December 8, 2020 marked the 40th anniversary of John Lennon being killed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as he was returning to the Dakota apartment building in which he lived, at West 72nd Street and Central Park West.
Yet, over 40 years after the former Beatles super-star musician and rock songwriter was murdered, many U.S. music fans, who question the Establishment media’s “official story” of how and why JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and RFK were slain in the 1960’s, also question its “official story” of how and why Lennon and some other celebrity musicians ended up dying before they reached the age of 50 years.
So Protest Folk Magazine recently asked the producer of the documentary film (and book) Drugs As Weapons Against Us: The CIA War On Musicians And Activists, John Potash, to share his thoughts with readers in an email interview. Potash has discussed his work on C-Span’s American History TV, A&E, RT, The Real News Network, and The Reelz Channel, along with over a hundred radio programs in the U.S. and abroad.
In a 1993 book then-University of Massachusetts Political Science Professor and Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Archives Chair Philip Melanson wrote about the June 4, 1968 elimination of New York State’s then-representative in the U.S. Senate, RFK, titled Who Killed Robert Kennedy?, he noted that “William Turner and John Christian in their 1978 book The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy…say” that the convicted assassin of RFK, Sirhan Sirhan, “was programmed by an expert or experts working for, or in the shadow of US intelligence’.” And a former arts editor of the Santa Cruz Sun, Mark Zepezauer, wrote in his 1994 book, The CIA’s Greatest Hits: “There’s evidence Sirhan was treated by a CIA-linked shrink” and “the Los Angeles coroner’s report states that RFK was killed from behind, while everyone agrees that Sirhan Sirhan…was at least three feet in front of him” and “Sirhan claims to have no memory of shooting at RFK.” Do you think there’s any possibility that the person convicted of killing John Lennon, Mark Chapman, may have been “programmed by an expert or experts working for, or in the shadow of, US intelligence"?
JOHN POTASH: Drugs As Weapons Against Us has a section on Robert F. Kennedy. The book and film have more information on the focus on the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra which was the use of drugs for “unconventional warfare” against American and European dissidents. That RFK section and another section includes much evidence supporting that the CIA used drugs and hypnosis to turn Sirhan Sirhan into RFK’s assassin, with the help of other shooters.
As previously stated [in part 1 of this email interview], Fenton Bresler presented a book full of evidence detailing the support for his conclusion that the CIA used hypnosis and drugs to turn Mark David Chapman into an assassin. The U.S. Senate Church Committee’s investigative documents, and those found on MK-Ultra (though CIA Director shredded 90% of MK-Ultra documents), show their successful work with the use of hypnosis and drugs at creating hypnotized assassins. Law professor Alan Scheflin has published details on this topic in his book, The Mind Manipulators.
Another researcher, Professor Peter Dale Scott, also said that Mark David Chapman went through CIA-developed behavior modification at Castle Memorial Hospital when he lived for a time in Hawaii. A ‘former’ CIA agent, Angelo Galante, headed New York’s Bureau of Special Services and the CIA trained police units in various cities. Furthermore, Lt. Arthur O’Connor headed the New York police district of one million people, where Lennon had lived. He told Fenton Bresler that he studied Chapman intensely and he “looked like he could have been programmed, and I know what you’re going to make of that word! That was the way he looked and that was the way he talked.” O’Connor was the second police officer to make that assessment.
This supports some of Bresler’s other evidence, including a police officer training Chapman in shooting and then giving him the hollow point bullets with which he killed Lennon.
How would you respond to the claim, by one “CIA Conspiracy Denialist” and folk music radio show producer/host on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded and corporate-sponsored WUMB radio station in New England, that “if our government had wanted to `eliminate’” Lennon, “they would have done it in the late `60s, when he was a powerful voice, loudly associating himself with radicals, like John Sinclair, who were calling for violent revolution;” but, “by 1980, he was almost entirely apolitical” and “he had never been saner, more stable, more domestic—or less political;” and this WUMB radio show host’s questioning whether there is “ANY evidence” that an `ex CIA operative’ had any involvement with Lennon, or his death”?
