Monday, February 29, 2016

ISIS, Peoples Temple, SLA and the Manson Secret: Mind Control, the CIA and Cult Manipulation

Every once in a while, I get a comment on this blog that inspires a new blog post.  Last October, when I wrote ISIS is BS: It's Just the Latest Greatest Gladio Operation, I received a comment from Peter Chamberlin who posted a link that detailed the concentration of future ISIS leaders (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi and Haji Bakr, to name four) who were imprisoned together at Camp Bucca, an internment center in Iraq where the US Army ran a "behavioral modification program."  From 2004 to 2009, these Islamists, along with many others, were in the midst of an "Al Qaeda school" where terrorists gave chalkboard lessons on explosives and suicide bombing techniques to younger prisoners.  Camp Bucca has been portrayed in the media as a place where a "pressure cooker" of Islamic extremists just blew. I think this interpretation is just another example of "blowback" being bullshit.  After asking at RI if anyone could find any corroborating links of what seemed to me to be evidence that ISIS was part of a mind control intelligence operation, seemslikeadream found a few different sources on the subject, and I discovered this one which not only corroborated my own suspicions that Camp Bucca was a CIA brainwashing facility for building radicalized leaders for ISIS, but brought up an example from the past to illustrate how mind control intelligence programs did not end with MK-ULTRA in the 1960s as the CIA has maintained.



But is such a thing really possible? Sadly, yes. CIA mind control technology has made tremendous strides since it began in the 1950s with the lavishly-funded MK Ultra program. MK Ultra was closed around 1960 because it had achieved its objective: Power over the human mind such that a brainwashed “Manchurian candidate” assassin could be created. That is, an ordinary human being, after CIA treatment, could be made to kill someone – anyone – without the slightest conscious awareness of his actions. The most notorious “Manchurian candidate” is Sirhan Sirhan, the mind-control slave who was set up as a patsy in the CIA’s murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

The CIA also has a track record of creating cults – and their charismatic leaders. The Reverend Jim Jones, an anti-establishment clergyman, was turned by CIA mind-control into a fire-breathing, charismatic puppet-master, who convinced hundreds of people to join him in a mass suicide. Ironically, the puppet-master was himself a CIA puppet; the mass suicide was a CIA experiment designed to discover whether a large group of political dissidents could be so totally controlled that they would kill themselves on command. This experiment, like the murder of RFK, was a success.

More recently, the CIA has been conducting Nazi-style mind-control experiments on Muslim inmates in Guantanamo and other terror prisons. Jon Ronson – a mainstream journalist and bestselling author who generally keeps his humorous distance from “conspiracy theories” – discovered in 2003 that Guantanamo inmate Jamal al-Harith and others had been subjected to torture and “silent sound” mind-control experiments while in US custody.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows that CIA torture is not designed to elicit information. Its real purpose is to “break” the subject so he or she can be mind-controlled.

Douglas Rushkoff’s book Coercion explains how CIA mind control works: The subject is “broken,” then the CIA interrogator presents himself as a substitute parent figure and seizes total control of the subject’s mind. That is how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, was convinced by his mind-control torturers that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

The secrecy surrounding al-Baghdadi’s five years in US custody strongly suggests that the self-proclaimed “caliph of Islam” is actually a Muslim version of Jim Jones. His “Islamic State” is a Muslim Jonestown. It is designed to mass-suicide Islam by turning Muslims against each other.

Fortunately, the world’s Muslims are not drinking the kool aid.



This is not the first time I have read the allegation that Jim Jones was involved with the CIA and that his Peoples Temple cult was a mind control experiment.  Peter Levenda wrote a brilliant trilogy of books titled Sinister Forces and in Book Two: A Warm Gun, he devotes all of Chapter Thirteen to the subject.  The first association Jones had with the intelligence community began when he was a fifteen year old sidewalk preacher in Richmond, Indiana and met Richmond police officer Dan Mitrione.  Giving liberal credit to author Jim Hougan for his piece Jonestown, The Secret Life of Jim Jones: A Parapolitical Fugue (Hougan's three part series on the subject on his website is a valuable update), Levenda maps out the known details of their relationship.  After his sidewalk preaching teenage years, Jones became assistant minister for the Somerset Methodist Church in Indianapolis in 1952.  It was there that he refined the approach for which he became known: preaching a gospel of racial tolerance that attracted black followers and performing "miracles" in which he fraudulently removed cancerous tumors through mesmeric passes, shouting Biblical phrases, and concealing chicken livers to be conveniently revealed as "tumors."  What was different during the 1950s as opposed to his later career is that his political outlook was decidedly anti-Communist.


