Jack Ruby’s Court Assigned Shrink Was an MKUltra Doc

The story is crazy. It's crazy and I think it's also a really important part of human history. Imagine if the whistleblower had not come forward and we didn't know about MKUltra. And all those documents didn't get... They didn't find the warehouse where the documents were. Just imagine. We never would have known about it. Like Kaiser Sose. Nobody in the program has ever come out and talked about it. I went to a couple of guys who are still alive, wouldn't talk to me. Of course. I mean they always fall back on... We signed an oath with the agency. If we talked to you without permission and they're not going to give us permission, we could go to prison. Just imagine what life must have been like for them knowing that this is what they were doing to people. Oh yeah. That's such a strange way to... Also, these people are agents for the federal government. I mean, what kind of precedent does this establish? Well, most of the people doing the research were subcontracted researchers at medical personnel at prisons. And in the case of Jolly West, he was first in the Air Force and then he was in university settings. And Jolly was... Once he got to the University of Oklahoma, he was experimenting on patients. And in one of his letters to Gottlieb asking for more funding, he's saying working with psychiatric patients actually benefits us because people can't... I'm not quoting directly here, but he was making the argument that their weird behavior wouldn't be noticed by anybody at the hospitals because they're psychiatric patients. So these people are getting LSD, which is a pretty powerful drug, and other drugs he was using. And he was hypnotizing them in many of his experiments without their knowledge and their psychiatric patients. Because I mean, it's worse than Nazis. Your mind is the next most important thing besides your soul, and they're tampering with it. One of Jolly's colleagues, a guy who actually took over the department when Jolly in 69 came out to UCLA from Oklahoma, said to me, because again, I would do this with people, I would show them all the documents. And he said he always... West was one of his best friends. He'd known him for, I think, 45 years when West died in 99. But he said to me, Jolly, it doesn't surprise me that he would have done this. This is the Jack Ruby stuff, which I guess you haven't gotten to yet. Jolly was Jack Ruby's psychiatrist. Oh, Jesus. It's a whole... That makes sense too, right? Yeah. Well, actually, I won't spoil it for you. Did you see the photo of Jack Ruby out in the hallway? I did. I was impressed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're going to get to about 30 or 40 pages on Jack Ruby and Jolly West. I'll just... I don't want to spoil it for you or for the listeners if they haven't read the book yet. But Jolly West inserted himself into the Ruby case after Ruby was convicted of shooting and killing Oswald in the spring of 64. Before he was going to testify to the Warren Commission, he had never told... He had never testified at his trial about why he killed Oswald. His defense argument was that he had epilepsy and he had had an epileptic fit and shot him and was amnesic of the shooting. Holy shit. Yeah. So... And that fits right into the narrative like a key. Well, this gets better. So West inserts... Pull that microphone out towards your face. Oh, sorry. It's all right. So what... You're getting into this? Yeah. Yeah. Move. So West inserts himself into the case, gets a sign through his connections to Ruby's new lawyer, Hubert Winston-Smith, who's a whole other kettle of fish. But anyway, goes to the Dallas County Jail in, I think it was April of 64, to examine Ruby in preparation for not the Warren Commission testimony, which he was giving in a couple of months before his next trial, because he had gotten an appeal for a psychiatric review. And West, who had told Sidney Gottlieb in these early letters from the 50s that part of his experiments were inducing insanity and a person without their awareness. West goes to examine Ruby, emerges from the county jail and there's press waiting for him. And he announces that within the preceding 48 hours, Ruby had had a psychotic break that was irrevocable. Paul couldn't he couldn't return to sanity. He had audio and visual hallucinations during the exam. He said Ruby hit under a table because he thought there were people in the room trying to kill him. Told West that he could hear children's screams outside his jail cell as Jewish children, as they were boiled alive. And West said he's completely insane. That was the day. I mean, there was no evidence of Ruby being mentally ill prior to West's exam. West was along with him in the cell and then treated him for about six months when Ruby finally gave his testimony to the Warren Commission. So Earl Warren, Chief Justice Warren, who was head of the commission, flew down to Dallas with Gerald Ford, who was in Congress and on the commission. And Ireland specter, the young Ireland specter, who was an investigator for the Warren Commission, who eventually came up with the magic bullet theory. He called it the magic bullet conclusion. Anyway, the three of them, you know, put Ruby under oath and Ruby Babble was incoherent, grabbed our inspector, who was like him, Jewish. And he said, don't you know they're killing Jews? And they've killed my brother and cut off his legs. I hear them being tortured outside myself. They couldn't use anything. West, that was one of his objectives in his research was to make people induce insanity without a person's awareness. Was there any contact with Jack Ruby before he killed that was again, that was one of the things I can't tell you how hard you know. Oh, you mean before you mean