Mind Control as the Pros Do It
How does Mary Sue get to have an alternate personality expert in killing? And how comes it that so much of real life politics in Washington seems so Zombie-like?
“Is that a hypo in your purse, darling?”
I’m slowly re-reading the late Dave McGowan’s last book, “Weird Scenes in the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream”, 2013. Dave passed away in 2015. I’ll always be grateful that I found his work. “Weird Scenes” is packed with information about the Hollywood “Folk/Psychedelic Rock” and celebrity movie stars scene leading up to and beyond the 1969 Tate and LaBianca murders and Charley Manson’s 1971 trial and conviction along with his “family” of drug addled, Zombie-like killers.
Before I forget to mention it, at the top of Laurel Canyon at that time was a secret but very large movie studio run by the US "Intelligence Community” which all through the '50s and ‘60s up to when it was closed (reportedly) in the mid 1970s. Hundreds of technicians, editors, and actors, including famous actors, notably Marilyn Monroe, are known to have worked there. Let’s see if we can FOIA request some of those reels, shall we? Best of luck.
Recently this passage in “Weird Scenes” on page 212 jumped out at me:
“[John] Philips’ circle of friends in the post Mama’s and Papa’s years included J. Paul Getty Jr, Bobby Kennedy Jr, and Princess Margaret. Getty and Kennedy, both plagued by demons of their own, were likely being supplied by Philips…” A few paragraphs on page 211 detail how John Philips, then former husband of fellow bandmate Michelle Philips was arrested tried and convicted on drug charges in 1981 and should have served 45 years but was released in 3 weeks. “It helps to have friends in high places,” Dave wrote.
Bobby Kennedy Jr has come clean about his past struggles with drug addiction and he doesn’t deserve to be defamed because of it. I wish him the best. And his denunciation of the COVID-19 “vaccines” still endears him to me.
It’s just the association with the CIA that bothers me. Bobby was the first prominent politician I’m aware of to openly accuse the CIA of being the killers of his father and his uncle President John Kennedy. Soon after that Bobby Jr became enfolded into CIA and Zionist circles and from being an anti-war candidate he became a more vocal supporter of Israel’s brutal campaign against Gaza than even Donald Trump. Also Bobby Jr’s other son, Conor, was a mercenary fighting alongside the Neo-Nazi Azov battalion in Ukraine. This bothered me and I wrote about it last November [ for Substack: “Amaryllis Belladonna and the Minding of a Candidate”].
But the reason why Bobby’s past association with John Philips caught my attention was that Philips was a powerfully connected impresario and a kingpin in the 1960’s LSD/Psychedelic Hollywood celebrity scene rife with connections to the CIA and FBI and their MKUltra and COINTELPRO programs against the anti-Vietnam War movement. This dark underbelly raises a stink that pervades all the Hollywood celebrity scene going back even decades before 1969 and stretching forward to today.
These are documented facts, if obscure. I highly recommend Dave McGowans, “Weird Scenes” and also his even darker previous book, “Programmed to Kill; The Politics of Serial Murder” which makes the “Intelligence Community” connection to programmed murder more explicit. In that connection I also recommend Tom O’Neill’s, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” – start with Chapter 11, “Mind Control”.
“Control" – or at least “surveillance” – of important celebrities and political leaders by America’s “Intelligence Community” has its legitimate side if you consider US National Security. You know what I mean, the "Foreign Intelligence” court and “Central Intelligence” and the National Security Agency and the FBI and all that.
Just about anything and everything can be excused as National Security it seems. I have my doubts but who am I, besides nobody worth bothering with ... guys, seriously. If 50 people even read my stuff I count myself successful, really. So I’m not worth bothering about, guys. Bless your hearts.
