John Judge has died

[Magda Hassan]

The Post obit and caption twice refer to John Judge as Gray or Bob Gray,
evidently conflating him with a slimy lobbyist who died. I wrote
the obit writer to point out this bizarre error.

I wrote to the author of the article and she was most apologetic and thankful for bringing it to her attention. She has fixed the online edition and they will print a correction in the paper edition. Apparently Bob Gray is the photographer and she used his name by mistake later in the obituary.

[Marlene Zenker]

The Post obit and caption twice refer to John Judge as Gray or Bob Gray,
evidently conflating him with a slimy lobbyist who died. I wrote
the obit writer to point out this bizarre error.

I wrote to the author of the article and she was most apologetic and thankful for bringing it to her attention. She has fixed the online edition and they will print a correction in the paper edition. Apparently Bob Gray is the photographer and she used his name by mistake later in the obituary.

awesome!::rockon::

[Joseph McBride]

The Washington Post obit writer replied to my correction,
saying the photographer who took the picture of Mr. Judge
is named Bob Gray, and referring to Mr. Judge as "Mr. Gray"
was her error. She has fixed the obituary online and says
they will also publish a correction in the print edition tomorrow.
She adds she is very grateful to me for taking the time to be
in touch about this.

Here is the correction that is now running:

Correction:
An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly identified Mr. Judge in the photo caption and in the text as "Mr. Gray." The article has been corrected.

PS, I wrote this post before reading Magda Hassan's above. I am glad we were both on the case and that we managed to get it fixed.

[Peter Lemkin]

John Judge and the Army Inspector's Report

John Judge and the Army Inspector General's Report


One significant event happened in the summer of 1976, the Bicentennial year in Philadelphia when Legionnaires disease struck the Belleview Stratford hotel and nation was awash in intelligence agency scandals.


John Judge was living in Philadelphia and working at a Quaker Peace action organization on Walnut Street, just a block from Rittenhouse Square, where there was an Oswald sighting in the summer of 63' and where all the hippies hung out. It was also where the hippest radio station WMMR FM was located.


When I was in high school, MMR was by day an elevator music station, but on Sunday nights guy by the name of Dave Herman changed the world by playing entire 33 1/3 record albums an entertaining revolution that was labeled "Album Oriented Rock AOR." The success of Herman's "Marconi Experiment" show led MMR to go with AOR 24-7, and they hired University of Penn grad Bill Vitka to run the news department, and he tailored it to the young and hip target audience.


From a friend in Washington John had acquired a recently released report by the US Army Inspector General on the Use of Human Subjects in Chemical Agent Research, which documented all of the military contracts with academic institutions and corporate companies that experimented with LSD and other psychotropic chemicals, ostensibly to learn their attributes for interrogation purposes.


I recalled meeting Ken Kesey at John's Dayton apartment a few years earlier and talking with him about his early experimentation with LSD. Kesey said he first got it from a San Francisco professor who did his experiments for the CIA and he explained that they experimented mainly on students, soldiers and prisoners, who were all paid for participating.


Among the contracts listed at the end of the Army Inspector General's Report were some local Philadelphia institutions including the University of Pennsylvania and Ivy Labs and a Dr. Kligman was affiliated with both places.


Knowing WMMR-FM radio news director Bill Vitka was a University of Penn grad, John and I walked to Rittenhouse Square to the WMMR studios where Vitka was glad to get a copy of the report and immediately began to make some phone calls to Penn and Ivy labs and he eventually got to Kligman and interviewed him. Vitka did a segment every day for over a week on the Philly connections to the military experiments, and credited me and John Judge for supplying him with the basic research and report.


While we were working with Vitka, some bells went off and he went over to a wall of reel to reel tape recorders and turned some on, and a few moments later a major Associated Press radio wire service news report came in. Two bells, Vitka said, was important breaking news a fire or earthquake. He's heard three bells but the only time he knows of five bells being used was the Kennedy assassination.


Vitka left WMMR a year or so later and began working for a San Francisco based radio syndicate before returning to Philadelphia to get married and begin working for CBS radio in New York City. He is now a radio news reporter for Fox News radio network.


Kligman later became the subject of Allen M. Hornblum's book "Acres of Skin" (Routledge, 1998)

[Peter Lemkin]

With John Judge at the Archives II

With John Judge at the Archives II


I went to the National Archives with John many times, first to the old, original Archives, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then to the Archives II when it opened in the early 1990s.


On the wall just outside the original Archives is the inscription: "WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE." We thought that Prologue was a great name for the newsletter of the Committee (for an Open Archives), but after a few issues we learned that the official publication of the NARA was already called Prologue, so once COPA got going the name of the newsletter was changed to Open Secrets.


Once the Archives II in College Park opened, that's where all of the attention shifted because that's where they moved all of the JFK records and began to accept millions of documents from other agencies to become part of the JFK Assassination Records Collection.


I had been registered at the old Archives as a Research Associate, but at the Archives II you have to sit down at a computer and register all your details to get an access pass, and they are very strict about entering with pens, books, papers etc., especially after Clinton's former national security advisor was caught lifting some of his old memos in his socks.


One memorial occasion, while I photocopied the Andrews Log for 11/22/63, John had requested a number of boxes concerning the US military response to the assassination DEFCON status. He was also looking for any references to missing code books aboard B-52 bombers on 11/22/63.


While John was sitting at a table, reading from a cart of document folders next to him, I photocopied the Andrews Log, and then went into a little booth to read it. After concentrating on that for awhile I sat back and stretched, and recognized the guy in the next booth a few feet away from me. It was John Dean, the former White House lawyer and Watergate whistleblower. He said he was working on a biography of President Warren G. Harding, who I also had a personal interest in. Dean autographed the back of his business card for a friend of mine named John Dean, a Jersey Shore realtor, and he walked over with me so I could introduce him to John Judge.


John was all excited, having found the DEFCON status for 11/22/63 which showed that the DEFCON status did not change for the CONUS, only in the Southeast Asia. He also showed me a newspaper clip a news report that Gen. LeMay was reported to have been killed in an airplane crash that day, later proved erroneous.


I was later disappointed in John Dean's bio of President Harding, as I suspect Harding was assassinated by his enemies, and didn't die accidently of food poisoning while on a train trip, as Dean relates. I base my opinion, not only on the very questionable circumstances of his death, but the fact that Clarence W. Barron, the founder of the Wall Street Journal, expressed foreknowledge of Harding's impending death, as related by Mary Bancroft in her book "Autobiography of a Spy."


I also got a phone call a few months ago, before John died, from a guy researching the DEFCON status and the missing code books of the Cabinet Plane 86972 and the B-52 SAC bomber, as reported by John Judge.

[Peter Lemkin]

John Judge and the Inspector Generals Report

John Judge and the Inspector Generals Report on the Use of Human Subjects in Chemical Agent Research




One significant event happened in the summer of 1976, the Bicentennial year in Philadelphia when Legionaires disease struck the Belleview Straford hotel and Washington DC was awash in intelligence agency scandals.


John Judge was living in Philadelphia and working at a Quaker Peace action organization on Walnut Street, just a block from Rittenhouse Square, where all the hippies hung out and where the hippest radio station WMMR FM was located. From a friend in Washington John had acquired a recently released report by the US Army Inspector General on the Use of Human Subjects in Chemical Agent research, which documented all of the military contracts with academic institutions and corporate companies that experimented with LSD and other psychotropic chemicals, ostensibly to learn their attributes for interrogation purposes.


I recalled meeting Ken Kesey at John's Dayton apartment a few years earlier and talking about his early experimentation with LSD, and Kesesy said he first got it from a San Francisco professor who did his experiments for the CIA. I recalled that Kesey explained that they experimented mainly on students, soldiers and prisoners, who were all paid for participating. Among the contracts listed at the end of the Army Inspector General's Report were some local Philadelphia institutions including the University of Pennsylvania and Ivy Labs, where a Dr. Kligman was affiliated with both places.


Knowing WMMR-FM radio news director Bill Vitka was a University of Penn grad, John and I walked to Rittenhouse Square to the WMMR studios where Vitka was glad to get a copy of the report and immediately began to make some phone calls to Penn and Ivy labs and he eventually got to Kligman and interviewed him. Vitka did a segment every day for over a week on the Philly connections to the military experiments, and credited John Judge for supplying him with the basic research and report.

FROM ANOTHER REPORT
JFKCountercoup2: With John Judge at the Archives II

I went to the National Archives with John many times, first to the old, original Archives, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then to the Archives II when it opened in the early 1990s.


On the wall just outside the original Archives is the inscription: "WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE." We thought that Prologue was a great name for the newsletter of the Committee (for an Open Archives), but after a few issues we learned that the official publication of the NARA was already called Prologue, so once COPA got going the name of the newsletter was changed to Open Secrets.


Once the Archives II in College Park opened, that's where all of the attention shifted because that's where they moved all of the JFK records and began to accept millions of documents from other agencies to become part of the JFK Assassination Records Collection.


I had been registered at the old Archives as a Research Associate, but at the Archives II you have to sit down at a computer and register all your details to get an access pass, and they are very strict about entering with pens, books, papers etc., especially after Clinton's former national security advisor was caught lifting some of his old memos in his socks.


One memorial occasion, while I photocopied the Andrews Log for 11/22/63, John had requested a number of boxes concerning the US military response to the assassination DEFCON status. He was also looking for any references to missing code books aboard B-52 bombers on 11/22/63.


While John was sitting at a table, reading from a cart of document folders next to him, I photocopied the Andrews Log, and then went into a little booth to read it. After concentrating on that for awhile I sat back and stretched, and recognized the guy in the next booth a few feet away from me. It was John Dean, the former White House lawyer and Watergate whistleblower. He said he was working on a biography of President Warren G. Harding, who I also had a personal interest in. Dean autographed the back of his business card for a friend of mine named John Dean, a Jersey Shore realtor, and he walked over with me so I could introduce him to John Judge.


John was all excited, having found the DEFCON status for 11/22/63 which showed that the DEFCON status did not change for the CONUS, only in the Southeast Asia. He also showed me a newspaper clip a news report that Gen. LeMay was reported to have been killed in an airplane crash that day, later proved erroneous.



