Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A.

Excerpted from:

Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A.

By Alex Constantine

Portland, OR : Feral House, 1995

Chapter Three

THE FALSE MEMORY HOAX

Part I:

CIA CONNECTIONS TO THE MIND CONTROL CULTS

Swiss newspapers described the carnage inside the charred farmhouse as a "wax museum of death." Within hours, 27 other members of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple were found dead at chalets in Granges, Switzerland and Morin Heights, Quebec. Luc Jouret, the Temple's grand master, the London Times reported, "espoused a hybrid religion that owed more to Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum than to any bible. His followers called themselves 'knights of Christ.' The crusading codes of the Knights Templar, the rose-and-cross symbolism of the medieval Rosicrucian Order, Nazi occultism and new age mysticism were joined together into a mumbo-jumbo mishmash that seemed more designed for extracting money from disciples than saving souls." Jouret, born in the Belgian Congo in 1947, set out in youth as a mystic with communist leanings, but his politics apparently swung full circle. He has since been linked to a clutch of neo-Nazis responsible for a string of bombings in Canada. He told friends that he had once served with a unit of Belgium paratroopers. French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously, Radio Canada announced that Jouret's Templars earned hundreds of millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), closed by authorities worldwide in 1991. Montreal's La Presse observed: "each new piece of information only thickens the mystery"--but the combination of international arms smuggling and BCCI presented a familiar enough picture of CIA sedition. The Manhattan D.A. who closed the American branch announced that 16 witnesses had died in the course of investigating the bank's entanglements in covert operations of the CIA, arms smuggling to Iraq, money laundering and child prostitution. The average coffee table would crumple under the weighty BCCI Book of the Dead. Journalist Danny Cassalaro and Vince Foster appear in it--grim antecedents to the Solar Temple killings. The cult's connection to BCCI (reported in Europe but filtered from American newspaper accounts) fed speculation among Canadian journalists that followers of Jouret were killed to bury public disclosures of gun-running and money laundering. But the fraternizing of America's national security elite and the cults did not begin in Cheiry, Switzerland. Jouret's Order of the Solar Temple was but the latest incarnation of mind control operations organized and overseen by the CIA and Department of Defense.

In a sense, we are in the same ethical and moral dilemma as the physicists in the days prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for a nearly total control of human emotional status.

-- Dr. Wayne Evans _U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine_

Scientists in the CIA's mind control fraternity lead double lives. Many are highly respected, but if the truth were known they would be deafened by the public outcry and drummed out of their respective academic haunts. Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy researcher, is based at the University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry Laboratory. He is also an original member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's advisory board, a tightly-drawn coterie of psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in CIA mind control experimentation in its myriad forms. The Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of cult mind control and child abuse. It's primary pursuit is the castigation of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual abuse. Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a common defense strategy, may relieve parents of preschool children. In a small percentage of cult abuse cases it's possible that children may be led to believe they've been victimized. But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested interest in blowing smoke at the cult underground because the worlds of CIA mind control and many cults merge inextricably. The drum beat of "false accusations" from the media is taken up by paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.

 Orne's forays into hypno-programming were financed in the 1960s by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell University and the underwriter of many of the formative mind control experiments conducted in the U.S. and abroad, including the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments of D. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. Research specialties of the CIA's black psychiatrists included electroshock lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants, hypnosis, sleep deprivation and radio control of the brain, among hundreds of sub-projects. The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne's work in hypnotic suggestion and dissolution of memory is eerie in the cult child abuse context. The voluminous files of John Marks in Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained under FOIA, to be exact, two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the occult) include an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston's Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI)--another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy plane escapades). This was the year that the CIA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) geared up a study of parapsychology and the occult. The investigation, dubbed Project OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social "laboratory" by SEI scientists at the University of South Carolina--a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and voodoo. Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind control corner at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. He does not publicize his role as CIA psychiatrist. He denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne, Marks once reminded him that he'd disavowed knowledge of his participation in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later recanted, admitting that he'd been aware of the true source of funding all along. Among psychiatrists in the CIA's mind control fraternity, Orne ranks among the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks that he was routinely briefed on all significant CIA behavior modification experiments: "Why would they come to him," Martin Cannon muses in The Controllers, which links UFO abductions to secret military research veiled by screen memories of "alien" abduction, "unless Orne had a high security clearance and worked extensively with the intelligence services?" To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne has been the donee of grants from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. "I should like to hear," Cannon says, "what innocent explanation, if any, the Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic amnesia."

 According to Army records, Orne's stomping grounds, Penn U., was a bee-hive of secret experiments in the Vietnam War period. The Pentagon and CIA--under the auspices of ORD's Steve Aldrich, a doyen of occult and parapsychological studies-- conferred the Agency's most lucrative research award upon the University of Pennsylvania to study the effects of 16 newly-concocted biochemical warfare agents on humans, including choking, blistering and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas and incapacitating chemicals. The tests were abruptly halted in 1972 when the prison's medical lab burned to the ground. Testimony before the 1977 Church Committee's probe of the CIA hinted that, as of 1963, the scientific squalor of the CIA's mind control regimen, code-named MKULTRA, had abandoned military and academic laboratories, fearing exposure, and mushroomed in cities across the country. Confirmation arrived in 1980 when Joseph Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman Leo Ryan (who was murdered by a death squad at Jonestown) exposed the formation of eccentric religious cults by the CIA. Holsinger made the allegation at a colloquium of psychologists in San Francisco on "Psychosocial Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon." Holsinger maintained that a CIA rear-support base had been in collusion with Jones to perform medical and mind control experiments at People's Temple. The former Congressional aide cited an essay he'd received in the mail, "The Penal Colony," written by a Berkeley psychologist. The author had emphasized: Rather than terminating MKULTRA, THE CIA SHIFTED ITS PROGRAMS FROM PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS TO PRIVATE CULT GROUPS, including the People's Temple. Jonestown had its grey eminence in Dr. Lawrence Laird Layton of the University of California at Berkeley, formerly a chemist for the Manhattan Project and head of the Army's chemical warfare research division in the early 1950s. (Larry Layton, his son, led the death squad that murdered Congressman Leo Ryan, who'd arrived at Guyana to investigate the cult.) Michael Meiers, author ofWas Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, scavenged for information on the People's Temple for six years, concluding: "The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as it was Jim Jones'.

 Though it was essential for him to remain in the background for security reasons, Dr. Layton maintained contact with and even control of the experiment through his wife and children." The African-American cult had at its core a Caucasian inner-council, composed of Dr. Layton's family and in-laws. The press was blind to obvious CIA connections, but survivors of the carnage in Guyana followed the leads and maintained that Jim Jones was "an employee, servant, agent or operative of the Central Intelligence Agency" from 1963--the year the Agency turned to cult cut-outs to conceal MKULTRA mind control activities--until 1978. In October 1981 the survivors of Jonestown filed a $63 million lawsuit against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, currently a teacher at the University of Maryland and a director of the Monsanto Corporation. The suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Francisco, accused Turner of conspiring with Agency operatives to "enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones," and of conducting "mind control and drug experimentation" on the Temple flock. The suit was dismissed four months later for "failure to prosecute timely." All requests for an appeal were denied. Ligatures of the CIA clung to the cults. Much of the violence that has since exploded across the front pages was incited by CIA academics at leading universities. Small wonder, then, that Ted Goertzel, director of the Forum for Policy Research at Rutgers, which maintains a symbiosis with the CIA despite media exposure, should write that the most susceptible victims of "cryptomnesia" (a synonym for false memories) believe "in conspiracies, including the JFK assassination, AIDS conspiracies, as well as the UFO cover-up." The problem, Goertzel says, "may have its origins in early childhood," and is accompanied by "feelings of anomie and anxiety that make the individual more likely to construct false memories out of information stored in the unconscious mind." This side of gilded rationalizations, the CIA's links to the cults are no manifestation of "cryptomnesia."

 Like Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army was a mind control creation unleashed by the Agency. The late political researcher Mae Brussell, whose study of The Firm commenced in 1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that the rabid guerrilla band "consisted predominantly of CIA agents and police informers." This unsavory group was, Brussell insisted, "an extension of psychological experimentation projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park." (She went on to lament that "many of the current rash of 'senseless killings,' 'massacres,' and 'zombie-type murders' are committed by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental hospitals or prison hospitals, where their heads have been literally taken over surgically to create terror in the community.") Evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was obvious. The SLA leadership was trained by Colston Westbrook, a Pennsylvania native. Westbrook was a veteran of the CIA's murderous PHOENIX Program in South Vietnam, where he trained terrorist cadres and death squads. In 1969 he took a job as an administrator of Pacific Architects and Engineers, a CIA proprietary in Southern California. Three of Westbrook's foot soldiers, Emily and William Harris and Angela Atwood (a former police intelligence informer), had been students of the College of Foreign Affairs, a CIA cover at the University of Indiana. Even the SLA symbol, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted by the OSS (America's wartime intelligence agency) and CIA to designate precepts of brainwashing. When the smoke cleared at SLA headquarters in L.A., Dr. Martin Orne was called upon to examine Patricia Hearst in preparation for trial. The government charged that she had participated voluntarily in the SLA's gun-toting crime spree. Orne's was a foregone conclusion--he sided with the government. His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to appraise Ms. Hearst's state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with research grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA's most notorious mind control specialists, currently director of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was West who brought a score of mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right political stripe to the UCLA campus. Drs. Orne, Lifton and West unanimously agreed that Patty Hearst had been "persuasively coerced" to join the SLA. She had been put through a grueling thought reform regimen. She'd been isolated and sensory deprived, raped, humiliated, badgered, politically indoctrinated with a surrealistic mutation of Third World Marxism. Ms. Hearst was only allowed human companionship when she exhibited signs of submission.

