Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

Beyond their supporting role, JTF-6 active and reserve-duty soldiers were lent to civilian agencies for direct actions – long and short-term assignments to conduct surveillance and counterintelligence activities within elaborate nationwide sting operations.

While McVeigh was seemingly aware that NORTHSTAR existed (although not necessarily under that name), PATCON’s existence was unknown to the public until 2007, when it was revealed through a Freedom Of Information Act request (although many details surrounding it remain hidden).

Immediately after his NYNG discharge McVeigh sought employment and took entrance exams with the very agencies whose policies he railed against; agencies connected to both PATCON and NORTHSTAR operations. The first was with the Niagara Falls based Border Patrol, yet after passing the screening test, they informed him that no positions were available.

Next, McVeigh took the exam required for employment with the United States Marshalls Service, receiving one of the highest recorded scores. He did not get the job, however, and later blamed it on reverse discrimination due to affirmative action.38

Further, he was becoming even angrier about the growing militarization of domestic police forces and their increasing co-operation with U.S. troops. He was joined in this last complaint by a disparate coalition of activists and civil libertarians on the right and left.

What happened at Ruby Ridge only confirmed growing suspicions of many on both the left and right, that the U.S. was becoming a police state. Among the radical right, for both the racially minded White Power Movement and the non-racially minded Patriot Movement, it was seen as proof that the government was waging war on its own citizens using so called ‘low intensity conflict’ tactics.

According to the newly released FBI documents and a 2011 article in Newsweek, in the aftermath of Ruby Ridge, PATCON assets and operatives were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their “willing[ness] to commit violence,” and “advocate [the] violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”

One recently released PATCON document discusses why a certain undercover FBI agent was particularly suited for the job. He had been in the military and had seen combat (in Vietnam), he was around the same age as the people he was assigned to target, and had “studied the white supremacy movement through the reading of numerous books and articles in the public domain…”50

Who has known heights and depths shall not again know peace – not as the calm heart knows low lived walls; a garden close. And though he tread the humble ways of men, he shall not speak the common tongue again. Who has known heights shall bear forever more, an incommunicable thing that hurts his heart, as if a wing beat at the portal, challenging; And yes-lured by the gleam his vision wore – Who once has trodden stars seeks peace no more. – Mary Brent Whiteside, “Who Has Known Heights,”v 1936.

Eventually, after years of previous denials, the Pentagon incrementally acknowledged that the experimental anthrax vaccine given to U.S. soldiers during the Gulf War contained the adjuvant squalene. It turned out that, not only had “officials repeatedly lied about the relationship of squalene,” throughout the 1990s, the U.S. military conducted experimental tests of vaccines for, among other things, AIDS/HIV, malaria, and herpes using civilians and soldiers while the Pentagon, in other countries, including Thailand, conducted experimental trials of HIV vaccinations not authorized in the U.S.

In 2005, journalist Margaret Cook reported on a study conducted by the University of Oregon, which found that over half of the African-American population believed that HIV was man-made and had been intentionally spread within their community by the government as a form of genocide. According to this lore, HIV was created in chimpanzees by the CIA in the 1950s and first introduced to the public via polio vaccines and later, within the gay population, through experimental Hepatitis vaccines. Others simply believed that, one way or another, their community functioned as government “guinea pigs.”

Kilshaw wrote that soldiers’ discussions about GWS were “a form of commentary” that used a “shared bodily language” to express “collective social angst” and “distress” within a “world of shared social meaning” that existed on “the fault lines of culture.” The “narratives of suspicion” offered by McVeigh and his COHORT, like those of thousands of other Gulf War veterans, are closely related to, and founded in, the same circumstances that have led many in the African-American community to believe that the government not only created AIDS but also administered it to the citizenry.

For the undecided, the question remained, “if extraterrestrials have found Earth, what will happen to our culture, religion, science and politics, and how will we react to these presumably superior beings?”

According to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “Nearly every military aircraft and space vehicle developed in the United States from the end of World War II until the present day has been tested at the facility, now known as Calspan.”

A sizable amount of information propagated by the UFO movement was intentionally planted there by the U.S. intelligence community. A handful of writers however, most notably Jodi Dean and investigative journalist Mark Pilkington, have presented credible and well-documented histories of the U.S. government’s attempts to contain, exert control over and shape the public’s never-ending fascination, inquiries and speculations about UFOs.

In fact, the government’s post-Robertson panel’s UFO perception management initiative could be described as a blend between the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the CIA’s MKUltra program (and similar ones before and after) and military psychological operations (PSYOPS).

To begin with, UFO sightings (and on occasion alien encounters) were staged in the U.S. and elsewhere, after which witness’ reports about what they saw and their subsequent activities could be studied, both psychologically (how did they react at the time of the sighting and afterwards) and sociologically (whom did they tell and how did the information travel).

