Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder (12 page)

“What do I say?”

“You say that … you say that I went away to work for two weeks, that's all. Tell her I will be back with money. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Where is she and your brother?”

He shrugged.

Puhlman pulled up in front and blew the horn.

“It's the fat man. I have to go.”

“Can I call you?”

“No. Two weeks.” He kissed his brother on the cheek. “Two weeks and things will be good, better than they have ever been for us.”

 

CHAPTER

16

Borger used Itani's absence to add to notes he'd made that would be included in his report once the exercise was completed. He was in the midst of that when he received a call from his CIA contact, the psychiatrist Colin Landow.

“How is it going?” Landow asked. He was calling from a Dallas hotel after having met with the project's moneymen.

“Very well. He's even more perfect than I'd hoped for. He'll be staying here at the house for a few weeks, plenty of time to prepare him.”

“A few weeks is too long, Sheldon. We've chosen a date eleven days from now, in D.C.”

“Oh?”

Borger leaned back in his office chair and did a quick mental calculation. He'd assumed that the project's culmination would occur in San Francisco during a campaign stop there by George Mortinson. Shifting it to Washington would mean transporting Itani there and setting him up. That gave Borger nine days at the most to accomplish what he needed to.

“Is that a problem?” Landow asked in his New England–tinged voice.

“No, it's not a problem, Colin. Of course there's the logistics of getting him there and—”

“That will be taken care of. Your responsibility is to have him prepared.”

Borger bristled at being told his responsibilities. He'd grown increasingly disenchanted with Landow over the past few years, resenting his imperious tone and need to remind Borger of the obvious.

“He'll be fully prepared,” Borger said flatly.

“Good. I'm coming to San Francisco tomorrow, staying overnight. Do you have dinner plans?”

“I planned on working with him every possible moment.”

“I'm sure you can spare a few hours for me.”

“Yes, I'm free for dinner.”

“Good. I'll call from the hotel. I'll be at the Hyatt on the Embarcadero.”

Borger heard the click on Landow's end.

Borger went to the window and looked out over the grounds. He'd been contemplating bowing out of the program for a while now. Had the time come? It seemed to him that it probably had.

*   *   *

Although he had joined the program late in its history, the quest for creating the perfect spy or messenger had been under way since the mid-1950s when then CIA director Allen Dulles persuaded Harold Wolff, a friend and prominent Cornell neuropsychiatrist and an expert on stress, to examine returning American prisoners of war who had served in Korea. The goal was to uncover brainwashing that these POWs might have undergone. Working through a CIA-funded front, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, later renamed the Human Ecology Fund, Wolff and others delved deeply into brainwashing techniques used by the North Koreans.

While the original purpose of the research was defensive in nature, it soon became evident to those involved that many of the same techniques used by the North Koreans—and the Russians—could be utilized to program and manipulate Americans for, as the project's founders proclaimed, “the national good.”

The research quickly escalated to include hundreds of scientists working at many of the nation's leading hospitals and universities, few of whom were aware that their financing came from the CIA. (Forty-four top universities around the country were eventually informed by the CIA in 1977 that scientific research conducted at their facilities had been, in fact, agency-funded.)

But that tip-of-the-hat demonstration of transparency in no way slowed the agency's ongoing and secretive investigations into means of controlling individuals. Large-scale programs with names such as ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA, and BLUEBIRD heralded an expansion of research, with unwitting American citizens the human guinea pigs.

Did the clandestine, sometimes brutal, and even deadly nature of these experiments prick the consciences of the doctors and scientists involved? For some, the money justified everything and anything. For others, a perverted sense of patriotism salved their guilt.

In Sheldon Borger's case, on rare occasions he questioned whether using the power of hypnosis for other than legitimate treatment of needy patients was appropriate. He wondered if making nefarious use of the pioneering work of such giants in the field as Herbert Spiegel and his HIP test was justified. But such flashes of conscience didn't last long. As far as Borger was concerned, University of Illinois psychologist Charles Osgood summed up a defense of the practice: “If we had to do only things that would be safe when other people use them, there would be very little—damn little—we could do in science.”