 Orne and his colleagues assured that attention was narrowed to their psychologizing, conveniently rendering evidence of CIA collusion extraneous to consideration by the jury. Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of "Tania" surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. (The FMSF board is almost exclusively composed of former CIA and military doctors currently employed by major universities. None have backgrounds in ritual abuse--their common interest is behavior modification. Dr. Margaret Singer, a retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland (1952-58). Singer turned up in 1982 on the book jacket of Raven-- the CIA's code-name for Jim Jones--by San Francisco Examiner reporters Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, a thoroughly-researched account of the People's Temple that completely side-steps CIA involvement. Co-author John Jacobs was supposedly one of the country's leading authorities on CIA mind control, a subject he studied at length for a series published by the Washington Post. Reiterman had been the Examiner reporter on the Patricia Hearst beat. Yet both writers managed to avoid obvious intelligence connections. Dr. Singer commended the book as "the definitive psychohistory of Jim Jones." Raven, she opined, conveyed "the essence of psychological and social processes that Jim Jones, the ultimate manipulator, set in motion." The true "manipulators," of course, were operatives of the CIA, and the public disinformation gambit lauded by Dr. Singer was, according to Meiers, in tune with "a concerted attempt to suppress information, stifle investigations, censor writers and manipulate public information." The CIA and Pentagon have quietly organized and influenced a long line of mind control cults, among them: The Riverside Lodge of the Ordo Templis Orientis: Also known as The Solar Lodge of the OTO, which followed the teachings of cult messiah Aleister Crowley, whose fixed gaze on the astral equinox resulted in instructions from his deities to form a religious order. Crowley, high priest of the OTO and a British intelligence agent, gave Winifred T. Smith a charter to open an OTO lodge in Pasadena. The high priest of the lodge was Jack Parsons, a rocket expert and founder of the California Institute of Technology. Parsons, who took the oath of the anti-Christ in 1949, contributed to the design of the Pentagon under subsequent CIA director John J. McCloy. He was killed in a still unexplained laboratory explosion. There is a crater on the moon named after him.

 The OTO's Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was presided over by Georgina "Jean" Brayton, the daughter of a ranking Air Force officer in the 1960s. The cult subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic view of the world, and like Charles Manson believed that race wars would precipitate the Big Cataclysm. In the Faustian Los Angeles underworld, the lodge was known for its indulgence in sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation and murder. Candace Reos, a former member of the lodge, was deposed by Riverside police in 1969. Reos said that Brayton controlled the thinking of all cult members. One poor soul, she said, was ordered to curb his sexual urges by cutting his wrists every time he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told police, according to the report, that when she became pregnant, Georgina was angry and told her that she would have to condition herself to hate her child. Reos told police that children of the cult's 43 adult members were secluded from their parents and received "training" that took on "very severe tones." "There was a lot of spanking involved," she said, "a lot of heavy criticism. There was a lot of enclosed in dark rooms." The teachers, she added. "left welts." If so ordered, adult cultists would beat their children. According to a Riverside County Sheriff's report, a six year-old child burned the group's school house to the ground. The boy was punished by solitary confinement in a locked shipping crate left in the desert, where the average temperature was 110 degrees, for two months. The boy was chained to a metal plate. When police freed him, they were nauseated by the suffocating stench of excrement. The child was smothered in flies swarming from a tin-can toilet.

 The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement: In 1985 the Portland Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series linking the cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson, slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the stockpiling of guns and biochemical warfare weapons. The year-long Oregonian investigation revealed cult ties to CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East. Domestically, Rajneesh's secret police force worked with Agency operatives.

 Finders: On February 7, 1987 Customs agents raided a child-porn ring in Tallahasee, Florida. Eight suspects and six children were taken into custody. The children, according to a Customs Department memo, behaved "like animals in a public park," and "were not aware of the function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets." The children told police that they were forced to live outdoors and were given food only as a reward. A check on the backgrounds of the adults turned up a police report, "specific in describing 'bloody rituals' and sex orgies involving children, and an as-yet unsolved murder." Customs agents searched a cult safe house and discovered a computer room and documents recording "high-tech" bank transfers, explosives, and a set of instructions advising cult members on moving children through jurisdictions around the country. One photographic album found in the house featured the execution and disembowelment of goats, and snapshots, according to a Customs report, of "adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a bloody ritual." An American passport was found. The investigating agents contacted the State Department and were advised to "terminate further investigation." They investigated anyway, reporting that "the CIA made contact and admitted to owning the Finders ... as a front for a domestic training organization, but that it had 'gone bad.'" The late wife of Marion David Pettie, the cult's leader, had worked for the Agency, and his son had been an employee of Air America, the heroin-riddled CIA proprietary. Yet Pettie denied to a reporter for U.S. News & World Report any connection to the Firm. Police in Washington refused to comment. Officials of the CIA dismissed as "hogwash" allegations of any connection to the Finders cult.

 MOVE: On May 13, 1985 MOVE's Philadelphia headquarters was firebombed by local police. Not only did the fire consume the cult's home--it devastated the entire neighborhood, leaving 11 dead and 250 homeless. The group was cofounded by Vince Leapheart, aka John Africa, a Korean veteran. His intellectual mentor and source of funding was Donald Glassey, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. Glassey was an admitted police "informant," but conducted himself like a paid provocateur. He purchased weapons for the cult with cash drawn from city coffers. John Africa, the cult's titular head, claimed to be a messiah, and like Jim Jones to have Godly "healing" powers and "total control" over his followers.

 O.T.A.: The Order of the Temple of Astarte in Pasadena, California is a "hermetic" occult organization that practices "Magick in the Western Tradition." The cult is led by Fraters Khenemel, a police officer, and Aleyin, a veteran Green Beret. The cult's everyday language is unusual for a mystical order-- one group schedule is laden with words like "operation," "sixteen-thirty hours," and "travel orders." Demonology is among the OTA's primary occult interests. The police connection recalls the statement of Louis Tackwood, the former LAPD provocateur whose revelations of secret police subterfuge set off a political tempest in Los Angeles in 1973. "You don't know," he told journalist Donald Freed, "but there's a devil worship cult in Pasadena. Actually in Altadena." Tackwood alleged that the cultists were "on the LAPD payroll."

 The CIA and Pentagon cooperate in the creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to covert operations, considers it a "primary issue of concern" that the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control and behavioral modification." It is beginning to dawn on the psychiatric community at large that the CIA's mind control clique is a menace reminiscent of Nazi medical experimentation. In 1993, Dr. Corydon Hammond, a professor at the University of Utah's School of Medicine, conducted a seminar on federally-funded mind control experiments. Topics covered by Hammond included brainwashing, post-hypnotic programming and the induction of multiple personalities by the CIA. Hammond contended that the cult underground has roots in Nazi Germany, and that the CIA's cult mind control techniques were based upon those of Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA for Cold Warfare. (Researcher Lenny Lapon estimates in Mass Murderers in White Coats that 5,000 Nazis resettled in the U.S. after WW II.) Hammond was forced to drop this line of inquiry by professional ridicule, especially from the CIA's False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and a barrage of death threats. At a recent regional conference on ritual child abuse, he regretted that he could no longer speak on the theme of government mind control. The psychological community is waking to the threat in its ranks, to judge by APA surveys and personal communications with ranking members of the mental health field, but the world at large remains in the dark. The "mass hysteria" and "false memory" bromides disseminated by the establishment press obscure federal and academic connections to the mind control cults, which are defended largely by organized pedophiles, cultists and hired guns of psychiatry. An ambitious disinformation gambit has led the world at large to side with cultists operating under federal protection. As at Jonestown and Chiery, Switzerland, the denouement of cult activity often ends in the destruction of all witnesses. This cycle of abuse and murder can only be ended by full public awareness of the federal mind control initiative.

