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July 17, 2018 27 mins

To prepare for Sirhan Sirhan’s 2011 parole hearing, his current legal team brings in an expert to investigate whether or not Sirhan was hypno-programmed to shoot Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is doctor Pollock February one, nineteen sixty nine, with
Sir Hans Sir Hand interviewed by doctor Diamond and also
mister Robert Kaiser. Doctor Diamond would put Sir Hand under
hypnosis in the cell give him a suggestion under hypnosis.

(00:22):
This is Robert Kaiser, a journalist who is in the
room when defense and prosecution psychiatrists hypnotize Sir Han. Sir Han,
Sir Hanne, when I when I bring you out of hypnosis,
you're going to feel very very good. But when I
take out my handkerchief, that will be a signal for
you to climb the bars of your cell like a monkey.
All right now, Sir Hanne, You're going to be coming

(00:43):
out of out of your deep sleep and when you
wake up you'll feel very very good. And then five
minutes later, Sir Hans climbing the bars of his cell
like a monkey. We look over Diamond and he's been
blowing his nose, and Diamond says to Sir in in
front of me and the attorneys, Sir An, what are
you doing up there? Oh, I'm just getting some exercise.

(01:05):
He says, that was what he thought he was doing.
That's a plausible explanation. Anyone that's under that influence will
I'll always give you a plausible explanation, but it won't
be the right one. We all knew that he'd been programmed,
and neither Diamond nor the attorneys would listen to me

(01:25):
for a moment. When I suggested that he may have
been hypnotized and programmed to kill Kennedy under her hypnotic state,
Sir hans original attorneys didn't buy the idea that he
had been hypnotized and programmed to kill Kennedy. I gotta
say I get that. But today on the show, we

(01:50):
talked to Sir Hand's current legal team and they say
he was hypnoprogrammed mind control. It had a major port
to do with the whole case, and I knew that
for for people to believe, But that doesn't mean it
didn't happen. It happened. Things are going to get weird.
I'm Zaxpert Pantier and I'm Bill Claiper, and you're listening

(02:10):
to the RFK tapes. My name is Sir Han Sarhan.
Seventeen days from today, I will be sixty seven years old.
I was born in Jerusalem and raised by devoutly Christian parents.

(02:32):
This is sir Han Sarhan speaking to a pro board
in twenty eleven. His death sentence was commuted to life
in prison in the seventies when California abolished capital punishment.
Every day of my life, I have great remorse and
deep regret and deeply regret the fact that I participated
in a horrible event which took place in the pantry

(02:54):
of the Ambassador Hotel on the night which Senator to
Kennedy was assassinated and five other innocent people were wounded.
Sir Han says he participated in the assassination of Kennedy,
not that he assassinated Kennedy, because decades later, he still
claims not to remember. So what do you remember about

(03:15):
shooting if you're willing to talk about that. I was
obviously I was there, but I don't remember the exact moment.
I don't remember pulling my gun, and I don't remember
aiming at at any human being. I don't remember any
of that miss arms. And now I've said that from
the get go. Okay, And what did you think it happened?

(03:37):
I didn't. I didn't. I didn't know what they happened.
Were you nervous at all. I don't remember. At the hearing.
There are two lawyers sitting next to sir Han. One
is Laurie Dusk. There's no doubt after you read the
autopsy report that sir Han could not have killed the senator,
and the other is William F. Pepper. The evidence of
his innocence it just hit it just hit you, just

(04:00):
so powerful. The bullets were powderburn range, fired from behind.
All of the witness statements indicated that he was always
in front of the Senator, never was behind him, always
in front. A lot of evidence was destroyed. There were
numerous holes in the door frames in the pantry. The

(04:24):
LAPD would like us to think that those holes were
there because a tray hit the wall or somebody's pin
hit the wall. It's just impossible, just impossible. In two
thousand and seven, when Pepper and Ducik took on the case,
one of the first things they did was hire an
expert to analyze Sirhan well. We talked about developing this

