The Death of John Lennon Excerpt from: THE COVERT WAR AGAINST ROCK, By Alex Constantine Feral House, 2000 $14.95 "Project Walrus" & Holden Caulfield�s Warm Gun The "Catcher in the Rye of the present generation" confronted his judge on January 6, 1981. The courtroom antics that followed were a macabre illustration of the principle that the cover-up proves the conspiracy. Justice Herbert Altman asked how Mark David Chapman chose to plead. "Not guilty," the prisoner, following the direction of his "voices," responded. By law, the defendant decides the plea, guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity, one or the other, not the defense attorney. Nevertheless, Chapman�s attorney Jonathan Marks punctuated the plea "... by reason of insanity." The bench favored a motion from Marks to enlist three psychiatrists to provide opinions on Chapman�s mental competence to stand trial. The first was Dr. Milton Kline, a prestigious clinical psychiatrist, an authority on hypnosis from New York,[1] and an esteemed consultant to the CIA on the creation of programmed killers while president of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, a true believer in the "Manchurian Candidate" killing concept who once boasted that he was capable of creating a hypnotically-driven patsy in three months, an assassin in six.[2] The second psychiatrist chosen to examine Chapman was Dr. Bernard Diamond from the University of California at Berkeley, a busy hive of illicit mind control experimentation in past decades. Dr. Diamond had provided the same service to Sirhan Sirhan. The accused killer of Robert Kennedy told another psychiatrist, Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, a clinical psychologist assigned to the case, that he did not trust Dr. Diamond. As Sirhan explained to Dr. Simson-Kallas after the trial, "Whatever strange behavior I showed in court was the result of my outrage over Dr. Diamond�s and other doctor�s testimony. They were saying things about me that were grossly untrue, nor did I give them permission to testify [on] my behalf in court."[3] The third psychiatrist entrusted to evaluating Chapman�s hold on reality was Dr. Daniel Schwartz, director of forensic psychiatry at King�s County Medical Center in Brooklyn. Dr. Schwartz had also examined David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz, and offered that the accused serial killer believed he�d been commanded by "demons" to kill. Mark David Chapman had also been pushed by the "demons" of his dementia to shoot John Lennon, Dr. Schwartz opined from the stand. He testified that Chapman had admitted, "I can feel their thoughts. I hear their thoughts. I can hear them talking�but not from the outside, from the inside." Up to the moment he squeezed the trigger of his Charter Arms .38, Chapman "continued to operate under this primitive kind of thinking, in which he believed or believes that forces outside of him, supernatural or otherwise, determined his behavior."[4] The diagnosis was identical to the one he gave Son of Sam. Not one of these three mental health specialists explored the hint of mind control, in the opinion of Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a professor in psychiatric research at the Yale School of Medicine and a consultant to Marks. Dr. Lewis reported that the assassin may have acted in response to a "command hallucination." British barrister Fenton Bresler, in Who Killed John Lennon?, asks: "Could any term be more appropriate for a disturbed man operating under hypnotic programming?"[5] In 1977, Chapman lost his religion. His fundamentalist indoctrination festered in a stew of self-loathing, devil-worship and a killer�s fantasies. Months before the murder, he visited satanist and filmmaker Kenneth Anger at a screening in Hawaii, shook hands and handed over two ..38 caliber bullets. "These are for John Lennon," he explained to Anger.[6] Chapman may have felt a spiritual kinship with the satanist. He had attempted suicide, interpreted his survival as a sign, and thereafter addressed his prayers to Satan,[7] who responded with commands, mind control. And, as it happens, the CIA has been obsessed with mind control techniques since the dawn of the Cold War. Agency psychiatrists were eminently capable of transforming a hyper-religious nobody on the board of the Decatur, Georgia YMCA into a programmed killer, and the allegation has been made repeatedly since Lennon�s murder. Psychotronics was the topic of an August 22, 1994 Newsweek report on a secret Arlington, Virginia conference between behavioral specialists from the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Center