I was later disappointed in John Dean's bio of President Harding, as I suspect Harding was assassinated by his enemies, and didn't die accidently of food poisoning while on a train trip, as Dean relates. I base my opinion, not only on the very questionable circumstances of his death, but the fact that Clarence W. Barron, the founder of the Wall Street Journal, expressed foreknowledge of Harding's impending death, as related by Mary Bancroft in her book "Autobiography of a Spy."

[Peter Lemkin]

John Judge Historic Tour of Washington D.C.

John Judge's Tour of D.C.


If you didn't get an historic tour of Washington D.C. from John Judge then you certainly missed out on not only some interesting but neglected historic sites in our nation's capitol, you missed some of his penetrating and insightful perspective of what happened there.


Usually driving around in John's old beat up grey Oldsmobile, with him behind the wheel, I think film maker Randy Benson may have filmed him while they were driving around DC, so maybe there is something saved on celluloid, but these are the Top 30 DC historic sites that I remember that are on John Judge's Assassins Tour of Washington.


They are listed in the order in which you would encounter them if driving into town from John's house in Anacosta, - aka the COPA Bunker, which is just across the river from Capitol Hill, SE


1) Quaker Meeting House South East Capitol Hill William Penn House where some of the early COPA organizational meetings were held, and around the corner and down the street from


2) The Hawk and the Dove a 1960s era bar and grill that has maintained its motif through many wars and still in the same family. The whole two block long strip is pretty cool, with a half dozen good bars and restaurants from the cheap neighborhood dive the Tune Inn, next door to the Hawk and Dove an Italian-Thai bar where the American Free Press crowd meet, the Pour House sports bar and a coffee house all with sidewalk café tables, a good book store and the Hunan Chinese where John and I dined often.


3) The Forestal Building a quick drive by, which he points out has sealed windows you can't open, fittingly naked after the former Navy? who killed himself by jumping out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hosptial.


4) Just behind the Captiol and past the Supreme Court building is the Mott House a convenient staging area for meetings run by good friends, across the street from the


5) A block away is the Teamsters HQ and the American Legion post where the Warren Commission often met and a few blocks from


6) Then there's Union Station where you can park for free in the parking garage if you eat in any of the restaurants or go to a movie, which we often did.


7) The Dubliner and Kelly's Irish Times are across the street from Union Station to the Southwest where I would often go after arriving by train and where John would pick me up or join me, sometimes in the summer at the sidewalk cafe.


8) Comfort Inn Chinatown. Driving west towards the White House, you pass through China Town, where an early important COPA organizational conference was held at the Comfort Inn.


9) Then there's a unique little neighborhood that we called the Bus Stop, because its where most of the school buses stop. There's the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Hard Rock Café the JE Hover Building Fords Theater the Spy Museum and further down the street is the Secret Service not-so-secret annex. That's the neighborhood where the old AARC was located, and the area originally targeted for the Hidden History Museum and Assassination Research Center.'


10) Not on any other historic tour of Washington John Judge is the only one who always makes a stop by back door of what he calls the "Hinkley Hilton," where John Hinkley shot President Reagan.


11) After drive bys of the MLK memorial and


12) Vietnam Veterans Memorial, its heading southwest you pass the


13) JFK Center for the Performing Arts and after a few blocks is


14) Dupont Circle where the Assassination Information Bureau once had an office, where the Chilean ambassador was killed in a car bomb by crazy Cubans and where John John Judge often enjoyed dining at an old, historic Italian restaurant or a late night meal at Words --- where he was somewhat of a celebrity for having appeared in a TV segment with Ali G the Jewish-Arab comedian and film maker.


15) Nearby there's the location of what once was Blackie's Steakhouse which, when we were there, was still haunted by some unpopular Vice Presidents who used to sneak in the side door, Col. Jose Rivera and Blackie, a decorated World War II combat vet. Blackie's is where we dined on a few occasions and where we discovered a little shrine to JFK that Backie maintained in one of the back dining rooms.


16) In Georgetown there's a stop at the canal path were Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered, (a still unresolved case), and a drive by one of


17) JFK's former residence a distinguished colonial row house at 1528 31[SUP]st[/SUP] Street NW a neighborhood where you can also drive by the residences of local Georgetown Social Set.


18) Past the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory note Collins Contract, and check out the security today how many cameras can you count on the front lawn? Then there's


19) American University the JFK Monument and a Thai restaurant often frequented when in that neighborhood.


20) Further Northeast is Bethesda Naval Hospital


21) Cobbs Creek Sheraton where Earl Warren resided in a special apartment and where a number of important COPA conferences were held.


22) A short hop along the beltway is the Archives II in College Park, Maryland. - Back south along the beltway there's some close but rural historic sites


23) Arlington National Cemetery JFK Grave Grave of the Unknowns RFK Grave


24) CIA HQ off in the distance, you can have your photo taken by the highway sign as David Atlee Phillips did.


25) NSA HQ Collins Radio cover security guard found dead


26) Hickory Hill JFK RFK residence in McClean, Va.


27) Back in town there's the Ronald Reagan Building where we attended an inaugural ball tickets compliments of Jersey Joe Piscapo, and nearby


28) Old Ebbett Hotel Bar which is popular with SS and was John O'Neill's hangout when in Washington.


29) Willard Hotel bar - the round wood bar where President Grant would visit nightly for his after dinner coniac and cigar, which Mrs. Grant wouldn't allow him to smoke in the White House. Once it became known that Grant frequented the place, those who wanted a favor from the president would gather in the lobby and wait for the President to arrive at the bar, and thus the term "lobbyist" was coined. It is also said to be where Francis Scott Key wrote some of his poems, including the national anthem, and where Martin Luther King put the finishing touches to his landmark "I Have a Dream" speech. There was also an Oswald sighting on the sidewalk in front of the Willard Hotel, where Oswald ostensibly handed out Cuban leftist literature a block from the White House.


30) The National Press Club just down the street about a block from the Willard and the White House the NPC was pretty much a convenient base of operations whenever something was going on. And where a celebration of John Judge's life is scheduled to occur.










POSTED BY BILL KELLY

[Peter Lemkin]

John Judge: Stirring the Plot

Stirring the Plot




By Molly Redden September 7, 2012


Conspiracy Cheery: Judge wants to educate, not agitate.
Photograph by Darrow Montgomery


http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/artic...-the-plot/


John Judge first utters the word "conspiracy" 37 minutes into our hour-and-a-half conversation, but the word has floated over our table in a crowded Starbucks near the Capitol from the moment we sat down.


Judge, 64, is a longtime fixture of what could be called the alternative history circuita space brimming with earthly explanations for UFO sightings and sinister hypotheses aboutU.S. involvement in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But there are academics on the spectrum of alt-history, too, who, calling their field "parapolitics" or "deep history," defy mainstream history through scholarship. Judge bridges the pseudo and scholastic ends of the alt-history worldat least, that is how he would like to be seen, as he hastens his ambitions to open the Museum of Hidden History.


With his scraggly white beard, Judge resembles a slightly worse-for-wear Santa Claus. "The Museum of Hidden Historywill be three things," he says, speaking so softly I strain to hear him. "History that we've made assumptions about and have been miseducated about. History that goes beyond our paradigms or for which we lack counternarratives. And history that has been stolen from us by the national security state." Some examples include exhibits on what is known, and what is still unknown, about the political assassinations of the 1960s, or on shortchanged minority and female perspectives on history. He also has plans for a research library, with thousands of documents wrested from federal agencies by good government groups.


Judge's goal is to open a brick-and-mortar museum in 2017. In the meantime, he's scouting sites in D.C.the unoccupied Franklin School downtown is among his desired locationsand making plans for a mobile exhibit on the assassination of John F. Kennedy to raise awareness and money. The museum's website boasts a clean new logo and a page for making tax-deductible donations. He has already secured a $10,000 grant from an unnamed family foundation.


But as a well-known figure in his field, Judge has an appropriately bizarre paper trail. He has argued on obscure websites that George W. Bush's 2000 election victory was prearranged by the powers-that-be before a single vote was cast, and he has written several treatises insisting on CIAinvolvement in the deaths at Jonestown. His more legitimate work isn't much closer to the mainstream. Judge's work on the 9-11 Citizens Watch, a group established by a yacht captain to monitor the 9/11 Commission, led to a stint as a kind of roving assistant to then-Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who famously told the commission that Bush may have known about the impending attacks. Little of the scholarship on his resume would be welcome in any traditional museum.
Yet Judge's work for McKinney, and on the Coalition on Political Assassinations, has nonetheless connected him to a handful of iconoclastic luminaries who have lent their names and occasional advice as board members, including the late historian Howard Zinn; James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me; Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg; and Cyril Wecht, the lone forensic pathologist to dispute the single-bullet theory of Kennedy's death before Congress.
Judge's dream, of a museum to educate some of the millions of tourists who pass through D.C. each year on the intricacies of the Warren Commission and the gaps in their knowledge on the national security state, seems to be on its way to fulfillment. But would Judge create a space for serious scholarship, or a temple to the questionable side of alt-history, with all its misbegotten suspicions?


The child of two Pentagon employees, Judge grew up in that bedroom community of the defense establishment, Falls Church. His father supervised loading docks at the Pentagon, where Judge remembers observing paper-pulping machines churn out raw material for thousands of books and binders. (Today, one of his obsessions is overclassification.) His mother was a manpower analyst who projected draft needs with the help of a hand calculator. Judge dates his interest in hidden history to an early age: Snatches of conversations between tipsy Pentagon employees at holiday partiesand his visits to the unclassified stacks of the Pentagon libraryled him to believe there was vastly more to the federal government than most understood. A subscription to Flying Saucers magazine at age 10, a gift from his uncle, didn't hurt, either.