Secondly, the Air Force, CIA, NSA and other agencies continued to spy on the UFO community by embedding operatives within citizen UFO research groups but rather than simply gathering information, the operatives acted as disinformation specialists, real life Men In Black, or “Mirage Men” targeted select individuals, often those who had already gained some clout and respect among their peers.

The Mirage Men would approach the targeted individual, either directly or through an intermediary, and offer to provide the Truth about what the government was hiding, sometimes in exchange for information about the latest rumors, trends and goings on in the UFO community. Having secured the target’s willing or unknowing compliance, the operatives would provide them with faked government documents about human/alien treaties, super-secret underground military bases that doubled as alien strongholds and faked footage of alien autopsies. Some Mirage Men, having gained clout and influence within the subculture (sometimes as spokespeople of citizen groups), would then proceed to make the most outrageous...

Cooper’s death helped to “write the final scene of a paranoid drama authored by Cooper himself” – said one report, indicative of so many others that overlook the actual role of the government in creating and spreading alien/UFO related theories. But then again, to acknowledge this would feed into the very paranoia such cultural crusaders were trying to combat.68 Plus, if the government helped create and spread the kinds of astounding nonsense floated by Cooper, and if Cooper had helped corrupt the mind of McVeigh, then the government kind of helped make McVeigh, and that’s the kind of thing that Cooper would say, so best not to bring it up.

Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe convincing people that they are in fact chipped victims of the skypeople has a much darker purpose. Perhaps the types of claims made by Leir (now deceased) and Colbern are nothing more than intentional disinformation, lies meant to mask the use of existing or impending technologies of control, although on whose behalf, I am unaware.77

Nichols later said that, Moore was compliant, just like McVeigh predicted he would be; so much so that during the robbery, Nichols wondered if Moore had been in on the plan all along. The cash was not hidden where McVeigh said it would be. It was lying out on Moore’s desk! As Nichols was leaving, Moore even told him about a remote location where he should drop Moore’s van (that Nichols was stealing). Maybe that was just the kind of nice guy Moore was.

According to West, people choose to become spies, secret agents and operatives for a handful reasons: loyalty to one’s country or an ideal; revenge; or to damage those whose secrets they sell and betray; and what West called a “bag of mixed psychological motivations.”

operatives are overly romantic thrill-seeking escapists with a need for control, a desire for power, narcissistic and conceited. They are empowered by the very secrets they harbor and their ability to conceal information, including about their own selves.

The handlers threaten to expose the operative for the very actions he or she was ordered to take in the first place. There is no getting out of the game, said West, “The bottom line is that you work for them forever.”

West’s colleagues warned of the devastating psychological effects professional imposters suffer, paranoia being one of the most frequent consequences.

The development of “noteworthy occupational maladjustment, psychiatric disturbances and unusual personality changes” is common, including symptoms associated with PTSD in varying degrees of severity and duration, such as extreme narcissism, confusion, psychosis, paranoia, disorientation, depersonalization, memory distortion, fleeting as well as longer lasting uncontrollable dissociative states, described as “out of context pseudo-identity reenactments” (a term coined by West). Also, “reappearance of false identity outside an operational context,” and simply “loss of self.”

Unbeknownst to conspiracy theorists everywhere, as a student at Oklahoma State University, McVeigh’s regular and trusted ‘therapist,’ Dr. John Smith (the only “shrink” he ever liked,) studied directly under none other than Dr. Louis Jolyon West.

There is considerable experimental evidence pointing to the significant role played by dissociative mechanisms in the production of the various phenomena of hypnosis. In fact, hypnosis may be considered a pure-culture, laboratory controlled dissociative reaction. Of the entire phenomenology of the various states described above, there is not one single manifestation which cannot be produced experimentally in the hypnotic subject.

Experiments involving altered personality function as a result of environmental manipulation (chiefly sensory isolation) have yielded promising leads in terms of suggestibility and the production of trance-like sates.

Like CIA-funded researchers Drs. George Estabrooks and Martin Orne, West advised the CIA about the creation of multiple personalities through hypnosis, post-hypnotic suggestion and amnesia, enhanced by mind-altering drugs like LSD and other methods such as electroshock and in combination with classical operant conditioning.

Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations. But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population [with] the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.171

Dr. William Kroger, bragged of having hypnotized Sirhan. One author noted that the final chapters of Kroger’s 1976 book, Hypnosis and Behavior Modification: Imaginary Conditioning, “describe the chilling possibilities offered by combining hypnosis with electrical stimulation of the brain, brain implants, and conditioning.”

Similar allusions were supposedly made by another Korean War-era MK ULTRA architect in the Los Angeles area, Dr. William J. Bryan. He was put on probation by the California Board Of Medical Examiners in 1969, after they learned of Bryan’s hypnosis and sexual abuse of a number of his female patients.