Part: II

The CIA, THE FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME FOUNDATION
AND THE POLITICS OF RITUAL ABUSE

The conference session bears a passing resemblance to a 12-Step meeting. Assembled in a Portland religious retreat, members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), all accused of child abuse, are encouraged to unload their anguish. Only women take the stage (they leave reporters with a sympathetic impression--men stigmatized by child abuse do not). Pamela Freyd, a Foundation founder, assures these victims of pernicious therapies they are not alone. The Foundation's office in Philadelphia, she says, takes 60 calls on a typical day from distraught adults hounded by their own confused children, rogue therapists and sensation-seeking pack journalists. The number of dues-paying members (each contributes $100 a year) varies according to the source. The group reported in January 1993 that 1,200 families had made contact in its first year of operation. The same month, the San Jose Mercury News declared flatly that "nearly 3,000 families" from across the country had been recruited. The FMSF now claims 5,000 families. Time magazine raised the figure to "7,000 individuals and families who have sought assistance." The Foundation's distinctive handling of statistics is incessant. In April of this year the FMSF claimed 12,000 families have been strained by false child abuse allegations. A month later, the figure dropped to "9,500 U.S. families." Yet the Foundation prides itself on accuracy. One FMSF newsletter advises members to insist the media "report accurate information. The rumors and misinformation surrounding the false accusations based on recovery of repressed memories are shocking." The same author regrets that "65% of accusations of abuse are now unsubstantiated, a whopping jump from 35% in 1976." This figure, once gleefully disseminated by such pedophile defense groups as NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) was debunked years ago. It was fabricated by Douglas Besherov of the American Enterprise Institute, a hard right-wing propaganda factory fueled by the Olin Foundation, a CIA funding cover. (Christian conservatives are often accused of propagating ritual abuse "hysteria," yet in the 1992 presidential election the para-conservative wing of the Republican Party slipped into its platform a strategy to put an end to investigations of child abuse.) The FMSF selectively ignores child abuse data that disagrees with their own. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, reported in the Harvard Mental Health Letter that false abuse allegations by children "are rare, in the range of 2-8% of reported cases. False retractions of true complaints are far more common, especially when the victim is not sufficiently protected after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation by the perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must preserve secrecy." Other statistics shunned by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation include a survey presented at a 1992 psychiatric conference that found that a full 88% of all therapists in a large sampling consider ritual child abuse to be a very real social problem with devastating emotional effects. Another: In 1990 the State University of New York at Buffalo polled a national sampling of clinical psychologists on ritual abuse. About 800 psychologists--a third of the poll--were aware of treating at least one case. Only 5% of all child abuse cases ever enter the courtroom--half of these end with the child in the custody of the abusive parent.. The recovered memory debate was discussed at a 1993 conference on multiple personality disorder. Richard Lowenstein, a psychiatrist from the University of Maryland Medical School, argued that the Foundation is "media-directed, dedicated to putting out disinformation." Other conference participants contemplated funding sources and "possible CIA connections."

The Devil Denuded

The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF advisory board. They have in common backgrounds in mind control experimentation. Their very presence on the board, and their peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily obscured facts about ritual child abuse. Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original board member of the Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry Lab in Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming (the elicitation of "anti-social" behavior, dissolving memory and other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at Cornell University. He was also funded by Boston's Scientific Engineering Institute, another front, and a clearinghouse for the Agency's investigation of the occult. The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to clandestine ops, considers it a "primary issue of concern" that the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control." The smoothing over of the national security state's cult connections is handled by academic "experts." A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New York, the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion, best known for the publication of Satanism in America: How the Devil Got More Than His Due, widely considered to be a legitimate study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual abuse, dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass "hysteria." Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March, 1991 article that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism in America co-author, at a Berkeley bookstore. "Frew was wearing a five-pointed star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and earth magic," Raschke says. Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the book, is identified by the media as a "physicist." Yet he runs the Gaia Press in El Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing house with an emphasis on witchcraft and occultic lore. Carlson is also a "scientific and technical consultant" to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (a promoter of the "false memory" theory of ritual abuse and UFO abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.

The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was far from disinterested on the workings of childhood memory, and concealed a secret sexual and political agenda. FMSF founder Ralph Underwager, director of the Institute of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in 1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations, written by and for child abuse "skeptics." His departure from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that it was "God's Will" adults engage in sex with children. (His wife Hollida remained on the Foundation's board after he left.) As it happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the exact credo of the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in 1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty of abuse upon children." In the interview, he prevailed upon pedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and reprehensible" users of children. In keeping with the Foundation's creative use of statistics, Dr. Underwager told a group of British reporters in 1994 that "scientific evidence" proved 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was "good for them." Dr. Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world, often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of pedophila tarnished an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press, dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration. He is the world's foremost authority on false memory, but in the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In 1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr. Underwager was "not qualified to render any opinion as to whether or not (the victim) was sexually molested." In 1990 his testimony on memory was ruled improper "in the absence of any evidence that the results of Underwager's work had been accepted in the scientific community." And In Minnesota a judge ruled that Underwager's theories on "learned memory" were the same as "having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling the truth." Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, openly leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August 1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "My family of origin was troubled in many observable ways, " she said. "I refer to the things that were never 'forgotten' and 'recovered,' but to things that we all knew about." She gave her father's alcoholism as an example. "During my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called himself a 'kept boy.'" Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution as an adolescent. At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about her father's nocturnal visits:

I am caught in a web, A web of deep, deep terror. she wrote.

The diaries of her youth chronicle the "reactions and feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and feelings ... to using knowledge of these same symptoms and feelings to discredit me." "My father," she says, "told various people that I was brain damaged." The accusation was unlikely. At the time, Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received numerous research awards. The "brain damage" apologia did not wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer's memories were "confabulations," and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Lief, currently an advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer. "He explained to me that he did not believe I was abused," Jennifer recalls. Dr. Lief's diagnosis was based on his belief that Peter Freyd's fantasies were strictly "homoerotic." Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the possibility of child molestation. Lief's skewed logic is a trademark of the Foundation. He is a close colleague of the CIA's Martin Orne. Dr. Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of federally-funded behavioral modification experiments at Holmesburg Prison. Dr. Orne consulted with him on several studies in hypnotic programming. His academic writing reveals a peculiar range of professional interests, including "Orgasm in the Postoperative Transsexual" for Archives of Sexual Behavior, and an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a journal on mental diseases edited by Foundation fellow Paul McHugh. Lief is a director of the Center for Sexuality and Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education Council. And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an executive editor of the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer), a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account of childhood abuse, and the facetious attempts of her parents and their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David Dinges, co-director--with the ubiquitous Martin Orne--of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

 "At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered 'false,'" Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane." She does not, after all, remember impossible abuses: "I remember incest in my father's house.... My first memories came when I was at home a few hours after my second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical psychologist working within an established group in a large and respected medical clinic. "During that second visit to my therapist's office, I expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit from my parents. My therapist asked about half way into the session, whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I responded, 'no, but...' I went home and within a few hours I was shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible flashbacks." Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed. "In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be discredited despite my personal and professional success?" Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her husband in Ralph Underwager's Issues in Child Abuse Accusations in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the "destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse accusations, and maligns "cult-like" support groups and feminists, or "lesbian cults." Executive director Freyd often refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of child abuse survivors as "lesbians," after the bizarre Dr. Underwager, who claims, "these women may be jealous that males are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close, intimate." Pamela Freyd's account of the family history, Jennifer insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her father, he openly acknowledged that in his version of the story "fictional elements were deliberately inserted." "'Fictional' is rather an astounding choice of words," Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor conference. The article written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure at another university due to a lack of published research. "In fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University of Oregon in 1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a tenured position as associate professor in the psychology department, one of the world's best psychology departments.... My mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my promotion year--that is, the year my case for promotion to full professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of truth." Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur. Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child sexual abuse, observes that "many people view the false memory syndrome theory as a calculated defense strategy developed by perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend them." A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped public opinion and warmed the clime for defense attorneys. The concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed, the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim reviled. The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We are Not Representing Pedophiles," an article written for the February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter by Pamela Freyd. In it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group could be molesters because "we are a good-looking bunch of people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend."

Friendly Fire

People forget things. Horrible things. Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed memory, or what would be called a false memory, that she had been sexually abused.