(04:46):
analysis of Sirhan and his behavior, his conduct, and his history,
and that Dan Brown would be the ideal guide to
do that. Doctor Daniel Brown is an Associate clinical professor
sort of psychology at Harvard Medical School. He's written multiple
textbooks on memory, trauma, and hypnosis. My expertise was in

(05:08):
how one does non suggestive interviewing. Doctor Brown began meeting
with Sir Hahn in two thousand and eight. First I
did free recall. Tell me what happened, anything else you
can remember, and then, and then and then, and then
if he says something, I would say exactly what he
said back to him. I said earlier in the interview,
you said this, Tell me more about that. So you

(05:30):
never introduce any new elements which could be potentially suggestive.
I did that for many sessions. Tell me what happened,
anything else you can remember, and then, and then, and
then and then. What was remarkable to me is that
he didn't have a personality disorder. He didn't have a
trauma related disorder, although he went to a traumatic experience.

(05:52):
And when he lived in the West Bank, the Israeli
jet planes bombed the West Bank and his mother sent
him to the well to fetch a pocket of water.
And he pulled a bucket of water up and there
was a severed hand in the bucket. Tell me more
about it. Severed hand, and the bucket. I asked him
to tell me at some length about his sister who

(06:12):
died of leukemia because several years before the assassination, because
those are verifiable memories, and we could see that what
he could remember go back his sister leukemia and puts
yourself in that situation. So there was quite a contrast
between the amount of detail he could remember about his
sister's illness and dying and the night of the assassination,

(06:35):
which he remembered almost no details for so that struck me.
Later in the number of interviews over the years, I
used hypnosis, and I'd have to say that Sir hand
is one of the most hypotizing Bree people I've ever met.
Dan just quietly talked to Sir Hann in a very

(06:57):
soothing voice, counts down and next thing I know, Sir
Hamm's eyes are rolling back in his head and his
head made a jerking motion, and then he's under I

(07:19):
asked him to try and recall the knight of the assassination,
and it took some time to reconstruct the pieces because
it was mostly fragmented, but this is what we found.
Sir Han recounted for doctor Brown much of the same
story he's told over the years that he spent the
day of the assassination at a firing range shooting his
pistol and eventually heard about a party downtown at the
Ambassador Hotel. A couple of guys said, we're going to

(07:41):
go down to this big campaign party at the Ambassador
Hotel and pick up girls. Do you want to come
with us? And when he got to the Ambassador Hotel,
he was self conscious because everybody was dressed up and
he was not, and it was very hot. He went
to a bar to get a drink of water, and
he said the bartender look familiar and gave him a

(08:02):
Tom Collins, And then he got a little bit drunk
because he said, it's like lemonade, it creeps up on you.
Sir Han said he went to his car to drive home,
but decided he was too drunk. But one thing I
couldn't get. He couldn't remember how he got the gun. Instead,
Sir Han remembered trying to find coffee to help him

(08:23):
sober up. So he traced his way back to the
Ambassador Hotel and made it back to the makeshift bar,
and he asked the bartender for a cup of coffee.
The woman with the polka dot dress was sitting at
the bar talking with the bartender, apparently knowing him. This

(08:43):
was a breakthrough for doctor Brown for the first time.
Sir Han said that he remembered a girl in a
polka dot dress. She took him behind the anti room
where Kennedy was speaking, where there was a coffee urine,
and this was an attractive girl, so he was with her.
He remembered the man with a clipboard and a badge

(09:04):
coming over and saying, you can't stay here, this is
a high security region. Take him to the kitchen. She
takes his hand and walks him to the kitchen. The
whole reason he was the girl in him. A waiter
said he saucer Han in the kitchen pantry with a
girl in a polka dot dress. Black or violent, all right.

