American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [45]
When the LAPD declassified more files in 2008—forty years too late!—a fuller picture of Sirhan started to appear. He was raised a Christian, wanted to be a jockey, and spent a good bit of time betting on horses at the Santa Anita racetrack. He wanted to make a bundle of money, and seems to have had some gambling debts. His personality appeared to change after he fell off a horse in September 1966. That’s when he began developing a curiosity about mysticism, such as the Rosicrucians, and got into learning self-hypnosis. Toward the end of 1967, Sirhan pretty much dropped out of sight for three months. His mother was worried because she didn’t know where he’d gone. When he finally did come home, his interest in hypnosis escalated.17 At the same time, somebody put Sirhan under clandestine surveillance for reasons that were never explained. Some 16-millimeter footage taken of Sirhan late in 1967—by whom or for what purpose we don’t know—later showed up in a drawer of a private detective’s office.
In mid-February 1968, Sirhan bought a .22-caliber Iver-Johnson, the pistol he would use the night of the assassination, for twenty-five bucks on the street. A gunshop owner remembered him coming in with several other people asking for “armor piercing ammunition,” for another weapon he doesn’t seem to have owned.18 So it sure looks like somebody was prompting Sirhan. He was also seen stalking Kennedy on two other occasions, both times with a young female companion (at a luncheon May 20 and a downtown L.A. rally four days after that). And he was seen doing target practice at tin cans with a young brunette and a tall guy who had sandy-colored hair.19
What does it all add up to? A few weeks before RFK’s assassination, the Providence Evening Bulletin ran a story headlined—“‘To Sleep’: Perchance to Kill?” It told of a visiting professor of psychology at Rhode Island College, who had been a leading adviser to the military since the 1930s on the possible applications of hypnosis. Dr. George H. Estabrooks was quoted that “hypnotism is widely used by intelligence agencies of the United States and other countries.” He went on to say that the key to creating an effective spy—or assassin—revolved around splitting someone’s personality: “It is like child’s play now to develop a multiple personality through hypnosis.”
The professor added that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby “could very well have been performing through hypnosis. They would have been perfect cases but I doubt you will find anyone admitting this possibility, especially in the Warren Report.” Estabrooks concluded by referring to the novel and film, The Manchurian Candidate, as putting forth an “entirely possible” scenario.20
The Manchurian Candidate had been a best-selling book in 1958, later made into a movie by John Frankenheimer (who, ironically, was a good friend of Robert Kennedy’s and had him as a houseguest right before the assassination). It’s about a soldier who gets “brainwashed” by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War, then later is used in a domestic assassination plot against an American presidential contender. This was regarded as pretty wild fiction at the time. Nobody knew until the late 1970s that both the military and CIA had been experimenting for years with drugs, hypnosis, and other means to figure out how to alter human behavior.
Back in 1954, a CIA study had raised the question: “Can an individual of (deleted nationality) descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily, against a prominent (deleted) politician or if necessary, against an American official.” After being drugged, the subject would perform the deed “at some later date,” after which “it was assumed the subject would be taken into custody by the (deleted) government and thereby ‘disposed of.’”21
In June of 1960, the CIA under the MK-ULTRA program had “launched an expanded program of operational experiments in hypnosis in cooperation