Fourth Reich Archaeology - You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby), Part 6–Side A

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

It is somewhat bittersweet to say it, but we’ve come to the end of the line with old Jack Ruby, and in this two-part episode, we will close out his saga in style with returning guest and Ruby expert Max Arvo. Side A comes in hot with a deep discussion of CIA mind control experiments, psychopathic psychiatrists, and Jack’s vivid visions of an American Holocaust, leaving his Warren Commission testimony and final denouement for Side B.We pick up where we left off after Jack’s conviction and death sentence. He fires Melvin Belli and hires the lawyer/psychiatrist Hubert Winston Smith to take his case on appeal. He tries to fire the mountain of a man, Joe Tonahill, too, but Joe refuses to go and sticks around. The first order of business after Jack is put on death row (besides filing his appellate papers) is to put him under hypnosis. And who better to do that than the CIA’s favorite super-shrink, Mr. MKULTRA himself, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. Coincidentally or not, Jolly just so happens to show up right after Jack suffers an acute psychotic break, including vivid audio-visual hallucinations. Thereafter, everything Jack says - including (and especially) all of Jack’s talk of a larger conspiracy - is taken with a heaping portion of salt and largely discarded by everyone around him. This is important because, as we’ve previewed heavily in past episodes, Jack’s Warren Commission testimony raises a lot of eyebrows, as we will cover in depth in Side B among other salient and lesser-known aspects of the end of Ruby’s life. If you want to full 3+ hours in one piece, head on over to Patreon and sign up to get early access! 

The following is a passage from Don DeLillo's 1988 novel, Libra. Jack Leon Ruby dies of cancer in January, 1967, while awaiting retrial for the murder of Oswald. In his time in prison, he attempts suicide by ramming the cell wall with his head and by trying to jam his finger. in a light socket while standing in a puddle of water. He tells Chief Justice Earl Warren at the commission hearings that he has been used for a purpose, that he wants to tell the truth and then leave this world. But first they have to take him to Washington. He will tell the truth to President Johnson.

He lives in a cell in an isolated area of the county jail, a small square room with a toilet pole and a mattress on the floor. floor. A guard reads the Bible to him. Jack believes this man has a listening device in his clothes. They safely store away all his incriminating remarks and then erase all the remarks that prove his crime was unpremeditated, a spasm of personal conscience. When he is feeling totally morose, a nothing person, he rereads the telegrams he received in the first days after the shooting. Hooray for you, Jack. You are a hero, Mr. Ruby.

We love your guts and courage. You kill the snake. You deserve a medal, not a jail cell. I kiss your feet born in hungry love. Then he remembers the guilty verdict, the death penalty, the reversal on flimsy technicalities. He knows that Dallas wants him dead and gone just like Oswald. He knows that people regard all the shootings of that weekend as flashes of a single incandescent homicide and this is the crime they are saying

Jack has committed. He is worried that he has been miscast. He runs across the room and butts his head. He wears white jail coveralls and scribbles notes when his lawyers come to the interview room where the walls are bugged. He insists on taking a lie detector test because the sincerity and authenticity of the truth are precious qualities to America. It seems as you go further into something, he scribbles on a pad. Even though you know what you did, it operates against you somehow, brainwashes you, that you are weak in what you tell the truth about. Authorities arrange a polygraph exam in July 1964. Results are inconclusive.

He begins to hear voices. He hears one of his brother screaming as people set him on fire outside the county jail. He believes all his brothers and sisters will be killed because of what he did. He believes people are distorting his words even as he speaks them. There is a process that takes place between the saying of a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly, but actually change it to mean what they. want. He believes the Jews of America are being put in kill machines and slaughtered in enormous numbers. He is miscast or cast as someone else, as Oswald. They are part of the same crime now. They are in it together and forever and together. The lawyers leave, the doctors

come waltzing in. The cancer is spreading. He can smell it on the hands. hands of his examiners. Jack Ruby reads his telegrams. Does anyone understand the full measure of his despair? The long, slow torment of a life in chaos, going back to Fannie Rubinstein toothless on Roosevelt Road, screaming in the night, going back in time to the earliest incomprehension he can remember, a truant, a ward of the state, living in foster homes, going back to the first blow, the shock of what it means to be nothing, to know you are nothing, to be fed the message of your nothingness every day for all your days, down and down the years. You have lost me, Chief Justice Warren.

He begins to merge with Oswald. He can't tell the difference between them. All he knows for sure is that there is a missing element here, a word that they have cancelled completely. Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the president's assassin. He is the man who killed the president. This is why Jews are being stuffed in machines. It is all because of him. It is the power and momentum of mass feelings.

Oswald is inside him now. How can he fight the knowledge of what he is? The truth of the world is exhausting. He lowers his head and runs. into the concrete wall. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make.

It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic. domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever.

I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. Now here's a mile. He knows so long this is to die. Freedom can never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? No. The CIA.

Now here's a model. The United States is coming. Big bit poor of ice is coming. Perthiologist. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome, listener to another installment of our series, within a series, within a series.

We are hoping to bring this sucker home today. We are joined once again by friend of the pod and returning guest, Max Arvo. Welcome Max. Hi, guys. Great to be here. Great to have you again. And today, I think we can finally promise the listener that we will reach the heights of weirdness in the Jack Ruby case. Before we do that, don't forget to like, subscribe to, and tell your friends about our project.

And if you are so inclined, willing and able, please head over to. patreon.com and join our growing community of patrons for the low cost of just $5 a month, which is itself discounted if you sign up for the full calendar year. And I promise you, listener, we have big plans in store for the year ahead. Now, by way of recap, in the last episode or the last couple of episodes in this series, we've been focusing on the aftermath of Jack Ruby's fatal shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. And we first saw the assemblage of the legal and psychiatric team that was part of a concerted effort to control Jack Ruby and to control all public-facing statements made by or about him.

and also, of course, to exert control over his legal proceedings. Remember this very telling tale of Melvin Belli's law partner Seymour Ellison, who said that first it was the mob, the particularly Jewish mobsters from Las Vegas, who called up and asked Belli to represent Jack Ruby, and then later called back and said, you know, you can do whatever you want, Mel, but we're going to stay out of this one because other parties have expressed an interest, and we can only guess that those other parties are connected to intelligence. Those other parties, of course, are shrinks, psychiatrists.

weirdos by the name of Jolly West, Hubert Smith, and their whole ilk. Now West had sought to put himself right in the action almost immediately when he sought court appointment to the Jack Ruby case to oversee some of the psychological aspects of the case. Of course, these efforts were unsuccessful at first, but presumably they, West and

Smith kept apprised of the progress of the case. After all, Smith had long ties with Belai. And remember that the trial itself was also

a tightly I don't want to say choreographed but planned out and tightly controlled they neither side neither the state nor the defense explored any sort of conspiracy and of course no allegations of conspiracy were raised by the state and the witnesses that each side put up were one was more bizarre than the next For Jackside, it was all sorts of people who seemed to have something to lose, something to hide. On the state side, it was a band of police officers that were outright lying. The prosecution, of course, resorted to all sorts of unsavory tactics, like witness tampering, witness threatening. Now, hey, Dick, we don't know that it was the prosecution that tampered with the witnesses

when those anonymous phone calls threatening witnesses and potential witnesses came in could have been from Bill Alexander and his crew, old bare-knuckle Bill, but my money is on some even shadier figures whose names will never know. That's absolutely right. I think my first impression on Bill Alexander's style is to put nothing past him, but you're absolutely right. We have no real confirmation that this was the case. But as we explained in our last episode, old Bill was a bulldog. He was willing to do just about anything to get his conviction, his notches on his belt for the record of. executions that he had and we also talked about the trial itself and how much of a spectacle the whole thing turned out to be and how pretty much everybody involved was out to capitalize off the jack ruby trial and off you know everyone from the lawyers to even the judge was well aware that the trial was going to get a whole lot of attention,

a whole lot of press, a whole lot of opportunity to perhaps take a little off the top, make a little money off of the story itself. Yeah. And of course, the actual defense strategy. was a big flop. The psychomotor epilepsy theory of the case was a big old swing and a miss. And that brings us up to today's episode. So today, we are going to pick up after that conviction when things start to really spiral out of control for Jack Ruby, as if they could get any worse they get a lot worse.