To be fair, Robert Kennedy Jr is a presidential candidate so it’s a good thing for National Security that there’s a “former” CIA eye in the family. That’s his daughter in law and campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, wife of his son Robert Kennedy III. Amaryllis had quit the CIA, for sure, when she met Bobby Kennedy III, quite by chance, at Burning Man, America’s most famous Peace and Love and occult ritual and marijuana/LSD festival still celebrating the aging Age of Aquarius in the Nevada desert every summer. Their whirlwind and ecstatic romance led to marriage shortly after. Bobby Kennedy Jr’s campaign had been managed by Dennis Kucinich until Bobby broke with the Democrats and Dennis was replaced by Amaryllis, despite her complete lack of any qualifications as anything but a spy for the CIA.
Earlier in this century Amaryllis (born Amaryllis Thornbur) had been a CIA field agent working undercover posing as an art dealer in Shanghai. She was married to a man named Fox. Her real mission was to track illegal arms trafficking. Those Chinese Secret Intelligence watchdogs were so incompetent that they had no idea that an art dealer, daughter of the notorious Ukraine-connected multi-billionaire Hodson Thornbur, was making down-low inquiries about billion dollar arms deals while working as an art dealer in Shanghai. Shows how dumb those Chinese Military Intelligence people must be, eh?
Aw come on! She might as well have been sporting a glow-in-the-dark CIA logo on her T-shirt in Shanghai. Right?
Who is Hodson Thornbur, Robert Kennedy Jr’s brother in law since CIA agent Amaryllis Thornbur-Fox married his son? We can read all about him on Wikipedia, so accessible, so mainstream, really:
<< Dr Thornber earned BA and PhD degrees, both in economics from the University of Chicago, where he subsequently served on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, now Booth Chicago...
<< Hodson Thornber retired in early 2008 as Managing Director in Renaissance Partners, the merchant banking arm of Renaissance Group, Moscow. Since retirement he has been an active venture capital investor in several British, American and Ukrainian companies. Hodson also serves on the Advisory Council of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago. He and his wife live in central London...

<< Dr Thornber joined Renaissance in 2001 and led the firm’s principal investments in the utility and ... Ukraine’s agricultural sector.
<< Prior to joining Renaissance, Hodson was a Moscow-based partner in Arthur Andersen where he …
<< Advised the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers, the Minister of Energy, the State Property Fund and the World Bank in the reorganization of Ukraine’s electricity industry around a competitive wholesale market… >>
As I wrote on Substack last November, Wikipedia informs anybody who wants to ask that Thornbur is as obviously CIA as his daughter whom he mentored into the tradecraft. Thornbur was an "economic hit man" with strong grapples between the Anglo-American East Coast Establishment and the US military in Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi government:
“ The history and travels of Hodson Thornber are in themselves an anatomy of how the CIA has, over the last 30 years, wormed it’s way (or tried to! Tried to!) into Russia, Ukraine and even China, coasting on a fancy greased bobsled called “Capitalism” all the time…”
And there’s a darkness there that Wikipedia barely hints at and it explains for me how easy it is to smell it if one has the historical background to know what you are sniffing. The CIA likes researchers to explore their torture and mind control underworld because it scares people.
As I wrote last November: “Hodson Thornber, globe trotting international man of mystery, named his daughter Amaryllis. He purposely inculcated her in the concerns of international terrorism when she was 8 at a time when she was upset because her best friend had been killed by terrorists. She must have already shown promise as a potential CIA hothouse flower to have been worthy of her mysterious and very powerful father so explicitly setting her future course as a spy. He was doing the kind of mind control the CIA is expert in by saying, to a bright 8 year old girl raw with grief over the murder of her friend Laura, “You have to understand the forces that took her or they will drown you.”
"Imagine saying that to an 8 year old little girl, “... they will drown you...”! What kind of a father was this? To me, he sounds like a High Priest of the CIA Cult… “
David McGowan’s “Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon” deftly steps among the shadows and traces of the dark “Intelligence”- connected world of Hollywood celebrities in the 1950s and 1960s and even before. Think of a celebrity name in the L.A. Folk Rock and Psychedelic Rock scenes in the 1960s and their US Military Intelligence background and interconnections becomes a surprise so often that one could become almost blasé about it. If it weren’t for Charles Manson.