Judge attended college at the University of Dayton, where he double-majored in broadcast journalism and theology, with an emphasis on saints, mystics, and religious leaders. He's not religious, calling himself "a recovering Catholic since about age 10," when he discovered for himself the Crusades and the Inquisition. He later worked as an activist, with a long stint warning D.C. high school students not to join the U.S. Armed Forces. That's his career to this dayhis salary from his time with McKinney, he confides sheepishly, is about the most he's ever made.
The road to Judge's rustic, three-story rattletrap in Hillcrest is so steep that as his Oldsmobile Royale struggles into the driveway, I feel I should be pedaling. Here he keeps his collection of 4,000 rare books and paperscounterhistories and conspiracy tracts, declassified documents and musty paperbacksthat form the nucleus of his life's work.


Judge stores about half of his collection in his basement, a dim room packed with crispy old newspapers, haphazard stacks of typed papers, and hundreds of bound volumes. The straining shelves bear the odd decoration here and there, like a bumper sticker announcing, "Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed." He points out some highlights: The Sept. 11 volumes. The anthrax volumes. The JFK shelf. The RFK shelf. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Row after row of scholarly tomes, indiscriminately mixed with kookier ones.


The rest is housed on the top floor, which teeters over his garage. This is the Ralph McGehee Intelligence Library, a collection of documents and books belonging to the disaffected CIA agent and bestselling author of the 1983 tell-all Deadly Deceits. Judge's housemate sleeps on the floor, on a thin pallet nestled among crowded bookcases bearing government reports and obscure periodicals obtained by McGehee. "I'm sort of a packrat with this stuff," Judge says, smiling. "That's part of why I want a museumso it's not just me who can access all this, sitting like Smaug over my gold pile."


For someone who has spent his career opposing what he believes to be a patronizing, overbearing national security state, Judge is weirdly uncynical. In describing his various conclusions about history, he comes off like an earnest, precocious teenager, but one without a tendency to get hot and bothered about his passions. That's part of what makes him engaging in spite of some of his wilder notions. He is unconcerned with present-day Washington's viciously partisan debates over the intrusions of government. When Judge pitches his museum, he does not describe a reimagining of national narratives so much as a bizarro Smithsonian.


His supporters can be a little more aggressive. Wecht, the forensic pathologistwho has gone on to be a best-selling author and TV commentator on the deaths of celebritiessees Judge's museum as a breakthrough in the campaign to reveal what he says is the truth about the Kennedy assassination. He begins to shout when asked how Judge could design exhibits in a way that avoided association with "conspiracy theories" and the easy dismissal that attends the term. "How can that appellation be made with any validity?" he yells. "Where does anybody have the chutzpah to make that kind of condescending statement when a majority of the American public don't believe the Warren Commission Report gave them the full story?"


In fact, it is because so many people doubt the veracity of official rulings on JFK's assassination that Judge has been such a successful agitator. That was the conclusion of Rebecca Moore, chair of the humanities department atSan Diego State University, writing in 2002 for the Journal of Popular Culture. Calling Judge a "professional conspiracist,"Moore argues that when ambiguity surrounds an event like Jonestown, the opportunity is ripe for someone to come along and capture imaginations with a grand explanation, even though he is challenged by almost all scholarly accounts.


Judge, though, always remains soft-spoken. Ronnie Dugger, the founder of the Texas Observer and a board member of the Museum of Hidden History, thinks this is part of what makes him so compelling. "In the miasma of the material that is out there, you really have to decide who you trust among the researchers," Dugger says. He trusts Judge, at least in terms of what he brings to annual meetings of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, because he is "a serious man" capable of screening others for "trash research."


The point, Judge says, is not communicating an absolute point of view, but "having an open, informed society." (Although there are a few things Judge is clear he does not believe in, such as honest-to-God extraterrestrials and the arguments of Sept. 11 truthers.) For him, the Museum of Hidden History is less about an alternative truth than about caching and presenting everything that precedes truththe specific tapes, documents, and outré research that Judge thinks are a must for anyone who wants to investigate, for example, the Malcolm X assassination from scratch.


"This history is going to be lost if it's not archived and retained and looked into," Judge says. "I think history in general has been untold, and not just the covert history. All the time, in different areas, history is being unearthed that gives us different perspectives. We're slipping into a posthistorical and postliterate age, where history isn't seen to be central.…Without an active effort to preserve our history, it is not going to be preserved. And without an active effort to unearth it from our own intelligence agencies, we're not going to know enough of it to make decisions about our future."'


This might be the appeal of the Museum of Hidden History, despite Judge's many strange beliefs. The idea that history hasn't been properly assembledwhether because of who wrote it or what they were working withis a notion that harangues every former grade schooler who grew up to learn, say, that Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest facilitators of institutional racism and not exactly the world peacenik we learned about when we were young. What makes Judge's vision attractive is the ever-tantalizing possibility that government conspiracies might exist, and the chilling evidence that they do.


The last decade of history alone is lousy with government scandals: warrantless wiretaps; revelations that, in the 1940s, NIH-funded researchers infected unknowing Guatemalan soldiers, mental patients, and sex workers with syphilis. Museums are meant to be educational, and Judge's track record suggests that, in the strictest sense, his might not be. But giving yourself over to the notion that there was a second shooter, just for an afternoon, could be a kind of education, too.

[Peter Lemkin]

Hinkley & Co.

Hinkley & Co. - Bill Kelly and John Judge


"Minds are malleable, but not self-malleable, a condition politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage." -William S. Burroughs.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....topic=5458


After John Hinkley shot President Reagan, he said, "The movie isn't over yet!"

And indeed it isn't. Political assassinations and coup d'etats are the most frequently used methods of changing governments and controlling power, and we shouldn't expect that to change.

Now we hear from Hinkley every few years or so when he exercises his right to seek release from St. Elizabeth's hospital, where he is incarcerated. Hinkley is in a hospital, rather than a prison, because of a quirk in our judicial system that says he is not responsible for his actions. If that is the case, then who is responsible for Hinckley's actions?

After the assassination of President Kennedy the murder of a president was made a Federal, rather than a local crime, so a Federal investigation would take precedence over local police, courts and authorities. Unlike the Hinkley-Reagan affair, the assassination of President Kennedy was successful and the government changed hands, minds and policy, while Hinkley's attempt on Reagan failed and the constitutional powers did not change.

Because we still haven't determined exactly who was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Reagan, we certainly haven't seen the last of political assassinations in our society. We haven't heard the last of John Hinckley, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan B. Sirhan or Mark David Chapman, the seemingly unimportant people who unexpectedly rise from the masses to take a monumental action that makes a mark on history and changes the course of our times.

As Hinkley said, the movie isn't over yet. Hinkley failed in his mission, but created an important case study that helps us understand the ongoing implications of assassination in our society.

War dawns slowly as a political hot spot becomes unmanageable and a limited conventional war gets out of hand, though we know the crisis is coming, but assassination, as a political incident, happens suddenly and often unexpectedly, except to those who intend it to happen. Since Hinkley shot Reagan, Sadat of Egypt, Aquillo of the Philippines, Ghandi of Inida, and dozens of other world leaders have become victim of assassins. Of all political avenues, assassination is the most likely, but least expected to happen.

"Well, it seems, you know, that there was this…there was this thing I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life, like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace." Taxi Driver

John Hinkley came crashing through that door on a lazy springtime afternoon in March, 1981, just outside a side door of the Washington Hilton Hotel. It's now nicknamed the Hinkley Hilton since Hinkley jumped out of a crowd of newsmen to shoot President Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, a secret service agent and a security guard.

Hinkley's alleged motive, a psychological, rather than political one, is that he shot the President to impress movie actress Jody Foster. Hinkley had repeatedly seen the movie, "Taxi Driver" in which Foster plays the role of a prostitute protected by a crazed taxi driver who stalks a politician with the intent to kill him, but then kills a pimp and a drug pusher. Rather than being sent to prison, he is declared a hero.

While the facts of Hinkley's life were being investigated and disseminated by the news media shortly after the attack, John Wright of Lansing, Michigan was arrested and charged with threatening the life of then Vice President George Bush. Wright had bragged, "that he could be more famous than Siran Siran or Lee Harvey Oswald."

As news of Hinkley's actions spread through the media, Edward Michael Richardson, Michael Vandewehe and possibly other "copy cat" assassins, as they came to be called, went through the Taxi Driver door on the heels of Hinkley. And like Hinkley and Wright, they found themselves in jail, charged with threatening the life of or attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.

On April 9, 1981, less than two weeks after the shooting at the Hinkley Hilton, Edward Michael Richardson was charged with two counts of threatening the life of the President. The first count stemmed from a letter Richardson wrote and delivered to Jody Foster Yale dormitory, while the second charge related to a letter found in Richardson's hotel room in which he stated that he was going to Washington D.C. "to bring completion to Hinkley's reality." Richardson was arrested in New York City with a loaded pistol while getting on a D.C. bound bus.

From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Richardson had spent some time in the military and was once a student of the Reverend Carl MacIntire's Shelton College, a fundamentalist religious school with campuses located in Cape Canaveral, Florida and Cape May, New Jersey.

Within days of Richardson's arrest, the Secret Service charged Michael VandeWehe of Wildwood, New Jersey, with threatening the life of the President. VandeWehe was considered a threat even though he was then incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at the time. The Secret Service said that he wrote and mailed a letter from the jail that made a "direct threat against the life of the President."

Before Reagan was shot, the Secret Service had commissioned a study by a panel of 27 experts to prepare a report on the methods of predicting violent acts. The Secret Service also compiles files on thousands of citizens that are potential threats to the President, and some 400 individuals are considered a serious enough threat to be kept under periodic surveillance. Neither Hinkley, Wright nor VandeWehe were considered to be a threat to the President before March, 1981.

Hinkley's case also made its mark in the legal journals as a precedent to be cited because of Hinkley's insanity plea, and attempts by the victim's attorneys to make Hinkley's psychologists responsible for his actions if he was not.

If Hinkley and the copy-cats were acting on psychological impulses, rather than on political, ideological or mercenary motives, then someone else could be held responsible for their behavior if it can be shown that they were conditioned or acting as an agent of others.

Rather than acting as a deranged lone-nuts on primitive instincts, perhaps one or even some of these assassins were psychologically conditioned or brainwashed by scientists with a more sophisticated motive and fit the archtypical Manchurian Candidate model.