So Jolly West makes the trip from Oklahoma down to Texas. Melvin Belli is fired from the case and replaced in the first instance by Hubert Winston Smith. And we are almost immediately in the aftermath of the conviction talking about who's Who's going to hypnotize Jack? So first in this episode, we're going to give just a very brief overview of the larger context of M.K. Ultra, mind control research, and Jolly West's career, and his role therein. And then we're going to talk about the extremely bizarre circumstances of West's,

and put it in quotes, care for the mental health of Jack Ruby. And finally, we're going to tie it all back. We are going to take the exit ramp from You Don't Know Jack, and we are going to get back onto the Warren Commission Super Highway to discuss the consequences of Jack. Ruby's psychosis on his infamous Warren commission testimony, as well as his weird public statements, and will sadly end on the unfortunate note of Jack's untimely death at the age of 55.

Our, our friend, I mean, I think now we could call him our friend. I'll say, speak to yourself, he's not my friend. I did, by the end of the articles, I started just reflexively typing Jack instead of Ruby or anything like that. Just spend so much time with the guy. It's just suddenly, it's like, no, I just remember who he is, remember who he is. Yeah. I definitely pity the guy.

I have pity for him And maybe some sympathy But that's about it Yeah Definitely not a guy You would actually want to be a friend Seems like he would ask a lot And

That's true You might get some puppies out of the deal though If you like dogs Yeah Yeah Okay Well now that we've got that out of the way Let's get digging

Right about now You've been entertained by Jack Ruby power a sound system at the controls in a crucial crucial style good a jack treatment in the hypnotic production of crime stay tuned to science and act learn about this valuable medical tool hypnotism I feel that there was no motive in Jack Rubber's man when he shot I was a sick man he had no motivation or ability to motivate me what about Jack to you that he doesn't want anything to do with you. What do you say about that?

That's a typical pattern of a man that's insane, insane, insane, insane, insane, insane. He has these ambivalent, swinging moves, he goes from blood to head, affection, or what have you. That's typical. That's the pattern of an insane person. You think the family... He says, I'm sane, you're crazy, I have no problem. I have no problem. He's a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist is now in his own field.

He's going to take up from where the clinical psychologist left off. But I have conditioned them. Or brainwashed them, which I understand is the new American work. Experiments in the hypnotic production of antisocial and self-injurious behavior. Do you think of the coming, we'll leave you alone now? You know that I need experiments in the hypnotic production of the crime. Hypnotism has been associated with hocus pocus, with entertainment, and with quackery.

Today, we know it is a valuable means of relieving pain and of learning more about behavior of the subconscious mind. On recognition of this, the American Medical Association in 1958, declared the use of hypnotism to be a legitimate tool in practice of medicine. Okay, so this episode brings us back to something you touched on very briefly, Don with Jeff Kay, and it's something we're going to be exploring. more and more in the future but we are going to sort of zero in on this idea of mind control of the involvement of psychiatry and psychology and sort of during this time to use any means

necessary to manipulate the mind um i am of course talking about the famous mk ultra program, I will assume, we will assume, that I would say most of our listeners would have some familiarity with the broad strokes of the MK Ultra program. Perhaps you've read John Marks's the search for the Manchurian candidate or Walter Bowarts Operation Mind Control or Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in chief or consumed any of the other documentaries books podcasts etc covering the issue if none of these jog your mind i know a lot of you have seen the tv show stranger things and in that show i mean one of the one of the key components is this the character 11 who is a subject of the mind control experiments um or a fictional

of this. So, you know, it's certainly made its way into popular culture. That's right. And so, you know, we want to keep it short, but we want to at least lay down just a very basic foundation. And especially to introduce the man, the myth, and the legend of Jolly West. So just a little bit on Jolly West from a book that I think we've mentioned earlier in the series. It's Wendy Painting's aberration in the Heartland of the Real, The Many Lives of Timothy McVeigh, and she covered Jolly West in pretty good depth after having learned that not only did he treat Jack Ruby, not only had he gotten involved with the treatment of RFK's alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan and the Patty Hurst case and the Manson murders and on and on.

But even in the 90s, he was still active and was involved in, again, in quotes, the treatment of Timothy McVeigh. So about West's origin story, Wendy painting writes, that Dr. Louis Jollyan West was born in New York City in 1924, the eldest of three and only son of Russian Jewish immigrants who eventually, along with their children, settled in Wisconsin. Although the West family was poor, his mother instilled in him a sense of power and destiny. And when World War II began, West joined the army, hoping he said to show Hitler there were Jews who knew how to fight and to kill i was a bloodthirsty young fella

and quote you almost got a wonder this is don talking if he didn't steal that line straight from jack ruby himself she continues the army had other plans for west though and sent him to medical school in Minnesota, where he achieved the rank of major and was transferred into the Air Force Medical Corps, who sent him to study psychiatry at Cornell Medical School, during which time the Korean War had begun. And while at Cornell, West became quite proficient in the art of hypnosis. In 1952, at just 28 years old, he became chief of psychiatry at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, where his career as a psychiatric pioneer began. And it was there where he conducted his seminal study of Korean POW Confessions,

which led to his unified theory of behavioral control termed debility, dependency, and dread, D, D, D.D. Don again, and that. of course is referring to the cases of those U.S. POWs in Korea who in captivity confessed to chemical and biological war crimes. That is the life's work of Jeff K., which we've referred to many times. And so, again, Jolly West you see is right there on the ground floor. and he's doing so in his capacity as an enlisted man. And I'm going to turn it over to Max now because Max has done a great deal of research on Jolly West and his career.

And Max, you were telling us earlier and sharing with us some of what you found about West's really early operational involvement in CIA projects and his budding friendship with the Poisoner-in-Chief himself, Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA's Technical Services Division, the real overseer of M.K. Ultra. So you want to talk a little bit about that, Max? Yeah, so something that was crucial to establishing the West CIA connection was discovery of these series of letters between him and, well, somebody who went by

the name Sherman C. Griffith, who was actually Sydney Gottlieb. That was his pseudonym at the time under the fake company name Kemmrophil associates in 1953. And those letters between the two of them, there's four, one very long one from West, or maybe a couple from West, and then three from Gottlieb in 1953 shortly after mk ultra was launched that shed some light on their on their relationship at an early date and um i'll read from a couple of them now and i'd note that this first one is from the date is second of july in 1953 and mk ultra was formerly signed into existence by dallas on i think april 13th so it's just what's that two and a half three months or so after. And I also note that, you know, MK Ultra was not the start of everything. Like on that

date, it's not like there was nothing up to that point. And then it all just started then. It was very much a continuation and expansion of stuff that had been going on since at least the mid-war years. So the way that got leaped, writes to West here does not seem like someone, like the way you write to someone who you've just encountered. You just got to know, and one of my pet theories that can't prove, but that everything, it seems very likely, I would suggest, I would guess that West was involved in these kind of things before MK. Ultra technically existed. And yes, so we'll see what you think. This is the letter from, the start of a letter from Gottlieb to West in July 53. It starts, my good friend, I return from a brief vacation in Maine to find your letter of 11 June or May. desk. I had been waiting your next communication with considerable anticipation and curiosity.