--Pamela Freyd FMS Foundation Founder

The debate's bloodiest stage is the courtroom. The hired guns of Martin Orne's circle of psychiatrists are constantly called upon to blow smoke at the jury's gallery to conceal CIA mind control operations. This branch of the psychiatric community is steeped in the programming of serial killers, political assassins and experiments on involuntary subjects. Agency psychiatrists on the witness stand direct the press away from the CIA, and the prosecution to a predetermined end. Martin Orne's high-toned psychologizing in the Hillside Strangler case, for example, is a strategy adopted by the FMS foundation to stifle the cries of mind control survivors. Orne's influence contributed to the outcome of a high-profile abuse case, the $8 million lawsuit filed by Gary Ramona of Napa, California against child therapist Marche Isabella and psychiatrist Richard Rose. Ramona charged that his daughter Holly's therapists elicited from her flashbacks of sexual molestation that never occurred, decimating his marriage and career as a vice president at Robert Mondavi wineries. His wife and employer, note, immediately believed Holly's accusations. In May of 1994 Ramona received a $500,000 jury award. He hailed the decision as a "tremendous victory." Nevertheless, Holly Ramona still maintains that she was sexually abused by her father, though no criminal charges have been filed. Holly first confronted her father with the allegations on March 15, 1990, with her mother and Isabella present. She filed a civil action against him in Los Angeles County, but before it went to trial her father's suit got underway in Napa. The suit turned on the use of sodium amytal to resurrect buried memories. Holly Ramona exhibited telltale symptoms of abuse--fear of gynecological examinations, a phobia of pointy teeth, like her father's--and asked to be treated with sodium amytal. Dr. Rose wrote in his notes that under the influence of the drug, Holly "remembered specific details of sexual molestation." But Orne, who has pioneered in the use of sodium amytal in hypnosis research, cautioned in a court brief that the drug is "not useful in ascertaining 'truth.' The patient becomes receptive to suggestions due to the context and to the comments of the interviewers." Yet the jury foreman stated for the record that Isabella and Rose did not implant false memories of abuse, as Holly's father had complained, but were negligent in reinforcing the memories as Holly described them under the influence of the barbiturate. The court considered it irrelevant whether Holly actually suffered abuse, narrowing the legal focus instead to the chemical evocation of Holly's recollections and her therapist's leading questions. Left hanging was the question of Ramona's guilt or innocence, not exactly an irrelevant issue. Orne offered no opinion.

 The "tremendous victory" in Napa, given these facts, begins to look like a manipulation of the court system, especially the use of "expert" testimony. The therapists did not, contrary to most press reports, bear the full brunt of blame. The jury found that Ramona himself bore 5% of the blame for what happened to him, Holly's therapists 55%, and 45% was borne by the girl's mother and the Robert Mondavi winery. But the 55% solution is diluted by Holly's memories. Contrary to the impression left by the press, her past has not been explained away. "I wouldn't be here if there was a question in my mind," she testified in Napa. False memory had no clinical history or symptomology (repressed memory has both), but the concept had held up in court. All that remained was to provide a scientific explanation. The Foundation had spread the word that a "syndrome" was winding through society and "destroying families." But what is the origin of false (not inaccurate or clouded or fragmented) memories? What are the symptoms? It remained to supply a cognitive model for false memories of ritual molestation.

 One of the most prolific and quotable popularizers of false memory is Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an advisory board member of the Foundation. Her dual academic interests have fueled suspicions that the organization is more committed to defending perpetrators than ferreting out the facts. Loftus testified in over 150 criminal cases prior to joining the Foundation, always on behalf of defendants. In 1991 she published a professional autobiography, Witness for the Defense, a study of eight criminal trials in which she appeared as an expert witness. In her book, Loftus--billed as "the expert who puts memory on trial"--conceded that her critics deem her research "unproven in real-life situations," and her courtroom dissertations "premature and highly prejudicial." One book reviewer for the New York Times grumbled: "Her testimony would be less controversial if she could distinguish between the innocent and the guilty and reserve her help for the former." Elizabeth Loftus has two criteria for taking the stand. The first is when eyewitness identification is the sole or primary evidence against the defendant. Secondly, the accused must act innocent--she regrets testifying on behalf of Ted Bundy because the serial killer once smiled at the prosecutor, which she regards as an expression of guilt--and defense attorneys must believe it. Loftus stood at the Harvard Medical School podium in May, 1994 to inform a conference on false memory of her research, "in which false memories about childhood events were created in 24 men and women ages 18 to 63." Dr. Loftus reported that the parents of volunteers "cooperated to produce a list of events that had supposedly taken place in the volunteer's early life." Three of the events actually took place. But one, a shopping trip, never happened. Some of the volunteers had memories, implanted by suggestion, of wandering lost on the fictitious shopping expedition.

 Karen Olio, the author of scores of articles on sexual abuse, complains that Loftus's memory studies "examine only the possibility of implanting a single memory with which most people could easily identify (being lost in a mall, awakened by a noise in the night). The possibility of 'implanting' terrifying and shameful memories that differ markedly from an individual's experience, such as memories of childhood abuse in individuals who do not have a trauma history," remains to be proven." Psychiatrist John Briere of the University of Southern California has found that nearly two-thirds of all ritual abuse survivors report episodic or complete amnesia at some point after it occurred. The younger the child, the more violent the abuse, the more likely that memory lapses occurred. these findings have been duplicated at the University of California at San Francisco by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, who concluded that children subjected to repeated abuse were more likely to repress memories of it than victims of a single traumatic event. Clinical psychologist Catherine Gould has treated scores of ritually abused children at her office in Encino, California. At the September 1993 National Conference on Crimes Against Children in Washington, D.C., Gould objected that the studies of Elizabeth Loftus ignore past research on trauma and its influence on memory. "My concern about Elizabeth Loftus," Gould said, "is that she has stated in print, and correctly so, that her data tells us nothing about the nature of memory of traumatic events. And yet she has failed to protest the misapplication of her findings by groups who are involved in discrediting the accounts survivors are giving of their traumatic history. I believe that Dr. Loftus, like other psychologists, has an ethical responsibility to do everything possible to ensure that her research findings are interpreted and applied accurately, and are not manipulated to serve the political agenda of groups like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. I question whether she has met this ethical responsibility." Some psychologists accuse Loftus of faking her research data. Her study did not live up to its promise. But now that she had "proven" that a false memory could be implanted, friends of the Foundation at the Harvard conference announced they'd identified the neurological and cognitive causes of disorder. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist and conference organizer, claimed that the "confabulator" selects a fragment of a real memory, "but confuses its true context, and draws on other bits of experience to construct a story that makes sense of it." Dr. Morris Moscovitch, a neuro-psychologist at the University of Toronto, claimed that "brain damage" could also evoke false memories. He noted that mental patients with frontal lobe defects frequently confuse imaginary stories with actual memories. A superficially plausible revelation was provided by Cornell psychologist Stephen Ceci, who reported on five studies of 574 preschool children. After 10 weeks of repeated questioning, 58% of them concocted a false account for at least one fictitious event. But like the studies of Elizabeth Loftus, Ceci did not attempt to explain the supposed amnesiac effect of severe trauma on children and adults alike (veterans of WW II and Vietnam have been known to "forget" atrocities of war). Besides, the average preschooler is bound to invent at least one fantasy in 10 long weeks of repetitive questioning. Toddlers aren't known for their consummate adherence to objective reality. An invisible playmate and the Cat in the Hat are not "false memories." The research results presented at the Harvard conference were not exactly staggering.

 All that had been proven was that children forget, become confused and make things up. Seattle therapist James Cronin, one of the Foundation's harshest critics, believes that the false memory concept is promoted by "fact and artifice" to a public conditioned to the fragmentation of knowledge, intellectual charades, elitism and the sterile abstractions that often pass for university education and expertise. The so-called experts now jumping on the side of false memory and therapist 'bias' are opportunists." Yet the New York Times hailed the Harvard conference as "epic." The conference had given a gracious "scientific nod to the frailty of memory." Victims of aggravated child abuse had nothing to celebrate, but the Times reporter was ecstatic. At long last, scientists everywhere had arrived at "a consensus on the mental mechanisms that can foster false memories." A consensus? Actually, the "consensus" of psychologists, at least the 88% mentioned earlier--only a vast majority--believe it to be a very real scourge. The Times story is typical of the scorn the press has shown ritual abuse victims and their therapists. Sixty Minutes, for example, publicly exonerated Kelly Michaels, a day-care worker in New Jersey, of charges that she sexually molested dozens of youngsters in 1984. Michaels was sentenced to 47 years in prison for sodomizing the children in her care with kitchen implements, among related charges. Her conviction was overturned in March 1993 when the state appeals court ruled that Michaels had not had a fair trial. But in its rush to present Michaels as a blushing innocent, the Sixty Minutes research department somehow overlooked a May 1991 New York Times story on the abuse trial, and the testimony of four Essex County corrections officers who witnessed Miss Michaels and her father kissing and "fondling" one another during jail visitations. Jerry Vitiello, a jailer, said that "he saw Ms. Michaels use his tongue when kissing his daughter, rub her buttocks and put his hand on her breasts." Similar incestuous liaisons were detailed in the courtroom by three women working in the jail. The bizarre sexual antics of Kelly Michaels--damningly chronicled in Nap Time by Lisa Manshel in 1990--was nixed from the one-sided Sixty Minutes account, which made her out to be grist for the meat grinder of wrong-headed child abuse laws.