and Dr. Smirnov, whose work was truly Frankensteinian: "Using electroencephalographs, Smirnov measures brain waves, then uses computers to create a map of the subconscious and various human impulses, such as anger or the sex drive. Then through taped subliminal suggestions, he claims to physically alter the landscape with the power of suggestion." The CIA attained the same level of sophistication as Dr. Smirnov�s EEG approach by the mid-�60s. In 1974, Ed Sanders, poet and author of The Family, a book that explores the totalitarian fantasies of Charles Manson, wrote a letter to the late political researcher Mae Brussell, describing federally-sponsored mind control operations in Hawaii, Chapman�s home, conducted by the U.S. military, most notably the creation of serial killers.[8] Northern California mass murderer Herbert Mullen, Sanders wrote, worked at a Holiday Inn and flew to Hawaii in 1970 with Patricia Brown, a much older woman, against the wishes of his family. She told him that they would stay with a "church group," but Mullen was committed the day after his arrival to a mental hospital operated by the U.S. Army instead. He was given generous servings of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, not exactly standard therapeutic practice. In her December 20, 1980 broadcast, Brussell related that Sanders informed her how Lawrence Quong, a raving gunman who shot at a San Francisco radio personality while on the air, "was taken to Hawaii by a woman and brought back to San Francisco with a mysterious gun placed in his hand." The gun was unregistered, its origin unknown. Quong "went to a private detective many times and said he�d been programmed with electrodes and he was directed to this radio station. He couldn�t control himself." Others, Sanders insisted, did. Mind control researchers have long pointed to Chapman�s relationship with World Visions, an evangelical charity that boasted John Hinckley, Sr., CEO of Vanderbilt Energy Corp., an oil exploration company. Hinckley was a close friend of George Bush, one path to the CIA.[9] (As in the Chapman case, CIA psychiatrists were summoned to evaluate John Hinckley, Jr. after his assault on Ronald Reagan. The prosecution�s psychiatric expert was Dr. Sally Johnson, currently chief of psychiatric services at the Butner Federal Correctional Institute in North Carolina�for decades one of the foremost CIA mind control facilities in the country. Dr. Johnson surfaced in the news weeklies in January, 1998 when she examined accused Unabomber Theodore Kacynzski�a subject of Agency-sponsored mind control experimentation while a student at Harvard�for the court. Her appearance raises the distinct possibility that the Unabomber was programmed. Dr. Johnson was called after Kacynzski tried to fire his attorneys and represent himself in court.) World Visions has collaborated with the CIA in past black operations, including the use of a camp in the Honduras where the organization fronted for a contra recruiting drive for the Nicaraguan rebellion. In Cuba, World Vision camps concealed the agitations of Alpha 66, the anti-Castro brigands of Bay of Pigs fame. Phalange fascists butchered Palestinians at the World Vision camp in Lebanon. These evangelicals also turned up in Guyana after the Jonestown massacre to plan a re-population of the area with Laotian mercenaries still reeking of raw opium, refined by the CIA into heroin for distribution to American GIs stationed in Vietnam and to the States via Air America and other criminalized Agency tenacles. Some researchers consider Chapman�s world travels suggestive of CIA support. In the summer of 1975, Chapman, then 19 years old, signed on to the YMCA�s International Camp Counselor Program (ICCP) and asked to be sent to the Soviet Union�an odd request, since Chapman was a strident anti-Communist. He was packed off instead for a stint in Beirut, where, it is postulated, he received instruction in the lethal arts at a CIA training camp, or, depending on one�s point of view, a school of terror (as did renegade Agency arms dealers Frank Terpil and George Korkola. And William Peter Blatty of Exorcist fame ran an experimental mind control unit for the Army in Lebanon[10]). Chapman did in fact receive firearms training at the Atlanta Area Technical School after dropping out of Covenant College, a Presbyterian academy in Tennessee, and taking a job as a security guard. He passed the pistol-training course with flying colors. The job and course work were a marked departure from Chapman�s prior ambition to lead the life of a missionary. They were suggested to him by a new circle