Washington Report: The Mind Controllers

...Again, the only way to put a halt to all this is to bring the criminals to book...

...Otherwise he is just another celebrity, a character in a TV series who, as one neighborhood kid said, "had some year...

...Except for the brief tenu/e of James Schlesinger, Stansfield Turner is the first grown-up to head the CIA...

...He was the psychological master of a city already approaching a despair brought on by blackout looting, unemployment~ street crime, noise and heat...

...None of the loony schemes worked, produced anything of the slightest use to intelligence gathering...

...At one point the Agency actually engaged the services of a professional magician for consultation and instruction...

...nevertheless, the work continued in order to get ahead of the dread foe...

...The substance of the new revelations falls roughly into two parts: the outrageous and the incredible...

...He is a "nobody" who suddenly became the most famous man in the world --until Elvis died and forced him off the front page...

...This, of course, raises the question as to whether that agent killed in Athens was killed by the Agency in order to show the danger of open inquiry into the Agency's activities...

...WASHINmTON REPORT THE MIND CONTROLLERS Before you even consider the alarming substance of the recent revelations about the CIA's 25-year, 25 million dollar quest for methods of mind control to be exercised over its own agents, foreign agents and anybody else the agency thought profitable to brainwash, hypnotize or otherwise fiddle around with, it is important to think about the way these horrendous facts became public...

...As we should have foreseen, a sick, pathetic man...

...And, as Rutgers psychology professor Edith D. Neimark pointed out in a letter to the New York Times [August 18], Berkowitz has become a victim of the public's willingness to let all kinds of psychotic behavior go unreported because we all learn to "mind our own business," and to allow easy access to guns and all kinds of dangerous drugs because guns and drugs are big business and big money is involved...

...With luck, that control will be broken by the farcetragedy now revealed...

...Since the Bad Guys are known to be willing to do anything to win, the Good Guys must be just as willing to commit any evil for the sake of the larger good...

...There was at least one murder ---or homicide, the category of crime has not been established because the crime itself has been swept.under the carpet by a complaisant Congress which handed out a reparation payment to the victim's widow some 20 years after the killing...

...That possibility is not to be dismissed lightly: the only benefactor of that murder was the Agency...

...The victim, incidentally, was neither a hospital patient, an imprisoned criminal nor a bar patron, but a scientist actually working on the program...

...It is not unfair to assume that under Helms and under his much too revered predecessor, Allen Dulles, the method of the agency in dealing with Congress was exactly that: to lie and to keep on lying as a matter of operating procedure...

...There was a scheme to detect the movements of Soviet submarines by employing the services of water witches...

...This is hardly a surprise but here it is established once more...

...To some extent that was certainly the case...

...At that same hearing, someone should also have yelled "Killer Helms...

...They were, therefore, romantic self-indulgence on the part of perpetual adolescents lost in the dreams of juvenile fiction...

...To acknowledge the commonness of David Berkowitz is to confront the community's common responsibility for his year of terror...

...A lot of the schemes on foot over those 25 years and through that $25 million of the best suggest James Bond, but actually before James Bond the same sort of idiocy was turning up in action comic books of World War II and the years of the early Cold War, the formative years, it may be, for the kooks who turned the Agency into the comic strip it became...

...at Dan Schorr~ the television newsman to whom we owe a lot of our knowledge about the spookiness of the spooks, that someone had had the wit to cry, "Liar Helms...

...The record shows it was willing to kill its own for its own purposes and certainly the death of Agent Welch did serve those purposes at the time, namely giving pause to those who wished to get the Agency's criminal record on the public record...

...One only wishes in that incredible moment when Richard Helms, of all people, leaving a congressional hearing to which he had lied and crying "Killer Sehorr...

...Where is the perjury inquiry...

...Two more points: it all came to nothing...

...The juveniles dominated the Agency through most of its life: the real work was done, mostly, by librarians...

...In short, somebody lied, including, in high probability, the long-time agency director, Richard Helms...

...in this case we turned into not the enemy as he was but the enemy as we feared he might become...

...The only way you stop that is to hold them for downs and Helms is as good a place to start as any...

...Despite self-serving statements by Helms and other murderous and felonious agents and "ex-"agents about nothing having been done without prior presidential approval, there is certainly a strong possibility that Helms and DuUes lied to Presidents as blithely as they lied to Congress...

...If the outrageous crimes the Agency was committing against Americans at random and its own employes or contractors suggest a tragic farce, Hitler's experimental camps Staffed by the Keystone Kops, the incredible side of the ledger suggests nothing so much as The Rover Boys Run Amuck...