If Hinkley was conditioned by the film "Taxi Driver," it might not have been just be environmental and social circumstances, but rather by design. Using drugs, hypnosis and multimedia programming techniques, individual subjects have been programmed to kill with a high degree of predictable response, so it is a possibility that deserves further investigation.

THE ANCIENT ORDER OF THE ASSASSINS

The U.S. Government, the military in particular, conducted psychological experiments on human subjects years, decades ago, and today, anyone with the knowledge and the tools could be in the business of privately programming and training assassins and terrorists.

We know coup d'etats and political assassinations occur routinely in third world countries and so-called "Bananna Republics," but our own system of government is equally vulnerable and more likely targeted for such manipulation. Until President Reagan, who survived the attempt on his life in the first weeks of his presidency, none of the previous five presidents actually served out their full two terms, eight years of office, since President Kennedy was assassinated.

Men with pistols, rifles, bombs and even samurai swords have been arrested at the White House gates, where guards have been on the lookout for suicide bomb trucks and remote control kamikaze airplanes.

The Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department, is responsible for the security of the president and thus keeps the files on thousands of people who are potential threats. Some are violent prone suspects, others religious fanatics, ideological demagogs, professional hit men, espionage agents and trained terrorists. Others are just plain nuts.

Their common name assassins, comes from the Arabic word Hashshishin, which means, "users of hashish," the euphoric drug, but their legend stems from a secret society that began in the 11th century Persia as a religious order. Their leader, it is said, "carries the death of kings in his hand."

Most of Western civilization first learned the tales of the Assassins from Marco Polo, who passed through Persia in 1273 enroute to China. Polo reported that the Shek of the Assassins lived in a fortified valley between two mountains, which is probably the fabled, impenetrable fortress at Alamut. There the Sheik had a beautiful fruit bearing garden "watered with streams of wine, milk and honey." Drugged and taken to the hidden garden, young impressionable recruits were courted by dancers, musicians, magicians and beautiful women. They were inebriated in ecstasy, then drugged again and brought before the Sheik. Having experienced paradise, they became slaves to its pleasures, and the Sheik's whim. "Away they went," Polo said, "and did all that they were commanded. Thus it happened that no man escaped when the Sheik of the mountains desired his death."

The role of the order of the Assassins, while they have passed into mythology, is still relevant, not only linguistically, but in regards to a contemporary understanding of assassination as a political weapon in our own society. In the 1000 years the term assassins has been used, assassins are still programmed and conditioned in ways similar to their ancient counterparts, but by much more sophisticated and predictable ways.

As the victim of an assassin President Lincoln became the last casualty of the Civil War. In 1900 Theodore Roosevelt assumed power when President McKinley was shot and killed by a "glassy-eyed anarchist." Assassins sparked Word War I by killing Archduke Ferdinand as he rode in a motorcade, and the Reichstag fire that herald Hilter's rise to power was allegedly started by a "lone-nut." French Admiral Darlin was assassinated by a British trained assassin in North Africa, while Hitler was the target of a failed assassination-coup attempt in 1944. After the war Leon Trotsky was targeted, stalked and eventually assassinated in Mexico City by Soviet agents.

The assassination of President Kennedy precipitated two decades of political unrest that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the wounding of Presidential candidate George Wallace, all by assassins who fit the archtypical assassin prototype James Earl Ray, Siran Siran and Arthur Bremmer. Richard Nixon's handpicked successor, Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, served on the Warren Commission inquiry into President Kennedy's assassination before assuming that office himself. As President he dodged bullets from two attacks, one from Sara Jane Moore, and FBI informant, and the other from Squeaky Frome, one of Charles Manson's disciples.

Assassins in the United States have not confined themselves to presidents and presidential contenders, but have also killed Union officials, foreign diplomats, journalists and cultural figures. United Mine Workers union president Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering the murder of his union rival Jock Yablonski, Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley turned states' evidence in admitting his participation with renegade Cubans in the Dupont Circle bombing assassination of former Chilean ambassador Leitter in downtown Washington D.C., and one-time fan, Mark David Chapman shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon.

By March, 1981 America and the world had been numbed by the accustomed ring of the assassin's gun when Hinkley opened fire on the President's entourage. Had he been successful, Hinkley would have made George Bush president of the United States with the flick of his finger and altering the course of history. The possibility that Hinkley was programmed or conditioned to shoot the President may have been privately evaluated, but has not been analyzed in a public forum.

STATE-OF-THE-ART ASSASSINS

The U.S. government has learned much about the psychological makeup of assassins, not by studying the profiles of subjects, but by attempting to create them. The state-of-the-art of conditioning assassins has advanced considerably sincethe days of the Hashshishin and the garden fortress at Alamut.

From 1949 until 1974 the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense conducted sophisticated mind and behavior control research, using students, agents, soldiers and prisoners as human guinea pigs in a number of experiments that used drugs, hypnosis, audio[visional and electronic programming techniques.

One such project, called ARTICHOKE, began using drugs for investigating interrogation techniques, which stemmed from attempts to understand brainwashing procedures used on American prisoners of war by the Chinese in North Korea. Eventually the program became directed towards finding "whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will."

One CIA contract agent, Jessica Wilcox (aka Candy Jones), a model and radio personality, was programmed to commit suicide by her CIA psychiatrist (See: "Candy Jones," by Donald Bain, Playboy Press).

Although both the CIA and the military claim that their research ended in 1974, there are indications that the mind control programs merely became "operational" when the "experimental" stage ended, and techniques for programming assassins were secretly blended in with the normal routine of clandestine and military affairs.

The discovery of a CIA handbook in Central America that gave guidelines on developing criminals as agents to eliminate selected government officials is evidence of this, along with the fact that it was used in Vietnam, supports the contention that the U.S. government uses assassination as a tool of foreign policy.

OSLO NATO CONFERENCE & THE NAVY NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL LAB

In the summer of 1975, a year after the government claimed it halted such research, Dr. Irwin Sarason organized a conference in Oslo, Norway for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which addressed the topic of "The Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety."

Dr. Sarason had produced a film which showed the success of school students who asked questions, and presented the film to a group of juvenile delinquents, who learned how to ask questions and showed marked improvement in their studies.

The U.S. Office of Naval Research offered to fund Sarason's work, provided it was classified, so it could be used by the Navy psychiatric lab in San Diego, California, where "spys were being trained to resist interrogation."

Peter Watson, a former psychologist and a reporter for the London Sunday Times attended the Oslo conference and participated in a seminar conducted by U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, a psychologist then assigned to the U.S. Navy Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy.

Lt. Commander Narut gave a talk on "The Use of Symbolic Models and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress." He claimed his work involved teaching "combat readiness units" to cope with the stress of killing.

After his general discourse, Watson talked privately with Narut, who told the London Times correspondent that he had done his doctoral dissertation on whether certain films provoke anxiety. Narut said that he studied whether forcing men to do irrelevant tasks while watching violent films made them cope better with anxiety associated with violence.

Narut also told Watson that the U.S. Navy programmed assassins on an assembly line basis, and that he personally worked with men whom he referred to as "hit men and assassins," who were involved in commando type operations and placed in U.S. embassies abroad. These men, Narut told Watson, were on call to kill selected victims when necessary. The U.S. Marine Corps, which is in charge of protecting embassies abroad, comes under the Department of Navy, and much of the advanced training for the Marines takes place at its bases in San Diego, California.

Narut said that drugs and hypnosis were no longer necessary, and that such conditioning was accomplished by a standardized behavior modification process called audio-visual desensitation. Subjects were desensitized to mayhem and carnage by viewing films of people being injured and killed in different ways, with mild bloodshed being succeeded by progressively violent scenes. They became acclimated to the brutality and eventually dissociated their feelings from the violence.

Narut was quoted as saying the best killers were classified as having "passive-aggressive" personalities, or men "with strong drives that were usually kept under tight control." These types he said, "were usually calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper during which they could literally kill without remorse." Men with these "qualities" could be identified through psychological testing, using the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory test, which is used in schools, businesses and corporations, as well as the military, and can measure hostility, depression and psychopathy.

After subjects with the right psychological qualities were selected and recruited they were sent either to the Naples Medical Center or the Navy Neuropsychological Lab in San Diego, California, where according to Narut, they were audio-visually desensitized by being strapped into a chair with their head clamped in such a way that they couldn't look away from the screen and their eyelids prevented from closing.

After Watson's story about the conversation with Narut was published in the London Sunday Times, Narut called a press conference to say that he had been talking only in "theoretical" and not "practical" terms.

HINKLEY'S MOVIE

"You see, I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys, Oswald, Booth and Arty Bremer, the lot, if it's one thing about them marks them out as real losers is they got a little unreal sometimes…" Taxi Driver

There has been much discussion on the effects the media has on people and whether it can instigate action, but the question shouldn't be whether or not the film "Taxi Driver" had a mental impact on John Hinkley, but whether the conditioning was coincidental or deliberate. Are Hinkley, Richardson and VandeWehe really "lone-nuts" acting on their own perverted psychological motives, or were they deliberately programmed by the government, military, the CIA or some sinister psychologists who specializes in such behavior modification?

John Hinkley's father was a wealthy oil man from Dallas, Texas, where Hinkley grew up and went to school. Hinkley bought his gun at a shop on Elm Street, not far from the Dealey Plaza intersection where President Kennedy was ambushed.

Hinkley's family moved to Evergreen, Colorado, where they were living in March, 1981. John W. Hinkley Sr. owned Vanderbilt Oil Company, and was active in a number of religious and charitable organizations, although he has more recently been devoting his time to promoting a foundation for mental health research.

Although Hinkley's main problem seemed to simplyl be finding direction in his life, his parents recognized some mental disturbance in him, and Hinkley saw no less than three doctors about his mental condition in the year before the shooting. In Lubock, Texas, Hinkley saw a Dr. Rosen, who prescribed an anti-depressant called Serentil, and valium, a tranquilizer.

Hinkley also saw Dr. John Hooper, who gave him biofeedback treatments. His father is also quoted as saying, "I made arrangements with a psychologist by the name of Durrell Benjamin, our company psychologist, to see John."