The Forgettable "Remembering Satan"

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation made its collective debut in "Remembering Satan," a two-part story by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker for April and May 1993. The story (republished in 1994 in book form) concerns a ritual abuse trial in Olympia, Washington that culminated with a 20-year prison sentence for Thurston County Sheriff Paul Ingram, chairman of the local Republican Party. Ingram has since filed motions to withdraw his guilty plea, a move rejected by an appellate court in 1992. Also charged, but not convicted, were Jim Rabie, a lobbyist with the Washington State Law Enforcement Association and a former police detective assigned to child abuse cases, and Ray Risch, an employee of the State Patrol's body-and-fender shop. Wright's conclusion, however, is based on the opinions of False Memory Syndrome Foundation psychiatrists: that accusations made by Ingram's two daughters, and his own confession to police, were fantasies misinterpreted by Ingram himself and his daughters as actual memories. Wright fumigates any question of abuse with false memory theory. Among the authorities consulted by Wright was Foundation board member Paul McHugh, director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins. Like Margaret Singer, he is a veteran of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (1961-64) and moves in political circles. For three years (1986-89), McHugh was chairman of the bio-psychology study section of the National Institutes of Health, and a former member of the Maryland Governor's Advisory Commission.
 McHugh is an unshakable skeptic of repressed memories. He told Wright that "most severe traumas are not blocked out by children but are remembered all too well." Most, in fact, are. But McHugh's own professional opinion leaves open the possibility that some severe traumas are repressed. He cites as an example the children of chowchilla, California, who were kidnapped in a school bus and buried alive. McHugh claims they remembered the horror "all too well." Not exactly. In fact, the FBI's subsequent use of investigative hypnosis was largely the result of the Chowchilla children's failure of memory. After their release, none of the children had a clear recollection of the kidnappers, could not identify them-- and neither did the bus driver, Ed Ray, who managed to recite the license-plate number of the abductor's van under hypnosis. Wright's defense of Ingram turns on the opinion of Richard Ofshe, a Berkeley psychologist, reputed mind control expert and friend of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Ofshe has written, Wright explains, "extensively about how the thought-control techniques developed in Communist china, the Soviet Union and North Korea had come to be employed and refined by various religious cults in the United States." Pointing to mind control in Communist countries is a favorite tactic of the American mind control fraternity to divert attention from the highly sophisticated techniques employed in "Democratic" countries (often in the form of experimentation on unknowing subjects). This historical revision is a fine example of "mirror imaging," the CIA technique of vilifying others, and ignoring the Agency's own role in the formation and control of mind control cults. Ofshe has not been directly linked to the CIA, but his work parrots the writings of UCLA'S Louis Jolyon West and other psychiatrists with Agency credentials.
Wright somehow failed to mention that Ofshe is sharply at odds with much of the American Psychological Association. He has filed a suit, with Margaret Singer, for $30 million against the APA for engaging in a "conspiracy" to "destroy" their reputations and prevent them from testifying in the courtroom. Both Ms. Singer and Richard Ofshe derive a significant part of their income as consultants and expert witnesses on behalf of accused child abusers. Their complaint, filed under federal racketeering laws--tripling any financial damages--claims that members of the APA set out with "repeated lies" to "discredit them and impair their careers." The Association flatly denied the charges. Two courts quickly dismissed the case.
The APA released a statement to the press stating that the organization had merely advised members against testifying in court on the subject of brainwashing with "persuasive coercion" (a concept, after all, pushed during the Korean war by the CIA to justify barbaric mind control experimentation on American citizens), and had in no way conspired to impair the careers of Ofshe, Singer or anyone else. Many in Ofshe's own profession believe him to be a world-class opportunist. He is a constant in newspaper interviews and on the talk show circuit, where he claims there is "no evidence" to support ritual abuse allegations. His categorical denial ignores Ingram's own confession and a number of jury decisions across the country.

 And then there are, to cite one documented example of evidence from the glut that Ofshe ignores, the tunnels beneath the McMartin preschool, the most widely-publicized case. And a raid on the Children of God compound in Argentina in 1993 turned up videos of ritual abuse and child pornography. Evidence does exist--Ofshe simply refuses to acknowledge the fact. A cult specialist with Ofshe's credentials would surely explore the abundance of evidence if he was a legitimate psychologist. Instead, he chirps a categorical "no evidence," perfectly aware that most mental health professionals will see through him. A credulous public will not. On the December 3, 1993 Rolanda talk show, a woman was interviewed who'd had flashback memories of abuse before consulting with a therapist. Dr. Ofshe appeared on the program, his silver beard groomed, looking every inch the authority. Rolanda asked Ofshe if "a terrible childhood memory, as bad as child abuse, (can) actually be repressed." "There is absolutely no reason to think that that is true," Ofshe told her. "And it's not just what I say--this is the sum and substance of everything science knows about how memory works."

 This, of course, is a transparent lie. Ofshe dismissed repressed memories of abuse as the reigning "psychological quackery of the 20th century." Dr. Daniel Lutzker, a psychologist at the Milton Erickson Institute, was sitting in the audience--turning crimson with rage at Ofshe's misrepresentations of the psychology of trauma. He stood up and argued that sex abuse can indeed begat buried recollections. "Repressed memories," Lutzker countered, "are not only important, they are the cornerstone of most psychotherapies. the fact is that the more awful the experience, the more likely it is to be repressed!" Ofshe responded that there was "no evidence" so support such "nonsense." Grimacing with disbelief, Lutzker said that Ofshe wouldn't make such outrageous comments if he bothered to pick up "any basic textbook on psychotherapy." "Your making it up!" Ofshe spat. Lutzker stared at him in disbelief. But the crowning contradiction to Ofshe's "expert" opinions appeared in a September 1994 L.A. Weekly article on alien abductions (another phenomenon said by the Foundation to breed "false memories"). "There are a lot of not particularly well-certified people out there," Dr. Ofshe told Gardetta, "using very powerful techniques on people. Visualizing this kind of stuff under hypnosis--abduction, Satan cults, sexual abuse--is the closest thing that anyone can experience short of the experience itself. That's why it's so traumatic to the individuals undergoing hypno-therapy, and why the hypno-therapist today can be seen as a new form of sexual predator." But one morning, shortly thereafter, Gardetta awoke to find a triangular rash on the palm of his left hand. "It didn't surprise me," Gardetta wrote. "Things around the house--which sits on a hilltop in a semi-rural area--had been getting weird. A jet-wash noise buzzed some afternoons around the house, its origin impossible to discern. Lights were turning themselves on, and the alarm system's motion sensor was tripping itself every morning between 5 and 6. One early evening, small footsteps crossed the roof. I ran outside to find the electrical wires leading to a nearby telephone pole swaying in the windless dusk." The mysterious federal mind control fraternity had struck again, leaving behind more memories to be denounced by the "skeptics" of the FMS Foundation--the CIA's answer to the Flat Earth Society.

Chapter Five

Pages 97-111

"What is that Odor?"

Mystery Fumes, the Poisoning of the Los Angeles County Commission
for Women's Ritual Abuse Task Force & the Los Angeles Times