Borger often told colleagues who questioned the work they did, “Look, we invented atomic energy. It can be used to light a city or blow it up. It's not up to us to question what use our research findings are put to.”

Borger never lost a night's sleep over it.

Nevertheless, he debated internally whether the time was coming for him to withdraw. The assassination of presidential candidate George Mortinson, using a killer he'd personally programmed, would be the touchstone of his long career. Not only would he prove the potency of hypnosis, he would also make America a better place by ridding it of the likes of Mortinson. After that, his work would be done. He deserved a nice long rest.

*   *   *

He returned to his desk and finished determining the schedule for working with Itani. He was cognizant, of course, that things could go wrong. Although Itani appeared to be the perfect hypnotic subject, Borger had seen others in that class fall apart during programming. It was his thesis that those situations resulted from a wrong move on the part of the hypnotist, and he pledged to himself that he would exercise the utmost caution in his approach. He'd had great success with Sheila Klaus, and from everything he'd heard and read, the amnesia he'd programmed into her had held. She'd proved to be an excellent subject, but it was his judgment that Itani was even better. Shelia's misplaced and unrequited love for Mark Sedgwick had generated anger at him in her. It was important that the subject already be angry with the selected victim, and Borger had sensed Sheila's unhappiness with her therapist the first time Sedgwick had brought her to San Francisco and to the Lightpath Clinic.

Once the word came down that Sedgwick was to be eliminated, Borger wondered whether he would have to “change the visual” with Sheila to cause her to kill Sedgwick. Borger had lectured on that technique many times to young medical students who'd chosen psychiatry as their specialty. He'd explained to them that it was almost impossible to prompt someone under hypnosis to violate his or her core beliefs. He used as an example high school males who'd heard that they could use hypnosis to convince a pretty co-ed to remove her clothing. That was unlikely—unless the girl was already eager to undress for the school's football star. But it was possible under hypnosis to convince the young woman that she was alone in a very warm room and needed to undress to be comfortable.

Another example was telling a wife under hypnosis to shoot her husband when he came through the door. That wouldn't work with a loving wife. But she could be programmed to believe that when the door opened, it wasn't her husband coming through it. Instead it was a rabid bear intent upon killing her.

As it turned out, it wasn't necessary to apply that technique to Sheila Klaus. Her pique at having her sexual and romantic overtures to Sedgwick rebuffed was sufficient. The problem was that murdering someone, anyone, wasn't compatible with her basic beliefs. That's where her “second personality” came in handy.

During his sessions with Sheila, Sedgwick had uncovered another personality within her, an imaginary childhood friend she called Carla. Using hypnosis, he'd reinforced this alter ego to the extent that Carla could be easily summoned by him. While Sheila was basically a passive person, she turned to Carla as the tough one, the person who would right the wrongs Sheila perceived as being perpetrated against her.

Sheila often demonstrated this second personality when Sedgwick brought her to San Francisco to participate in trials at Lightpath. Borger was delighted to see this imaginary person in her life and focused on further developing Carla. In doing so—and without Sedgwick's knowledge—he injected himself into Sheila's life as her second “control,” someone whom she, and Carla, would obey without question. When Borger was told that it was necessary to get rid of Sedgwick, he instructed Sheila (and Carla) to stop seeing her therapist in Washington, which she did. She was then programmed to make two more trips to San Francisco without Sedgwick, during which Borger applied constant reinforcement of her negative feelings toward Sedgwick and the need for Carla to take revenge. Sheila had been given a code to which she would respond when back in Washington, a telephone call during which the caller would say, “It's a beautiful day for a cruise.” That brought Carla to the fore, who did as instructed. Carla walked out of Sheila's house to a white Buick sedan that had been delivered and parked in the driveway. She got behind the wheel, drove to Virginia Avenue, waited for Sedgwick to cross the street, and ran him down. She then returned the car to Sheila's home, where the man who'd delivered it got behind the wheel and drove away. Once Borger had been informed that Sedgwick was dead, he called Sheila and said, “The cruise has been canceled.” She instantly came out of her trance state and had no memory whatsoever of any aspect of what had happened, including her visits to Borger and Carla's violent act against Mark Sedgwick.