Frankly, I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. A considerable portion of your letter indicated that you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this, I am deeply grateful. I'm not sure that anyone else would be grateful, but Gottlieb certainly was. And yeah, so, and the context for this, West's letters, including once at least half a dozen pages, were about plans for a huge study of hypnosis and its use and interrogation and things like that. Pure, classic, MK Ultra, particularly early, you know, right at its start in the early 50s, MK Ultra kind of thing. and so I think when Gottlieb's talking about his rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems and an accurate picture of exactly what we were after that's what it's particularly in reference to

these absolute classic MK Ultra things that we all associate them with and then here's the end of another Gottlieb letter from later in that year he says to West I feel that we have gained quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you we will work this thing out one way or another. It is of the greatest importance to do so. So again, this thing out, I think that refers to this planned hypnosis project, the MKLTref overall, various other things that they were discussing. Like West was trying to get, telling Gottlieb all his struggles about trying to do this work

while technically within the Air Force and how, I mean, in his letter he says, this guy who runs things at the base you know you should try and get him transferred or fired because he's he's difficult and uh you know i'll need to move out of the air force anywhere at some point and go private um because that would allow for even greater security as in you know he could hide what he was really doing even more easily and um and things like that so so this is what they were all this is what they were going back and forth about and yeah that comment from godly it is of the greatest importance to do so. These weren't throwaway things.

These were, I mean, obviously it was essential to both of them. But, yeah, I think important to the systems they were a part of as well. There was also the sense of urgency for, in terms of like the state, right, the government, or the army or military will say, there was this gap, perceived gap in what they were able to do versus what the enemy was able to do. Yeah. Yeah. And trying to meet that, right? So there's also that, that passage that you're focusing on that sort of, to me, there's a bit of that baked into that comment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you're right. It's, yeah, that gap, I won't dwell on it, but that, that perceived gap, for what it's worth, I, I'm not sure that I've seen anything really that, I may have said this already previously, but I'm not sure that I've seen anything that really provides any particularly strong. evidence that the enemy you know the um those damn communists soviets and the chinese and

everything were were even at that they were not just working on on these kind of things but that they were even beginning to think of doing the kinds of things that that got leave and west and cia and people like dallas um were we're thinking of doing so but yeah it was that it was this as everything was at that time you know all these people believe in this real existential I mean I think really existential

is how they perceived it you know threat as you say really urgent and communists around every corner and have every kind of tool in the book and yeah yeah and to bring it back to the forthright archaeology

bigger picture remember some of the people that were intimately involved in these experiments had come straight from the concentration camps of the Nazis, where they were running these types of experiments on prisoners there and developing... On the Nazi side. Yeah, yeah, of course.

The Nazis... Nazi scientists were conducting mind control experiments in concentration camps on the prisoners of the Nazis, and then were given new identities to come to the United States and join the armed forces and to join the CIA. And one of the biggest modus operandi of the Nazis, whether it's the paperclip, Nazis, or the Galen org, was as a matter of self-preservation to hype the threat of Soviet communists. because at that time, and it's as true in the early 50s as it was in the late 40s, but the U.S. was totally ill-equipped and unprepared to deal with an enemy as large and as foreign

and as unknown to Americans as were the Soviet countries at the time. And that was one of the big pieces of leverage that the Nazis exercised. And certainly in our view on this podcast, the outsized role that Nazis played in convincing American policymakers of the Soviet threat and its magnitude is one of the great buried elements of post-war American history, with repercussions, really, for the history of the entire post-war world. So absolutely, and Jolly West here, you know, like you said, Max, there's very strong indications that this was not his coming out party here in these correspondence with Gottlieb, and in fact, his DDD thesis or program,

was worked into the programming of all of these U.S. training schools and manuals and psychological testing platforms, et cetera, et cetera, right after he came up with it. So he was like a real Wunderkind to use one of the German language words that perhaps some of his Nazi colleagues used to describe it. Yeah, yeah, everything he says is, yeah, it's exactly it. I mean, well, a few things I just want to add. I mean, I think, as you said, the direct, not just speculative or not just, yeah, at the level of ideas and thought, but the concrete direct link between, well,

involvement of former Nazis in post-war efforts in the US was one of the one of the places where you see it clearly happening was in this kind of area of research and it's not just the space program and things like that and and I think also the the kind of insane range and extremism and breadth and just kind of essentially let's just try it we don't care we're on top of the world kind of thing that whole approach that you see in the way the Nazis carried out there in experiments is very similar to the the way that i think got leave and west and all these these folk operated within mk ultra and all this research and um so yeah it's and i completely agree about

the importance of that connection like the straight straight line you can draw very clear line you can draw from, well, yeah, it is, I mean, exactly as you're making the point with your podcast, it's a complete continuity in so many ways from, you know, at the end of the Third Reich to, to the world we live in now. And it's, when you start looking into these kind of things, you see these former Nazis, well, I don't know if you can say former Nazis, but just not in Germany anymore. You see them stationed at bases across, military bases across America. I mean, there was one name in particular that I ran into with some of this research. He was based down in, I think he was at Lackland for a bit, but also another base near Houston.

And what he, I mean, it's almost feels somehow, I know, it's tough to even repeat the kind of things that they did in the camps, but directly, you know, known to have killed people with their experiments. And also all this stuff overlaps. like the stuff like, you know, even the NASA side of things, there's this whole thing that I hadn't heard about, you know, aerospace medicine, and then when it comes to the Air Force aviation medicine, and that stuff starts leading into, you know, their justifications, or, you know, the root of certain things is stuff like,

how will a pilot fare at extreme altitudes or in extreme conditions, or under stress, which is another thing that was, like stress was something that was at the heart of West's early research and these things, these kind of terms that sound innocuous at first are just the kind of gateway for research into, I mean, so much can fall under stress. Oh, and the point about the DDDS, you start seeing that cited in so many of these, well, yeah, so many things, as he said, and cited by peers of his as well.

As soon as it came out, it was understood as, you know, they all turn to it often. And yeah, and I think we might have made the point before, you might have, but Alfred McCoy makes the point as well in his book, A Question of Torture about the way in which all these experiments were, I mean, one angle of it is the way that they've been, and again, it's not tenuous, it's not speculative, it's absolutely they were the foundation for the torture regime, and more methods at least, of the West in years since. Yeah, he makes the point that was made in various places that one of West colleagues, Albert Biederman, produced something called his chart of coercion, which is kind of a ten-step way to break someone's mind. And that was found at Guantanamo in the, after the, you know, when things started to be exposed following the war on terror. So it's, yeah, this is not just some weirdness that happened in the 50s and 60s.

Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point because too often you hear dismissal out of hand of discussions of MK Ultra as, well, yeah, they tried to use LSD to brainwash people and control them, and it was a total failure. And then it backfired because LSD freed people's minds man and that's kind of the knee-jerk lib response nowadays that you hear a lot and it's like no when george estobrooks wrote in 1943 about creating like dummy couriers in the army he was not just making stuff up and when Jolly West continued that research and published paper after paper in academic journals about the use of hypnotic suggestion to alter people's behavior and implant memories. He was not making shit up. It's like so beyond ironic that this criticism comes from

the same people who make up much of the trust the experts crowd when we're talking about like peer-reviewed medical scientific journal articles stacked way high that prove and it's not in every single case right susceptibility to conditioning varies among individuals to be sure but it's outrageous to claim that the whole thing was just a big old goof off and a total failure and obviously it's not surprising that that narrative has gotten traction because it benefits the people in power. Yeah, so, I mean, if I could say one more thing on that, it's, yeah, just in terms of understanding MK culture, I'm trying to write something at the moment which gets exactly that, the way in which the popular, that kind of dismissal of it is just, well, I mean, yeah, it's completely missing the point. And I think part of it, to try and be as quick as possible, as you said, the kind of gateway that people use to dismiss it is saying, okay, these crazy people in the 50s, they tried to, some of them tried to create hypnoprogrammed assassins, that's it.