...Among the victims, too, however, were people actually working for the Agency and staff members of some of the involved institutions...

...Very early, however, it was learned that the Russians had done no such thing...

...What all the schemes had in common was the idea of a magic solution to a complex problem reduced to an attractive but false simplicity...

...It has been a feature of the Cold War that we are constantly turning into the enemy...

...FRANK GETLEIN Comnlonweal: 549...

...What the liar does in those circumstances, besides obviously violating his oath of office, is to make orderly, democratic government more difficult, more nearly impossible...

...Some of them came out in testimony by new CIA director Stansfield Turner, more in files obtained by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act...

...He--they~have to be tagged on it...

...What that demonstrates, if it needs to be demonstrated at this late date, is that the Agency has been quite willing to murder its own if that seems desirable, a conclusion buttressed by the fact that one aim of the whole research endeavor was to fix CIA agents so that they would ignore self-preservation and die for the cause...

...A blank-faced, innocuous, perpetually smiling, pudgy, little composite of so much that is both good and sad about the urban culture that made and feared him: Italian, Jewish, Baptist, "Jesus freak," satanist, exsoldier, volunteer fireman: auxiliary policeman, postman, drug-abuser, strange neighbor, forsaken yet loved, free as any citizen to own a .44 caliber revolver and to walk in and buy a .45 caliber, 30-shot semiautomatic rifle in a neighborhood gun shop...

...Killer Helms...

...What's it all mean...

...Under the heading of the outrageous, the CIA, in the process of testing drugs that would facilitate the control of people's minds, committed felonious assault upon some hundreds of American citizens, among them patrons of East and West Coast bars, inmates in criminally psychopathic institutions and patients in ordinary hospitals...

...Why not...

...Most of the material was found in a report which had previously been represented to Congress as no longer in existence...

...another to use mental telepathy to send and receive clandestine messages, to melt the Berlin Wall--perhaps by the same sinister forces hovering in the air that A1 Haig blamed for the gap in the Watergate tapes that served his master so weU--to make mushrooms into rubber, a feat easily accomplished, in fact, just by overcooking...

...Was the CIA--is it stiU?--a combination d the criminally insane and the just plain cuckoo...

...O.K., they lie...

...it was said to have been destroyed...

...it's hard to explain the record any other way, and to that extent, it is amazing those agency loonies would take the risk of entering mental hospitals to carry on the good work, astounding they got let out again: standards are falling everywhere...

...This is natural enough because the whole CIA worldview throughout most of its history has been one of comic-book simplicity: the Good Guys Against the Bad Guys...

...Now he is suddenly a man, with a face and a history and even a joke---a parking ticket...

...Presidents, like members of Congress, are merely elected officials, not inside "The Company," not really appreciative of the desperate stakes for which the game is played nor of the need to fght fire with fire, to subvert the Constitution in order to save it and so on and so on in that style for pages, chapters, years: you can read all about it in the novels of Howard Hunt: the agent as self-pitying, self-sacrificing hero, taking upon himself the awful burdens of secrecy and illegality to save a nation that will never understand what it has been saved from nor by what methods, let alone by what lonely bero---unless, of course, it reads his novels and believes them...

...To lie is a sin, to commit perjury a crime...

...Caligari meets Rube Goldberg...

...There, as he planned to climax his year of madness by shooting up a Long Island discoteque, there was little between Berkowitz and his potential mass-murder weapon but the gun dealer's judgrnent that she would not sell it to a "ding-a-ling" but that this was a "very nice fellow...

...Liar Helms...

...Finally, the Agency always had control of the minds it needed to control: presidents and key congressmen...

...Killer Schorr...

...we have no different name for it, but for the head of any government agency to lie or commit perjury 2 September 1977:$48 in sworn testimony to the representatives of the people empowered to watch his work, that, surely, is worse than saying you already have a dinner date when you don't, even than saying you were in Syracuse when poor old Sacco Fagiole did the scuba dive in cement flippers off the Hoboken piers, when you, in fact, were fitting the flippers...

...He psyched out everyone for a whole year...

...Thus the blood of the victims is also on the hands of those who permit the conditions that produce psychotic killers to grow...

...It is said in extenuation that the Agency loonies got into this line of work when it was believed that the Russians had perfected mind control, used it on Mindszenty, on American prisoners d war in Korea, on a possible Manchurian Candidate...

...Thus to understand David Berkowitz in a way that would allow us to deal with what he has done we must see him both as an individual and in the way that his reign of terror has characterized the growing violence and desperation of city life itself...