(09:30):
The girl looked back, she was holding it looked like
she was almost holding him to Chicago. And she kept
turning away, and she was very distracted, and he was
hard for him to flirt with her. And at some
point people started coming in through the doors, and at
that point she goes like this. He said, it felt

(09:55):
like a pinsion is in his elbow. I said, did
anyone ever give you instructions or suggestions to shoot on command.
And then Sirhan immediately suddenly jumps up like this, takes
his stance, and goes Doctor Brown says, sir Han suddenly

(10:18):
stood up in front of him, extended both arms, and
began firing an imaginary pistol. Now we figured out that
we could trigger him by either saying the world shoot
on command, or I could tap him on his elbow.
Decades after the crime, doctor Brown says he discovered that
sir Han could be triggered to go into a stance
that doctor Brown calls range mode, and then we could

(10:41):
trigger range mode. And every time that I would give
him the queue, he would jump up and go into
range mode inn alter personality state where he would be
shooting in his mind of circles targets in the range.
I asked Sirhan when he was shooting, did he have
any sense of what was going on around him? And

(11:03):
he said it was all chaos. And the next thing
he remembers is the people are pinning him down and
grabbing at his throat, hold him, hold him. Finally we
got his He was very strong for a small man,
but his finding his arm was on the George Plimpton

(11:26):
was one of the guys who helped wrestle the gun
from Sir Han. All about his eyes. They were doc brown,
enormously peaceful eyes. Enormously peaceful eyes. He realized, he said,
Oh my god, I just shot somebody. What does that

(11:48):
sound like to you? Watching Sir Han go into range mode?
Attorney Laurie Dusk thought that he might actually have been
hypno programmed. But it was like finding a small east
to a puzzle and hoping that that small piece might
fill in the rest of the puzzle. You think that
hypno programming is a possibility in this case, Yes, I do.

(12:12):
And if I hadn't seen what Dan did with Sir Hann,
I would be a little more skeptical. But having watched
Sir Hann being hypnotized and how quickly and deeply he
goes under, Dan thinks that barbiturateus were used and sensory
deprivation was used. Whoever did this to him did a

(12:36):
great job, So who could have done this to him?
That's after the break? Hello? Hello, hey Bill? Yeah, hey Jack,

(12:59):
how are you? I'm good? I'm better better, Yeah, I
was under the weather, and uh, I'm almost out of it. Good. Yeah,
I think we gotta do it. Though, what do we
got to do? I think we have to be hit
no program? Well it in a lot of ways. It's

(13:26):
a simplest explanation, and it's hard. It's hard because it's
hard to it's hard to find the answer. How how
do you prove someone who was sitting program? What's the
proof of that? You know, it's just you've got all
these clues, but it's not like you know, they leave

(13:48):
fingerprints on your brain. Um badly here, Hello, well you
know OCAM's razor tell me? Okay. In general, usually the

(14:11):
simplest explanation for something is more often than not the
right explanation. And so how does that relate to mind control,
because that would seem to be the most baroque, the
most ornate, elaborate explanation for things. Well, I have problems

(14:31):
with the simple, simple explanations because when I look at
the evidence, I see very compelling evidence that two guns
were firing. I see compelling evidence that Sir Hannah was
in the company of people that night, and I find
compelling evidence that Sir Hannah's being sincere when he says
he doesn't remember the crime now I have trouble putting

(14:52):
those three facts together and coming up with a simple explanation.
Mind control and hypno programming sounds more like a cold
war science fiction movie. In fact, it was a cold
war science fiction movie called The Manchurian Candidate was released

(15:13):
in nineteen sixty two and starred Frank Sinatra. Became a
cult classic normally conditioned American. It's been trained to kill
and then to have no memory of having killed. His
brain has not only been washed, as they say, it's
just been dry clean. The film's director was John Frankenheimer,

(15:43):
and he happened to be a good friend of Robert Kennedy's.
The night before the California primary, Kennedy stayed at Frankenheimer's
house in Malibu spent the next day on the beach
with his family. But The Manchurian Candidate is a movie,
not reality right well, According to a book called The

(16:04):
Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA was experimenting with
mind control. This is the author John Marks, a former
State Department official. This research product is a potential threat
to where most basic freedoms if it gives the government
or anyone else the ability to manipulate human behavior. These
techniques do not just smack of nineteen eighty four. They
open up the prospect of totalitarian control. The co author

(16:28):
of Bill's book shadow Play, Phil Mlanson, also researched the
CIA experiments. The notion that you can't be hymantized to
do something you're not more inclined to do was clearly
disproved by our government. They demonstrated how it could be done,
and millions of dollars were spent, and hundreds of people
were worked on and were made to do those things.