No, the whole thing was an effort to, among other things, it was about the manipulation of human behavior, to quote a book that a bunch of these people put out in early 60s. And yeah, it's just about behavioral control and understanding how people can be, something as simple as how people can be discredited. They talk about that in the earliest MK Ultra documents or disabling and discrediting devices they refer to. I mean, I think that is one of the ways that it's still used as kind of, there was this one particular goal that failed, therefore, who cares? It was never about that. and also one quick but I think important point this stuff was used operationally it was not just research um it was not not to say not to dismiss it even but you know you kind of can if you say it's

just a research program you can kind of go well you know research okay so they they went overboard but it was just in controlled conditions or whatever no this stuff was deployed um before mk ultra under things like artichoke and stuff like that and um it's a very real thing and it's underpins a hell of a lot you know yeah the LSD thing is you know they were trying everything and when you say mind control when you say controlling behavior altering behavior hypnosis those words they tend to evoke fantastical or sort of voodoo of types but it's really when you think about the nuts and bolts of what they were doing it was like you know sleep deprivation and using fear and using things like humiliation

and then putting people through the gamut of stress and then having a brief period of relief where they feel good. And these sort of techniques, I mean, it sounds a lot like what maybe Barack Obama might call enhanced interrogation techniques, right? It's there, they were. It's absolutely that, yeah.

very much put in use in our girl i know still being used today yeah i mean um i think west it's somewhere in some letter or something um says now this this is something that's in archives or something so we you know this may be knowing him um underplaying things somewhat but i think there's also truth in it that he said that he found that there was nothing more effective at that essentially breaking someone than sleep deprivation and uh i don't know about you but i've certainly had times where i'm i'm very bad with sleep and uh i know that you know you can get to the edge pretty quickly of being like hold on the second i mean i've had road trips where i uh go too long without a break and i think this is i right this is irresponsible you know it's so quick yeah i mean there are clinical

studies on this where you know you don't sleep for a few days you'll be you go into some form of psychosis yeah I think it's essentially I mean yeah guaranteed really like um that's going to happen and so yeah and I think you factor all that in I mean even even something as simple as west saying from my experiments I found that sleep deprivation was as effective as anything else if not more effective you know if you want to say it's a failure well and even in that small sense that's a success for them to get to this point where they've tested things and they found those things you know so it certainly wasn't a failure and um and just one other quick point just to bear in mind i think getting to the jack ruby side of things and the treatment is the way i was

thinking of it as i was writing articles and was really really deep in it was it's not that everything they tried or thought to try had to have been a complete success. I think the first kind of point is how did they approach things? How were they thinking? And what did they believe could work? Or as you said, you know, they were trying everything. What would they try? And when you understand where their heads were at at the time, it's easier to sort of understand how this could fit into the treatment of someone like Jack Ruby it's not necessarily they did this one specific thing that was very concrete to someone and it did this exact thing it's kind of you know there's a lot they could

throw into it and um it's also yeah it's would they have tried it or you know the context for me was helpful in understanding they're doing all of this and it all relates so clearly to to things like what happened to Ruby that yeah it's just kind of of building that that bigger kind of picture and context that helps it make make more sense to then when you get to the point of saying I think they applied these kind of techniques to the killer of the alleged assassin of a president you know that's a hell of a point to get to and yeah all this context I think is just it's to say that's not just going completely crazy and pulling that out of thin air you know this is overwhelming ever.

that explains how they were thinking and what they were doing, yeah. Yeah, the last contextual point that I would add is about the structure of the program as it evolved. So Artichoke and Bluebird were, I believe, more contained and were carried out largely by employees or military members who had a classification and a security clearance and with mk ultra the money pours in the program expands exponentially and it stays secret through this elaborate network of front organizations. So you have your classic fronts like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as any other number of government research institutions, federal Bureau of Narcotics, the National Institute of Public Health, Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse, Veterans

Administration, all of these organizations. are administering certain grants under the program, and then just a plethora of private foundations and hospitals and clinics pop up all over the country, and in many cases, the type of research projects that will be controlled by one of the intermediary people involved in the operation, and, you know, in the no, so to speak, would not tell the underlings actually doing the work. And so that's why once M.K. Ultra finally got exposed, there was a lot of doctors that gave interviews and made statements and went on record to publicly distance themselves and say, I had no idea that I was working for the CIA. And so I think it's important to understand Jolly West as one of these

choke point individuals who absolutely was in the know, who was a conduit from the CIA to the medical community. And just to give an example, I'm again going to Wendy painting here who just lists some of the titles that Jolly West held at the height of his career in the 50s and 60s all at the same time. So he was, for example, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research Advisory Council for the Behavioral Sciences Division head. He was a consultant in psychiatry at the Oklahoma City VA Hospital. the chief of Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, as well as a consultant in psychiatry at the Air Force Hospital. The list goes on and on. He was on the board of directors and the board of scientific advisors for the Institute for Research in Hypnosis, the American Medical

Association's Council on Mental Health, the American Medical Association's Committee on Hypnosis, And of course, as we talked about two episodes ago, he was also very involved in the American Psychiatric Association. So here's a guy who is a real go-getter. He is holding all of these appointments simultaneously. He is putting his name on all of these research papers, you know, whether he's actually putting pen to paper on them, like most academic. probably he had assistance and underlings doing a lot of the writing, but he's signing them and overseeing their work at least. And he is involved at the policy level in direct correspondence with the likes of Sidney Gottlieb. So as a structural matter, it really was a way for

the CIA and the military, whatever you want to call it, let's call it the deep state as a shorthand, because we're talking about covert and classified projects. And it's infiltrated the entire psychiatric profession at the highest levels in the entire United States. It's really remarkable. Like, you can't understate it. Yeah, I was just going to say, like, nothing you just said is an understatement. And, I mean, the other thing is, I mean, height of his career, at least as in the CIA context, and that's just what we know, maybe it was the 50s and 60s, but in 69, which is also note, that's the year of the Manson murders, he went from Oklahoma to, he became head of

the psychiatry department at UCLA. And he was there until 1989. when he retired and he was director of their neuropsychiatric institute and he was a go-to for you know comment in newspapers and wherever on his work ended up focusing more on mass cults at larger groups than individuals I have a personal hunch that that's also where some of this research started to turn by the late 60s at the intelligence level towards bigger groups and I think you know, when he died, he had a huge New York Times obituary. There's a whole book that was written at some point. I think while he was alive, there's a few hundred pages of just essays

about various things basically for him in his name, in honor of him. I mean, he was extremely revered. And I think, as you said, a bunch of these doctors genuinely probably didn't know about the CIA connection. I think a hell of a lot of them did. And they did it as, you know, the national security serving the nation thing. Certainly West, I mean, one thing I guess you can say is that I think people in CIA can't acknowledge it while they're, you know, during their lifetime even after they've retired, I think, unless they get some other, we're supposed to remain secret. So, okay, maybe he was doing what he was supposed to do, but he lied about it throughout. And that was another point with those letters that we read.