West and anyone, anyone that could have done something to get out to kill Ruby. No, Ruby to kill Ruby to kill Ruby. Yeah, Ruby had a lot of connections to organize crime and federal. He was part of which later emerged the anti Castro Cuban effort to overthrow Fidel Castro, which was run. It was Operation Mongoose by the CIA. It was an illegal assassination program. Ruby denied being in it. And that's in the book. I found out that, again, through West papers that I got access to, Ruby admitted never that he stalked and killed Oswald on the orders of anyone, but that he was working with these people who were suspected of being involved in the assassination if there was a conspiracy. And he had never admitted that to anyone. It's only in West's file. And West withheld that. So let's break that down. So for people that don't know the the primary theory of who was responsible if there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And one of the thoughts was that it had to do with some sort of CIA operation to overthrow Castro. Yeah. Well, there was so the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. There was no conspiracy. Alan Dulles, the former head of the CIA, who was fired by John F. Kennedy, was second in command to Judge Warren and the commission. Richard Helms, who was actually Jolly West employer for MK Ultra, was the liaison between the CIA and the commission. So Helms knew that Ruby, who they call their most important witness in their investigation, the Warren Commission investigation, because he was the one who silenced the killer. There could be no trial for Oswald because he was dead. So they tried to learn everything they could about Ruby to see if he had had any meetings with Oswald prior or if he had connections beyond the superficial ones to organize crime. Was there something deeper? The commission, which I believe was, you know, a joke from the beginning, it was set to determine. I mean, they said in the beginning their objective was to prove that Oswald acted alone. They came up with that conclusion. But after the first intelligence, Senate intelligence hearings in this in the early 70s that exposed MK Ultra Chaos, COINTELPRO, primarily the Frank Church hearings, they found out that Dulles and Helms and others had lied about the CIA's involvement with Oswald. And with their own agents who had had these peripheral. We don't know if they were peripheral or not, but definitely encounters with Oswald. They withheld all that. So the House voted to have what they call the House Select Committee on Assassinations that began in 77. In 78, they released their report, which they concluded there was a probable conspiracy to kill Kennedy, that Oswald didn't act alone. And, you know, there's lots of books about that. And in their findings and then later the two, the head of the committee, Robert Blakely wrote a book where he said that that Ruby had acted on behalf of the conspiracy to silence Oswald, that he had stalked him, premeditated the murder and that the whole thing was part of keeping the secret. So was West a part of that? You know, again, I can't prove it. I wanted to find out if West had had any encounter or any interaction with Ruby prior to Ruby committing the murder. Couldn't find that. And that's the kind of thing that maybe there's no evidence. Maybe it happened, but there's no evidence. But I wasn't going to put it in the book. And I exhausted every resource I had, you know, because that that one has always been so puzzling for me, because here's this guy. That's not connected to the murder, allegedly, and then steps forward and shoots Oswald in front of everybody. Yeah. Sentencing himself. I mean, like there's no doubt about it. You're the guy who did it. Everyone saw it. You're going to go to jail forever. Why would you do that? Well, the first report, which was fabricated by his first lawyer who admitted this years and years later, he told Ruby to say he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to come to Dallas for a trial of Oswald. That was made up. Made no sense. And then Melvin Bell. I was assigned to the case was I mean, Ruby fired like three lawyers in the first couple of weeks. The Mel Melvin Bell. I took over and took it to trial. And his argument was that he had had an epileptic fit and didn't know what he was doing. And when he was grabbed by the cops after he shot Oswald, he said, hey, I'm Jack Ruby. What am I doing here? What are you doing to me? Don't you know who I am? Because he knew all the cops. My argument in my book is it's important. My most important finding is that a CIA contracted agent or researcher for mind control became the most important witness to the Warren Commission. He became that witness's doctor right before he testified and told his story. I go, that should have been disclosed, obviously, to the commission, but they're not going to say it because it's a secret program. Right. And then he goes crazy. And then he goes crazy. I got told by a couple of the people who were nobody on the commission would talk to me that was alive when I started pursuing them. Gerald Ford wouldn't talk to me. Arlen Spector, I think I mentioned that to you before. There's an interesting I approached Arlen Spector, who was running for reelection. This was 2002 and told him I had new information and he had he had always maintained. You know, he he made a lot of money off of his books about justice and the magic, defending his magic bully bullet theory. He always said, if anybody comes to me with new evidence, I'll look at it with an open mind. So I had sent him a persuasive letter with his people. They finally said, all right, if you have these documents showing that this doctor who treated Ruby, you know, and within the 24 hours he lost his