of friends, and accompanied by a drastic change in his personality. The happy, hard-working Christian fundamentalist went sour. He moved to Hawaii to start a new life, but sank into a period of deep depression and attempted suicide. He was admitted to Castle Memorial Hospital in 1977, where he was diagnosed as suffering from severe depressive neurosis. Chapman was not considered pathological, however, and was released two weeks later. He had proven so popular with doctors at the clinic that Chapman was hired on in August 1977 through November 1979 as a maintenance worker with a promotion to the customer relations office. But he impulsively quit the job with a modest loan from the hospital credit union in his pocket, Chapman claimed, and set off on a world tour.[11] In August 1980, he surfaced in New York and mailed a letter to an Italian addressee. The Dakota was given as the return address. It was a breezy note, nothing momentous <ETH> with the exception of a reference to his "mission" in New York. The "mission" could be interpreted as a "command hallucination," or possibly a boastful exaggeration if it weren�t for the mysterious path the letter followed after Chapman dropped it in the mailbox. The Italian acquaintance could not be found and it was returned to New York, where it moldered in the dead-letter bin for three years and was finally delivered to the Dakota. Yoko Ono glanced at the returned letter, dropped it in her DERANGED file and forgot about it. In June 1983, Dan Mahoney, the head of security at the Ono household, was sorting through the file and found the letter, postmarked 1980. This was evidence of premeditated murder and possible conspiracy. Mahoney intended to give it to Yoko Ono and ultimately the police. But shortly thereafter the Chapman letter vanished, only to reappear again on Yoko�s kitchen table, slightly altered. The postdate was now 1981. Turning the letter over to authorities was now out of the question. The revised letter was as breezy as the original, but now made no mention of Chapman�s "mission" in New York.[12] (In conversation with Rev. Charles McGowan at Rikers Island a few days after the murder, the gunman also spoke of a "mission that I could not avoid."[13]) An infiltrator in Yoko�s household had apparently altered the letter to protect the "lone" gunman�s accomplices�and they were up to their own nostrils in a black operation the conspirators called "Project Walrus." [...] Notes [1] Fenton Bresler, Who Killed John Lennon?, New York: St. Martin�s, 1989, p. 242. [2] John Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate", New York: Times Books, 1979, p. 187 and 191n. [3] Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, Affidavit in Behalf of Sirhan Sirhan Serving Time in San Quentin, March 9, 1973, pp. 13-14. The Sirhan trial, he concluded, "was, and will be remembered, as the psychiatric blunder of the century" (p. 22). But Simson caught a glimpse of conspiracy beyond the "blunders" when he examined the notebooks supposedly kept by Sirhan. Simson wrote: "A conclusion emerges from the study of court transcripts that Sirhan�s �notebooks� were modified ... to support the improper diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. This is an assumption that should not be ignored" (p. 14). "I strongly suspect that the notebooks are a forgery, for the thinking reflected in them is foreign to the Sirhan I carefully studied" (p. 18). [4] Bresler, p. 270. [5] Bresler, p. 240. [6] Bill Landis, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger, New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 228. [7] Michael Newton, Raising Hell: An Encyclopedia of Devil Worship and Satanic Crime, New York: Avon, 1993, p. 77. [8] Mae Brussell, World Watchers International broadcast, Monterey, California, December 20, 1980. [9] The two families were close. Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley, Jr. and a VP at Vanderbilt Energy Corp., was to have been a dinner guest of Neil Bush, the vice president�s son, the day after the shooting. Neil, the Los Angeles Times reported on March 31, 1981, "said his family knew the Hinckley family because they had made large contributions to [Bush�s] campaign." [10] Bresler, pp. 104-5. [11] Synopsis of Bresler text. [12] David and Victoria Sheff, "The Betrayal of John Lennon," Playboy, March 1984, p. 188. The Sheffs write: "If some kind of switch was made, it could only have been to make it seem as if some crank had written a letter to Italy in 1981, and with Lennon long dead, had used Chapman�s name and the Dakota address as some sort of macabre joke." [13] Bresler, p. 174.
