Classic film buffs know the taught 1962 thriller by director John Frankenheimer and featuring a surprisingly good performance by Frank Sinatra. The film depicts a Korean War buddy of Sinatra's character brainwashed by dirty
commies to assassinate a presidential candidate on command. His psychic trigger is the Queen of Hearts. The film is another case of art imitating life because the CIA actually did extensive research after the Korean War into mind control using hypnosis and psychotropic drugs like LSD. At one point its program,
known by the code name, MKULTRA*, involved 44 universities doing research into various aspects of brainwashing. The agency's interest was prompted by the mistreatment of American POWs by North Korea. 95% of the GIs that were brainwashed reverted to their normal personalities with a few weeks of release, but 5% did not. It was that small group the CIA wanted to understand, potentially duplicate, and use as agents in the Cold War.
Sirhan B. Sirhan, the convicted assassin of RFK, has been in jail for fifty years; his death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972. His parole has been regularly rejected. A reason offered by the parole board is he “did not show adequate remorse or understand the enormity of his crime”. To this day Sirhan claims he cannot remember anything of the events at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He does not deny being in the kitchen the day that Kennedy declared victory in the California primary. His legal appeals are exhausted. In January 2018 Robert Kennedy Jr. visited Sirhan in prison after reviewing the legal and forensic documents concerning his father's murder. He spent 3 hours with Sirhan; he did discuss what was said, but he came away with
the conviction that the investigation of his father's death should be reopened. His sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, agrees. The siblings join Paul Schrade, a union supporter of JFK who was shot in the forehead as he walked behind Bobby, calling for the case to be reinvestigated.
Schrade has been attempting to convince authorities to reopen JFK's murder since 1974; he thinks there had to be a second shooter. He summarized his 2016 parole hearing testimony as, “while Sirhan was standing in front of Bob Kennedy and his shots were creating a distraction,
the other shooter secretly fired at the senator from behind…”
So why would two of Bobby's children be willing to revisit the horrendous events of June 5, 1968? There are a few inconvenient facts concerning their father's murder in the hotel's kitchen. Today, audio evidence exists of thirteen shots. Sirhan's pistol, a .22 Ivers-Johnson revolver only contains eight cartridges. Sirhan was subdued by onlookers with that gun in his hand. No witnesses saw him reload or fire another gun; nor did he have time to do so. Bobby was fatally shot at very close range; powder burns were found embedded behind Kennedy's right ear by the LA coroner. Sirhan was standing in front of Bobby as he walked through the kitchen on his way to a press conference; eye-witnesses (Uecker, Hamil, Romero) say Sirhan was not close enough to shoot RFK from behind at point blank range. The two bullets found in Kennedy's body and five in surrounding victims could not all be matched to Sirhan's pistol. (Exhibit 55). In fact, an internal LA police document concluded that a bullet in Kennedy did not match a bullet found in a wounded bystander. (Weisel, Exhibit 54) The LAPD could not account for two bullet holes found in a door frame at the scene; the door frame was later removed as were two ceiling tiles. These facts are derived from the award-winning documentary,
The Second Gun.>
Sirhan admitted his guilt on instructions from his attorney at the time of trial. Kennedy Jr told interviewers that Sirhan's trial was actually a penalty phase hearing--guilt or innocence was not contested. So the possibility of more than one assassin, or that Sirhan was acting under some kind of coercion that would have mitigated his guilt, was never tried. The debate rages to this day. More recently, Sirhan's attorneys have put forward the theory that Sirhan was acting under psychic compulsion induced by hypnosis and drugs. He was examined several times over eleven years by a Harvard psychiatrist, a prominent expert on trauma and hypnosis, Dr. Daniel Brown.
Dr. Brown says Sirhan is an excellent subject for hypnosis, being complaint and very
open to suggestion. He declared in a parole board filing, "Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met..." Brown claims to have made a startling discovery while Sirhan was in a somnambulent state. Upon a trigger command Sirhan would assume what the doctor calls "range mode", referring to the time Sirhan spent practicing with his pistol at gun ranges. He would mimic a pistol firing stance with hands extended in front of him as if gripping a pistol. This startling "range mode" was witnessed by Sirhan's attorney, Laurie Dusek. Sirhan would have no conscious memory of his actions upon awakening. During his trial, Sirhan's interrogation under hypnosis by Dr. Diamond was highly suggestive, but Sirhan continued to not remember his actions.
US Person finds the video describing Brown's evaluations of Sirhan very interesting: he describes how Sirhan got a job as a novice thoroughbred exercise jockey; how he dabbled in self-hypnosis; his fateful fall from a mount and hospitalization; his ranch boss' connection to the Detroit mob; the attractive woman in a black and white poka-dot dress who led Sirhan to the Ambassador kitchen pantry; and the mysterious "radioman" who may have programmed Sirhan using Morse code. Brown also claims to have been subjected to unwarranted searches by airport officials during his visits with Sirhan. Ridiculous fantasy? Decide
for yourself by linking to You Tube and viewing the video.
*the existence of a vast mind-control program was made public by the Church Committee investigation in 1975. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of MKULTRA documents in 1973, so the investigation relied on first hand testimony and some documentation that survived the shred order. In 2016 another trove of documents was produced by the agency pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit.