This doctor told Hinkley's father that, "John was immature and that we needed to work out a long-range plan to make John self sufficient." Hinkley wanted to attend a writer's school at Yale, and Benjamin recommended that he do so. Yale is where Jody Foster was attending school at the time.

They had Hinkley draw up a written agreement contract that read: "I will receive the sum of $3,000 in checks, taken from my stock,…to last from September 17 to February 1st…and I do pledge to try to make the coming weeks and months as productive as possible. It is now or never. Thanks for the money and one more chance. John Hinkley, Jr." The next day he left for New Haven, Connecticut and Yale, but he never enrolled in the writer's school.

"I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill, wrote all night long,…making calculations and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of these guns." Taxi Driver

Hinkley had seen a number of films with Jody Foster in them, some repeatedly, and in the month of August that year, he saw some on television. According to one report, "It was his feeling that the movies had been put no TV to excite him into action."

Returning to his parent's home in Colorado briefly, Hinkley went back to Lubbock, Texas where he purchased some weapons, the same caliber pistols bought by "Travis," the hero of "Taxi Driver," who he emulated. From Texas Hinkley went to Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and then to Dayton, Ohio, where he stalked then President Carter, who was making a campaign stop. Hinkley then went back to New Haven to see Jody Foster, then went to New York city where he sought out young prostitutes.

Traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, Hinkley contacted one of the leading activists in the American Nazi party, and fraternized with rightwing military types, before going to Nashville, Tenn., where Carter was campaigning. Picked up at the Nashville airport where his guns had registered on a metal detector, Hinkley was arrested with unregistered weapons in a city where the President was visiting, yet he was never considered a threat to the President and placed on the "watch" list, as thousands of other Americans routinely are "red flagged."

After paying a fine Hinkley went back to New Haven where he checked into the Colony Inn Hotel before moving to the Sheraton Park Plaza, never in need of money. Returing to Texas, Hinkley purchased two more handguns and then traveled to New Haven, Washington and Colorado, where he saw Evergreen psychologist Dr. John Hooper.

In an effort to make Hinkley relax, Hooper prescribed a series of biofeedback treatments. According to an account in Rolling Stone Magazine, "He was given earphones similar to those he wore in the nearby pistol range when he was practicing shooting at human silhouettes. An electrode was attached to his forehead. But while he was supposed to be relaxing, he was actually fantasizing about assassination and Jody Foster." Dr. Hooper however, said at the time he had never even heard of Jody Foster.

Towards the end of 1980 Hinkley went to Washington D.C. where he was on December 8, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. Hinkley then began stalking Ronald Reagan, and posed for pictures in front of the Ford Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated.

After seeing Dr. Hooper again in January, 1981, Hinkley went to New Hampshire in February, then to D.C. where he got a room at the Capitol Hill Quality Inn and visited the offices of Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy wasn't in. He then visited the White House before going to New York where he planned to commit suicide at the Dakota, where Lennon was killed.

Returning to Colorado once again, on February 19th he left his parents a note saying, "Dear Mom and Dad; Your prodigal son has left again to exorcise some more demons."

In New Haven, Conn. Hinkley stalked Jody Foster, delivered her a note, and then traveled to New York, from where he called home at 4:30 a.m. on March 6th. Hinkley's father contacted Dr. Hooper, who advised him to give his son $100 and say goodbye. A friend of Hinkley's father gave him the money to fly home, and on Saturday, March 7, Hinkley's father picked him up at the Denver airport.

Staying at the Golden Hours Motel in Lakewood for a week, Hinkley moved to the Motel 6 in Lakewood rather than stay at home. He registered under the name of "Travis," like his "Taxi Driver" hero. On March 25th his mother drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to Hollywood, California, where he stayed for less than a day. After four days on a bus, Hinkley arrived in New Haven, via D.C., then went back to D.C. and got a room at the Park Central Hotel, less than two blocks from the White House. There he watched TV, ate fast foods and read a Washington Star newspaper that contained the President's itinerary.
After writing a letter Hinkley picked up a John Lennon button, which he put into his left coat pocket, then put his .22 in his right pocket and proceeded to the Hilton Hotel where the President was making an appearance.

As Hinkley was shooting the president, quite by coincidence, his brother Scott Hinkley was at the White House with his good friend, the son of Vice President George Bush. Bush's daughter reportedly arranged dates for Scott Hinkley, and Ms. Maureen Bush, a niece of George Bush, is said to have been photographed at a Nazi rally with John Hinkley. The ironies were compounded however, when Michael Richardson was arrested in New York.

In the two weeks after Hinkley's attack on Reagan, the Secret Service investigated over 300 threats against the life of the President, and Richardson was the most interesting of the copy-cat assassins.

MICHAEL RICHARDSON

From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, Richardson was arrested on April 7, 1981 at the New York City bus terminal with a loaded .32 cal. Pistonl. He had been in New Haven, where he left a note in his hotel room saying he was leaving for Washington "to bring completion to Hinkley's reality."

"Our duel realities merged into a single vision," wrote Richardson, and indeed their trails had previously crossed. Unlike Hinkley, Richardson had briefly served in the military. He was trained at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, from January 4 to March 31, 1977, and received an early honorable discharge after three months of basic training, but the reasons for his discharge were not disclosed. At his arrangement in New York however, U.S. Attorney John Martin said Richardson stabbed someone during his brief military stint.

After attending Delaware Community College in Pennsylvania in 1979, Richardson started school at the Rev. Carl MacIntire's fundamentalist bible school, Shelton College, near Coca Beach, Florida. He also reportedly went to Cape May, New Jersey, where he spent the summer at MacIntire's school there, earning extra money by helping to paint Macintire's Christian Admiral Hotel on the beach. After two semesters, Richardson left Shelton and moved to Lakewood, Colorado, where he move in with his two sisters in December1980.

Hinkley's parents lived in Evergreen, Colorado, near Lakewood, and Hinkley had stayed at the Golden Hours motel in Lakewood in March 1981.

Richardson left Colorado in mid-March, Hinkley on March 25. In a letter mailed from Grand Junction, Colorado on March 25, and received by the Evangelist Magazine the day Reagan was shot, someone warned, or mysteriously predicted that Reagan would be shot and the country "turned to the left."
Richardson's family attorney, Joseph F. Moore, Jr. said that the connections were only "cosmic," and not evidence of conspiracy. No one however, inquired as to whether Richardson underwent any psychiatric treatment while in Colorado, or looked into whether or not Hinkley's doctors, particularly Dr. Hooper, also treated Richardson.

Besides their joint fixation with Jody Foster and guns, and their "cosmic" Lakewood, Colorado connections, Hinkley and Richardson were both affiliated with evangelical ministries. Richardson, a student of the Rev. Carl MacIntire, pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, N.J. and Cape May, and president of Shelton College, was the founder of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC).

MacIntire was also a close, personal friend of J. Edgar Hover, who shared MacIntire's fanatic anti-communist fervor. MacIntire has frequently condemned the competing World Council of Christian Churches (WCCC), which includes parishes from Communist countries. MacIntire's radio show, the 20th Century Reformation Hour, was broadcast behind the Iron Curtain and called for a Christian crusade against communism.

John Hinkley's father, who sponsored a philanthropic foundation that ran a Denver soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, and where his son sometimes dined, was also on the board of directors of World Vision, and ran the World Vision center in Denver.

Both MacIntire's ICCC and Hinkley's World Vision are members of the ecumenical federation called the Evangelical Foreign Missions Assocation (EFMA) of Evanston, Illinois. One of the main functions of both ICCC and World Vision, which has its headquarters in Redwood Valley, California, is to operate refugee camps, especially refugee camps that attend to those who have fled communist countries.

According to John Judge, in the June-July issue of The Continuing Inquiry magazine, "World Vision is an evangelical, anti-communist missionary operation that works around the globe…and administers refugee camps in Ghana (where the Jonestown massacre occurred), and at Sabra and Shatilla camps in Lebanon where the Isralie massacre occurred." Judge says that World Vision also operated along the Honduran border where CIA mercenaries fought Nicaraguan Sandinistas and El Salvadorian revolutionaries and that Alpha 66 and Omega 7 anti-Castro Cubans terrorists were hired to run some of the camps. One such camp also employed Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman, who worked at the Haitian refugee camp at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas.

The CIA first began interviewing refugees from communist countries in East Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of Reinhard Gehlen's Operation Wriger, and the practice continued through the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and religious organizations like the ICCC and World Vision. Providing food and shelter in exchange for intelligence information is only the basis for the cooperation, and CIA evaluation of the refugee intelligence indicated that children were the most reliable of sources. Some of the foreign missionaries not only accepted money and assistance in exchange for intelligence information, but provided access to select refugees so they could be recruited and trained as assets, operatives and agents.
It is purely speculative whether or not Chapman, Hinkley or Richardson were targeted, recruited, trained or conditioned because of their association with these ministries, but the possibility is there.

Besides these associations, there is Hinkley's bizarre association with the Islamic Guerilla Army (IGA). On December 16, 1981, Jack Anderson reported, "…Hinkley is widely believed to have acted out a crazy desire to impress actress Jody Foster. It's an explanation that has gained credence by its very absurdity…But there is a possibility that Hinkley became associated with some Iranian terrorists who call themselves the Islamic Guerrilla Army (IGA)…In January 1981 an informant told the FBI and Secret Service that the IGA planned to assassinate Reagan sometime between Mid-March and early April, and that one of the assassination teams had the code name of Hicks' a student who had been arrested in Nashville in October for illegal possession of firearms…Another informant, a government undercover agent, identified Hinkley as theman he saw at the Denver airport in 1979 with leaders of the Earth Liberation Movement (ELM), a communist backed group with ties to the IGA."

John Hinkley's father said that, "(Conspiracy) is one of the first things we looked at. The government looked into it and didn't find anything. There's absolutely no truth, no substance to conspiracy. John is very ill; he is a sick person. He did this for a vary pathetic reason."