Among Delgado’s achievements was his shocking 1964 experiment involving placing a stimoceiver in the brain of a bull, controlling its aggressive rage and stopping it in mid-charge with the press of a button. Delgado also tested his brain implants on, among others, children and mental patients.184

The year before, in a 1969 memo written to the National Security Agency (NSA), Delgado, who by this time had greatly improved upon his stimoceiver, predicted the use of implantable two-way receiving/transmitting devices in the brain to send satellite-relayed messages, what the military now calls “synthetic telepathy.”

Delgado’s memos were pleas for funding. He believed, as outlined in his book published the same year (1969), Physical Control Of The Mind: Toward A Psychocivilized Society, that the ills of mankind could be cured through the establishment of a society of technological control in which brains were manipulated from cradle to grave.

In late 1971, a Senate Subcommittee chaired by Sam J. Ervin, Jr. began an investigation into “individual rights and the federal role in behavior modification.” The committee was catalyzed after realizing that several federally funded programs already under investigation pointed: “collectively to the emergence of a new technology of behavior control which posed serious questions [about the] protection of the constitutional rights of individuals.”189

The Hastings Center’s report detailing the conference explained that science now possessed technological surveillance methods and means to control mood, emotion, desire and ultimately, behavior; the methods to do so becoming “increasingly effective” at an “accelerating” rate. Included were “psychological conditioning techniques, psycho-pharmaceutical discoveries and neurological methods for controlling brain functions electronically or chemically [which] singly or in combination, conditioning, drugs, and brain implantations are the most important…”

If uncontrollable aggression can be flawlessly controlled, for instance, and the victim of it made happier thereby, then its political expression can be just as cured as its personal one, however – by the same technique – and the patient will be grateful afterwards, so who’s to object?” These technologies, their users, uses, and regulation touched upon issues of agency, free will, individual vs. collective good, and potentially likely political abuses when, after “some initial coercive step, consent can be flawlessly engineered.”

Another topic of discussion at the 1972 conference was the use and regulation of drugs as a method of control over both individuals and groups. Drugs, like biotechnologies, had definite, if controversial, military and political applications. Several participants supported the view that, rather than simply as agents of healing and pain management, the most effective use of such drugs were “as controlling agents when linked with other kinds of social and psychological pressures.” Dr. Wayne Evans, representing the U.S. Army Research Institute, spoke of “a developing capacity to deliver drugs to large numbers of the population at a time,” and specifically mentioned “anti-riot and anti-aggression gasses.”

West, “it is possible…to arouse violent reactions by applying minute electric stimulation [to deeply buried areas in the brain.]” and “to record bioelectrical changes in the brains of freely moving subjects, through the use of remote monitoring techniques.”

wanted to put “permanent radio receiver transmitters in the brains of parolees” linked to a computer. They could be perpetually tracked and monitored and if the computer detected the “probability of misbehavior,” an electrical shock would be sent straight to their brain and alert police to their whereabouts. As it stood, a number of prototype devices of this sort were already being field tested. Also included on the list was Dr. Ralph K. Schwizgebel, author of Psychotechnology: Electronic Control Of The Mind (1972), who “conducted substantial research into” and whose book described the present and potential use of brain implants to determine and control “the location, activities, and even thoughts” of individuals.205

Their 1974 report noted no less than 537 ongoing LEAA behavior modification initiatives. Further, West’s proposal contained no mention of ethical safeguards that would be established to protect the rights of test subjects. Why would it? He’d been working without such guidelines his entire career.

“Agency Panic,” an “intense anxiety about the apparent loss of autonomy or self-control.” The first of two major defining features of Agency Panic is an “uncertainty about the causes of individual actions,” sometimes manifesting in suspicions that external forces are controlling, "programing," or brainwashing the will of oneself or others. The second concerns the motive and means of the external controlling forces themselves, who are often identified as “large, and often vague, organizations,” on whose behalf the faceless controllers operate.224

Agency Panic is not a psychiatric diagnosis, however, but a cultural condition, an affliction of the masses born from technological and political realities or potentialities.

But, as others have pointed out, the U.S. government’s fomenting of this fear acted itself as a strategic fiction that, among other things, shielded their own development of advanced mind control methods and technologies and the testing and use of these on U.S. citizens. This “Cold War duplicity” had the effect of dissociating the public’s knowledge of the state from its actual workings, replacing fact and history with implanted screen memories and skewed perceptions.225

“Because the chains that bind us were forged imperceptibly, link by link, we submitted.”

by Ronald K. Siegel, PhD, esteemed experimental psychology researcher at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, who happened to be a close colleague of Dr. West. The book, Whispers: The Voices Of Paranoia, offers several case studies of Siegel’s interaction with and study of paranoics throughout his career, at least three of which seem to have found their way into BUG.

Finally, Siegel documents several individuals who have come to believe that bugs have infiltrated their bodies, self-mutilate in an attempt to stop the bugs, and in some cases, are able to convince people close to them that the bugs are real and have targeted them too. In one case, a man who believes his bugs originated from the machinations of secretive government agencies, kills himself in front of his family.