Borger knew, of course, that there would come a day when Sheila Klaus would have to be eliminated to ensure that her amnesia was truly permanent. There was always the threat that she'd end up with someone else who practiced hypnosis and have her programming undone.

But that was not his concern at that moment. Once his work with Iskander Itani was completed, he would bow out of the program. Sheila Klaus would be
their
problem.

His only concern at the moment was to turn Itani into the perfect assassin, and he had nine days to do it.

 

CHAPTER

17

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Meg Whitson, chief of staff to George Mortinson, aspirant for the presidency of the United States, had arrived at the candidate's D.C. campaign office at six that morning and was in a meeting five minutes later with key members of her staff.

“I can't believe that he's taking the day off,” a staffer said, throwing up his hands in desperation.

“Oh, come on, John,” Whitson said. “I'm just surprised that it hasn't happened more times than this.”

Mortinson often proved exasperating to his staff. He was brilliant. He was photogenic. He could deliver a stirring speech to rival Obama, Reagan, or Kennedy. He was also too nonchalant in the eyes of those who had guided him to this pinnacle in his political career.

“I've been working on that interview with Diane Sawyer that could have come off later today.”

“Good thing you hadn't finalized it,” was Whitson's terse reply. “Look,” she said, “we all know that the guy needs his downtime. Remember what Gene McCarthy said when he was running?”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. He said every president should take a day off a week to read poetry or listen to music. Look where
that
got him.”

Whitson sighed and pushed away a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. “Can we shelve this?” she asked. “He's made up his mind to take a day off, and that's that.”

She turned to another at the meeting, a Secret Service agent with a shaved head who was in charge of the detail assigned to protect the candidate. “Anything new on those latest threats?” she asked.

“Yeah, there is. We traced the latest one to some loopy chicken farmer in Missouri who blames the senator for the price of eggs going down.” He grinned. “The FBI has retained him for further questioning. If he hadn't talked about burying the senator underneath his chicken coop, he would have been ignored. We've gotten a lot more, though. Every time Senator Mortinson makes a speech, they come pouring in. That talk he gave yesterday about how you can only judge a society by the way it treats its less fortunate and vulnerable really opened the floodgates. But that's not the real problem. Can anybody here rein him in? Every time he works a crowd, he puts the pressure on us, especially with his spur-of-the-moment decisions.”

The staffer who'd complained about losing a potential Sawyer interview laughed. “Lots of luck,” he said. “Senator Mortinson really does march to his own drummer. Drives us nuts.”

The Secret Service agent consulted a clipboard. “All we've been told about today is that he's playing tennis at eleven at the Sutton Racquet Club on New Mexico with a friend, a law professor at GW, Mackensie Smith, and lunch with him after the match at Chef Geoff's downtown. That jibe with what you have?”

Whitson nodded and said, “Chef Geoff's. He likes the burgers there.”

The agent continued reading from his notes. “He and Mrs. Mortinson are having dinner at seven with this same friend and his wife, Mrs. Annabel Lee-Smith, and another couple from Wisconsin, a Mr. and Mrs. Morey, Jack and Maria. At least he's chosen the restaurant for dinner in advance, Bistro Bis in the Hotel George. He doesn't always. The Smiths were cleared long ago. We're checking out the Moreys now. The restaurants are being swept.”

Whitson laughed. “Bistro Bis,” she said, “where he'll have steak tartare, his favorite.”