Copyright © 2009 by Wayne Stegall.
August 25, 2009
Updated August 26, 2009.    See Document History at end for details..

Covert Assassins

Many months ago, perhaps as much as a year, I noticed a brief mention of peculiar news in the media:  First that Congress was considering reopening the Robert F. Kennedy assassination investigation, then later that Sirhan Sirhan believed that he had been programmed.  That these were only briefly mentioned then never again may indicate the items were not meant for public disclosure.
 

Programmed Assassins

A common spy movie theme, the programming of assassins, has much basis in fact.

Consider early research in this area.  Russian scientist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, was inspired by the salivating of dogs over food to investigate areas of research outside his normal interests.  He found that if he associated a trigger signal with the feeding of the dogs, such as the beating of a metronome or other noise, that after they had been trained they would salivate upon the activation of the trigger signal alone.  He called this a conditioned response.  That his research persisted from 1898 until 1930, would give Russia momentum in these sorts of investigations even though Pavlov himself was opposed to Communism.  Russia certified their interest in Pavlov’s investigations when in 1922 they denied him permission to transfer his laboratory abroad.  They said that they needed scientists like Pavlov and that they would give him the same food rations as an honored Communist.¹

Other countries are no less interested in this sort of programming.  The CIA’s interest in this sort of programming shows a willingness to target domestic objectives as well.  Consider the following excerpt from a 1954 CIA document released under the Freedom of Information Act:²

As a ‘trigger mechanism’ for a bigger project, it was proposed that an individual ... be induced under Artichoke to perform an act, involuntarily, of attempted assassination against a prominent [deleted] politician or if necessary, against an American official.

Although the CIA destroyed many documents in 1973 by order of its Director, Congressional hearings in 1977 revealed considerable CIA abuse of willing and unwilling human subjects in the course of testing LSD.  It is alleged that one man jumped to his death out of a tall building during these proceedings.  The same hearings reveal that established programming procedures utilized a combination of sodium pentothal and hypnosis after physical and psychiatric examinations.³  Such require an abduction or some other means of acquiring the subject.  Whatever the scope of these tests, facilitating the creation of a conditioned response in a human subject would be among its uses.

Drugs are not the only means by which programming can be done.  Microwave hearing is a means by which a microwave (or near microwave) carrier modulated by audio is used to project voices into persons minds.⁴   Another technology, brainwave synchronization, attempts to manipulate emotions (or appetites) by exposing a subject to subsonic signals corresponding to the brain wave activity associated with the desired impulse.  Both of these, transmitted to the subject remotely by a microwave carrier, could be easily thought to set him to accomplish any covert objective.

Why would Sirhan Sirhan believe he was programmed?  Consider the following writing of his written prior to the act.

 
That microwave hearing was used by covert operatives well by that time might suggest a religious deception.  A microwave projection of an urging by the “master” might be hard to resist.  Brainwave synchronization might have been modulated into the microwaves as well to add anger to his motives.

The inevitable misrepresentation of such crimes slight introverted persons.  The common depiction of such pawns as lone wolves may be more due to the ease by which loners or shy persons could be isolated or even abducted to use them in this way.  Most shy persons are so because they are more sensitive than others, not because they have criminal tendencies.

Further Developments

It is perhaps no longer necessary to program assassins.  It has been a long time since the attempt of an assassination which could be attributed to this kind of activity.  The refinement of directed beam weapons may have made this activity obsolete.  Although, logically, weapons of this type are impractical at present for mobile operations requiring many shots against an adversary, sniper use is well possible.  I calculated that a D-cell alkaline battery could power a 1kW microwave oven for 108 seconds if you could presume 100% power conversion efficiency.⁵ A narrow beam directed at a sensitive area of the body could kill very efficiently.  A sniper using this technology could carry out a clandestine assassination easily with modest portable power modules.  Such an assassination now would pass for death from natural causes.

If you think all this to be science fiction, consider the abstract of a Navy patent, 4038602, entitled “Automodulated relativistic electron beam microwave source.”

In case an innocent were killed in this manner, it would be of concern both to the public and to those left to investigate a seeming natural death.
 

Postscript

The death of Ted Kennedy on the day this article was first published creates a double coincidence.  The brief mention of reopening the RFK investigation and of Sirhan’s belief that he was programmed occurred in the two month period between my writing a Senator about my plight and Ted Kennedy’s bout of seizures and diagnosis of brain cancer in May of 2008. (I underestimated the passage of time in this case.)  I did not hear back from the Senator to whom I wrote and sent a copy of my book, but will not tell his name because I believe him to be one of the good guys.  Because my book contained some material that might pique interest in American political assassinations, I naturally believed that Kennedy had heard about some of the content of my book.  What an odd ally, I thought.  I could almost have a soft spot for someone who could not be a greater ideological adversary.  Washington may be divided now so that those who oppose such ruthless activities as I have revealed may not even know who they can trust.  Many need your prayers.
 

¹Encyclopedia Britannica 2002, article “Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich” and “Animal Learning: Types Of Learning.”
²Thomas G. Whittle and Jan Thorpe, Freedom Magazine of the Church of Scientology International, August 1997.
³See source text:  Appendix A of the Transcript of the 1977 Senate Mkultra Hearing.
⁴See source text:  Bioeffects of Selected Non-lethal Weapons.
⁵Energizer specifies a 20,000mAhr life for its D-cell alkaline.  Multiply by 1.5V to get 30W-hr.  Multiply by 3600s/hr to get 108kJ (Joule = W-s a unit of energy).  Divide by 1kW power rate = 108 seconds.  This does not account for decline in voltage as battery is expended.  My only intent is to establish plausibility of the ease of supplying power to the devices of interest.
⁶Further plausibility of assasination by battery power is to be found by calculating and comparing the energy of a bullet.  My calculation of a .45ACP round firing a 125 grain load at a mussle velocity of 945ft/s resulted in 352J of energy.  An article I found later on the internet posted energies from 350J for a very small rounds to 1440J for a .44 caliber revolver round.  Wow a D-cell has the energy of ≈306 times that of the .45ACP rounds for which I calculated 352J and perhaps more than could be loaded at once into an M16!  After considering plausible energy conversion efficiencies from 8 to 50%, these calculations perhaps only validate sniper use as yet.  See kinetic energy calculation example in the article Norwegian Spiral.

Document History.
August 25, 2009  Created
August 26, 2009  Updated.
November 18, 2011  Added footnote comparing bullet energy to that of an alkaline D-cell to verify possiblity of assasination by battery-powered directed-beam weapon.