(16:50):
The CIA program was called Bluebird, then Artichoke, and finally
mk Ultra. Experiments were conducted using drugs, brainwashing, and hypnosis.
So I'm just going to read a section of that book,
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, And in this section,

(17:10):
John Marks writes about a CIA official named Morris Allen.
Morris Allen decided to take his hypnosis studies further right
into his own office. He asked young CIA secretaries to
stay after work and ran them through the hypnotic paces.
He had secretary steal secret files and passed them on
to total strangers, thus violating the most basic CIA security rules.

(17:33):
He got them to steal from each other and to
start fires. On February nineteenth, nineteen fifty four, Morris Allen
simulated the ultimate experiment in hypnosis, the creation of a
Manchurian candidate or programmed assassin. Allen's quote victim was a
secretary whom he put into a deep trance and told

(17:56):
to keep sleeping until he ordered otherwise. He then hypnotized
a second secretary and told her that if she could
not wake up her friend quote, her rage would be
so great that she would not hesitate to kill. Alan
left a pistol nearby, which the secretary had no way
of knowing was unloaded. Even though she had earlier expressed

(18:17):
a fear of firearms of any kind, she picked up
the gun and shot her sleeping friend. After Alan brought
the killer out of her trance, she had apparent amnesia
for the event, denying she would ever shoot anyone. Bill's
co author Phil Mullanson again, doctors were prominent in the

(18:38):
secret research efforts, all of whom worked together in southern
and northern California, all of whom worked for the government.
And my belief is that two of them, if not
three of them, had something to do with Sirhan's programming.
They were in the right place at the right time. Bill,
What do you think happened. I think Sirhan did fall

(18:59):
in with someone who was a head hunter, and whether
it was through the racetrack, whether it was through a
medical odyssey he went on after he fell off the
horse and injured himself, injured his head, some house or
hand in my opinion, and it's just just a theory.
I don't know, but he went out and ran into

(19:19):
some people who were looking for subjects. Doctor Brown has
a theory about how it happened. It all started with
Sir Han falling off his horse. He remembered riding high
and being on the horse and then suddenly losing consciousness.

(19:41):
And I found the medical records from the Corona Community
Hospital and he was treated on an outpatient basis in
the emergency room, given a stitch from the minor cutting
his eye, and released the same day. But that's not
what Sir Henry remembers. Sir Henry remembers being on a
special unit in a hospital for two or three weeks.

(20:05):
The windows had prison bars on them, and there were
six other people on the same unit. Behind the curtains Sirhan.
We remember drifting in out of consciousness. That's the time
that he was trained. I think he was kidnapped, given
a drug and he apparently was the best candidate because

(20:28):
of his hypnotic ability. In doctor Brown's declaration to the
Parole Board, he writes, quote, it is my expert opinion
that mister sir Han was trained, through a variety of
coercive persuasion techniques to serve as a distractor on the
night of the assassination so that a second professional shooter

(20:51):
could render the fatal shot by the sea. Doctor Brown concluded,
since he has spent all of his adult life in
prison for a crime that he may not have committed,
nor has volition about knowledge of nor memory four, the

(21:15):
compassionate response would be to let mister sir Han live
the remainder of his life free. There is little risk here.
Dan Brown, in particulars has focused on the fact that
he's he could not be feigning, and sir Han's attorney,
William Pepper, laid it all out for the Pearl Board
in twenty eleven, and my co Counsilmstusik was present that