MICHALE VANDEWEHE

Like Richardson, Michael VandeWehe also served in the military, where something strange happened to him. VandeWehe was charged with threatening the life of the president after Hinkley's attack on Reagan even though he was already incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at Cape May Court House, New Jersey.

Born in Cooperstown, New York, VandeWehe grew up in the Chelsea section of Atlantic City. His brother Richard died in a motorcycle accident in 1975 while stationed in Okinawa as a Marine. Michael joined the Marines in 1978. His father noted, "He felt he had to take his brother's place."

After basic training Michael was transferred to Iceland, where he was stationed for two years. But something happened there that forced him to be sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, where he was treated in the psychiatric wing in May, 1980.

As for his stay in Iceland, his father said, "Something happened there, but we're not sure what." Released from the hospital in June of 1980, VandeWehe was discharged from the Service and returned to his parents home in Wildwood, New Jersey. Not permitted to move in with his parents, who stayed at the Sandman Towers senior citizen complex, named after former Congressman Charles Sandman, Michael got a room at a local boarding house.

When he missed a rent payment, he was locked out of his room and his belongings confiscated by his landlord. Arrested for burglary, theft and criminal mischief for taking merchandise from a burnt out Wildwood bar, VandeWehe was released and then rearrested and charged with aggravated assault for striking his landlord, who attempted to prevent him from removing his clothes from his room.

"You can't take a young boy like this right from the hospital and put him out on the street," his father said at the time. A week after Hinkley shot Reagan, VandeWehe wrote a letter from the Crest Haven jail that the Secret Service said, "made a direct threat against the life of the President."

Although VandeWehe's home inWildwood is only a few miles from the Rev. Carl MacIntire's Christian Admiral Hotel and Shelton College in Cape May, there does not appear to be any known association between VandeWehe and MacIntire or Richardson and their proximity seems only a coincidence. Much like the Lakewood, Colorado proximity between Hinkley and Richardson.

What is interesting however, is the last chapter of the book "The Parallax View," a novel about a reporter who investigates and penetrates a private network of programmed assassins for hire. Although the screenplay of the movie based on the book, which stars Warren Beaty, was altered to provide for a different ending, the suspense novel ends on the two mile long coastal road that runs between VandeWehe's Wildwood and Cape May, where MacInire and Richardson were at the Christian Admiral.

Also unlike the movie, in which a commission concludes there was no conspiracy in a political assassination, the book ends with a suspicious local policeman investigating an automobile accident, and concluding it is a murder.

"The movie isn't over yet" John Hinkley, Jr.

[Scott Kaiser]

Hinkley & Co.



Hinkley & Co. - Bill Kelly and John Judge


"Minds are malleable, but not self-malleable, a condition politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage." -William S. Burroughs.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....topic=5458


After John Hinkley shot President Reagan, he said, "The movie isn't over yet!"

And indeed it isn't. Political assassinations and coup d'etats are the most frequently used methods of changing governments and controlling power, and we shouldn't expect that to change.

Now we hear from Hinkley every few years or so when he exercises his right to seek release from St. Elizabeth's hospital, where he is incarcerated. Hinkley is in a hospital, rather than a prison, because of a quirk in our judicial system that says he is not responsible for his actions. If that is the case, then who is responsible for Hinckley's actions?

After the assassination of President Kennedy the murder of a president was made a Federal, rather than a local crime, so a Federal investigation would take precedence over local police, courts and authorities. Unlike the Hinkley-Reagan affair, the assassination of President Kennedy was successful and the government changed hands, minds and policy, while Hinkley's attempt on Reagan failed and the constitutional powers did not change.

Because we still haven't determined exactly who was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Reagan, we certainly haven't seen the last of political assassinations in our society. We haven't heard the last of John Hinckley, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan B. Sirhan or Mark David Chapman, the seemingly unimportant people who unexpectedly rise from the masses to take a monumental action that makes a mark on history and changes the course of our times.

As Hinkley said, the movie isn't over yet. Hinkley failed in his mission, but created an important case study that helps us understand the ongoing implications of assassination in our society.

War dawns slowly as a political hot spot becomes unmanageable and a limited conventional war gets out of hand, though we know the crisis is coming, but assassination, as a political incident, happens suddenly and often unexpectedly, except to those who intend it to happen. Since Hinkley shot Reagan, Sadat of Egypt, Aquillo of the Philippines, Ghandi of Inida, and dozens of other world leaders have become victim of assassins. Of all political avenues, assassination is the most likely, but least expected to happen.

"Well, it seems, you know, that there was this…there was this thing I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life, like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace." Taxi Driver

John Hinkley came crashing through that door on a lazy springtime afternoon in March, 1981, just outside a side door of the Washington Hilton Hotel. It's now nicknamed the Hinkley Hilton since Hinkley jumped out of a crowd of newsmen to shoot President Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, a secret service agent and a security guard.

Hinkley's alleged motive, a psychological, rather than political one, is that he shot the President to impress movie actress Jody Foster. Hinkley had repeatedly seen the movie, "Taxi Driver" in which Foster plays the role of a prostitute protected by a crazed taxi driver who stalks a politician with the intent to kill him, but then kills a pimp and a drug pusher. Rather than being sent to prison, he is declared a hero.

While the facts of Hinkley's life were being investigated and disseminated by the news media shortly after the attack, John Wright of Lansing, Michigan was arrested and charged with threatening the life of then Vice President George Bush. Wright had bragged, "that he could be more famous than Siran Siran or Lee Harvey Oswald."

As news of Hinkley's actions spread through the media, Edward Michael Richardson, Michael Vandewehe and possibly other "copy cat" assassins, as they came to be called, went through the Taxi Driver door on the heels of Hinkley. And like Hinkley and Wright, they found themselves in jail, charged with threatening the life of or attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.

On April 9, 1981, less than two weeks after the shooting at the Hinkley Hilton, Edward Michael Richardson was charged with two counts of threatening the life of the President. The first count stemmed from a letter Richardson wrote and delivered to Jody Foster Yale dormitory, while the second charge related to a letter found in Richardson's hotel room in which he stated that he was going to Washington D.C. "to bring completion to Hinkley's reality." Richardson was arrested in New York City with a loaded pistol while getting on a D.C. bound bus.

From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Richardson had spent some time in the military and was once a student of the Reverend Carl MacIntire's Shelton College, a fundamentalist religious school with campuses located in Cape Canaveral, Florida and Cape May, New Jersey.

Within days of Richardson's arrest, the Secret Service charged Michael VandeWehe of Wildwood, New Jersey, with threatening the life of the President. VandeWehe was considered a threat even though he was then incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at the time. The Secret Service said that he wrote and mailed a letter from the jail that made a "direct threat against the life of the President."

Before Reagan was shot, the Secret Service had commissioned a study by a panel of 27 experts to prepare a report on the methods of predicting violent acts. The Secret Service also compiles files on thousands of citizens that are potential threats to the President, and some 400 individuals are considered a serious enough threat to be kept under periodic surveillance. Neither Hinkley, Wright nor VandeWehe were considered to be a threat to the President before March, 1981.

Hinkley's case also made its mark in the legal journals as a precedent to be cited because of Hinkley's insanity plea, and attempts by the victim's attorneys to make Hinkley's psychologists responsible for his actions if he was not.

If Hinkley and the copy-cats were acting on psychological impulses, rather than on political, ideological or mercenary motives, then someone else could be held responsible for their behavior if it can be shown that they were conditioned or acting as an agent of others.

Rather than acting as a deranged lone-nuts on primitive instincts, perhaps one or even some of these assassins were psychologically conditioned or brainwashed by scientists with a more sophisticated motive and fit the archtypical Manchurian Candidate model.

If Hinkley was conditioned by the film "Taxi Driver," it might not have been just be environmental and social circumstances, but rather by design. Using drugs, hypnosis and multimedia programming techniques, individual subjects have been programmed to kill with a high degree of predictable response, so it is a possibility that deserves further investigation.

THE ANCIENT ORDER OF THE ASSASSINS

The U.S. Government, the military in particular, conducted psychological experiments on human subjects years, decades ago, and today, anyone with the knowledge and the tools could be in the business of privately programming and training assassins and terrorists.

We know coup d'etats and political assassinations occur routinely in third world countries and so-called "Bananna Republics," but our own system of government is equally vulnerable and more likely targeted for such manipulation. Until President Reagan, who survived the attempt on his life in the first weeks of his presidency, none of the previous five presidents actually served out their full two terms, eight years of office, since President Kennedy was assassinated.

Men with pistols, rifles, bombs and even samurai swords have been arrested at the White House gates, where guards have been on the lookout for suicide bomb trucks and remote control kamikaze airplanes.

The Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department, is responsible for the security of the president and thus keeps the files on thousands of people who are potential threats. Some are violent prone suspects, others religious fanatics, ideological demagogs, professional hit men, espionage agents and trained terrorists. Others are just plain nuts.

Their common name assassins, comes from the Arabic word Hashshishin, which means, "users of hashish," the euphoric drug, but their legend stems from a secret society that began in the 11th century Persia as a religious order. Their leader, it is said, "carries the death of kings in his hand."

Most of Western civilization first learned the tales of the Assassins from Marco Polo, who passed through Persia in 1273 enroute to China. Polo reported that the Shek of the Assassins lived in a fortified valley between two mountains, which is probably the fabled, impenetrable fortress at Alamut. There the Sheik had a beautiful fruit bearing garden "watered with streams of wine, milk and honey." Drugged and taken to the hidden garden, young impressionable recruits were courted by dancers, musicians, magicians and beautiful women. They were inebriated in ecstasy, then drugged again and brought before the Sheik. Having experienced paradise, they became slaves to its pleasures, and the Sheik's whim. "Away they went," Polo said, "and did all that they were commanded. Thus it happened that no man escaped when the Sheik of the mountains desired his death."

The role of the order of the Assassins, while they have passed into mythology, is still relevant, not only linguistically, but in regards to a contemporary understanding of assassination as a political weapon in our own society. In the 1000 years the term assassins has been used, assassins are still programmed and conditioned in ways similar to their ancient counterparts, but by much more sophisticated and predictable ways.

