Watching all the YouTube videos about the revelations about the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy files, I found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Especially with the jaundiced coverage of the RFK assassination.

By Emad Aysha
The so-called experts who are getting to comment, both those against the conspiracy theory and even those for it, didn’t impress me. It seems even dissenters from the CIA don’t know the first thing about brainwashing, assassinations or anything clandestine for that matter.

Brainwashing, if you pardon the phrase, is as easy as piss. Just look at history, from the Mongols, to the Hashashin/Assassins, to the Byzantines. They all had modalities to indoctrinate people forcefully. Just look at the Moonies and Branch Dividians. No LSD, magic mushrooms, hypnosis and electroshock therapy like MKUltra, and they had much better results.

So what gives? Good old-fashioned common sense, and a little history to boot. One case in point is the Len Deighton spy novel The IPCRESS File (1962), the first espionage thriller I ever read and his very first novel. Wouldn’t you know it, brainwashing is centre stage.

STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE: The movie's plot is lackluster compared to the novel, but one thing they got right was to keep on making fun of the Yanks!

The hero, played by Michael Caine in the movie version, is trying to find out what happened to certain British nationals who disappeared briefly and then reappeared, completely changed. All conform to a given norm and have become members of extreme rightwing groups, while spying on behalf of the Soviets.

They find some evidence at a deserted locale – vacuum flasks, a tape recording, and electric radiators. (That’s what I remember. I was a freshman, hunting for secondhand books in Egypt as you can guess). Then they figure it out. Fever!

The vacuum flasks are attached to the skin with an infected mosquito. When you’re feverish and delirious, your defences are down, and you can be reformulated however they like. The tapes have horrible sounds of screaming to keep the victims up at night and stress them out.

The radiators cause huge differences in temperature between night and day, cold and hot. Nausea wears down your defences, as well. Not to mention a near-starvation diet. (Insulin works, too.)

However, the upshot is that it only works for regular civilians. Spies with interrogation training and set professional personalities can handle it. Also, the approach doesn’t surprise anyone, even the secretary, who knows brainwashing well.

Women always do it to their husbands, using guilt to get him to pay for something expensive she’s already bought beforehand. It’s that simple. So why the hell can’t the Americans see it?

They don’t have the reservoirs of historical experience and common sense that the English do. And the worst is that all these so-called trade secrets are in print, accessible to anyone with a taste for the macabre in publishing.

But the Americans have to start from scratch and go up the learning curve all over again, instead of taking advantage of the existing stock of methods and knowledge. The same for interrogation and torture, of course.

All you have to do is force someone to stand for hours on end, and grab their testicles, and they confess and sign up to anything you fancy. Who needs electric shocks, pepper spray and sensory deprivation, all causing permanent damage. And incriminating evidence for the courts to boot.

You’d think spy agencies would know how to cover their tracks. (Not in some countries, apparently.) From watching the classic ABC News documentary Mission Mind Control (1979), you got the impression that many people involved were not that serious about it.

DRYCLEAN AMERICA: A scene from the pilot episode of 'Hawaii Five-O' (1968), with the original hypnosis master (Khigh Dhiegh) from The Manchurian Candidate up against Detective Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord). How little has changed.

They were a bunch of careerists, left over from the OSS. There also seems to be a strong class dynamic in American law enforcement and intelligence. The CIA is a WASP organisation like no other, but lots of blue-collar types crept in through the back door, so to speak, through the more nefarious professions.

Murder, surveillance and brainwashing, of course. I’m talking about Bill Harvey, James McCord, Howard Hunt, and George White from MKUltra. They all cut their teeth elsewhere, either on the front line with the Sovs in Europe, or as flatfoots in the bureau of narcotics.

That got them into the promotions circuit. George White in particular had a love-hate relationship with the criminal underworld that he used to pursue and used whorehouses to test mind-bending drugs on unsuspecting subjects.

When White was in a bar or nightclub, however, he waved his pistol around like a cowboy on steroids. It hardly fits the ‘secret’ agent profile now does it? By the time he retired, he seemed to have felt that he’d done it all, talking about how his career was nothing but fun, fun, fun.

So much for national security, he just enjoyed getting away with destroying people’s lives and turning innocent bystanders into guinea pigs. That included erasing Canadian homemakers' memories through electroshocks and trying to replace them with recorded instructions on a tape, to no avail.

Compare that to IPCRESS. Being a right-winger is excellent cover, but it also replicates extreme leftwing thought and party indoctrination.

Who needs to erase a personality if you can get a person to reevaluate his memories instead? People constantly change and convince themselves they haven’t; religion, ideology and temperament. And to be fair to the Americans, their pop entertainers are one step ahead of the so-called experts.

There are visual cues in The Manchurian Candidate (1962); hence, the Polka Dot dress with RFK. In the original Hawaii Five-O series, hypnosis is used to turn somebody into a killer just by implanting false data.

DUAL-USE DEMOCRACY: A screenshot from the more sinister 2004 Manchurian Candidate, starring a villainous Meryl Streep that looks disturbingly like Hillary Clinton. What's next, brainwashing voters?

If you convince a person (through hypnosis) that such-and-such a man murdered your father, then hatred will do the rest. Talk about Trump’s term ‘fake news’. Hey, wasn’t Thomas Crooks a registered Republican and a progressive simultaneously?!