(21:36):
every one of the sessions that doctor Brown had and
clearly the picture that has been given to me, both
by doctor Brown and by her is that in those
sessions he genuinely demonstrated a non violent temperament. He genuinely
and consistently expressed remorse. His lawyer, William F. Pepper, says

(22:04):
he believes that sir Han was brainwashed or hypno program,
you know, like a Manchurian candidate who was working at
the behest of evil. Very difficult to show remorse and
take responsibility when you say you don't remember the crime, Megan,
the Parole board, very unlikely the matter of Sir hanser

(22:31):
Hands CDC number B as a boy two one zero
one four. The panel has reviewed all the information received
from the public and irrelevant information that was before us today,
and I've concluded the prisoners not yet suitable, fool and
would close an unreasonable risk of danger, a threat of
public safety if released from prison sir Han. Sir Han

(22:52):
was denied parole for the fourteenth time. We also have
another plan in mind that I'm not going to go
into it outside the prison. William Pepper spoke to the
press that this is an ongoing fight, an ongoing story,
and we're not going to let this guy rot in
here for something quite frankly, that he didn't do. That's
what's very important. Yes he was there, Yes he fired

(23:14):
his pistol. Yes he was pinned to the table and
kept firing it. But he did not kill Bob Kennedy. Okay,
So for like this to be true, for Sir Han

(23:35):
to be a hypno program to assassin, we have to
believe that there's this secret hospital with her doing all
these mind control experiments, and the girl in the book
about dress was this handler, that the bartender is somehow
in on it. That heat when Sir Han goes into
this hypno program state, then the real assassin shoots Kennedy

(23:57):
in the back and puts the gun away and leaves.
The girl then goes running through the Ambassador Hotel yelling
we shot him, we shot him. But then you also
have to imagine that the lapd is somehow involved in this.
Like how high up does the cover up go. It's
just a lot, it's a lot of dots. That's a

(24:19):
lot of dots to connect. Yes, of all of those
things could be true. So if you accept there's a
massive conspiracy, why why would they do this? Anybody who

(24:39):
knew Robert Kennedy knew that if he could find the
people who killed his brother, you wouldn't want to be
that person, and you wouldn't want to be that agency.
So you think they're gonna sit still and let Robert
Kennedy become President of the United States and come looking forum.

(25:06):
That's in two weeks. You did to mean you know
something I do not know. I see it in your soul.
I see it in your soul. Grimetown is me Zack

(25:31):
Stewart Pontier and Mark Smirling. The rf K Tapes is
made in partnership with Cadence thirteen. The show is produced
by Jesse Rudoy, Bill Klaiber, Wula Culpa, Ryan Murdoch and
Max Miller. Austin Mitchell is our senior producer, editing by
Mark Smirling, fact checking by Jennifer Blackman. This episode was mixed,

(25:53):
sound designed and scored by Kenny Kusiak. Additional music by
John Kusiak and Seth Botis. Title track is Maria Tambien
by Krungbin. Our credit track this week is See It
in Your Soul by Sean Gat Music supervision by Josh

(26:19):
Kessler and Dylan Bostick at Heavy Duty Projects Archival footage
courtesy of the California State Archives. Archival research by Brennan Reese.
Production assistance by Kevin Shephard. Our website is designed by
Kurt Courtney, thanks to Emily Wiedeman, Gene Claibur Green Card Pictures,
Alessandro Santoro, Paul Schrade, Bill Molanson, Lori Dusk, Shane O'Sullivan,

(26:43):
and the team at Cadence thirteen. For more information on
the Robert Kennedy Murder, pick up a copy of Bill's
book shadow Play from Saint Martin's Press. And if you
like the show, consider leaving us a rating and review
on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It really helps
others find out about the show. You can find us

(27:03):
on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at therf K Tapes. For
bonus content, check out our website RFK tapes dot com.
This week we've got doctor Dan Brown's declaration and photos
from the parole hearing. Check them out. Thanks see in
two weeks
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