As the victim of an assassin President Lincoln became the last casualty of the Civil War. In 1900 Theodore Roosevelt assumed power when President McKinley was shot and killed by a "glassy-eyed anarchist." Assassins sparked Word War I by killing Archduke Ferdinand as he rode in a motorcade, and the Reichstag fire that herald Hilter's rise to power was allegedly started by a "lone-nut." French Admiral Darlin was assassinated by a British trained assassin in North Africa, while Hitler was the target of a failed assassination-coup attempt in 1944. After the war Leon Trotsky was targeted, stalked and eventually assassinated in Mexico City by Soviet agents.

The assassination of President Kennedy precipitated two decades of political unrest that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the wounding of Presidential candidate George Wallace, all by assassins who fit the archtypical assassin prototype James Earl Ray, Siran Siran and Arthur Bremmer. Richard Nixon's handpicked successor, Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, served on the Warren Commission inquiry into President Kennedy's assassination before assuming that office himself. As President he dodged bullets from two attacks, one from Sara Jane Moore, and FBI informant, and the other from Squeaky Frome, one of Charles Manson's disciples.

Assassins in the United States have not confined themselves to presidents and presidential contenders, but have also killed Union officials, foreign diplomats, journalists and cultural figures. United Mine Workers union president Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering the murder of his union rival Jock Yablonski, Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley turned states' evidence in admitting his participation with renegade Cubans in the Dupont Circle bombing assassination of former Chilean ambassador Leitter in downtown Washington D.C., and one-time fan, Mark David Chapman shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon.

By March, 1981 America and the world had been numbed by the accustomed ring of the assassin's gun when Hinkley opened fire on the President's entourage. Had he been successful, Hinkley would have made George Bush president of the United States with the flick of his finger and altering the course of history. The possibility that Hinkley was programmed or conditioned to shoot the President may have been privately evaluated, but has not been analyzed in a public forum.

STATE-OF-THE-ART ASSASSINS

The U.S. government has learned much about the psychological makeup of assassins, not by studying the profiles of subjects, but by attempting to create them. The state-of-the-art of conditioning assassins has advanced considerably sincethe days of the Hashshishin and the garden fortress at Alamut.

From 1949 until 1974 the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense conducted sophisticated mind and behavior control research, using students, agents, soldiers and prisoners as human guinea pigs in a number of experiments that used drugs, hypnosis, audio[visional and electronic programming techniques.

One such project, called ARTICHOKE, began using drugs for investigating interrogation techniques, which stemmed from attempts to understand brainwashing procedures used on American prisoners of war by the Chinese in North Korea. Eventually the program became directed towards finding "whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will."

One CIA contract agent, Jessica Wilcox (aka Candy Jones), a model and radio personality, was programmed to commit suicide by her CIA psychiatrist (See: "Candy Jones," by Donald Bain, Playboy Press).

Although both the CIA and the military claim that their research ended in 1974, there are indications that the mind control programs merely became "operational" when the "experimental" stage ended, and techniques for programming assassins were secretly blended in with the normal routine of clandestine and military affairs.

The discovery of a CIA handbook in Central America that gave guidelines on developing criminals as agents to eliminate selected government officials is evidence of this, along with the fact that it was used in Vietnam, supports the contention that the U.S. government uses assassination as a tool of foreign policy.

OSLO NATO CONFERENCE & THE NAVY NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL LAB

In the summer of 1975, a year after the government claimed it halted such research, Dr. Irwin Sarason organized a conference in Oslo, Norway for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which addressed the topic of "The Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety."

Dr. Sarason had produced a film which showed the success of school students who asked questions, and presented the film to a group of juvenile delinquents, who learned how to ask questions and showed marked improvement in their studies.

The U.S. Office of Naval Research offered to fund Sarason's work, provided it was classified, so it could be used by the Navy psychiatric lab in San Diego, California, where "spys were being trained to resist interrogation."

Peter Watson, a former psychologist and a reporter for the London Sunday Times attended the Oslo conference and participated in a seminar conducted by U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, a psychologist then assigned to the U.S. Navy Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy.

Lt. Commander Narut gave a talk on "The Use of Symbolic Models and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress." He claimed his work involved teaching "combat readiness units" to cope with the stress of killing.

After his general discourse, Watson talked privately with Narut, who told the London Times correspondent that he had done his doctoral dissertation on whether certain films provoke anxiety. Narut said that he studied whether forcing men to do irrelevant tasks while watching violent films made them cope better with anxiety associated with violence.

Narut also told Watson that the U.S. Navy programmed assassins on an assembly line basis, and that he personally worked with men whom he referred to as "hit men and assassins," who were involved in commando type operations and placed in U.S. embassies abroad. These men, Narut told Watson, were on call to kill selected victims when necessary. The U.S. Marine Corps, which is in charge of protecting embassies abroad, comes under the Department of Navy, and much of the advanced training for the Marines takes place at its bases in San Diego, California.

Narut said that drugs and hypnosis were no longer necessary, and that such conditioning was accomplished by a standardized behavior modification process called audio-visual desensitation. Subjects were desensitized to mayhem and carnage by viewing films of people being injured and killed in different ways, with mild bloodshed being succeeded by progressively violent scenes. They became acclimated to the brutality and eventually dissociated their feelings from the violence.

Narut was quoted as saying the best killers were classified as having "passive-aggressive" personalities, or men "with strong drives that were usually kept under tight control." These types he said, "were usually calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper during which they could literally kill without remorse." Men with these "qualities" could be identified through psychological testing, using the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory test, which is used in schools, businesses and corporations, as well as the military, and can measure hostility, depression and psychopathy.

After subjects with the right psychological qualities were selected and recruited they were sent either to the Naples Medical Center or the Navy Neuropsychological Lab in San Diego, California, where according to Narut, they were audio-visually desensitized by being strapped into a chair with their head clamped in such a way that they couldn't look away from the screen and their eyelids prevented from closing.

After Watson's story about the conversation with Narut was published in the London Sunday Times, Narut called a press conference to say that he had been talking only in "theoretical" and not "practical" terms.

HINKLEY'S MOVIE

"You see, I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys, Oswald, Booth and Arty Bremer, the lot, if it's one thing about them marks them out as real losers is they got a little unreal sometimes…" Taxi Driver

There has been much discussion on the effects the media has on people and whether it can instigate action, but the question shouldn't be whether or not the film "Taxi Driver" had a mental impact on John Hinkley, but whether the conditioning was coincidental or deliberate. Are Hinkley, Richardson and VandeWehe really "lone-nuts" acting on their own perverted psychological motives, or were they deliberately programmed by the government, military, the CIA or some sinister psychologists who specializes in such behavior modification?

John Hinkley's father was a wealthy oil man from Dallas, Texas, where Hinkley grew up and went to school. Hinkley bought his gun at a shop on Elm Street, not far from the Dealey Plaza intersection where President Kennedy was ambushed.

Hinkley's family moved to Evergreen, Colorado, where they were living in March, 1981. John W. Hinkley Sr. owned Vanderbilt Oil Company, and was active in a number of religious and charitable organizations, although he has more recently been devoting his time to promoting a foundation for mental health research.

Although Hinkley's main problem seemed to simplyl be finding direction in his life, his parents recognized some mental disturbance in him, and Hinkley saw no less than three doctors about his mental condition in the year before the shooting. In Lubock, Texas, Hinkley saw a Dr. Rosen, who prescribed an anti-depressant called Serentil, and valium, a tranquilizer.

Hinkley also saw Dr. John Hooper, who gave him biofeedback treatments. His father is also quoted as saying, "I made arrangements with a psychologist by the name of Durrell Benjamin, our company psychologist, to see John."

This doctor told Hinkley's father that, "John was immature and that we needed to work out a long-range plan to make John self sufficient." Hinkley wanted to attend a writer's school at Yale, and Benjamin recommended that he do so. Yale is where Jody Foster was attending school at the time.

They had Hinkley draw up a written agreement contract that read: "I will receive the sum of $3,000 in checks, taken from my stock,…to last from September 17 to February 1st…and I do pledge to try to make the coming weeks and months as productive as possible. It is now or never. Thanks for the money and one more chance. John Hinkley, Jr." The next day he left for New Haven, Connecticut and Yale, but he never enrolled in the writer's school.

"I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill, wrote all night long,…making calculations and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of these guns." Taxi Driver

Hinkley had seen a number of films with Jody Foster in them, some repeatedly, and in the month of August that year, he saw some on television. According to one report, "It was his feeling that the movies had been put no TV to excite him into action."

Returning to his parent's home in Colorado briefly, Hinkley went back to Lubbock, Texas where he purchased some weapons, the same caliber pistols bought by "Travis," the hero of "Taxi Driver," who he emulated. From Texas Hinkley went to Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and then to Dayton, Ohio, where he stalked then President Carter, who was making a campaign stop. Hinkley then went back to New Haven to see Jody Foster, then went to New York city where he sought out young prostitutes.

Traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, Hinkley contacted one of the leading activists in the American Nazi party, and fraternized with rightwing military types, before going to Nashville, Tenn., where Carter was campaigning. Picked up at the Nashville airport where his guns had registered on a metal detector, Hinkley was arrested with unregistered weapons in a city where the President was visiting, yet he was never considered a threat to the President and placed on the "watch" list, as thousands of other Americans routinely are "red flagged."

After paying a fine Hinkley went back to New Haven where he checked into the Colony Inn Hotel before moving to the Sheraton Park Plaza, never in need of money. Returing to Texas, Hinkley purchased two more handguns and then traveled to New Haven, Washington and Colorado, where he saw Evergreen psychologist Dr. John Hooper.

In an effort to make Hinkley relax, Hooper prescribed a series of biofeedback treatments. According to an account in Rolling Stone Magazine, "He was given earphones similar to those he wore in the nearby pistol range when he was practicing shooting at human silhouettes. An electrode was attached to his forehead. But while he was supposed to be relaxing, he was actually fantasizing about assassination and Jody Foster." Dr. Hooper however, said at the time he had never even heard of Jody Foster.

Towards the end of 1980 Hinkley went to Washington D.C. where he was on December 8, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. Hinkley then began stalking Ronald Reagan, and posed for pictures in front of the Ford Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated.