Cult leader Jim Jones
Jim Jones  Photo credit: Corbis via NPR


That changed during the 1960s when Jones hooked up again with Dan Mitrione.  According to Hougan, Mitrione had moved on from being chief of police in Richmond, Indiana to training three months at the FBI's National Academy in 1957 to being hired by the State Department in 1960 as a "public safety adviser."  In late 1960 he moved to Brazil officially employed as an Agency for International Aid (AID) officer attached to the Office of Public Safety (OPS).  I've written multiple blog entries about how AID often provides cover for the CIA, but I've not yet written about OPS.  Levenda goes into more details about OPS and Mitrione in Sinister Forces Book Two: A Warm Gun on page 171:


Mitrione, it is now known, was involved with the training of Latin American police forces in the use of torture and drugs in interrogations, under the auspices of the now-defunct and cynically entitled Office of Public Safety (OPS), an Orwellian organization that was formed during the Eisenhower administration.  Mitrione was an avid practitioner of the methods he taught and, according to one of his trainees in Uruguay in the late 1960s, he would pick up homeless people on the streets to be used as guinea pigs in his training sessions, bloody interrogations which were always conducted in a soundproof room.  In Montevideo, this room was in the basement of his home.  When the derelicts died during the course of the "training," their bodies would be dumped back in the streets as a warning to Communist insurgents.





Dan Mitrione  Photo credit: Advance Indiana


Eventually this flagrant sadism caught up with Mitrione and he was, to quote Levenda on page 171 again, "taken hostage and killed by the leftist guerrilla Tupamaros in Uruguay in 1970, revolutionaries who knew that he was a CIA agent with AID agency cover."  What is fascinating about this in regard to Jim Jones is that the CIA opened a 201 file on Jones at the same time Mitrione was staying in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in November, 1960.  Mitrione then moved to Belo Horizonte, Brazil in December 1960, which is where Jones and his family traveled to in April 1962.  Prior to that, Jones had been spotted in places as varied as Hawaii, Cuba (where he supposedly had his picture taken with Fidel Castro while trying to convert and convince black Cubans to leave with him to Indiana) and even Guyana - but at conflicting times where he couldn't be in both places at once.  Considering the State Department issued Jim Jones two passports - one on June 28, 1960, the second January 30, 1962 - Hougan believes that, in a peculiarity similar to the 'Oswald double' phenomenon, there were two Jim Joneses: the real one and an impersonator.  While in Belo Horizonte, Jones was interested in the works of David Miranda, who did a study on ESP and mass-conversion techniques, subjects of interest to the CIA in connection with MK-ULTRA, which Mitrione would become involved with later in Uruguay.  What Hougan suggests is that the CIA file was opened on Jones in 1960 when Mitrione was recruited into the CIA because he intended to use Jim Jones as a CIA agent and that Jones' file was closed and purged in 1970 as a direct and logical result of Mitrione's assassination.

Jones was certainly not the same preacher who left America when he returned in 1965.  He moved to Ukiah, California and incorporated the "Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ of Redwood Valley" on November 26, 1965.  The religious organization that adopted them and insured their legitimacy, the Disciples of Christ, has counted three presidents among its members (James Garfield, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan) and is a millennialist sect with apocalyptic beliefs.  Jones himself preached apocalyptic visions, but now instead of preaching anti-Communism as he had done in Indiana during the 1950s, Jones was preaching the gospel of Karl Marx.  Yet despite this (or perhaps because of, if this conversion was all part of a psy-op), "the Messiah from Ukiah" was, according to the late conspiracy researcher John Judge, contacted by missionaries from World Vision.  This particular non-governmental organization (NGO) has a history of intersecting with the intelligence community including Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion, southeast Asia with the CIA, and as Levenda points out on page 184, "World Vision is only one example of an organization that is widely reported to have cooperated extensively with American intelligence services in South America."  World Vision also has bizarre ties to the John Lennon assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan that I have written about before.

After moving to San Francisco in 1972, the Peoples Temple became more prominent and consequently received greater public scrutiny.  Occasionally there would be negative coverage in the press, though nothing comprehensive of the beatings, sexual abuse, torture, brainwashing and mind control.  On October 3, 1976 one member named Bob Houston wrote a letter to Jim Jones resigning from the Peoples Temple.  On October 5th, he was found dead under suspicious circumstances.  Houston's father worked for Associated Press was convinced of foul play as a result of his son's defection and pushed for a deeper investigation into the Peoples Temple.  He was able to convince Congressman Leo J. Ryan to take up his case.  Levenda summarizes Ryan's creds in Book Two: A Warm Gun on page 204:


At the same time, California Congressman Leo J. Ryan was making a name for himself as a government watchdog. He had co-authored the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which required the CIA to get prior approval from Congress before undertaking any covert activity. In addition, he was asking questions about the CIA's mind-control projects in the State of California, as he wondered whether or not the notorious members of the Symbonese Liberation Army (SLA) had been willing or unwilling beneficiaries of the MK-ULTRA program while serving time at Vacaville.