Introduction: Cults, Chemo-Terrorism and the CIA

After the deadly March 1995 subway gassing in Japan, 1,200 police and military troops raided the "sixth santium" of Aum Shinri Kyo, one of the country's 17,000 religious cults, in the shadow of Mount Fuji. Sporting chemical gear, they cut their way into the Kamikuishiki warehouse with circular saws and oxyacetylene torches. On the first floor, police stumbled upon a "Perfect Salvation Initiation," a yogic ritual that employed electrical skull caps to deliver four- to ten-volt shocks to the novitiate in an attempt to open his chakras, the body's centers of spiritual energy. Among the healing rites practiced by the sect was the imbibing and vomiting of whole gallons of water, electrical jolts and the "Christ Initiation," an arduous regimen of enemas and scalding hot baths. Former members of the sect, according to a Los Angeles Times report, "paint a chilling picture of psychological indoctrination ... sleep deprivation, mind control techniques and enforced isolation from the outside world. Access to family and friends - even newspapers and TV - is prohibited"1 The cultists exhibited an alarming degree of mind control. Police freed a screaming woman from a stainless steel pod, and fifty cult members were found sprawled unconscious in a chapel on the second floor, six others in a drug-induced coma.2 Police announced that the stockpile of noxious chemicals discovered at the compound was the source of the nerve gas released in a Tokyo subway, killing ten people and injuring 5,000, with 70 in critical condition. Sadly enough, the neurotoxic effect of the gas is likely to be severe. Medical research has shown that acute exposure to toxic levels of sarin (a poison developed at chemical laboratories in Nazi Germany as a war gas) produces prolonged changes in brain function.3 It was the first use of a chemical warfare agent on a large group of people by a non-military group4 (though the apocalyptic sect is believed to have had a hand in an unexplained sarin "leak" in the Japanese Alps in 1994 that left eight dead and sickened 212.5 "Birds dropped from the sky," one abashed correspondent wrote from Tokyo. "Dead dogs and cats lay in the gutters, and dead carp and yabbies floated to the surface of an ornamental pond"6). It was not the first time that a cult has been accused of waging chemical warfare on unsuspecting civilians. In Los Angeles, for example, a series of mysterious attacks on members of the local County Commission for Women's Ritual Abuse Task Force in 1992 led to complaints of nausea, blurred vision, dizziness, headaches and elevated blood pressure. Eight of these cases had been independently confirmed by blood tests - yet, incredibly, Los Angeles Times coverage made light of the victims, blaming the outbreak of symptoms on the fertile imaginations of professional paranoiacs.7 After all, allegations of abuse at McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach had been debunked. The expert opinions of reputable academics had shown that organized cult activity in southern California was non-existent, the zaniest of "urban legends." Hadn't they? Surely the task force was laboring under another bout of cult "hysteria." The Times reassured the community that, once again, a few fevered brains had made monsters where none existed. The newspaper adhered to its position even when Dr. Catherine Gould, chairwoman of the ritual abuse task force, fired off a letter of rebuttal, pointing out that the allegations were backed up by blood-test reports verifying that members of the group had, contrary to the Times report, been exposed to organophosphate poisons.8 The Times did not print the letter. Dr. Gould, a licensed clinical child therapist, countered that she had found it shocking a major metropolitan newspaper would "deliberately bypass the available data in favor of a series of emotional charges which essentially amount to a chorus of 'it couldn't be true.'" She also bemoaned the newspaper's "pattern of biased and inaccurate reporting" on ritual child abuse, a tendency to side with perpetrators of SRA and promote the small minority of psychologists - only one out of ten, in fact - who deride recovered memory therapy and have largely succeeded at discrediting therapists who work with children abused by mind control cults.9 This small but unremittingly "skeptical" school constitutes the pool of academic psychologists available to defense attorneys. They have received much play in the press, champions of the false memory theory of ritual abuse - though most are not licensed to practice child therapy. Ubiquitous in the media, this clutch of academic psychologists includes Drs. Richard Ofshe, Margaret Singer and Elizabeth Loftus of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, all of whom have made lucrative careers testifying on behalf of accused pedophiles. The therapists who actually treat the young victims are not sought out by reporters. This inequity, biased in favor of the false memory brigade, amounts to blanket censorship of all qualified professionals on the subject of ritual abuse. The press has thus become the sole domain of a small minority of defense psychologists. Lopsided media coverage of ritual abuse amounts to a virulent form of disinformation. The perpetrators and their hired guns in academia have a monopoly on the molding of public opinion. They are not representative, but they are quoted time and again by the press. Their bona fides are often in CIA mind control experimentation. These include UCLA's Louis Jolyon West (LSD experiments) and Berkeley's Margaret Singer (brainwashing studies), both "experts" on cults. Dr. Ofshe, who turns up constantly in the newspapers to call recovered memory therapy a "quack" science, writes monographs on mind control strongly influenced by Dr. West's academic writing. Dr. Martin Orne, an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, studied hypnotic persuasion at the University of Pennsylvania for CIA and Naval Intelligence paymasters. What the Los Angeles Times neglected to tell its readership is that CIA behavior control scientists and the cults have formed an alliance. The Agency uses the cults to further the techniques and technology of mind control.10 In exchange, the CIA provides behind-the-scenes legal assistance and public relations. A perpetrator of ritual abuse, when nabbed, is often treated to friendly press coverage. In contrast, ritually abused children and their therapists have been targeted for harassment because they threaten perps, cults and the Agency alike with exposure. Competent psychologists are, in the public print, made to appear greedy, incompetent opportunists practicing a medieval science based on quack theories of memory. Stories critical of those in the field of ritual abuse often bear an uncanny resemblance to a CIA disinformation campaign - and that, if the truth be known, is no accident. Despite public pronouncements to the contrary, the CIA is still very actively engaged in mind control research. Communities around the world have been converted into laboratories. Cults in their midst are led by operatives trained in the techniques and technology of behavior control. And media disinformation conceals the work of this mind control fraternity. In January of 1992, Dr. Gould recalled in her letter to the Times, "I became aware of a strange pattern of illnesses [affecting] both Los Angeles therapists treating ritual abuse patients, and individuals engaged in support and advocacy work on behalf of ritually abused children and adults." The afflicted complained not only of a general malaise that might be expected to accompany a demanding career, but also such unusual symptoms as numbness in the face and extremities, blurred vision, muscle tremors and weakness, memory loss and even "incontinence." The first to complain of symptoms saw a physician, who diagnosed her as suffering from diazinon poisoning. (Diazinon, like the sarin unleashed in Japan, is an organophosphate.11) Independently, another member of the task force had a blood test performed at Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles and was handed the same diagnosis. A third member of the group, an SRA survivor, was examined at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center and told that she had "organophosphate poisoning." Yet another member, a therapist suffering a constellation of toxic symptoms, bought a pesticide detection kit. She tested samples of food from the kitchen one evening when she discovered that her home had been broken and entered. A half dozen of the food samples proved positive for pesticide poisoning. The therapist (requesting anonymity) claimed in a letter to the task force, "our home has been broken into several times, even during the day when witnesses were on the property. Neighbors inform us of continual nighttime surveillance. We have been followed several times by a variety of vehicles. On at least three occasions the interior of our home has been splattered with blood, and two birds have mysteriously died."12 Concerns were raised at the panel's March 1992 meeting that some people engaged in helping ritual abuse survivors escape cult influence might be victims of pesticide poisoning. By that time, a number of therapists suffering from symptoms of organophosphate poisoning had contacted their physicians. Satanic cult survivors on the task force also exhibited symptoms of toxification, including a young woman and incest survivor - referred to here as M - who received the following recorded message from her sister shortly after taking a blood test:

I talked to mom this morning - she's very upset! She said she had a phone call yesterday about a meeting and that she wanted to tell you that any files, any medical reports that you go or that anyone else goes looking for will not be found. We know what you're up to and you're not going to get away with it. I repeat, anything you look for - medical files, reports - will not be found. Don't do this.... I'm telling you this to beware - you're treading on thin ice - mom told me to tell you'd better be careful. You'd better watch who you talk to. Watch what you say, because you're marked and you know that. We know what school [your child] goes to. You'd better be there for him. You'd better watch out for him. Anything can happen. Have a nice day!

Medical reports from clinics across the county vouch for members of the task force who reporting toxic effects. Still, the L.A. Times took the position that they were suffering paranoid aberrations. The adamant editors of the Times turned up their noses not only to the medical reports, but also to a number of letters from other therapists of ritually abused children in Los Angeles - they, too, exhibited symptoms of organophosphate poisoning. One mother of two, after leaving a local cult, contacted Gould's task force in November, 1992 about the L.A.Times story: "I was alarmed, since I had all the symptoms last year, as had my children." Another mother wrote to say that in February, 1985 she discovered that her youngest daughter had been sexually abused in a daycare center in the San Fernando Valley. Her daughter's intense emotional trauma persisted, though she frequented a therapist for over a year. Then the toxic siege began ...

In 1988 I started to experience physical problems. I was severely tired much of the time. It felt as if I had been drugged. Soon after that I started to have occurrences of tachycardia (rapid heart beat), headaches, shortness of breath, loss of memory, blurry vision, sweats, and at times I noticed a strange odor in my clothing, not to mention the female problems I was having. Doctors tested me every which way and yet every test was negative. They told me I was suffering from stress. I argued that I felt drugged, that I had some kind of chemical imbalance. They insisted it was stress, and I was referred to various stress programs, given tapes to listen to and forced to leave a very lucrative job. In July 1989, I was put on disability. Today I am considered permanently disabled. Early in 1992 it was suggested to me that I might be a victim of pesticide poisoning. Truth is I didn't believe it. I was afraid my doctor would think I was crazy. I eventually did go to him and asked his opinion. I was surprised at what he told me in a phone conversation the next day. He had consulted with two other doctors, and it was their opinion that I was suffering from chronic pesticide poisoning.13