Steve Stills, Frank Zappa, John Phillips … on and on. All of them and more were casually acquainted with Charley Manson and resembled him in every respect except murder. Dave cites another author and quotes him on page 45 in a passage that I think nails the psychological mind control mechanics that CIA has brewed up and that has become as ubiquitous as evil itself in Hollywood.
Phil Ochs was the composer of “Changes”. I remembered Gordon Lightfoot’s cover version from 1966 and I remembered the lyrics as being more sentimental than they really are. When I looked up the recording and the lyrics a few mornings ago the name Phil Ochs unpleasantly surprised me. I do love Gordon’s original work but “Changes” has a weird edge that Gordon’s compositions are free of.
Phil Ochs was prominent in the early ’60’s Folk and Folk-Rock scene in L.A. along with Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Phil was an enthused and dedicated far-left, anti-Vietnam-war singer and activist who had dropped out of college in 1962 to pursue music and activism and starting in 1966 he issued several albums still dear to those who love that era. Phil was also addicted to booze and pills and after 1970 when his career began to slide down his substance troubles increased. And so did his apparent far-left activism. In 1973, for the most notable example, Phil Ochs travelled to Chile and was there when Salvador Allende was toppled by the CIA.
In 1975 Phil Ochs suddenly proclaimed that he had been a CIA agent and also he had been an alternate personality all through his career and this alternate personality, whom he called “John Butler Train” had ritually murdered “Phil Ochs” and was now gloriously free of the psychological closet. “John Butler Train”, he announced in a shocking interview, was and had always been not only a spy for the CIA but a rabid pro-war, pro-Capitalist, pro-American Empire crusader. During the following months "Train/Ochs” scribbled copious notes rife with references to US secret chemical warfare and mind control. It may well be unsurprising that soon “John Train/Phil Ochs” was found hanged in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Suicide of course.
David McGowan cites and quotes another author whose work seems horribly relevant to Phil Ochs and to more that just him. Years before Ochs died an admitted psychological warfare expert named George Estabrooks published his book “Hypnotism” in which he detailed his version of how US Intelligence agencies create the perfect spy. This is the spy whose spy persona is hidden within a conscious persona who never knows this dark inner personality and is therefore (theoretically) immune to being discovered by interrogation. Until the mental machinery of induced schizophrenia breaks down, maybe?
Wrote Estabrooks:
“We start with a subject … a man or woman who is highly intelligent and physically tough. Then we start to develop a case of multiple personality through hypnotism. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to the authorities. Note that he will be acting in good faith … his PA Is a communist and will behave as such. Then we develop personality B (PB) … the unconscious personality … This personality is rabidly American and ant-communist. It has all the information possessed by PA, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage… My super spy plays his role as a communist in his waking state… but his PB has all the memories of PA and … As a loyal American he will not hesitate to divulge those memories.”
But what happens if all this torture and trauma aided conditioning and hypnosis and psychotomimetic drug aided fiddling with the human mind goes off the rails? What happens if PB takes over and PA finds out the terrible truth? Is that what happened to Phil Ochs?
Does this remind you of numerous cheesy spy movies? “Total Recall” is probably the best example but the trope gets redone frequently. These days it’s usually a girl spy “PB" the critics commonly call a “Mary Sue” whose mild mannered school teacher “PA" suddenly becomes a martial arts master when Men in Black come calling.
Why does Hollywood keep replaying this trope? My guess? It makes the idea seem the stuff of cheesy movies. All that CIA/Spy stuff couldn’t possibly be real. Could it?
This stuff about Jeffry Epstein and NXIVM and Satanism and child sex trafficking and Manson-type conditioned honey traps … it’s all fantasy, right?