I mean, that's, you know, it's just more evidence of him, of how thoroughly and effectively he always lied. but yeah anyway he was um i think to some extent that he became like a known figure in popular culture you know that and it's only he died in 99 and in the years since it's sort of he was attacked in justifiable ways i mean when i say attacked um during his lifetime but it's it's only in the last 10 15 years or so that the true nature of of his career has come out or begun to come out Not eaten. Anyway, yeah, so it's a, yeah, he was a big deal. And the whole thing, as you say, just, I think you said it already, but yeah, the entire psychiatric community and structure in the US, from like academia to clinics to policy to pharmaceuticals that so much is, yeah, was built by a lot of these people with these connections to the deep state. yeah and it's part of this flip side you mentioned that he had a public reputation and that is really the flip side of all the secrecy is the game that they're running in the realm of the spectacle where and this goes back to what you were saying dick about sleep deprivation one of Jolly west's big TV moments was sometime in the late 50s, some radio host underwent a sort of personal

experiment to try and stay awake for seven days. And Jolly West was one of the media consultants who was giving color commentary on his psychological deterioration in real time over the course of that period and would do other kind of stunts like that but it's a classic CIA thing where you have a public facing persona in order to build up this legend and use that legend to shoo away any allegations of anything untoward like Jolly West you mean the guy who was on TV with the with the funny sleep deprivation guy or you know this guy with a CV a mile long and a list of publications that could choke a horse totally you know it's and think about what that does for the public too like the public facing component of it like if or when word gets out that there are these

air force pilots that are admitting to using chemical warfares or whatever and the u.s can say well they were under mind control or they were under, and then you have Jolly West sort of putting a face to it all and saying, well, yeah, you know, this is something that can happen. And one of the explanations for why people would say that they did these terrible things is that they're under mind control. Exactly. And today, they don't even need to have all the cloak and dagger hidden shit because, you know, these types of experiments can be entrusted to Mr. Beast. Yeah, totally. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, the new Jolly West. So I think we're about ready to take it back to Dallas. The last MK Ultra big point that I wanted to make sure that the listener tucks away in their breast pocket for our trip to Dallas now is the fact that in the listener. that in 1953, when the pocketbook of the CIA and the monetary largesse of the United States government was dedicated to this martial plan of the mind, as it was known in some circles, the head of the CIA who spearheaded the entire effort was, of course, Alan Dull. who as we know was on the Warren Commission and who certainly would have been at least passingly familiar with such a bright light in this area of intense interest to him as

Louis Jollyon West and so I only mention that because obviously Spoiler alert, Dulles, nor anyone else on the commission, brings up West's spooky bona fides. But once they saw West making public appearances and getting involved in the Jack Ruby case, it's beyond the pale that they would have just been clueless about his deep, deep government connection. Yeah. One very quick point on Dulles' connection to it all. I think it was Harold Abramson, one of the crucial, crucial foundational figures of M.K. Ultra and so much of this stuff, I think it was Abramson who was treating one of Dallas's children. And so Dulles knew him personally, and they would have discussions about all these kind of things. And it was partly on the basis of that relationship that Dulles became particularly convinced of pursuing all of this. He was not distant from it. I mean, he was right there and knew him personally. And again, these senior people who are foundational for it all,

like West, they were extremely respected and revered. And they were all, you know, they had crucial positions on it, a huge number of kind of high society think tanks and things like the Macy conferences in the 40s and 50s and the 60s, which were included people like John von Neumann and Oppenheimer thinking about, you know, the big ideas for the rest of the century, these kind of thing. And a lot of these people were there.

So it was, yeah, that was just to say these people were certainly in Dallas's world. Yep. And he was in theirs as well. That was good. Yeah. That's right. Well, it's time for him, Kealtra. Come on, babe, let me control your brain. Well, I've seen you and I'll want you to prove that you're insane And I'll numb all of your pay

And bring the ride back here again my midnight climax I want to watch you through the glass I've got connections in high finance and we can put you

on your ass have you shooting eight chance smoking crack and then we're throw you in All right, Dick, you want to take us down to Dallas? No problem, so after Jack is convicted, he's trying to get rid of his team and he hires

Smith, his counsel to lead the initial efforts for his appeal. Jolly West is brought in to assess Ruby and prepare a written report in support of this process. So Smith wants to petition the court for more psychological testing and preferably in a hospital setting. And he specifically asks that Jack be treated by a specialist in hypnosis. And, you know, at the time, it's a maybe a shorter list than you would think because, you know, Jolly is brought in and within a couple of weeks he is, you know, assessing Jack. Right. I think that the conviction was handed down in mid-March of 1964. Yeah, I think it was something like the 13th or so. Yeah, so he's convicted then in March, I think even in the courthouse or immediately after,

the Ruby family tells Beli to go back to California. Yeah, the quick story there is Beli lost, and I think it's probably some heavy narcissism there, and he raged very publicly and to the extent it got a lot of coverage and the law community was very angry at him for just this outburst that was sort of saying just damning Dallas and saying you know Dallas is a terrible place and they did this and you can't trust it and all this kind of thing he basically had a temper tantrum which really sealed the deal and then yeah he's let go I think by like

the 16th, like two or three days after. Yeah, and then I thought it was funny. They also wanted to fire Tonehill, whom Belaide had brought on to the case, and Tonehill just refuses to leave the case. All right, yeah, that tracks.

And if you must remember, we fired Joe Tunaill last July the 22nd, and I wish to God would he step out of the case willingly. He hurts up every time he opens his big mouth. But what is the principal objection to Mr. Tanoil? We don't trust him. I don't. So I'll Dan and the family had better leave me alone because if they interfere with my work now under a court

appointment to go all the way to the Supreme Court, I will cite them for contempt to leave me alone and let me be effective counsel as I can be and represent Jack Ruby. How would you be ready for the time? And I mean every word of that. And it's not totally unusual. I mean, it's true in the legal profession that sometimes it comes to like, having to file a motion for the court to sever the attorney-client relationship, which I guess the Rubies did not do, but Tonehill stays around, does take a bit of a back seat because

Hubert Winston-Smith is in the driver's seat, and really it's, there's two drivers, and the other one is Jolly West. So Jolly arrives in Dallas. to do his evaluation of Jack on April 26, 1964. And the very same day that he is making his way to the Dallas police building, the same building, remember, where Ruby had shot Oswald in the first place and was now being held as a prisoner, well something pretty wild happened in jack ruby's cell the way the story goes is that ruby was depressed

it was lights out and he was supposed to go to sleep but he refused and he asked the sheriff that was standing guard outside of his cell to go and get him a glass of water and the sheriff was making his way to go get the water and saw Jack take a running start and bang his head against the wall and draw blood. Now this is a very bizarre scene and it's a scene that we are forced to take the word of this sheriff's deputy and his boss, Sheriff Bill Decker. Do you have any thoughts on, you know, what really happened, why Jack did this, what motivated him to, whether it really happened? I mean, one thing that I noticed reading just a lot of different accounts about it

is that there seems to be some dispute over whether Jack was really trying to bash his skull in or whether he was just crying out for attention. At least Bill Decker's original testimony about it seems to indicate the latter. I think Bill Decker used the verb. He rubbed his head on the wall and seemed to think like, this guy, he's just being dramatic.

He's just trying to get sympathy or something like that. Yeah, it's weird. And as you said, we don't really have any. again, and it's just a simple point to make, this stuff is pretty historically important and we have barely any record of it at all. And the records that we have are like Dallas Police and Jolly West. So it's not exactly, could it be worse? I don't know.

But my sense of it is that the initial police reporting on what happened that night, comments to the press don't mention Ruby being insane. They mentioned that, or having a psychotic episode, even though that's basically hours later, apparently, or related to it all, according to West. They just say that, well, the bottom line is that I think he was supposedly playing cards with one of his jailers in, you know, in his cell. Jailer gets up to get water, and Jack runs at the wall headfirst. West's report has this throwaway line that says essentially, there was. were also reports that he turned some of his sheets into a noose, which again, that's not really particularly, that's not useful information in any serious way. And there's no evidence

about that. But, you know, I think being cynical, you throw that in and it sounds like more evidence of some suicidality. The timeline on that is also so bizarre as you read it. Like, because it says he was taken out of his cell to get his head looked at and they determined they did like an x-ray and determined that it was just a bump and it was after he got back that he's supposed to have started tearing up his sheets and clothing to fashion a noose and then immediately after that is when west shows up it was just like so is west coming at like the early wee hours of the morning it just the whole thing is very bizarre how it's written up it's very unsatisfactory Yes, completely agree.

It's completely unsatisfactory. And another one of those things where you're like, God, I have so many questions and it seems like nobody around the situation had those questions. And we're totally satisfied with it as it was. And I can't prove this. I don't think we ever would be able to. It's not the kind of thing you would be able to. But my personal hunch is that West did not just arrive.

the afternoon of his exam. And also, there's no records about the hospital visit either. It's just, which is, again, you know, as far as I'm aware, there's nothing. I would guess there was, uh, some, uh, some other things happened in the hospital. Because also, when you think about what Smith and West and all these people were always pushing for from the very start, when you fold this back into that whole thing about getting the panel of psychiatric experts involved in everything, part of it was always about, and I would suspect this may have been the primary or at least one of the primary focuses

if you assume these people were not acting in good faith it was to they were always asking for more medical tests more time in hospital and what West ends his report on that the day by essentially insisting though it doesn't happen is permanent hospitalisation under his care Smith was already asking for that before West saw him so I think you know if you take him out of prison you get him into a clinical setting where you are the person in charge what you say goes rather than what the cops say they clearly wanted that

it's that I find him to be mentally ill at this time and I think a mentally ill person should be in a hospital just as simple as that any possibility they might just been faking not in my opinion my hunch would be that something happens in the hospital and just again to speculate even further i wonder if what got him to the hospital was a suicide attempt or if some of those wounds were perhaps maybe i don't this is

just purely speculation but i sort of wondered about like if there's some kind of scuffle trying to get him out of the cell or something like that and um and then the next day i think there's references to him having things like a West references some kind of lump or wound on his cheek which you don't get as far as I'm where I can imagine from running head first into a wall just little things like that where I feel like there's a scuffle and we don't know what the hell happened that night but he goes to hospital and they conclude that he's completely fine like there's trivial kind of you know superficial as you said bump to the head, you know. But that's, there's some speculation in there. But yeah, that's kind of, it's a

strange night and things happen as you said. Well, I think West suggested it was at midnight, where, or just after midnight, I think he says, is when Ruby apparently had his, um, break. Yeah. I mean, now that you mention it like that, you know, remember that Jack Ruby in his Warren commission testimony when he breaks down crying and then immediately after says, I must be a great actor. And there is a certain performativity about a lot of the things that Ruby does. This also plays into like his perfectly crafted alibi with the Western Union order. And it plays into the way that Ruby carried a bunch of cash on his person. when he went to go kill Oswald solely because he thought that carrying cash would give him

an excuse to carry a concealed pistol in his pocket. And, you know, it seems like just to throw another speculative possibility in the mix that perhaps after consulting with Hubert Winston Smith about this hospitalization gambit and if they could convince Ruby that that would be in his best interest, then I could see him going along with it and taken a pop to the head to try and make it happen as well. Yeah, no, I think that's possible too. I mean, my sense is that he felt that at least during the trial,

he had maybe this sense decreased over time, but that the people around him were working for him or did have his best interests of heart, not in the sense that they were just good lawyers, but that he knew that there was some kind of, he was going to get taken care of in some way. And then I think it becomes clearer that he's not going to be. It becomes clearer that he's not going to be.

And then what you see over, just skipping out briefly is what you see over the next few years until he dies January 67. The trust just keeps being eroded more and more. and more and more of time. And yeah, I think that's totally possible. Because I mean, he never actually becomes suicidal even as he descends into a deep psychosis. Right. But I guess he could also be depressed if he originally thought he's going to get off and now his new lawyers are telling him your best hope is to spend the rest of your life in a hospital. So I don't know. No, yeah.

I think there are some references to him after the conviction becoming a few people say it seemed like it was after the conviction where his mood seemed to change, which, you know, that's understandable at a human level. And I think part of that may be a sense of he thought things were going to go a different way. And then it became clear that he wasn't going to be taken care of in the way he perhaps thought. Yeah, so we'll talk about his psychotic break now. before we do that, just really to put a finer point on the legal matter that I just pointed out, just to make a note, when you are up for appeal, your mental state does not matter at all, right? So Jack Ruby, he was not participating in his actual appeal, except if he's judged insane, in which case he could be taken off of death row and move to a hospital.

hospital, that's one possibility, but otherwise, the appellate process in a criminal case works like so. You send all the paper record from the trial, all the evidence, all the transcripts of all the testimony, et cetera, to the appellate court, along with the written arguments by the lawyers, and then the appellate court decides whether to affirm the jury's conviction or to to vacate the jury's conviction and vacator of a conviction will in a case like this almost definitely result in a retrial but of course it's up to the prosecution whether to retry the case here of course I mean bare-knuckle bill was not about to give up Jack Ruby and let him walk the streets. And so just looking ahead from Jack's point of view, the best outcome for him would

be, you know, win a retrial and then be a judged not guilty by reason of insanity or something similar and be committed to a mental institution rather than a prison. So that's just the substance probably of what his conversations with his lawyer sounded like in the couple weeks between his conviction and his psychotic break after the head bump incident on the night of April 26th. Yeah, and one other bit of context, which we may have mentioned in a previous episode, but in terms of the legal maneuverings, the timing of the psychotic break is, it's, I was going to say insane. It's, well, yeah, it's crazy in several ways. And one of them is that the very next day, so it was on a Sunday, on the Monday, they were due in court for hearings on what Smith

had already been trying to do, which was to get rulings by the judge delayed. And again, this was only Smith joined the case last week or so of March and he's off by the first week of June this happens end of April and during that time the month and a half or so up to when this happens Smith is rushing to try and get motions in that will delay it that will get I mean one of his motions during that time is pushing for a full hospitalisation oh yeah I think maybe we did mention it full hospitalisation with kind of you know extensive treatment and examination studies of hypnosis using hypnosis and sodium pentothole by west and people like that and the judge sort of keeps batting it all away and so when i was looking at it the more

i started looking at the kind of real day-by-day kind of timings of what dates from certain documents and things it seems pretty clear that they are again my sense is that they were in perhaps a panic to some extent or there was a kind of sense of extreme urgency on their part trying to buy more time trying to get him into hospitals and yeah as I said it's it's kind of absurd how convenient what happens is it's absurd from a kind of larger scale and it's absurd at the level of I mean absurdly convenient at the level of it's exactly what would have needed well in the end it doesn't even end up what the judge still kind of bats things back but it's kind of mid days, I think less than a week after Smith has requested exams using hypnosis by West

and hospital and hospitalisation, all these things. And again, yeah, it's the next morning that West is then in court with Smith and Ruby there presenting his report to the court on what had happened to Jack the previous night. I mean, it's, it's so some of the other, I think, helpful context from Jolly West himself, maybe not so helpful, but at least what he said about how Ruby was with him in the room on 26th of April 64 it's interesting to me that Wes says that Ruby keeps referring to quote what happened last night I said he kept repeating that quote after what happened last night there was nothing more in life for him he insists that he was being mocked or con by the examiner and I think we'll get into

this later but over the next few years it becomes even more emphatic his distrust to the extent that there's one quote from from i think 65 where he says to west you and i are not on the same team which is now of course this is all cited as evidence of his paranoia and insanity i think the guy was uh uh very very sane when he said that you know it seems like exactly the case um so yeah just that when west is seeing him that afternoon jack is referring to what happened last night and there's another attorney David Kandish I don't know that he was a full attorney but he was part of the one of the assistants on the team