Having amassed a bulky file of medical documentation to establish that members of the task force had been poisoned, Dr. Gould was still reluctant to contact the local press until she'd gathered enough evidence to convince even the most obstinate skeptic. In Los Angeles, the legal victory of Ray Buckey on molestation charges, after a five-year travail of public debate, had prompted a heated backlash against child therapists. The task force was still collecting medical evidence and discussing possible courses of action when Stephanie Sheppard, a cult survivor, broke ranks and phoned the L.A. Times and a local television station to "blow the lid" off the group's "psychotic" belief they'd been poisoned. Ms. Sheppard's admission was made to therapist David Neswald prior to a meeting of the panel. Dr. Neswald recalls that Sheppard "apparently mistook me for Dr. Papanek and called me out to the hallway to speak privately."14 The agonizing irony in the confusion of identity is that Dr. Paul Papanek has long been a medical champion for the spraying of technical-grade malathion (an organophosphate and known neurotoxin) in densely-populated Southern California neighborhoods, a practice he commends as safe and effective to rid the region of periodic medfly infestation, despite growing evidence that the insecticide has adverse, often severe effects on human health. A mother of two, referred to here as N.R., once sought advice from the task force when she suspected her two daughters had been abused. She struggled with an undiagnosed illness for a year before it occurred to her that the cause might be a poison. She phoned the task force office and was referred to Stephanie Sheppard, then acting "contact person" on questions concerning toxins. Sheppard, the woman complained, "proceeded to question me at length," and gave several "lectures about how all of these symptoms I was having could be from other causes, including 'getting old' (I am forty)." N.R. became "very suspicious of her intentions and did not wish to talk to her again."15 After a routine blood test, Ms. R.'s physician received not one, but three phone calls from Stephanie Sheppard. She asked how the tests had come out, and informed him that she seriously doubted anyone on the task force had been poisoned. When Stephanie rang N.R., "I told her that I had found out that she had called my doctor and that I was very angry. Her voice took on a tone that was obviously aimed at shaming me for questioning her. I told her in a strong voice not to call again and I hung up." Alarmed, she called the clinic, only to discover that Stephanie had called there repeatedly for a copy of the blood test results. (As it happens, the test proved negative. This means little, though, because Mrs. R. learned later that it was a test capable of detecting only high levels of toxicity from recent exposure.) Ms. R. complained to the task force that her doctor had "no experience with ritual abuse. Now she certainly has a first-hand experience of cult attempts to sabotage all exposure of their violent harassment techniques. I am totally outraged." She characterized Stephanie Sheppard's intrusions as "a total red alert" to "infiltration." But the quickest cuts, the harshest treacheries, were yet to come - from the Los Angeles Times. British journalist Piers Brendon, in The Life and Death of the Press Barons, found in the course of researching the book in 1983 that "as an integral part of the country's power structure, the Times tends to overlook its public responsibilities."16 But then, dodging responsibility is something of a tradition in the press, Brendon observed: "The First Amendment was drafted on the understanding that newspapers would be voices crying in the wilderness. It did not matter how raucous or even how deceitful they were." The very paragon of this principle is the L.A. Times. Catherine Gould is cautious of the press. She and other therapists working with ritual abuse victims have been repeatedly besmirched for shattering the spell of public denial woven by the media around any mention of ritual child abuse or cult mind control.

"We considered it too early to make any kind of definitive determination about the nature or extent of the poisonings," Dr. Gould says, "and had in no way thought to publicize our concerns at this time." She was still collecting medical reports when the Times came a-calling. A cursory treatment of the story was written up by staff reporter Aaron Curtiss and appeared on December 1, 1992. It was founded solely on allegations, not hard evidence. Curtiss promised the group a follow-up story based on the medical data they'd collected. Gould agreed to turn over the blood test results. But the Times pulled a switch. Curtiss phoned Gould to say he'd been pulled off the story. It was instead assigned to John Johnson, the author of an earlier biased pooh-poohing of ritual abuse that appeared in the Times on April 23, 1992.17 Dr. Gould was still aching with resentment at the paper for printing Johnson's condescending denial of underground cult activity in Los Angeles. Gould told Curtiss that she saw no purpose in working with Johnson. Curtiss passed on Gould's concerns to his editor. The next day Curtiss called to say that his editor had agreed that Gould could give the medical reports to the Times and expect fair treatment. He assured her that the information would be accurately reflected in the story written by Johnson. Thus assuaged, she turned over the medical reports. Quite suddenly, without explanation, Curtiss went incommunicado. Gould phoned the Times repeatedly over the next ten days - Curtiss refused to either take or return her calls. Gould had a cold sensation in the pit of her stomach that the paper would debunk the poisonings. "I was appalled," Gould later wrote to editors of the Times, "when the article appeared on the front page of the 'Metro' section with none of the available data in it. The article represents a breach of ethics on the part of John Johnson and the Los Angeles Times, and a breach of promise made by a staff member." The Times story that appeared on December 13, 1992 glossed over the medical evidence entirely, depicting the task force as a collection of paranoiacs who "claimed they are slowly being poisoned by those who want to silence them." The paper noted that there were "43 reported victims of the alleged poisoning," but "so far, there is no proof that anyone was poisoned and skeptics abound." Johnson cited as example Dr. Paul J. Papanek, chief of the county's toxins epidemiological program and the most reviled public official in L.A. County - the very "authority" who has repeatedly sanctioned malathion spraying in Southern California despite overwhelming medical data, a multitude of case histories and strident city hall testimony indicating that the pesticide is harmful to humans. Dr. Papanek "attended a recent task force meeting and branded as 'outrageous' the poisoning claims." He sharply faulted the commission for not attending to "common sense rules of evidence." On the heels of this "controversy," nameless authorities had "begun an investigation into the activities of therapists and an acupuncturist linked to the poisoning claims by task force members." Other "skeptics" were "turning up the heat for answers.," Johnson reported, among them Tom O'Connor, executive director of the Board of Psychology. "Are they diagnosing diazinon poisoning?" O'Connor asked. "That's beyond the scope of their license. This sounds like some sort of mass hysteria." Another categorical denial came from Stephanie Sheppard, who "said she checked out the claims of pesticide poisoning and found no facts to back up the allegations." The Times had only to cite the medical reports supplied by Catherine Gould to silence these critics of the task force. The spurning of the blood tests reduced the story to a transparent smear, probably to discredit Gould and other therapists treating victims of ritual abuse. The deliberate distortions of most news reports on cult conditioning of children blurs public perception of the issue, and contributes to the continued vulnerability of children to a most heinous form of abuse. If anything is more ludicrous than the atrocities described by victims, it is the confabulistic tales advanced by false memory advocates in the press.

