50 Years Later:

Why The "Manchurian Candidate” Theory

Solves The JFK Assassination Mystery

By Jerry Leonard

11/22/2013

pdf version of this article

Initially, MKULTRA-testing was conducted under a defensive pretext. Various methods of eliciting confessions from captured enemy agents (truth drugs such as LSD, electric shock, sensory deprivation, and hypnosis) were investigated so that countermeasures could be undertaken to create "torture-proof" American agents. Although this technology has been used operationally for decades, it is now making international headlines again thanks to lawsuits by victims of the original experiments and by the Abu Ghraib prison-torture scandal. (As one investigatory panel recently found: “interrogators and health professionals transformed training methods used to resist torture into abusive methods of interrogation to be used on detainees.”)

But knowledge gained from MKULTRA experimentation also promised an offensive capability--the manufacture of so-called "involuntary assassins" who would carry out actions “even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

As the New York Times explained,  the CIA began the crash program “in 1954 to find out whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will.” 

It gets better. The Times article described a CIA "involuntary assassin" memo, written years before the JFK assassination, that predicted the details surrounding the crime with eerie precision. According to this declassified memo from 1954: a defector would be manipulated to kill an American official “if necessary” under the influence of CIA mind control and then be “disposed of” after being taken into custody for the crime. (Curiously, this particular assassination was to be exploited as part of a "trigger mechanism" for a bigger project.)

This scenario was dramatically fulfilled in the JFK murder when a defector (Oswald) killed an American official (Kennedy) and was then “disposed of” in police custody (by Jack Ruby), on live television.

As I reveal in The Perfect Assassin, we have learned quite a bit over the last 50 years about the CIA's program of creating involuntary operatives as well as how the CIA created staged defections and planted informants and provocateurs to surveil, disrupt and discredit targeted organizations. The agency also planned assassinations of heads-of-state in Cold War operations--such as Operation MONGOOSE, the Kennedy-era anti-Castro crusade. 

We also have learned much about how Oswald’s actions complemented these programs, which cleverly used apparent pro-Communist sympathizers in anti-Communist operations. For example:

• • • We now know that Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union was handled by the CIA as a counterintelligence mission and it mirrored an elaborately staged defection involving another low-level American soldier (with a background very similar to Oswald's) posing as a pro-Communist under high-level government supervision. As was recently revealed by David Wise (Cassidy's Run), this fake defection (and highly successful “intelligence dangle” known as Operation Shocker), began the very same year Oswald's did.

    • We also know that Oswald (the supposed "lone-nut"), following his return to the U.S., met with a CIA-backed, anti-Castro assassin while engaging in apparently pro-Castro activities as a provocateur in New Orleans. It took 30 years for this activity, which occurred under CIA and FBI surveillance shortly before the JFK murder, to come out on the front page of the New York Times.  

• We also know that Oswald's supposed pro-Communist behavior fit the profile of a hypnotized anti-Communist intelligence operative as described in detail by author John Marks (The Search For The ‘Manchurian Candidate’) and military hypnotist Dr. George Estabrooks.

• Estabrooks even bragged of carrying out an operation employing a Marine who was hypno-programmed with a militant pro-Communist personality so he could be prematurely discharged from the service as a fake defector to be used in an anti-Communist intelligence operation:

  • “I worked this technique with a vulnerable Marine lieutenant I’ll call Jones. Under the watchful eye of Marine intelligence I split his personality into Jones A and Jones B. Jones A, once a “normal” working Marine, became entirely different.

  • “He talked communist doctrine and meant it. He was welcomed enthusiastically by communist cells, and was deliberately given a dishonorable discharge by the Corps (which was in on the plot) and became a card-carrying party member. ... Jones B was the deeper personality, knew all the thoughts of Jones A, was a loyal American and was ‘imprinted’ to say nothing during conscious phases. All I had to do was hypnotize the whole man, get in touch with Jones B, the loyal American, and I had a pipeline straight into the Communist camp. It worked beautifully.” [Emphasis Added]

In addition, the CIA was discussing the use of  MKULTRA/"involuntary assassin" technology in its Operation MONGOOSE anti-Castro project--a program riddled with psychological warfare experts.

• According to the New York Times, "the security officer for the MKULTRA/assassination project, Sheffield Edwards, was later the CIA man assigned to form the assassination team that made attempts on the life of Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba.”

• It was more recently revealed by journalists including Jefferson Morley that the CIA-backed anti-Castro group Oswald interacted with prior to the assassination was run by George Joannides, “the chief of Psychological Warfare branch in the CIA's Miami station in 1963.”

  • Joannides played a critical role in the House Select Committee's investigation into the crime. According to the New York Times: "In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role. That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities."

  • Dr. Estabrooks had also proposed using his hypnotic split-personality technique on militant Cubans to buildup a paramilitary operation of the type that we now know ex-Marine Oswald interacted with, and Joannides would have supervised:

    • "...preferably well before the outbreak of war, we would start our organization. We could easily secure, say, one hundred excellent hypnotic subjects of Cuban stock, living in the United States, who spoke their language fluently, and then work on these subjects.”

Oswald's murderous actions not only fulfilled a CIA memo from the 1950s outlining a “terminal experiment” using “involuntary assassins,” but they also complemented a sinister Cold War operation secretly planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly before the Kennedy murder. Recently declassified memos from this covert program, called Operation NORTHWOODS, reveal a shocking plan to use false-flag violence to justify the ongoing war against Castro's Cuba (Operation MONGOOSE) and provide an excuse for escalating the Cold War.

