After JFK was assassinated a cottage industry appeared to spread outlandish theories about what really happened. Real researchers like Penn Jones, Silvia Meagher, Harold Weisberg were suddenly snowed under by crank leads and rabbit holes leading nowhere. These efforts were only magnified when Jim Garrison began investigating the case in New Orleans. Probably the most effective stream of this gunk was manufactured by Discordians some of whom had been obviously unwittingly captured into participating in a clever counterintelligence operation designed to neutralize the real researchers. Apparently, the Discordians believed the Garrison investigation was a fraud, which justified their attempts at conspiracy theory monkey wrenching.
A lot of the gunk involved various theories regarding MK/Ultra mind control experiments, something few had any clue to in the mid-sixties. Mind control eventually became a subject pervaded with disinfo, starting with the first books on the subject, Were We Controlled by Lincoln Lawrence, followed swiftly by Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart.
Lincoln Lawrence turned out to be a regular on the emerging UFO circuit (real name: Art Ford), who claimed to have discovered a ray-gun at the North Pole that was over 100,000 years old. Most people thought this artifact looked like a toy pistol. Ford’s book claimed Oswald was a KGB sleeper agent and had been set-up as a patsy. He claimed the real story was published by a Chicago publisher, who turned out to be Novel Books, which was Kerry Thornley’s publisher as well, which should tell you all you need to know about this rabbit hole. Thornley’s editor at Novel was Louise Lacey, who would later be “ordained” as a Discordian Pope. Surely this is the most dubious distinction any JFK researcher can hold. Who would fund the rise of a fake religion dedicated to spreading fake news about the JFK assassination? The answer is James Angleton.
Bowart is an even more interesting character. An orphan from Omaha, Nebraska (which means he likely could have resided at Boy’s Town, the most famous Catholic orphanage in the world), Bowart moved to New York City in the early sixties and in 1965 became a founder of the East Village Other. He married Mellon heiress Peggy Hitchcock, whose brother Billy funded the spread of Orange Sunshine across the globe, while his uncle Richard Scaife invented the Radical Right. While the Astor, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Carnegie dynasties have disappeared, the Mellon clan remains richer than ever.
Bowart and Hitchcock bore two children but the marriage didn’t last, although Bowart got a few thousand a month in alimony for several months after the divorce was finalized. He moved to Arizona and created a publishing company for exploring metaphysical topics. Decades later, it would be determined Boy’s Town was a center for recruiting child sex slaves, similar to what Jeffrey Epstein ended up doing. Apparently, managing sex slaves can be very profitable and most of the profit comes through either selling the tapes or using them as blackmail.
Like many others in the alternative media, I originally mistook Bowart as an honest researcher, but later in life I happened to pick up his book and went through a painful reevaluation, starting with the list of influencers given credit in the opening pages for shaping his zeitgeist. I was startled to see this list begin with Chip Berlet, an obvious intel propagandist who was head of the Friends of Albania in Chicago while also serving as an FBI informant. Berlet would go on to lead pushback against those claiming the the CIA killed JFK, who were suffering from a fake mental disorder he labeled “conspiracism.”
Berlet had a mirror operation on the right that was much bigger and better funded being run through Lyndon LaRouche. These two centers of propaganda staged a dogma war for a few decades, LaRouche asserting a Jewish cabal was running run the world while Berlet batted down those theories as far-right antisemitism.
Also on Bowart’s list was British intelligence super spook William Stephenson (misspelled “Stevenson”), the man who ran the world’s largest propaganda campaign in history from free offices on the 35 and 36th floor of Rockefeller Center.
Also on the list was Fletcher Prouty, the primary whistleblower on the JFK assassination from inside the Pentagon, who in hindsight appears to have been a backstop and not a real whistleblower as none of his information ever led to an official investigation of anyone.
