MIND CONTROL SERIES Ryerson CKLN Radio in Toronto: Producer Wayne Morris interviews Ronald Howard Cohen part 2 Week 8 in a Series of Broadcasts CKLN FM 88.1 in Toronto WAYNE MORRIS: Good morning. You have tuned in to The International Connection on 88.l. We are in Week 8 of the radio series about mind control. Today you are listening to Part 2 of the story of Ronald Howard Cohen, a writer and activist who was abducted by the CIA and U.S. military and severely drugged as part of Project MKULTRA. He has pursued finding out why this has happened and attempted to get some justice. We will hear his story about writing a book and finding out about the government's interference in suppressing the book from being published. Now, Ronald Howard Cohen. RONALD HOWARD COHEN: The most reassuring thing that came out during the Carter Administration without me going to the files and dragging all that stuff out, is that, "Thank God. I am not nuts. I am not alone. This really happened." That was solid. The next turn of events which was very large was Ronald Reagan (... please I ask you to control me if I start getting angry and annoyed at Mr. Reagan. I would like to stay even-toned.) With Reagan, what had been done ... the intelligence community was very upset because Carter put in a bunch of lawyers and said you guys have got to deal with a bunch of stuff but before you go out and do this stuff, run it through with these guys. The ego of the people involved in all of that was like, "... we'll do whatever the hell we want ..." The thing is, Carter got out and Reagan got in. There was a very good article in a magazine called The Progressive, I was back in New York at that time ... the title was "Back in the Saddle Again". What Reagan said to them was like, "Carter hung you out to dry? ...write your ticket." When you send in requests for things through Freedom of Information, I try and establish a relationship with the librarians, and also when I write to senators for stuff like that, or congress people ... I not only write to their Washington office, but I write to their state office. I was raised by a union politician in NYC, in the plumber's union ... Reagan ... when you sent in requests then ... forget it ... you didn't get any information. WAYNE MORRIS: Were you able to get a significant amount of information through Carter? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: Through it all ... through Reagan and Bush ... I am a damn good researcher. I am also persistent as hell. I will go eyeball to eyeball. I was divorced, and the book "TRANSGRESSION" was written. It covered the drugging. I knew from having lived in New York as a young bohemian ... you want to get published? Which parties do you get invited to? 57th Street and Fifth Avenue ... you want to get published, you have to move back to New York. I got an agent in New York. The agent is very interesting. I was very flattered. She was an older woman and one of her clients (she knew many famous and influential people). One of her clients was Upton Sinclair who had written a book called "The Jungle", which was about the meat-packing industry in Chicago. A very working class writer. That's my orientation from a literary point of view, basically a working class novelist. I had the agent, and the book was going around New York. I had to get my day job. You have to survive as an artist in this society. All of a sudden, I start getting mail from CISPES -- Nicaraugua is going on, El Salvador ... I was attending meetings, I was very functional, taking care of business. Coming in from Canada, getting an agent, getting my book published, I was going to get back to Canada. My stuff was in a small town in Vermont ... in a storage facility in Vermont called Bradelborough, Vt. That was all my belongings. I was living in Chelsea, around the 23rd Street, West side area. I was very cautious. New York is heavy turf. You gotta know what you're doing, take care of business, and stay very focused and centered. I knew that. I knew what I was doing. WAYNE MORRIS: So at this point the book was completely written? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: It was written. It was at an agent. It was being shown around publishing houses. WAYNE MORRIS: Just to clarify. All your manuscripts, all your documentation ... RONALD HOWARD COHEN: 25 years worth of work, along with everything else a person (... my pots and pans, my sheets and towels ...) everything, including all of the writing, is in cardboard cartons and two trunks. There is quite a bit of writing ... in Bradelborough, Vt. I was sort of tentative ... I basically felt, I want to be back in Canada ... well, if New York works out ... I have documentation from Landed Immigrancy and Citizen- ship and all that from both countries. The thing is I am there. What this leads into ... for lack of a better term, I had two mind-blowing set-up situations. Here I am in New York looking for a day job while my agent is trying to peddle my work about cover operations of the FBI, the CIA and U.S. army intelligence