After seeing Dr. Hooper again in January, 1981, Hinkley went to New Hampshire in February, then to D.C. where he got a room at the Capitol Hill Quality Inn and visited the offices of Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy wasn't in. He then visited the White House before going to New York where he planned to commit suicide at the Dakota, where Lennon was killed.

Returning to Colorado once again, on February 19th he left his parents a note saying, "Dear Mom and Dad; Your prodigal son has left again to exorcise some more demons."

In New Haven, Conn. Hinkley stalked Jody Foster, delivered her a note, and then traveled to New York, from where he called home at 4:30 a.m. on March 6th. Hinkley's father contacted Dr. Hooper, who advised him to give his son $100 and say goodbye. A friend of Hinkley's father gave him the money to fly home, and on Saturday, March 7, Hinkley's father picked him up at the Denver airport.

Staying at the Golden Hours Motel in Lakewood for a week, Hinkley moved to the Motel 6 in Lakewood rather than stay at home. He registered under the name of "Travis," like his "Taxi Driver" hero. On March 25th his mother drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to Hollywood, California, where he stayed for less than a day. After four days on a bus, Hinkley arrived in New Haven, via D.C., then went back to D.C. and got a room at the Park Central Hotel, less than two blocks from the White House. There he watched TV, ate fast foods and read a Washington Star newspaper that contained the President's itinerary.
After writing a letter Hinkley picked up a John Lennon button, which he put into his left coat pocket, then put his .22 in his right pocket and proceeded to the Hilton Hotel where the President was making an appearance.

As Hinkley was shooting the president, quite by coincidence, his brother Scott Hinkley was at the White House with his good friend, the son of Vice President George Bush. Bush's daughter reportedly arranged dates for Scott Hinkley, and Ms. Maureen Bush, a niece of George Bush, is said to have been photographed at a Nazi rally with John Hinkley. The ironies were compounded however, when Michael Richardson was arrested in New York.

In the two weeks after Hinkley's attack on Reagan, the Secret Service investigated over 300 threats against the life of the President, and Richardson was the most interesting of the copy-cat assassins.

MICHAEL RICHARDSON

From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, Richardson was arrested on April 7, 1981 at the New York City bus terminal with a loaded .32 cal. Pistonl. He had been in New Haven, where he left a note in his hotel room saying he was leaving for Washington "to bring completion to Hinkley's reality."

"Our duel realities merged into a single vision," wrote Richardson, and indeed their trails had previously crossed. Unlike Hinkley, Richardson had briefly served in the military. He was trained at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, from January 4 to March 31, 1977, and received an early honorable discharge after three months of basic training, but the reasons for his discharge were not disclosed. At his arrangement in New York however, U.S. Attorney John Martin said Richardson stabbed someone during his brief military stint.

After attending Delaware Community College in Pennsylvania in 1979, Richardson started school at the Rev. Carl MacIntire's fundamentalist bible school, Shelton College, near Coca Beach, Florida. He also reportedly went to Cape May, New Jersey, where he spent the summer at MacIntire's school there, earning extra money by helping to paint Macintire's Christian Admiral Hotel on the beach. After two semesters, Richardson left Shelton and moved to Lakewood, Colorado, where he move in with his two sisters in December1980.

Hinkley's parents lived in Evergreen, Colorado, near Lakewood, and Hinkley had stayed at the Golden Hours motel in Lakewood in March 1981.

Richardson left Colorado in mid-March, Hinkley on March 25. In a letter mailed from Grand Junction, Colorado on March 25, and received by the Evangelist Magazine the day Reagan was shot, someone warned, or mysteriously predicted that Reagan would be shot and the country "turned to the left."
Richardson's family attorney, Joseph F. Moore, Jr. said that the connections were only "cosmic," and not evidence of conspiracy. No one however, inquired as to whether Richardson underwent any psychiatric treatment while in Colorado, or looked into whether or not Hinkley's doctors, particularly Dr. Hooper, also treated Richardson.

Besides their joint fixation with Jody Foster and guns, and their "cosmic" Lakewood, Colorado connections, Hinkley and Richardson were both affiliated with evangelical ministries. Richardson, a student of the Rev. Carl MacIntire, pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, N.J. and Cape May, and president of Shelton College, was the founder of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC).

MacIntire was also a close, personal friend of J. Edgar Hover, who shared MacIntire's fanatic anti-communist fervor. MacIntire has frequently condemned the competing World Council of Christian Churches (WCCC), which includes parishes from Communist countries. MacIntire's radio show, the 20th Century Reformation Hour, was broadcast behind the Iron Curtain and called for a Christian crusade against communism.

John Hinkley's father, who sponsored a philanthropic foundation that ran a Denver soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, and where his son sometimes dined, was also on the board of directors of World Vision, and ran the World Vision center in Denver.

Both MacIntire's ICCC and Hinkley's World Vision are members of the ecumenical federation called the Evangelical Foreign Missions Assocation (EFMA) of Evanston, Illinois. One of the main functions of both ICCC and World Vision, which has its headquarters in Redwood Valley, California, is to operate refugee camps, especially refugee camps that attend to those who have fled communist countries.

According to John Judge, in the June-July issue of The Continuing Inquiry magazine, "World Vision is an evangelical, anti-communist missionary operation that works around the globe…and administers refugee camps in Ghana (where the Jonestown massacre occurred), and at Sabra and Shatilla camps in Lebanon where the Isralie massacre occurred." Judge says that World Vision also operated along the Honduran border where CIA mercenaries fought Nicaraguan Sandinistas and El Salvadorian revolutionaries and that Alpha 66 and Omega 7 anti-Castro Cubans terrorists were hired to run some of the camps. One such camp also employed Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman, who worked at the Haitian refugee camp at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas.

The CIA first began interviewing refugees from communist countries in East Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of Reinhard Gehlen's Operation Wriger, and the practice continued through the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and religious organizations like the ICCC and World Vision. Providing food and shelter in exchange for intelligence information is only the basis for the cooperation, and CIA evaluation of the refugee intelligence indicated that children were the most reliable of sources. Some of the foreign missionaries not only accepted money and assistance in exchange for intelligence information, but provided access to select refugees so they could be recruited and trained as assets, operatives and agents.
It is purely speculative whether or not Chapman, Hinkley or Richardson were targeted, recruited, trained or conditioned because of their association with these ministries, but the possibility is there.

Besides these associations, there is Hinkley's bizarre association with the Islamic Guerilla Army (IGA). On December 16, 1981, Jack Anderson reported, "…Hinkley is widely believed to have acted out a crazy desire to impress actress Jody Foster. It's an explanation that has gained credence by its very absurdity…But there is a possibility that Hinkley became associated with some Iranian terrorists who call themselves the Islamic Guerrilla Army (IGA)…In January 1981 an informant told the FBI and Secret Service that the IGA planned to assassinate Reagan sometime between Mid-March and early April, and that one of the assassination teams had the code name of Hicks' a student who had been arrested in Nashville in October for illegal possession of firearms…Another informant, a government undercover agent, identified Hinkley as theman he saw at the Denver airport in 1979 with leaders of the Earth Liberation Movement (ELM), a communist backed group with ties to the IGA."

John Hinkley's father said that, "(Conspiracy) is one of the first things we looked at. The government looked into it and didn't find anything. There's absolutely no truth, no substance to conspiracy. John is very ill; he is a sick person. He did this for a vary pathetic reason."

MICHALE VANDEWEHE

Like Richardson, Michael VandeWehe also served in the military, where something strange happened to him. VandeWehe was charged with threatening the life of the president after Hinkley's attack on Reagan even though he was already incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at Cape May Court House, New Jersey.

Born in Cooperstown, New York, VandeWehe grew up in the Chelsea section of Atlantic City. His brother Richard died in a motorcycle accident in 1975 while stationed in Okinawa as a Marine. Michael joined the Marines in 1978. His father noted, "He felt he had to take his brother's place."

After basic training Michael was transferred to Iceland, where he was stationed for two years. But something happened there that forced him to be sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, where he was treated in the psychiatric wing in May, 1980.

As for his stay in Iceland, his father said, "Something happened there, but we're not sure what." Released from the hospital in June of 1980, VandeWehe was discharged from the Service and returned to his parents home in Wildwood, New Jersey. Not permitted to move in with his parents, who stayed at the Sandman Towers senior citizen complex, named after former Congressman Charles Sandman, Michael got a room at a local boarding house.

When he missed a rent payment, he was locked out of his room and his belongings confiscated by his landlord. Arrested for burglary, theft and criminal mischief for taking merchandise from a burnt out Wildwood bar, VandeWehe was released and then rearrested and charged with aggravated assault for striking his landlord, who attempted to prevent him from removing his clothes from his room.

"You can't take a young boy like this right from the hospital and put him out on the street," his father said at the time. A week after Hinkley shot Reagan, VandeWehe wrote a letter from the Crest Haven jail that the Secret Service said, "made a direct threat against the life of the President."

Although VandeWehe's home inWildwood is only a few miles from the Rev. Carl MacIntire's Christian Admiral Hotel and Shelton College in Cape May, there does not appear to be any known association between VandeWehe and MacIntire or Richardson and their proximity seems only a coincidence. Much like the Lakewood, Colorado proximity between Hinkley and Richardson.

What is interesting however, is the last chapter of the book "The Parallax View," a novel about a reporter who investigates and penetrates a private network of programmed assassins for hire. Although the screenplay of the movie based on the book, which stars Warren Beaty, was altered to provide for a different ending, the suspense novel ends on the two mile long coastal road that runs between VandeWehe's Wildwood and Cape May, where MacInire and Richardson were at the Christian Admiral.

Also unlike the movie, in which a commission concludes there was no conspiracy in a political assassination, the book ends with a suspicious local policeman investigating an automobile accident, and concluding it is a murder.

"The movie isn't over yet" John Hinkley, Jr.

"Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley turned states' evidence"

He's no longer on the witness protection program, last word was he may now be living in California, or he may all ready be dead. But, there are a few little birds looking for him. I know if they find him, I wouldn't want to be Mike.