West asks him into the room and he'd watch them talk and West writes as the lawyer Candish continued to discuss plans for the appeal actually as I'm reading that that's kind of interesting he says that the lawyer is he brings in a lawyer who tries to sit down to discuss plans for the appeal with Ruby

but that seems like a strange decision when Ruby, according to West, is in that very moment so insane he needs to be instantly hospitalized for his psychosis. Anyway, apparently the law I thought. Good time to discuss plans for the appeal in Westwords. Mr. Ruby became increasingly agitated and clearly paranoid as it dawned on him that Mr. Candish, whom he had trusted, was now, quote, pretending not to know what had happened last night. so attempts to carry out many of the more formal aspects of a mental status examination are impossible the patient was oriented in place in person but perhaps not for time he was non-responsive to many inquiries concentration was poor associations and continuity of thought were disrupted this is another

interesting sentence just thrown in some material pertinent to his shooting of oswald was elicited but is not included in this report hmm head scratcher right there yep i remember now that i've when i first read that No idea if that's included anywhere else, but Jolly decided that wasn't relevant, apparently. And yeah, he says at this time Mr. Ruby is obviously psychotic. He's completely preoccupied with his delusions of persecution of the Jews on his account. He feels hopeless, worthless, and guilty because he is to blame for the mass murders of his own people. The experiences of last night are not only grossly delusional, but include auditory and visual hallucinations as well. His emotions are abnormal, feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, suspiciousness and despair are expressed in various proportions.

yeah those emotions might be abnormal but they don't seem completely unjustified i mean anxiety depression guilt suspiciousness despair yeah i think anyone in his situation would be feeling those things and again it's just another example of what i think are quite reasonable reactions to the situation he was in being we're just gaslighting again frankly i would say almost evidence of sanity is is used as evidence of insanity. I argue also at a bigger level relates to how what we were talking about earlier, how these things are handled and at the level of society

when you're told, you know, presented is insane to question these kind of things. Same playbook, I think. And yeah, so just that, I think that's all interesting in terms of explaining what West was apparently presented with. And yeah, just as I pointed out during that, it kind of, on the one hand, he's saying that the guy was completely consumed by these hallucinations and psychotic. On the other hand, he's

talking to a lawyer about, and plans for the appeal. And he doesn't say that during that discussion, there was evidence that he was, you know, just couldn't even hold a conversation. All he says is he became agitated and paranoid, as it dawned on him, he couldn't trust this lawyer. So, I think another, yeah, just all that's examples of West saying one thing, but the facts on the ground not really lining up with what he's saying the situation was so that's the situation

Jack was in when West saw him that afternoon and one other thing is on the legal stuff the judge knocks back the motion that Smith was trying to file but on the basis of what happened I think either files a motion regarding insanity which my

understanding is that at least in Dallas at that time the court couldn't just dismiss that they had to, once it was filed, at least for them to consider it, they had to then entertain that. It wasn't just an emotion in that sense. And the point being that there was this kind of real pressure that I felt like just kept coming across to me that in the days and weeks right between that conviction and it happening where I'm just trying to get, you know, this complete control and everything that they want

and then it happens almost to the hour like perfect timing not for jack but for them yeah yeah so i think by now we've already alluded to it several times but just in recap what happens when jolly west comes out of his meeting with ruby and he does spend i think a long time right it's like several hours with him yeah i i think so and then he sees him again on the on the 27th the next day um this is on the 26th april and uh yeah he spends um yeah hours that afternoon and then files his report i think same day which of course could happen but um yeah yeah that that's pretty interesting that he's able to get it together in time because what he describes in his report is that Jack Ruby is suffering from acute depressive psychosis, and he is hallucinating vividly with both

visual and auditory hallucinations that everywhere in the United States, a pogrom is underway against the Jewish people, and outside his jail cell, his siblings are being tortured and dismembered and mutilated and burned and that it's all his fault because he's being blamed not only for killing Lee Oswald but also for killing John F. Kennedy and doing so on behalf of the Jews such that this John Birch conspiracy of the anti-Semitic right wing is gearing up the pitchforks and calling into the streets mobs to enact horrific Nazi-like Kristallnacht scenes right there in the city of Dallas. And Jeff Kay made this comment on the episode that he was on

about the M.K. Ultra Doctors on the Warren Commission. I believe it was episode nine of the Warren Commission decided where Jeff Kay commented that these types of hallucinations are ordinarily not symptomatic of schizophrenia or other psychotic conditions, but are rather brought on frequently by some kind of ingestion of a psychotropic drug, like, for example, Jolly West's favorite LSD. Yes, which Jolly West had literally killed an elephant with the previous year. I mean, quite famously. And, yeah, I mean, that was something where I went back and forth with Jeff

discussing the symptomatology of Jack during that, this episode. And so I completely defer to him on it. But it was partly based on those discussions that I was able to write some of what I wrote on this. And without personal clinical expertise, what I was able to, or train him at any kind, What I was able to put together trying to entertain any other possibility is, and also he had no, as far as I can tell, no history of this kind of, I mean, the extremely severe intense, visual and auditory of hallucinations previously. And so that's emerging, you know, a few decades into his life and suddenly all at once. and I was just looking at some other West documents from his papers. There's one where he summarises it in 1965.

He ended up examining, at least officially, his examining him at least six times over the following few years, and including those exams. And in this document he says, apparently some crystallization of his delusional ruminations took place within 48 hours prior to the time in my first examination on 26th April, 1964. there's no evidence that it was within

48 hours is I think pushing it in a way that he knew it was doing and again the point that the cops that night when they spoke to the press they didn't mention him hallucinating they didn't mention any kind of you'd think that would be something you'd when I guess maybe you'd

well these are not the kind of people to be sensitive or delicate with their information I mean like for a patient's sake there was no hint in their comments that he was having some kind of break as far as I remember and yeah he wasn't sedated or anything right right and and so the point of all that is that there's no history of these kind of extremely severe hallucinations and west says within 48 hours

actually and then now i remember that's his 65 one in his original one he says it was sometime after midnight so that's kind of some BS from him right there so it was after midnight and um and we don't know exactly when and then it's in the afternoon that west supposedly examines him and point being he has no history of all this stuff and they emerge very suddenly and then even by the next day when west goes to see him again in his own words he says that a lot of the symptoms have improved the point being there if you're wondering what you know trying to figure out what happened you've got really sudden onset of these extremely severe symptoms the whole thing's very very very acute in the sense of, you know, the intensity and it's brief.

He seems to repeat after six to 12 hours, something like that. And then it fades pretty quickly, and it's something that he's got no history of a point being there's barely anything that you can attribute that to other than the effect of something, some other substance. And that was my understanding, you know, based on talking with Jeff as well. And I think anyone can answer, you know, there's not much that that could, you know, If it comes out the blue, it's probably from something that will cause that. So, yeah, the point being, it's, I think, very, very hard, even if you're trying to argue.