JOHN POTASH: I presented some of the key evidence regarding Jose Sanjenis Perdomo’s CIA work and aid in the murder of John Lennon above [in previously posted part 1 of this interview]. Regarding the use of the term "conspiracy", New York University Media Professor Mark Crispin Miller has presented the CIA document from the 1960s that outlined their plan to use the term “conspiracy” to try and smear anyone criticizing the absurd Warren Commission report on President John Kennedy’s assassination. Comedians, such as Mort Sahl and Woody Allen, talked about it as “a fine book”, but that they’d like to read the non-fiction report on the president’s assassination, too. Even the apolitical Seinfeld tv show was able to ridicule the Warren Commission’s magic bullet theory with the “magic loogie” incident regarding New York Yankee Keith Hernandez in “The Boyfriend,” episode.
Regarding the idea, ‘why didn’t the CIA kill John Lennon when he was younger,’ that takes a longer explanation, which is done in my work. To try and paraphrase my book and film in a sentence or two, one of MK-Ultra’s major subprojects appeared to be the targeting of popular musicians in general. As one of the CIA documents stated as a tactic, “use narcotics” on them.
I show the evidence that part of MK-Ultra’s use of drugs for “unconventional warfare” involved manipulating musicians to promote drugs to the burgeoning tide of activist young adults. They did this to accomplish what former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark told me was the government’s goal of “using drugs to sedate and divide the masses.” My work shows that it further diverted the masses of Civil Rights and antiwar protesters, while hurting their best thinking and organizing abilities.
An example of this came from author A.E. Hotchner, a former editor for Ernest Hemingway, who stated in his book Blown Away, that MK-Ultra Assistant Director Robert Lashbrook came to London in January of 1965 and instructed his agents to get acid in as many musicians hands as possible. Lennon’s first acid trip came from having his coffee dosed without his knowledge by George Harrison’s dentist. Mick Jagger’s first hit came in 1967 from the “acid king” David Schneidermann, whom London’s Daily Mail said was both an FBI and MI5 undercover agent.
I show the evidence that when many of these musicians, such as Lennon, Tupac Shakur, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain, started sobering up and getting more into leftist activism, they were murdered. I show evidence suggesting U.S. Intelligence involvement in all of these murders.
Regarding John Lennon in particular, he reported having a hard time performing publicly when he had become most radical, in the early 1970s, stating that LSD had given him so many bad trips. I show the evidence that acid contributed to his intense panic attacks before performances. Lennon talked about this in interviews I found. By the late 1970s, he’d mostly sobered up, getting back into activism [as previously mentioned in part 1 of this interview], and he was about to get his full American citizenship.
When some New York City media outlets produced news show segments to mark the 40th anniversary in December 2020 of Lennon’s death on the Upper West Side, were you invited by many local NYC radio show producers or hosts of NPR-affiliated stations, like WNYC, or by the Democracy Now! radio and cable-tv show, to discuss what your “Drugs As Weapons Against Us” film and book exposed about “The CIA War On Musicians and Activists”? And if not, why do you think local NYC radio or tv stations might not want to encourage their listeners or viewers to watch your film or read your book in 2021?
JOHN POTASH: I was lucky to get a good public relations agent to help me when my book first came out. That helped me get onto some major syndicated radio programs, including, Coast to Coast, Pacifica Radio’s program hosted by Gary Null, and Alan Handleman’s Rock Talk. But mainstream media, and even purported alternative media, have become massively controlled, either by multinational corporations or massive foundations backed by the America’s wealthiest families.
All of my work includes sections on this topic. I give examples that include the fact that Cal-Berkeley School of Journalism Dean Ben Bagdikian wrote the book, The Media Monopoly, exposing how virtually all of mainstream media has interlocking boards of directors with the top multinational corporations. He also said that by corporate law, the media company is not supposed to act in ways that hurt the profit of the interlocked corporation. Thus, the conflict with defense contracting companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc. Senator Bernie Sanders held a press conference repeating Bagdikian’s work, citing how over six multinational corporations control over 90% of our information as of 2012.
The U.S. Senate Church Committee had also published in their report how well over 400 members of the media lived dual lives in their work for the CIA. These included virtually all the owners of top media companies. Watergate muckraker Carl Bernstein published a seminal Rolling Stone article about this titled “The CIA and the Media.”
Are you planning to produce any future documentary films?
JOHN POTASH: My next documentary film project is on Eugenics and the Pandemic. It’s meant to have many dark comedy sections. For more information on all my work, feel free to see www.johnpotash.com. (end of interview)
 |
| John Lennon performing at Free John Sinclair concert and rally in 1971 |