The abysmal ethics of the Times in its handling of the task force poisonings extended to the paper's reports on a related story, the logic-defying "Mystery Fumes" case in Riverside, California. The half-dozen accounts of the case published by the newspaper were the exclusive domain of staff writer Tom Gorman. In February, 1994 six emergency room attendants at Riverside Hospital fainted after inhaling an "ammonia-like" odor discharged by the blood of Gloria Ramirez after drawing a sample with a syringe. "In the ensuing confusion," Gorman reported, "two people unaffected by the fumes tended to her as she went into full cardiac arrest. Within minutes, the 31-year-old woman - suffering from cervical cancer and weakened by nausea - died." State health officials and toxic specialists had no idea what prompted the incident, and Gorman reported that the Riverside Fire Department's hazardous materials squad found nothing peculiar in air samples taken from the emergency room.18 (Five months later, however, Gorman reversed himself and reported that a chemical compound derived from ammonia had been found in the air samples.19) Dr. Huberto Ochoa, director of the emergency room staff, noticed white crystal spikes in the syringe used to draw blood from the dying Gloria Ramirez. "I'd never seen anything like it," he said. OSHA technicians detected an unidentified derivative of ammonia in Ramirez's body bag.20 Nevertheless, one state hygienist blamed "stress" or "anxiety." This explanation, however, failed to account for the profound memory loss of Maureen Welch, a respiratory therapist. The strain of overwork seemed a lame explanation for the gangrenous knees of nurse Julie Gorchynski after her blood had been contaminated, killing the supply of oxygen to her bones. She also suffered from breathing difficulties, muscle spasms and other symptoms reported two years earlier by members of the task force. In fact, the New York Times noted, medical professionals held that 'the toxic substance that felled the emergency room workers may have been an organophosphate, a chemical used in pesticides and military nerve gas."21 (On the West Coast, the heirs of General Otis Chandler never once raised the possibility that Gloria Ramirez may have been exposed to organophosphates, quite possibly to avoid linking Dr. Gould's task force with the mystery fumes case in the minds of readers.) "I had chemical burns in my throat and nose," Gorchynski told reporters, "lungs working at half capacity, biopsies showing dead knees, a drop of enzyme levels and crystals in my blood as well. It's all medically documented."22 But the Los Angeles Times - which had ignored medical data in its reporting on the poisonings of ritual abuse task force members - also neglected to discuss Julie Gorchynski's medical examinations. The hospital's own blood tests detected organophosphates, but the local press refused to report this critical fact for many months. The Times wasn't the only local news outlet to spin a cloud of disinformation around the mystery fumes case. Dean Adell, a local talk show doctor for KFI, an AM radio station in Los Angeles, dismissed the incident as "mass hysteria."23 This diagnosis outraged Dr. Ross Kussman, Gorchynski's physician, who called the radio station to explain that the hospital personnel displayed symptoms of toxicity. "It doesn't fit the grounds for mass hysteria," Kussman said. "Julie became very ill from the toxin, developed pancreatitis and hepatitis, which are known to kill bone tissue." Dr. Adell scoffed, as though this diagnosis was the most preposterous abuse of medical science he'd ever heard. What poison could possibly account for Gorchynski's litany of symptoms? he asked. "Organophosphates are well known to cause pancreatitis," Dr. Kussman offered. He explained that pancreatitis, in turn, is a known precursor of bone necrosis, the condition afflicting Dr. Gorchynski's knees. Adell asked why health authorities hadn't arrived at the same conclusion. "Because," Kussman returned, "the County was uncooperative in helping us find out where it came from." (Gorchynski also claimed that county authorities were "stonewalling" her.) "Trust me," Dr. Adell, an optometrist, snorted with psychic confidence, "there ain't no fumes!" This appeared to be the official position of the Times as well. Gorman parroted the statements of state health officials when, two weeks later, they too attributed the swooning at Riverside Hospital to "mass hysteria" (failing to point out that this is formally considered to be a "diagnosis-by-exclusion" - meaning that if no other cause is detectable, mass hysterics could account for a spread of physical symptoms.24) At any rate, this explanation didn't wash well in the public print. But before the sighs died down, another diagnosis was offered by Riverside County Coroner Scotty Hill. The coroner released a report from Lawrence Livermore labs - a few days before ballots were cast in Hill's run for re-election - concluding that the noxious fumes discharged by Gloria Ramirez were created internally from the bodily absorption of the pain remedy DMSO chemically transformed by her unique biochemistry into dimethyl sulfate, a lethal chemical warfare agent.25 But the DMSO theory had as many gaping holes in it as "mass hysteria." "DMSO is commonly used," Dr. Kussman says, "and they're saying now that everyone who uses it emits a nerve gas?" The Ramirez family fervently denied that the patient had ever used DMSO. Besides, said Ron Schwartz, an attorney in the case, "the coroner's office is still saying that she died of cervical cancer, but now they're saying she created a chemical warfare agent that didn't hurt her. That doesn't make sense to me." The Los Angeles Times neglected to report a second outbreak of mystery fumes that further decimated the DMSO hypothesis. After initial treatment at Riverside Hospital, two of the poisoned hospital employees were transferred to Parkview Hospital, according to a local television news report.26 "What few people know," an excited reporter announced from Parkview, "is that four of the workers who treated them here were ill themselves. A poison expert examined the four new patients - he said the same symptoms at two different hospitals argues against a DMSO reaction, and points to an entirely different poison." Lawrence Livermore chemists may have also overlooked an outbreak of mystery fumes in Bakersfield a week after the Riverside poisonings. The emergency room at Mercy Hospital was evacuated after doctors inserted a breathing tube in the trachea of a 44-year-old woman struggling with shortness of breath. As at Riverside, emergency room personnel noticed a gaseous cloud rising from the patient. They complained that a potent chemical odor originating with the patient's blood left them with burning eyes, nausea and headaches.27 The growing list of tenuous explanations contributed to suspicions of a cover-up. These were augmented by the announcement that the syringe used to draw blood from Gloria Ramirez had been thrown away.28 And in the course of lawsuits filed by the Ramirez family, Dr. Gorchynski, nurse Sally Balderas and attorneys for Riverside County filed a court motion to destroy all of the evidence gathered from the contaminated emergency room. As it was, entire barrels of evidence had been kept secret from the Ramirez family. They and others filing suit had no chance to have the contents of the barrels examined by toxicologists. An attorney for Sally Balderas complained that he had not been notified that the county wanted to destroy the evidence, or even that a hearing had been scheduled. Judge Richard Van Frank refused to give the county its way, ruling that interested parties work out a plan for the evidence before the hearing continue.29 Coverage of the mystery fumes case by the Los Angeles Times did not extend to the evidentiary hearing. The residents of L.A. were not told that the very "stonewalling" officials charged with investigating a case of mass poisoning wanted to burn every scrap of evidence to minimize "storage costs." By suppressing significant details (medical evidence documenting a toxic assault on the ritual abuse task force, or symptoms of organophosphate poisoning in the mystery fumes case) the Times plays an insidious game. The newspaper has clearly distorted the chemo-terrorism of cults in the southern California with a disinformation gambit that shields the culprits and defames victims (Gloria Ramirez?) for breaking out, talking to reporters, striking back or otherwise interfering with domestic intelligence cult operations.

- Alex Constantine

Notes:

1 Teresa Watanabe and Carol J. Williams, "Japan Sect Uses Pain to Impel Faith," Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1995, p. A-1-D.

2 Jonathan Annells, "Temple of Doom," London Times, March 26, 1995, p. 1.

3 B. Boskovitch and R. Kusic, abstract to "Long-Term Effect of Acute Exposure to Nerve Gases Upon Human Health," in Mass Mind Control of the American People, compiled and edited by Elizabeth Russell-Manning, published by Russell-Manning, San Francisco, 1992, p. 90.

4 There have been scores of military gassing incidents. In 1969, for instance, the accidental release of nerve gas in Okinawa hospitalized 25 Americans (see Sterling Seagrave. Yellow Rain, M. Evans, New York, 1981, p. 260-61). Non-military accidents are not all that uncommon either: In 1976, the explosion of a factory owned by a subsidiary of Hoffman-LaRoche discharged a cloud of fumes that sickened and disfigured children of Seveso, Italy for life (see John G. Fuller, The Poison that Fell from the Sky, Random House, New York, 1977).

5 Annells.

6 Ben Hills, "Police, Scientists Still Baffled by Japan Nerve Gas Deaths," The Age (Australia), August 20, 1994.

7 John Johnson, "County Panel Scrutinized for Satanic Claims," Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1992, p. B-1. 8 Catherine Gould, letter with medical verification to the Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1992. Copies are available from the L.A. County Commission for Women's Ritual Abuse Task Force office.

9 Randy Noblitt, "Multiple Choice: Which of the Following is Most False: (A) The Memory, (B) The Syndrome, (C) The Foundation?" Newsletter of the Society for the Investiga-tion, Treatment and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse, vol. 1, no. 3, Fall/Winter 1993-94, pp. 3-5. The percentage of psychologists who believe recovered memory therapy to be effective is about 88%. The proportion is the same in Great Britain, according to one survey released last year. On January 1, 1995, the Sunday London Times reported that "the first expert investigation into 'recovered memory syndrome' in Britain reveals that nine out of ten psychologists believe the technique of searching for buried sexual trauma can produce accurate memories."

10 Jonathan Vankin, in Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes (1992), cites a lecture by Joe Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman Leo Ryan, at a psychology conference in Berkeley, noting: "the possibility is that Jonestown was a mass mind control experiment by the CIA." Holsinger offered as evidence "The Penal Colony," an essay written by a U.C. Berkeley psychologist. "The Berkeley author of the article ... believes that rather than terminating MKULTRA (the Agency's mind control program), the CIA shifted its programs from public institutions to private cult groups, including the Peoples' Temple" (p. 176).

11 Shirley Briggs, Chemical Classes of Pesticides, Hemisphere Publishing Co., 1972, Washington, D.C., p. 213. Immediate effects of organophosphate poisoning include behavioral disturbances, muscle twitching, headaches, nausea, dizziness, anxiety, memory loss, weakness, tremor, abdominal cramps, blurred vision, slowed heartbeat and incontinence.

12 Anonymous attachment, Dr. Gould's letter to the L.A. Times.

13 Letter to Myra Riddel of the L.A. County Commission for Women's Ritual Abuse Task Force, December 15, 1992. On file in the task force archives.

14 Dr. David W. Neswald, letter to Dr. Myra Riddell, task force chairwoman, December 10, 1992. Neswald found Ms. Sheppard's behavior "rather suspect."

15 N.R. in a letter to the task force, November 30, 1992.

16 Piers Brendon, The Life and Death of the Press Barons, Atheneum, New York, 1983, p. 232.

17 John Johnson, "Satanism: Skeptics Abound," Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1992, P. A-1.

18 Tom Gorman, "Family Claims Woman was Victim, Not Cause, of Fumes," Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1994, p. A-3.

19 Tom Gorman, "6-Month Probe Fails to Solve Mystery of Hospital Fumes," Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1994, p. A-21.

20 Tom Gorman, "Victims of Fumes Still Ill, and Still Seeking Answers," Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1994, p. A-1.

21 B. Drummond Ayres Jr., "Elaborate Precautions Taken for Autopsy in Mystery Fumes Case," New York Times, February 25, 1994, p. A-17.

22 Tom Gorman, "'Mystery Fumes' Doctor to File $6-Million Claim," Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1994, p. A-1.

23 Dean Adell program, KFI-AM (Los Angeles), August 8, 1994.

24 Kussman.

25 Tom Gorman, "Lab Suggests Mystery Fumes Answer," Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1994, p. A-1.

26 Mystery fumes update, late evening news broadcast, KNBC-TV, Los Angeles, November 26, 1994.

27 "Fumes Again Sicken People," Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1994, p. A-3.

28 Tom Gorman, "Syringe Used in Fumes Case Lost," Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1994, p. A-3.

29 Pat Murkland, "Bid to Destroy Fumes Evidence Lost," Corona (Calif.) Press-Enterprise, January 12, 1995, p. B-1.