I'm not sure how you can argue, even if you're wanting to do it, that it happened, that it wasn't artificially caused, is the point. Yeah. And it seems a hell of a lot like an LSD trip, maybe even something more intense. as well mixed in but but it's this like right when it needs to happen it's this kind of it's this insanely acute episode that is yeah it's just it's hard to see what else it could be yeah and i would just add you know combined with hypnotic suggestion as well right once the drug kicks in it enables the hypnotic suggestion to take on a whole other dimension in the visual and auditory

hallucinatory realm. But Jolly West, if you just peer through any of his publications from the 50s, they're all talking in no uncertain terms about how hypnosis can be used to induce delusions fugue states amnesia multiple personalities right i mean he is a true believer and again a true believer based on clinical experiments not based on making it up right i really think that you know anybody that is just wishing away the reality of this type of stuff on people with certainly a pre-existing let's say susceptibility to suggestion

as I think Jack Ruby certainly was I mean he was a neurotic guy that's for sure his mother had a history of I don't know if it reached the level

of psychosis but certainly deep depressive episodes and you know he was raised in an abusive household all of this stuff you know a cumulative childhood trauma. He checks off all the boxes for susceptibility to suggestion and hypnosis that

somebody like West would be on the lookout for. Yeah, exactly. And another point, I was looking into Artichoke recently. Well, the story is that it was the predecessor for M.K. Ultrenic role, it was rolled into it. That's not true. There's documents. CIA released. documents that discussed the use of artichoke into the late 60s. So it's not true. It was separate. The point here is that that was operational. That was separate from MK Ultra. I was under Office of Security. But within those documents, they talk about the artichoke method itself, or the A method, which was back to at least the early 50s, if not earlier. What that was was that it was the combination of drugs and hypnosis, hypnotic induction, post-pnotic.

conducting, things like that. And so that was being used operationally, you know, for at that point, at least 13 years, 14 years or so. And just my hunch with West separately is I'd get, I would suspect he may have been a part of artichoke or something like that prior to you're separate from MK Ultra and before that. That's just a hunch. But point is that that's, yeah, it's a crucial point I think that's it and if you add that in you know he's got the hours of this official exam but then we have no idea what happened before as we were just talking about that whole night and this that's the playbook and it was the one that it once I mean it was used operationally because they'd had you know they had some maybe it wouldn't always work all the time but you don't need to control someone

you know in this situation all you need is to be able to make him temporarily lose his mind So you don't even, yeah, you don't even need something that is very specifically effective at, you know, somehow, you know, taking over his entire brain. It's just, he just, if you're, if you're assuming bad intent, you just got to make him temporarily completely lose it. And they've been doing that for a long time. And there are the things like the visions of this Jewish holocaust. I have always been intrigued by those because I don't know where that came from is the bottom line. and it seems to be appear the specific the hallucinations they seem to appear like then for the first time and one of my hunches since I first started looking at it all was if that might be something that would have been um added into the mix and again that's not completely based on nothing to say I mean the idea of hypnotic and induction, post-epnotic induction, or suggestion is a real thing, and it's been a real thing for a long time.

And I'm playing off something that maybe in some way already existed a, you know, he was a, wasn't a practicing Jew, he did have a rabbi, you know, maybe all his guilt and things like this, and, and that, that tradition with it, that was within his family. Yeah, I think it, I think it was right there on the surface for somebody like West to take advantage of and exploit because you have everything from Jack Ruby allegedly saying I had to show the world that a Jew has guts after he shot Oswald to all of this other testimony that Ruby used to get into fights all the way from boyhood when people would call him a dirty Jew and stuff like that to the fact that at the trial, anti-Semitism was a big thing. And Beli made a big deal

about anti-Semitism during the trial. And there was this backdrop to the whole thing that dates back at least to Ruby's Midnight Quest for Bernard Weissman, remember, the signatory of the Kennedy black border ad in the Dallas morning news that he thought was part of some false flag to pin the JFK assassination on the Jews or so the story went yeah yeah so in brief you know I think that West certainly had enough raw material out there that oh hey this guy has some latent paranoia about anti-semitism. So let's go with that. Right. And I mean also when you think about how psychology, psychiatry has always been used within intelligence agencies and is still used, you know, to this day, a major, major part of it is developing profiles on people,

whether it's foreign leaders or whoever and also figuring out, and through that, figuring out, I mean, I think it's the kind of thing that can be even the kind of thing that gets passed to a president about when they're trying to figure out how to deal with certain things or even going into negotiations, they'll get a psychological profile by particularly CIA saying, hey, this thing they're particularly sensitive to or, you know, things like that. So, yeah, it's just, I just think it's just so easy to see how this, without anything. suggesting anything wild. It's just, it's easy to see how, how this could have all worked by by not having to pull on anything exceptional, you know, just the stuff they always did, how they always operated. And then so that, yes, it wouldn't take long and it would track with everything for them to just profile him and pick up on, this could be something to go for in the moment kind of thing. Yeah. And I'll read another passage now. This one is from,

Tom O'Neill's chaos that O'Neill had interviewed dozens of West's colleagues that had worked with him over the years. And so they described him as a, quote, devious man, egotistical, an inveterate narcissist and womanizer. And O'Neill goes on to write, the few who hadn't already suspected his involvement with the CIA accepted it readily. But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shirley, his Jolly West's good friend of 45 years, who'd worked with him at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shirley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA.

I asked him if he thought West would have accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby's mind. Quote, I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly's memory, Shirley said, but I have to be honest with you. My gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.

End quote. Calling West, quote, a very complex character, Shirley explained, quote, he had a little problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced America,

American history in some way or other, whether he got credit for it or not. Jolly had a real streak of, I guess you'd call it patriotism. If the president asked him to do something or somebody in a higher office, he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions. Yeah, I mean, it seems clear that the guy didn't care of people or anyone, including those very close to him apparently you know his family he didn't care about you know hurting them and he did

what he wanted and just I mean if you see any clip of him I was just thinking as you're saying that like my sense is always he seems like extremely charismatic I can totally see how he just hold a room easily but also a guy who

in my personal read I think if I were in face or haste with him it would be a kind of he just gives off this kind of if you yeah just go on YouTube and watch any any clip of him he seems like an arrogant prick and um and and and just a guy who I wouldn't believe he was you know he doesn't seem like a guy who would necessarily be telling the truth always just a guy who would be trying to get one over on you and um yeah not not a good guy but very compelling it's I mean I can completely see how you know

know, just in his personality, you know, how he a powerful presence. One more thing to say about Jack's psychosis before we pivot to talk about his Warren commission testimony is that Jack's psychosis, acutely as it came on, did not go away. So even though he wasn't continuously hallucinating all the time, he was, according to people that were meeting with him at this time, almost always very paranoid, very bizarre in his statements and behaviors, and that comes through very strongly in his Warren Commission testimony, a lot of which we have read into the episodes in the cold opens,

especially earlier on. Hypnoanalysis offers the quickest method of probing a subconscious. First, Vicki will be placed under hypnosis. How do you do that? Well, there are many ways and methods. All right, folks, that does it for this week's episode on the free feed. If you want to continue listening, please join us on patreon.com slash forthright archaeology. our Patreon members will have access to the full episode today.

Otherwise, you'll have to tune in next week. Until next week, on behalf of Dawn, I'm Dick saying farewell and keep on digging. Now think first of relaxing the muscles of the top of your scalp. Let your thoughts go down over the muscles of your face, down your shoulders, Down your arms to your hands resting upon your knees. Then your thoughts down over your thighs, your legs to your feet upon the floor.

Every muscle of your body completely...