Sunday Times, where in 1965 a supposedly whacko Ruby told his shrink he received orders by telephone from Fort Worth.
Scott, p. 134: “[This breakdown suggests] a high-level police-Ruby collusion which Blakey downplayed...nearly all the detectives were with Oswald in front of the cameras...there were almost no remaining patrolmen and reserve officers...Thus, there was nobody guarding the stairwell down which Ruby, as the Committee confirmed, probably made his entry.”
Ruby “co-wrote” a firsthand account claiming as much with sus-ass Lawrence Schiller of Helter Skelter fame. Schiller bribed the guards for access. Long Beach Press Telegram 1/28/1964, "My Story." Pgs. 1, 4, 6.
at least according to the shrink hired by Melvin Belli. For reasons that will become clear, we’re partial to the fugue state theory, or something close to it.
Strongest argument against is Ruby’s post-conviction testimony to Earl Warren. It’s one of the most seismic things we’ve ever read. Ruby tells Warren he, Ruby’s family, and Warren are in danger of being murdered; decries his lawyer Joe Tonahill as a plant; begs Warren to spirit him out of Dallas so he can tell the whole truth; asserts he was part of a larger conspiracy to kill JFK; and warns of a “whole new form of government” taking power in the wake of the assassination. For relevant testimony (and banger analysis of it), see Oglesby, pgs. 114-145.
Gene Usdin letter to Jack Ewalt, West Archive. Quoted in O’Neill, p. 496.
1/21/64. As quoted in 1/22/64 New York Times, “Ruby Disclaims Knowing Oswald: Tells of Trip to Cuba - Drops Request for Bond.” Available here.
West said he was “asked,” but never by who. ibid., p. 496: “Libby Price [West’s assistant], outline[d] dictated notes from West...’Chapter 2: How West was asked to set up a panel of experts - psychiatrists - later that winter [1963] before Ruby trial started - turned down by Brown Court.’” [emphasis added]
Painting, p. 646.
“Motion by Defense Counsel, for an Order by the Court,” Texas v. Jack Ruby, no. E-4010-J, Apr. 22, 1964. Relevant portion suck-jobbing Jolyon available here.
Probably enticed with the promise of a job offer. O’Neill, p. 496: “Smith was fired from his professorship at the University of Texas School of Law in 1965...yet that didn’t stop West from seeing that Smith was hired at Oklahoma that autumn.”
The West-Ruby interview reads like Conspiracy Mad Libs: no witnesses. Ruby was suffering hallucinations. He tried to kill himself by running into the wall. Cf. O’Neill, p. 379, and Painting, p. 646.
We wish we were kidding. WR Beavers, “Evaluation Report on Jack Ruby,” April 28, 1964. Available through record search here. Keyword search “toxic,” “psychosis.”
The Sunday Times, 6/25/1974. Teuter couldn’t help but rub our noses in it, too - Ruby was still crazy not just because of the auditory Holocaust, but also because he kept insisting he was part of a conspiracy: “[Ruby] carried on a reasonable conversation as long as he or others avoid the mental illness is located: anti-Semitism, the murder of Oswald, and the conspiracy regarding the presidential assassination.”
We’re speculating, but a cancer gun isn’t even the most outlandish weapon Gottlieb had in his arsenal. Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief, p. 149: “The interviewer asked [George White sidekick Ira] Feldman if he had ever met Gottlieb. That set off an extended recollection.
I met Gottlieb at the pad...I says, “You’re a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers?” He had this black bag with him. He says, ‘This is my bag of dirty tricks.’ He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Beach. Sidney says, ‘Stop the car.’ He pulls out a dart gun and shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, ‘Come back in two days and check this tree.’ So we go back in two days, the tree was completely dead, not a leaf left on it.”
The victim of a CIA contractor (who’s BFFs with the Agency’s poison master) comes down with terminal cancer six months before his retrial. Then they put him under armed guard until he croaks. Funny how that happens. [Disclosure: we exchanged letters with Kinzer regarding MKULTRA. He hews doggedly to the “didn’t work, stopped after 1963!” line, and claims “weirdos” like Jolyon went rogue on their own spinoff projects - when we provided receipts to the contrary, Kinzer stopped replying. Funny how that happens.]
(Faust_flag, if you're out there - this one's for you, brother. Nobody puts MKULTRA in a corner!)
I've been using the phrase "post mk-ultra" as the framework I use to analyze history.
We need to accept mind control efforts were real AND fruitful.
Also, my grandfather was young in his 20s working at the Sears in Dallas when he met Ruby there. Ruby asked him to checkout his club, and apparently my grandma said hell no.
Grandpa grew up in Cuba, great grandpa was a missionary there, and was more than right leaning. Kinda makes me wonder if grandpa mighty been first pick Patsy....ironically, grandpa's second wife's name was Patsy.