Book Description
Excerpted from The Perfect Assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA and Mind Control by Jerry Leonard. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CIA Memo Foreshadows Kennedy Assassination
Declassified CIA documents reveal that the scenario of the assassination of a U.S. official by a defector followed by the elimination of the assassin while in police custody had been discussed as a potential intelligence operation nearly a decade prior to the infamous events in Dallas. This proposed assassination would be unique in that the killer would be a victim of CIA mind-control technology and would not necessarily be conscious of, or responsible for, what he was doing.
News of such CIA research programs to create "programmed" assassins was released to the general public in a New York Times article on February 9, 1978. This article reported the following information regarding a long-running CIA program to train mind-controlled assassins:
"The Central Intelligence Agency began a study in 1954 to find out whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will, newly released Government documents disclosed today."
The declassified record indicates that U.S. intelligence agencies considered using these mind-control techniques (developed in programs code-named ARTICHOKE, MKDELTA and MKULTRA) to kill political figures including American officials.
Detailed information about one such planned assassination (under the project code-named ARTICHOKE) was revealed in an edited 1950s-era CIA memorandum quoted in the Times article:
"As a ‘trigger mechanism,’ for a bigger project, it was proposed that an individual, of (deleted) descent, approximately 35 years old, well educated, proficient in English and well established socially and politically in the (deleted) government be induced under Artichoke to perform an act, involuntarily, against a prominent (deleted) politician or if necessary, against an American official." [emphasis added]
The CIA memorandum continued:
"After the act of attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the subject would be taken into custody by the (deleted) government and thereby ‘disposed of.’"
Consider the parallels between this proposed CIA-backed assassination and the events in Dallas: Oswald, a defector, after allegedly committing the assassination of a high-level American official, Kennedy, was "taken into custody" by agents of the American government in Dallas and shortly thereafter "disposed of" by Jack Ruby on national television in the basement of a Dallas city jail.
Although news of the CIA’s assassin training program was released through the New York Times in the 1970s, it was not until 1993 (nearly 30 years after the publication of the Warren Commission Report) that a front page article in the New York Times would reveal that Oswald, the alleged "lone nut" responsible for the Kennedy assassination, had more incriminating ties to the CIA than we were originally led to believe.
On August 24, 1993, The New York Times revealed that Oswald had not only been associating with CIA assassins prior to Kennedy’s death but was under nearly constant surveillance by both the CIA and the FBI while doing it! These facts have enormous implications.
The decades of post-assassination investigative efforts have peeled away many levels of CIA disinformation designed to portray Oswald as a lone-nut assassin. These efforts have revealed numerous leads consistent with the thesis that Oswald was in fact connected with CIA operations ongoing at the time of the JFK assassination and that the CIA was fully aware of Oswald’s activities prior to the assassination. Many of these leads are also consistent with the hypothesis that CIA-backed mind-control techniques were used in the assassination.