The question Ryan asked the CIA regarding the SLA concerned their leader, Donald DeFreeze.  While imprisoned at Vacaville, he was involved with the Black Cultural Association under the direction of Professor Colston Westbrook.  Westbrook has since been identified as a former intelligence agent who worked for AID, the same agency providing cover for Dan Mitrione and possibly Jim Jones in Brazil.  The SLA, like ISIS and the Peoples Temple, also engaged in brainwashing, famously kidnapping and programming heiress Patricia Hearst to help them rob a bank.  It is possible they were not genuine revolutionaries but agent provocateurs; at one point they hijacked a car and driver, drove around a few hours telling them who they were, then let the driver go - the same type of attention-demanding phoniness that Lee Harvey Oswald doubles engaged in test driving cars while talking tough about Russia, or talking about killing Kennedy at rifle ranges.



Donald Cinque DeFreeze
Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze  Photo credit: Find a Grave


But Ryan took their intelligence connections seriously enough to ask if DeFreeze, who was killed along with five other SLA members May 17, 1974 in an LA SWAT team raid where the house they were staying was burned to the ground, was involved with the CIA MK-ULTRA program.  The CIA issued a non-denial denial, stating that "DeFreese" (note the misspelling.  Deliberate?) was not a participant in CIA program as "far as our records" indicate.  This was issued October 18, 1978.  By then, Jones had already moved the Peoples Temple out of the US into the jungles of Guyana where Jonestown was created.  Congressman Ryan then investigated Jonestown in November, offering to take members back to the US who didn't want to stay.  When they drove to the airport November 18, 1978, the party was gunned down by Jones' security force, murdering Ryan and several others.  Jones then proceeded to kill 913 human beings including himself.  Whether through administering hypodermic cyanide injections, having his security force kill those trying to escape, or the brainwashed Kool-Aid drinkers the media loved to highlight, Jones is responsible for all these murders.

There was one man whose life Jones went out of his way to save: Richard Dwyer.  Dwyer had accompanied Ryan to Jonestown.  He was a career intelligence officer working under State Department cover at the US Embassy in Georgetown.  Multiple sources have said his real employer was the CIA.  How amazing that in the midst of orchestrating the complete decimation of Jonestown, he tried several times to make sure that someone from the intelligence community was out of Jonestown when his apocalyptic visions were about to become very real.


Ed Sanders, in his book about Charles Manson and the Family, stated that if the Pentagon ever formulated the Manson Secret, the world would be in trouble.  One wonders if Jonestown was an example of such a formula: a white man, with murky intelligence connections and political activity in Latin America and the Caribbean during the sixties, becomes the leader of a large black congregation and orders them all to their deaths.  If this had been in a novel, it would have been dismissed as unbelievable.



Charles Manson might be getting married
Charles Manson  Photo credit: death and taxes


The above passage from page 203 of Peter Levenda's Book Two: A Warm Gun is just one of many examples where he draws parallels between Jonestown and Helter Skelter.  Jim Jones preached that he was the reincarnation of Jesus (and Lenin); Manson also would tell his followers that he was Jesus (and the Devil).  Like Manson, Jones had his "family" (he insisted they address only him as Father) through which he used psychodrama to subordinate other members.  Manson would orchestrate the sex lives of the members of his family by directing group copulation; Jones would control the sex lives of his congregation arranged marriages, public humiliations and private rape.  Manson would use drugs, particularly LSD, as part of his acting out rituals for the Manson Family such as putting him on a cross in a mock crucifixion where he would be resurrected; Jones had a huge pharmacy of narcotics and psychoactive compounds, it's not really clear how the drugs were used in everyday life in the compound.  At the Jonestown compound, Jones put his congregation through rigorous physical labor and sleep deprivation; Manson would often exhaust his women with physical work prior to sex and would take his crew on late night "creepy-crawl" burglaries.  As Levenda wrote in the previously cited book on page 98, "That combination of sex and drugs and a kind of perverse operant conditioning are the basic working parts of what Ed Sanders calls "The Manson Secret."  It was what CIA psychiatrist Ewen Cameron was working on until virtually the day he died, except that Manson was much more successful.  As documented in The Nine, Cameron created zombies; Manson created assassins."

Was Manson involved with the intelligence community?  Levenda believes that Manson may have been subjected to MK-ULTRA testing while imprisoned in Chillicothe during the 1950s.  Manson maintained a connection with the intelligence community during the 1960s with a drug dealer named Ronald Stark.  According to the blog VISUP, Stark was a large scale LSD during the 60s who was finally brought down in Italy in 1980.  He was released by an Italian court on the basis that he had been employed by US 'secret services' since at least 1960.  It's hard not to wonder if Jones was a more refined large-scale approach as Manson.  Both believed in the prospect of an imminent race war.  To quote Levenda's book again on page 201, "One could say they were on either side of the same argument: Jones (ostensibly) wanted to preserve the black people of America and Manson wanted them destroyed.  Both, however, saw race war as inevitable.  When the dust cleared, however, Manson had killed only white people (with an attempted murder on one black drug dealer); Jones had killed hundreds of black people in Jonestown."


My point in exploring these dark chapters of the past hopefully illustrates that the past continues to live on into the present.  ISIS is only the most recent blatant example.  The techniques of mind control will continue to be effective on anyone willing to surrender their free will for the illusion of security.  When you surrender your free will, you surrender your power.  Guard against that with vigilance.