In this plan, which Kennedy vetoed, the CIA's anti-Castro agents, disguised as pro-Castro agents, would engage in a series of violent actions, including “staged assassinations” on American soil. Such covert actions were designed to provoke "a helpful wave of indignation" in the American public and generate support for a more overt and militaristic Cold War crusade.

These NORTHWOODS memos, when combined with the earlier CIA memo describing a mind-controlled defector-assassin who would be used in a "trigger mechanism" as part of a "bigger project" show how Oswald's staged actions as a "pro-Castro" agent dovetailed with the NORTHWOODS project to provoke "a helpful wave of indignation" supporting militant Cold War projects. By killing President Kennedy, Oswald not only eliminated a roadblock to the CIA's more militant anti-Communist policies (Kennedy fired the CIA director who oversaw these policies and who then served on the Warren Commission), he provided a justification for them. With Kennedy out of the way, President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated the Cold War using the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, which took 40 years to be exposed as a manufactured pretext for war.

Was Soviet-defector Oswald used in a series of covert operations designed to identify and eliminate threats to the CIA’s covert operations, including a President deemed soft on communism?

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By closely studying 50 years of declassified documents we can now build a case that Oswald was programmed through MKULTRA for COINTELPRO operations, culminating in the fulfillment of Operation NORTHWOODS planning documents, as an adjunct to Operation MONGOOSE, which we now know "lone-nut" Oswald was participating in.

• This theory provides an overarching unity to Oswald’s otherwise puzzling activities up to and including the assassination of JFK; namely, his use as an unwitting operative in a “terminal experiment” programmed to play the role of a card-carrying pro-Communist--as described by military hypnotist Estabrooks--to identify and eliminate perceived threats to CIA anti-Communist operations.

• Moreover, this mind control technique, which is the ultimate form of plausible deniability and information compartmentalization, was mirrored in the CIA’s use of the media as a psychological warfare tool through Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

Indeed, Operation MOCKINGBIRD, the CIA’s far-reaching program to infiltrate and control the establishment media to silence critics of its programs (including JFK conspiracy theorists), has successfully portrayed Oswald as a “lone-nut” assassin, instead of the personification of now famous Kennedy-era Cold War operations.

The Perfect Assassin provides a glimpse at how the CIA not only manipulated Oswald’s activities but also the public’s perception of how seamlessly they fit into the CIA’s secret, ongoing covert ops.

With knowledge of these programs, we can integrate decades of seemingly contradictory evidence to propose a harmonizing unity to Oswald’s activities: he was a bit player in several counterintelligence programs to identify and eliminate threats to CIA anti-Communist operations using hypno-manufactured pro-Communist operatives. Apparently, no one was safe from these programs—even the President.

Was Oswald a patsy-assassin? Or was he a “lone-nut” perpetrator? From the unique perspective of the “Manchurian Candidate” theory of the JFK assassination, we can view Oswald as both perpetrator and patsy and finally solve the crime-of-the-century:  a programmed perpetrator as the ultimate patsy. (My summary of the evidence in support of Oswald as a lone-gunman assassin that day can be found here.)

It is imperative that the public understand the capability that the CIA has developed for quietly manipulating human behavior with its MKULTRA technology. Indeed, the operational use of mind control has horrific ramifications for the healthy operation of a free, democratic society. 

As Estabrooks warned with respect to hypnosis:

“Only a people ...who question and think . . . can be sure that hypnosis—disguised or direct—will not undermine their freedom and rob them of their very lives.”

By presenting evidence that the CIA used one of George Estabrooks' hypnotically created Marxist-marine "super-spies" in the events of November 22, 1963, I hope to stir the American people to question and think about the implications of using this technology in the past, present and future.

 For the novice and expert alike, the evidence and thesis presented in The Perfect Assassin hopefully will stimulate discussion for years to come.

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“I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger... We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

 --LBJ, shortly before his death

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 pdf version of article

Jerry Leonard is the author of The Perfect Assassin which reveals declassified documents and historical precedents supporting the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was manipulated through the CIA’s MKULTRA program to murder JFK, as outlined in a CIA memo, following a career as a COINTELPRO operative. Oswald’s behavior dovetails with long-running covert programs from the era such as Operation Shocker, the Operation MONGOOSE assassination program and Operation NORTHWOODS. This latter project envisioned CIA provocateurs engaging in acts of false-flag violence on American soil while posing as pro-Castro agents to justify escalating the CIA’s anti-Communist projects. (These programs took years of investigation to come to light due the CIA's control of the media through Operation Mockingbird.)  Kennedy’s death by one of these provocateurs, hypno-programmed for espionage as outlined in detail by a respected military hypnotist from Harvard, removed a roadblock to this program while creating a justification for it. This illuminating perspective  on the assassination allows us to view the best information from the two main schools of investigation as complementary rather than contradictory and finally solve the crime.  

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Supporting Illustrations:

The CIA's Interrogation-Proofing Project Still Making Headlines:

Oswald's Undercover Alter Personality?: Alek Hiddel

How The CIA Has Covered Its Tracks on the JFK Assassination

“Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.

“These critics and others, the C.I.A. said, should be depicted as ‘wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in,’ politically or financially ‘interested’ in disproving the commission’s conclusion, ‘hasty or inaccurate in their research, or infatuated with their own theories.’

“Among the arguments that the agency suggested were that the Warren Commission had conducted ‘as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.’”

Memo from CIA dated April 1, 1967, quoted in: “Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report,” New York Times, 12/26/77

Watch them pull the one secret service agent who was in the line of fire: