by Kenn Thomas Adventures Unlimited Press POB 74 Kempton, IL 60946
The KGB certainly felt high anxiety when police arrested Oswald for the murder of Kennedy. In his history of the KGB, writer John Barron reports that Yuri Nosenko, a defector sentenced to torture and confinement for years under CIA counter- intelligence head James Jesus Angleton, told him that "the anxiety was so intense that the KGB dispatched a bomber to Minsk to fly his file to Moscow overnight...officers crowded around the bulky dossier, dreading as they turned each page that the next might reveal some relationship between Oswald and the KGB." Barron speculates that the KGB worried about American public opinion, and it may have been considering the implications for global armageddon that KGB involvement in the JFK assassination represented, but it seems more likely that those Soviet officers feared what all secret agencies fear most: exposure of their methods and techniques of espionage.
Did this involve mind control? Lee Harvey Oswald clearly was not unfamiliar with the term. In the summer of 1962, he came to the office of New Orleans assistant district attorney Edward Gillen and asked him about LSD. He told Gillen that he had a supplier, inquired about its legality, and made several references to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World*. Historians note that at the time the CIA served as one of the few suppliers of the psychoactive substance, emphasizing that it was used in human experimentation and mind control among the Marines at the Atsugi Naval Air Base where Oswald served in Japan. One Marine from Oswald's unit even confessed that he had been one of the human subjects. One analyst suggested that Oswald making himself visible in this way, on this topic, with a public official, may have been another attempt to establish an image for himself as a dope-taking Commie symp. Of course, Oswald may have had a genuine curiosity about the drug.
In any event, Were We Controlled? does not argue for drug- induced mind control. Instead, it posits that two methods--Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control (RHIC) and Electronic Dissolution of Memory (EDOM)--influenced the behavior of both Oswald and Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby, as well as the actions of "vegetable oil" swindler Tino de Angelis, who rode the downward wave of the stock market on assassination day.
* Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, Chatto and Windus, Ltd., 1932. The book remains a drug literature classic. Interestingly, Huxley died the same day as JFK, after his wife Laura gave him a final dose of the psychedelic drug. As she tells it: "Some time during the morning, a new tank of oxygen [for Aldous Huxley's medical treatment] was brought in by a young man who had come several times before. He started, rather loudly, to say, 'Did you hear that President Kennedy...' I stopped him with a look. Aldous did not notice, maybe because he was preoccupied about the [young man's] tip. 'Those tanks are heavy; give him a dollar.'" (Horowitz, Michael and Palmer, Cynthia, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1977.) The New Orleans Public Library records that Oswald borrowed two books by Huxley in September 1963. (Lee, Martin A., Ranftel, Robert, and Cohen, Jeff, "Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid?", Rolling Stone, March 3, 1983.)