Abuse of Psychiatry in the Kennedy Assassination
The old Soviet Union was notorious for its corruption of the psychiatric profession and its use of psychiatric hospitals to imprison and neutralize its dissidents. It is an easy profession to abuse by wielders of corrupt authority, and those meeting that description have apparently not been immune to the temptation in the United States. The following grotesque little vignette comes from Phillip Nelson’s extraordinary and very persuasive new book, LBJ, the Mastermind of the JFK Assassination.* All of Nelson’s references for the story are to Noel Twyman’s earlier, but very hard to find book, Bloody Treason. Since the cheapest used copy of Bloody Treason available from Amazon.com goes for $133.15 we shall have to content ourselves for now with the Nelson version, from pages 360-362, supplying our own links as we go:
Exactly one month before JFK was assassinated, a cryptographic code operator working for the U.S. Army Ordinance [sic] in Metz, France, tried to alert his superiors—all the way up to Robert F. Kennedy—that John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in November, in Texas. An FBI report dated April 9, 1964, confirmed that Eugene B. Dinkin, entrusted with the military’s highest Crypto clearance, predicted “that a conspiracy was in the making for the ‘military’ of the United States, perhaps combined with an ‘ultra right wing economic group’.” He discovered the plot as he routinely processed messages between the plotters (i.e., Bill Harvey and/or Guy Bannister [sic] and QJ/WIN, a hit man of French origin, associated with the Antoine Guerini Mob headquartered in Marseilles, France. A number of known hit men were part of this gang, some known variously as Carlos Rigal, Victor Michael Mertz, Michel Roux, Lucien Sarti, or Jean Soutre).
His mistake was letting certain of his superiors know about his discovery and that he was preparing to leak this information despite his sworn oath of secrecy; evidently, he felt that there was a higher duty owed to his country than to knowingly participate, by omission, in the murder of the president. Dinkin heard through the grapevine that he was going to be locked up as a psychotic and decided to go AWOL, taking a train to Geneva, Switzerland, where he found reporters in the pressroom of the United Nations office to whom he told his story. From there he went on to Luxembourg, where he reported it to several embassies and finally on to Germany where he reported it to Overseas Weekly where he was talked into turning himself in. At that point, the grapevine rumor came true. His reward for trying to save the president’s life was to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. By December 5, 1963, he had been brought back to Washington DC and put into Walter Reed Hospital where he was given strong drugs and electric shock treatment. He was forced to admit that he was only looking for attention; whenever he said otherwise, he was given an electric shock. “Dinkin said that he feigned cooperation and professed understanding of his unfortunate mental condition being ‘schizo-assassination prognostication’.” Dinkin discussed his treatment with his mother, who then wrote Robert Kennedy on December 20, 1963, stating, among other things, that “Col. Dickson and Lt. Col. Black came into the orderly room of his company and phoned psychiatrist Col. Hutson and gave him a direct order to find him psychologically unfit to handle security information, and to write a paranoiac evaluation. He claims this to be a frame up.”
In a civil action lawsuit in 1975, Dinkin stated that the information he intercepted revealed that “blame would then be placed upon a Communist or Negro, who would be designated the assassin, and believing that the conspiracy was being engineered by elements of the military, I did speculate that a military coup might ensue. I did request of the Attorney General that he dispatch a representative of the Justice Department to Metz, France to discuss this warning.”
Either [James Jesus] Angleton’s tentacles reached deeply enough to intercept Dinkin’s letter to Robert F. Kennedy or military superiors familiar with Johnson’s plan caught it; it is possible that RFK simply ignored it after being reassured that Dinkin was a nut. In any event, it got Richard Helms’s attention who alerted a number of others in a classified memo, which stated, “All aspects of this story were known, as reported above, by U.S. military authorities and have been reported by military attaché cable through military channels.”
The CIA was coincidentally running its Operation MK/ULTRA (owned by Allen Dulles and operated by Richard Helms) at the same time, which involved psychological warfare, mind control, and hypnosis with a little LSD experimentation mixed in; the evidence presented by author Twyman indicates that Dinkin was quickly swept into that program as soon as he was institutionalized. It was within this same program that [Lee Harvey] Oswald was possibly groomed for his adventures in the Soviet Union and beyond.
This story brings to mind an even more Soviet-style neutralization, that is the 16-year confinement to a mental hospital of the influential cartoonist and writer, Percy Crosby. The travails of Crosby at the hands of the Roosevelt administration, which he bedeviled with his writing and cartoons, and later during the Truman administration, are detailed in “Roosevelt’s Revenge?” A good idea of why he might have been considered such a threat to FDR can be found in the article “Percy Crosby on Franklin Roosevelt.”
In the first of those articles, I relate the abuse of psychiatry in the case of Crosby to similar abuse in the suspicious deaths of James Forrestal and Vincent Foster. Even less known is evidence of psychiatric hanky-panky related to the deaths of both Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy, and, amazingly there is a link between the two, as we see from the following quote from the short, but powerful, article by Hugh Turley:
FBI records show Hemingway was under surveillance, and shortly before his death he checked into the Mayo Clinic using the alias George Sevier.
In a letter to his son Patrick, Hemingway wrote that he was being treated for high blood pressure. Mayo’s Dr. Howard Rome kept the Minneapolis FBI office informed on Hemingway’s condition. Dr. Rome is the doctor who later performed a psychological autopsy of Lee Harvey Oswald for the Warren Commission.
Contemporary newspaper accounts touted Hemingway’s visit to the Mayo Clinic as evidence of his “depressed” state of mind leading to his “suicide.”
This writer has expressed his opinion of those sham and really impossible “autopsies” in verse:
Let's hear it for expert witnesses,
A mercenary breed.
Ask them what they're prepared to say,
Their response is, "What do you need?"
If the cops want to say, "Self-murder,"
They will reinforce it:
The psychological autopsy
Is dusted off to endorse it.
And if the defense is well-heeled,
The jury can be beguiled
By tales of how the client killed
From being abused as a child.
The last verse came in particularly handy in the case of the well-heeled former candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, Ruthann Aron, who was able to get nine psychiatrists and psychologists to testify in her defense—presumably with straight faces and for handsome compensation—that her attempt to hire a professional killer to get rid of her husband and his lawyer was a result of her childhood mistreatment. See “Expert Witnesses.”
But let us return to the more serious question of political assassinations. The similarity between our country today and the old Soviet Union goes far beyond psychiatry, and we have also expressed it previously in verse:
Converging Systems
When I first read The Gulag Archipelago
I knew that those Reds had to go.
They weren’t quite as bad as Joe Stalin,
But they were still up there running the show.
Now the killers of King and the Kennedys
And the makers of Dick’s silent coup
Have a similar grip on this country
And we have to be rid of them, too.
March 21, 2012
*The Mary Ferrell Foundation has a greatly watered-down and ultimately neutered version of this story here. The Dinkin story is also discussed in some detail, and in general corroboration of the accounts by Nelson and Twyman, by Dick Russell in his 1992 book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, pp. 552-557. Phillip Nelson’s web site for his Kennedy assassination book is at http://www.lbjmastermind.com/. Noel Tyman’s web site is at http://www.noeltwyman.com/.
See also “More Abuse of Psychiatry in the JFK Cover-up,” “Mencken on Psychology” and “Learned Helplessness.”
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