To unravel counterintelligence operations, one only need identify the major designated influencer on a subject and before long more will reveal themselves as part of the team because these operations involve budgets and can always outlast and outwit any independent investigative researchers. Today, we have the phony Q-Anon community as the modern update on Discordianism, but the impact is the same, which is to muddy the waters on real deep state information, the people who ran the MK/Ultra assassins.
Mind control was a deep CIA secret for decades, part of the family jewels, which is why a cottage industry appeared to plant rabbit holes on the subject as soon as the public became aware of the situation. Oswald likely went through behavior modifications through hypnotism, and was probably told these experiments were designed to help him maintain his cover while in Russia. We know Oswald was hypnotized by David Ferrie while serving as a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol because Ferrie hypnotized all his cadets. One thing that stands out: orphans and those without strong father figures seem to make the best subjects.
There are numerous candidates for the list of CIA-programmed assassin: Mark David Chapman, Sirhan Sirhan, and John Hinckley. But one of the best documented cases is also among the least well-known.
Luis Angel Castillo was imprisoned for robbery in Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey, another site documented as conducting MK/Ultra experiments. Raised in Puerto Rico by Cuban nationals, he left Puerto Rico to attend school in Cuba in 1960. This may have been part of a JM/Wave penetration project. He was trained for several years as a Cuban intelligence agent. In late 1966, he changed identities with a Filipino living in Chicago named Antonio Reyes Eloriaga, at the direction of the Cuban Intelligence Service, for the purpose of using Eloriaga’s Philippine passport to go to the Philippines.
Castillo departed Chicago for the Philippines, traveling under a Philippine passport taken from a Philippine national illegally in the USA. Apparently his mission was to assassinate Ferdinand Marcos, who was dipping his fingers excessively into the stolen gold stashed by the Japanese after WWII and recovered by Yale Bonesmen working with Opus Dei. Marcos was getting kickbacks for contributing soldiers to aid the war in Vietnam.
Once in the Philippines Castillo was arrested by security services and claimed to be a Castro secret agent and offered his services in assassinating Huk guerrillas. But then they decided to submit Castillo to drugs and hypnosis and an entirely different story popped out. He quickly confessed to being among 14 Cuban intelligence agents who had been deployed in Dallas for Kennedy’s assassination after which he flew to Chicago in a plane piloted by a Russian-looking women named Jean Dole of Madison, Wisconsin.
It appears Castillo could have been a shooter, or back-up patsy linked to Castro if anything went south with the Oswald-as-lone-assassin scenario. One of the assassins, John Roselli, would float the theory that a CIA team sent into Cuba to kill Castro had been turned by Castro and sent back to kill JFK. In a sense, this is what happened, only the team was not “turned” by Castro. Castillo claimed to have been positioned on the second floor of the Dal-Tex Building with a rifle in his lap that he had no memory of firing (a detail that could easily have been hypnotically erased). Also of note, Castillo claimed the rifle was produced out of a bag in two parts, which corresponds to Ed Hoffman’s testimony of the grassy knoll gunman, as well as Joseph Milteer’s description of the weapon.
Apparently, Castillo never had a clear idea of who he really worked for. The CIA put immense effort into locating people who were easy to hypnotize and used them for a variety of ops and Castillo pioneered a list that now includes Sirhan Sirhan, Mark Chapman, John Hinckley and Donald DeFreeze. The problem was Castillo had so many multiple personalities it became exceedingly difficult to determine which statements might be true, as opposed to those hypnotically planted.
“Castillo was visited by a World Health Organization-based doctor,” claims Victor Arcega, “who tried and failed to re-hypnotize him.” Life, Time and Post correspondents interviewed him, while warning him to “shut up. In 1968, Castillo returned to the US on charges of mischief and vagrancy and entered an Illinois federal jail, but his wife (and soon-to-be ex), swore he never spent a day in jail. Within a month, the Illinois governor pardoned Castillo. “The last time he was seen, his mother was told Luis was shopping for clothes and travel stuff, preparing for a ‘missionary’ trip. To Angola.”