mind. Spector will look at them and then decide if he'll talk to you fax him to us. And at that point, that was 2002. I lost the magazine story and I didn't have a book deal. So I was operating entirely on my own. I said, I can't send this stuff to you because it's my smoking gun. The letters between Gottlieb and West describing all the experiments. So finally, Spector agreed to talk to me on the phone for a few minutes. And it was amazing. He called me from the Senate floor while they were waiting to vote on whether or not they were going to invade Iraq. This was 2002. Oh, shit. So we were only supposed to talk for a few minutes. And when I explained what I had and what it showed West had been involved with at the time, he treated Ruby. He said, well, if you're not going to send the stuff to me, I don't know. I need to see it. And I go, well, I can't send it to you. And he said, well, you want to meet me? Because I told him I was in Philadelphia visiting my folks. And he was from Philadelphia, too. He says, I'm there in the weekend. I'll meet you Saturday. I have a squash game at the Wyndham Hotel. Meet me there. Christ, squash. So we had a meeting set up for like three days later. And this is something I'm always second guessing about. I made a decision. I don't think I got to I don't think I ever really got paranoid doing this. But Spector had been a long term senator. He was running for reelection. And it was the first time in his career that the polls were against him that his opponent was they were predicting that he was going to specter was going to lose. He had also defended this magic bullet theory forever. I mean, more people known for the Kennedy assassination than anything else. I thought, so if I do meet with him and I show him these documents, maybe it was grandiose of me, too. I thought he's going to go, oh, my God. I need to be part of their exposure because if he didn't and walked away from it, I thought they were important enough that he would know that that would once they were publicized and he had the opportunity to say, hey, we need to look into this and didn't. He would look bad. So then I thought, well, maybe he's going to two things. He's either going to use it for to get publicity, have a press conference and help him in his reelection. Or he's going to use it to be the hero of it and run with it before I published a book. And then I'll just be a footnote to all this because he took it. So I canceled the meeting the morning of. I called up his press secretary and his cell phone, like the three phones I had for him. I said, you have to tell Senator Specter, I am so sorry, but there's an emergency. I've got to go back to Los Angeles. I actually was scheduled to go the day after on Sunday. So it was a lie. And I didn't talk to anyone. I just left the message and I said, I'm so sorry, but obviously I've worked so hard to get this meeting. It's embarrassing, but I have to go back. So I left my parents place to go to the post office because I had been there for three months. I was actually writing the first version of the proposal at their place to get away from my friends and, you know, all the distractions in L.A. And I was only going for like 15 minutes. I go, Mom, if that press secretary calls, I told them I was leaving. So tell him that I just went to the airport and I apologize. And she goes, well, I can't lie to a press secretary. I go, Mom, you got to. So I go to the post office and I come home 15 minutes later and she's like, as white as a ghost, I go, what? And she goes, Senator Specter called. I go, you mean the press secretary? She goes, no, he called himself. He wanted to know what happened. Why you changed your mind and why you were canceling. And I had to lie to him. I don't lie. I go, but I lied to the senator. And, you know, he was a big deal in Pennsylvania back then. And so I don't know if that was a mistake on my part. I think, you know, twenty twenty hindsight, I should have done it and taken my chances. I did know what he would have done. I know that's a very powerful man. And if he thought that he was in danger, you could have fucking driven off a cliff. I never I mean, I really didn't try to think like that through all those years. I thought like that when it comes to our inspector. I mean, do you know how deep that guy had to be in on that to come up with that whack? I know. Or that. Yeah, yeah. That theory so bad, the fact that that actually gets debated and the fact that it never gets brought up, that there were more bullet fragments in Connelly's body than there were missing from that bullet. Yeah. And the fact that anyone who knows anything about guns, right? Any anyone who's ever shot a gun has seen what a bullet when a bullet shatters bone, what it looks like, would look at that fucking bullet and think that bullet went through two human beings. Right. Right. And the fact that the reason why they had to make up this theory in the first place was because a guy was hit by a ricochet on the underpass. Yeah. Know the whole story behind that? Well, here's what I did. I tried not to lose myself any more than I had to in each compartmentalized area I was going into. So with the Kennedy assassination, I just did a superficial because like Manson, I was never interested in any thing. So-called conspiracies. Yeah. I never cared about Kennedy or the John Kennedy assassination. But once I found out that West was connected to Ruby and again, that was a moment that I was like, oh, no. I mean, first it was West in the CIA. And then I'm like, and Ruby, how can I not look at the Kennedy assassination? So I kept my focus narrowly just on Ruby, Oswald, West, Specter. I looked a little bit at the magic bullet and agree with you, but I never did a deep dive into a lot of that stuff.