on U.S. citizens. Well, I tell you ... Joe reads this, and he calls Sam upstairs, and he calls Harriet and they say, "Who the hell is Ronald Howard Cohen, and what is this book all about?" WAYNE MORRIS: These are publishers you are talking about ... RONALD HOWARD COHEN: >From my understanding of operations of the intelligence community is that they are in all avenues of the corporate military industrial interlock ... and the media ... including the New York Times. The thing is, what you do is, if you want people to know what's what, you train them, you say, "Very nice. Go back to your job." They become literary agents, or they become editors at book publishers ... whatever field of endeavour they are in. You have to be very cautious about what you are doing. This is all based on somewhat factual but still conjecture ... I don't really know what's going on ... but if there's somebody functioning in this profession ... you can find out whatever the hell you want. I was working at a temporary agency ... temporary office work in New York ... to see how quickly the book would sell and I could get out of there. From a personal standpoint, the thing that is important to me is that I had all this documentation, but I had never had any contact with a person who had this done to them, or anything similar. I had never had it confirmed from an authoritative source ... so I was on pretty flimsy ground. A lot of what I had was answers to my Freedom of Information requests and other books I had read, research, etc. I go to this real estate management office, I get a temporary job. I have some bookkeeping, accounting, clerical skills. I did a job on 6th or 7th Avenue around 45th, 46th Street, near Times Square. I put on my suit, do my 9 to 5 gig. I come into this place, there's this guy, such a cliche, heavyset, very intellectual, smoking a pipe, has a beard. We talked for about an hour and a half ... I haven't done any work. He is telling me how he has a girlfriend and she is in Russia. Then we go into the Boardroom, lovely Boardroom, comfortable leather plush chairs ... making coffee in the back, drinks out there. Very nice. Sit down. Two guys come in. There are stacks of papers around. The guy I had been talking to says the other two guys are from a temporary agency, they have been here for a while, they will tell me what to do. They look at each other, and sit down. I start checking these guys. One sits at the head of the table and the other sits at his righthand side. I am down the table on the lefthand side. I am working away, and they are not really working. I look up at them and the one at the head of the table says "You don't have to do that shit, man. Don't worry you'll get paid for it." I said "Who are you?" He said, "I'm with the FBI." I get a chill, a little nervous. This is not your common, everyday experience. I look at the other guy and say, "And who are you with, the CIA?" He says, "Yeah. We just want to talk." The guy at the head of the table says, "I'm from New Orleans and I came up here to talk with you." The other guy didn't say where he was from. He said "I'm an actor." (As well as the CIA?) "I didn't get a part in "Witness". You remember there was a commercial movie ... an undercover operation. The guy from the CIA pointed to the guy from the FBI and said "we have just met". They gave me a name, and I started scribbling stuff down and I saw them rushing me, and I thought "scribble when you get out of here". I am not only outraged, I am really fucking nervous. I have never had this happen to me before. I wasn't prepared for it. I just felt like I want to get the hell out of here, how can I get out of here. Maybe they were going to abduct me a second time. The guy says, "Maybe we can work something out. You have a book out ... come on, we know." I got up and I said, "I have to think about this. I am going home. I am going to be here tomorrow. You both will be here tomorrow?" "You will be paid for the full day and we will be here tomorrow." I got home and I had a cup of mint tea, I didn't trust myself with Scotch. I put some calming music on. I called up the temporary agency that had sent me to this job. I told them a really strange thing had happened at the job that day. The woman said, "Uh uh, what was that?" I said, "Well these two guys identified themselves as working for the U.S. government." She said (right out of her lips, she said ...) "They told you what we do?" End of conversation. She said, "Are you going back?" I said, "I am thinking about it." Wow lady, welcome to big league baseball. I took a walk. Came back and thought "far out, let's do the game." I wore dungaree tough-guy clothes the next day, took my tape recorder, and they are both sitting there ... in their suits. At one point, I guess I was being glib, trying to find a basis for taking it seriously. One guy says to me, "Well, what do you want? Well your book isn't going to get published ..." I said, "Oh yeah. How about a job at the New York Times." They looked at each other like, "that's all he wants?" I said, "Listen you stupid sons of bitches I'll tell you what I want. I want truth and justice. Next, both of you, I want both of you to take a flying fuck at the moon and I'm out of here and you can send the fucking cheque." I walked out of there. I had, to them, crossed a line. I had gotten to their macho. They wanted to make me a deal I couldn't refuse. I'm being a wise ass and telling them to go fuck themselves. WAYNE MORRIS: After you told them to take a hike, did they contact you again? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: Yeah. They did. There were three set-up situations. That was the first. I got in touch with my agent who said I sent it to a couple of houses but it came back. I have to work day jobs ... she said, "you won't be the first". I had enough of the suit and tie business, so I got a job packing crap in a warehouse, in the garment district. This is right after the real estate company temporary job. Packing different imported leather goods... between 7th and 9th Avenue in Manhatten. Again it's a temporary service, manual labour. I've got my workboots on, my sweatshirt, and I'm doing manual labour. There were six or seven other temps, all black. The intelligence community hires people from all different types of groups... They arrived in the warehouse. Now we come to death-threat time. It's lunchtime. I am trying to maintain my cool. Maybe I should go up to Vermont. I take my brown bag and my thermos and I go off in the corner and I am having lunch. This smaller type fellow (about 5'4", lightweight, strong, no fat on him, he had mentioned about the Marines) comes over and says, "Can we talk?" He said, "Well, you know, I came from Hawaii to talk with you." I said, "Ah fuck. Who are you with?" He said, "With Army intelligence. Stay cool. I just want to talk. Want to talk about Indianapolis and Indiana." Here was the first time -- solid confirmation. I really wasn't nuts. This really happened. "Look, I don't think I want to talk to you. I just want justice. I don't think I'm going to get that talking to you." He says, "I've got somebody I have to report to." I said, "Okay, you do your trip man, but I am telling you if you think I've got anything to talk to you folks about, I've written it all out, okay? And I told you what I wanted, truth and justice. Leave me alone. I need the money, I just want to do this job. I am leaving New York. Just leave me alone." He got up and said, "Okay, we'll leave you alone." Well, this fellow was not alone. The other fellow ... they didn't have to cover their cover anymore ... this got more like football locker room type of subtle dialogue ... with the boxes throwing back and forth. We're going up a back elevator, wooden, creaking up old elevator, with all the boxes. You're squeezed up against all the boxes, unload it at the warehouse, shelve it, and then it's time to go home. I didn't know what these two guys wanted ... my feeling was, "We sent you the businessmen, the nice guys, what do you want to see, we got other guys?" WAYNE MORRIS: Did you feel that all of your co-workers at that time were keeping an eye on you? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: Absolutely. Not only all 7 of them, but also the people at the company. We almost had a choice, whether we wanted to work or not. The managers were civilians, if I can use that term. There were times when these guys and I were just talking. We weren't doing any work. If it was really a legitimate gig, somebody would have been coming over saying, "Hey you're getting paid. Get back to work." That's not what happened. We had the run of the place. One morning I came in and this guy said, "Hey Ronnie. Did you ever hear of G. Gordon Liddy?" I said, "Oh yeah. I think I heard about him. Isn't he the guy who busted Leary on acid the first time up in Millbrook, right? I knew some people who used to hang out with Leary." This guy says, and he lit his lighter, "Do you think it's true that he put his hand over the flame?" And then he shut it off. He was going to show me he could do it too and burn his flesh. We're riding up in this elevator. There's two guys in the back and one of them says, "What do you think of that Licence to Kill shit?" The other one says, "I don't use that much." I just thought, oh boy. Play hardball. I just said, "Are we going to unload the boxes or what?" I came home. I had really had enough of New York. I got my paycheque. I had had it. The phone rings. I was foolish. I didn't jot down this fellow's name but I was off-centre. Nervous. This guy says, "I'm so and so. I'm an editor at New York Times Sunday Magazine section." (You remember I had been foolishly jesting about get me a job at New York Times ... this was about two weeks after that.) WAYNE MORRIS: Had you sent your resume to the New York Times? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: No. This guy says, "We at the New York Times, we're very well connected. We have a lot of different people. New York City, we're always looking for very talented people. We have some people working in employments, environments, places like that. I've seen a copy of your resume. Would you like to come in for an interview?" I said, "Hey man, I wouldn't miss it for the world." I want to read a segment from my book, "TRANSGRESSIONS" ... "I didn't want to feel fear or awe but I did. I was going to an interview at the New York Times, the paper of record. It was hard not to be impressed. I took the subway up to 42nd Street and Times Square and walked over to 43rd Street. The Times building ran the entire block from 7th to 8th Avenue. There was a workman's style cafe across from the Times and I decided to sip on a cup of coffee for a few minutes. I still had about a quarter of an hour til my appointment ... I entered the jammed elevator and watched for my floor to light up on an indicator above the floor. I was still nervous. Even on this crowded elevator the air itself seemed to be thinning out, bringing everything into focus, making details distinct. I was entering some sort of center of power. It will be all right, I told myself, as soon as you actually meet this guy you will be all right. Mr. Berg is just one more human. My floor arrived and I got off the elevator. There was another reception desk right ahead of me with the sign saying, "The Sunday Times Magazine" on the wall behind it. I told the man sitting there that I had an appointment with a Mr. Berg and he lifted the receiver of the phone on his desk and he announced me, "A Mr. Rosen is here to see you Mr. Berg." ... He comes out and he says, "Why don't we talk up in the cafeteria?" We walk down the hall there to the employees' cafeteria. Almost all of the many tables in the cafeteria were empty. There was a good food serving area off to the side and Mr. Berg started to walk towards it. "Grab a seat towards the back table will you? That one back there looks good. How do you take your coffee?" I told him, and I went way down the room to the table he had pointed to. There sure wasn't any chance of our conversation being overheard. I looked at the leaves of a potted plant waving from the effects of the circulating air or air conditioning. My nervousness had disappeared. This was some interview. The man seemed ready to give me the store. I was terribly confused. ... (he comes back, we chitchat) ... "I guess you know the Sunday Magazine gets one hell of a lot of copy that's filled with some so-called facts and needs some careful checking. Do you ever do that sort of work?" "I always like to check my facts," I smiled at him. "Good," he smiled back. "A very good policy." He looked down at my resume for a while, and then he looked at me. We both sipped at our coffee. "We've got a slot that pays $45,000 a year." My face must have shown how much that figure struck me. "I know that the smaller places don't pay that sort of scale, but this is The Times. I don't know how my co-worker will take to taking on someone new right now, I will have to check with her." I looked around the almost-deserted cafeteria for a minute, and I sighed deeply. As I looked down the room to a table where a woman and two men sat chatting, they were talking together like comrades. In my soul, I wanted to be sitting there, to be one of them. So at an out-of-the-way back table, in a nice, clean cafeteria, I came to decision time. I couldn't do it. Dammit all to hell, I couldn't do it. "Mr. Berg, can I ask you something? What's going on here? I mean I don't have the credentials for this job. Most of my resume is sheer fluff and gunsmoke, I'm pretty sure you can see that." He nodded and looked straight at me, feeling, I am sure, ten times more uncomfortable than he had been only a few minutes before. Obviously I was going to turn out to be a real character. Of course I am thrilled at coming across an opportunity like that. If I had come upon it honestly I'd be jumping all over the place. But I can't do anything until I know what is really going on. "I don't know what to say," Mr. Berg replied. "I know that about ten years ago a Senate Committee said that the CIA and some newspapers were involved with each other, but I thought that had all stopped." Mr. Berg didn't like the sound of the word "CIA" but he reacted like an editor who had spent his life checking facts and sifting through them. "Yes, in the 1970's I believe it was 15 newspapers, a dozen major book publishing companies, about 400 writers and journalists, if I remember correctly." He grimaced and continued, "If I remember correctly," he said staring at me, "some fellows have found it all to be very lucrative. All of that has gone on all the time I've been here and I've been here for some time. There never seems to be a problem recruiting people. I personally think it is all a very dangerous practice but others say it is the only way to know which whore is trying to take a piss on you." "Do you feel that way?" "I believe in accuracy," he said, and our discussion was over. (end book excerpt) WAYNE MORRIS: How close is that to what really happened? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: Oh that was pretty close! Oh yeah. You gotta keep in mind what I have now done. I told them to take a hike, and then they offer me a $45,000 gig. I am not going to take a bribe. I am a real yeuch to their community ... they are being "nice" and they just told me there is no freedom of the press, and my book isn't going to get published, but they are going to get me a job at the New York Times. I get in touch with my agent who was never able to sell the book, and we finally parted company. She gave up. I told my agent I am going back to Canada and I am going to get re-located there, and we will stay in touch by phone and mail. I went back to Canada and I got the same feeling I always did when I crossed the border, "Oh thank God!" For whatever you got going here ... at least is to some degree rational ... I took a whole process where I got an apartment in Toronto, got some furniture but all my stuff is stored in Vermont. I hire a moving man to drive down to Bradelborough, Vt. to get my life's work and my possessions and bring it back to Toronto. Very nice moving guy ... he and his girlfriend ... we drove down in his van ... we had lunch in Bradelborough ... nice town ... sort of a wine and cheese and cracker place with ski lodges etc. for people who are academics at Harvard and MIT ... My belongings were stored at Hillwinds Farm which was a farm with a very big barn that had been converted into storage facilities. We bring the van through the front where the horses came in ... it's like paddocks that are now storage facilities ... There's a caretaker who lives on the premises and every month I would pay the rent there, and to some degree had a correspondence with the people there ... I go to open my lock on my storage unit, and it's not my lock. I went over to the caretaker's facility and I go, "What's with the lock?" She said, "Mr. Cohen, I know you are a very responsible guy but you must have forgotten to put your lock on ... I went walking through there and I noticed it was missing, so I put a lock on." She opened the locker for me and my first impression was that it was all there. I am a total paranoid about locking something ... I pull on it and pull on it to make sure it's locked ... My hi fi, my record stuff is there, books are there ... let's load the van up. The van's loaded and something is like "Hmmm" but I am not sure what. We have to stop in town. I want to stop at the police station. I go in and tell the guy I want you to take this all down. I told him the whole story and I wanted to cover my backside this way ... I don't have any drugs, I am not a drug dealer. If I get stopped at the border and they go through my stuff and find drugs I want you to know I reported this, and I didn't have them, and they planted stuff. I may be off the wall just now but I want you to know this. We get on the highway and I get shivers through me. What I had remembered was I had more boxes. My writing, my writing was in some boxes. Those boxes weren't there. But more, what struck me was, I had a lot of writing in these two trunks. I had my original first story I did when I was 8 years old, poetry readings I had given in New York on tape ... not only that I had my commercial portfolio as an advertising copywriter, all this stuff, my clippings ... all my manuscripts for unpublished stories, plays, essays. Everything. My life's work. When we had loaded the van, those were heavy trunks. It was a two-man job. I said "stop the van", I opened up both trunks and then I realized I had a couple of portable typewriters (I was a typewriter nut). I had a 1920's Royal and that was gone too. Message. I just sat there and the couple came along, and I was crying. I couldn't tell them the whole story. We drove back to Toronto and they were very sophisticated, nice people and they didn't ask any questions. I unpacked and I was devastated. I was into some very bad emotional pain. I was really pissed. What do you do after your life's work is stolen? I got the answer. You write about it. I sat down and I said, Page One. 'TRANSGRESSION' and we're going to start back 30 years ago. So the book in manuscript form doubled in size. I have rewritten it. It's gone out to agencies, publishers, senior fiction editors, top of the heap, who said to me over the phone, "Ron you made the cut. You made the decision buddy. We were only going to publish X number of books ... I've seen long fights over which ones we were going to go with ... we're not going to go with it ... keep at it." It sounded like she was a little disgusted. You are dealing with heavyweight people. The editor goes to lunch with the publishers and the editor says "Okay do you want to publish this thing and we go lawyers, and we go lots of money, lots of fights, or what?" I've asked myself quite intensely, "What is this crap? Is this thing any good? And I re-read it, cold. Yeah, it's good work. So then what gives? This thing could make somebody some bucks and you're a high risk ..." After Clinton got in, I got on the computer. I got the new line-up card in Washington, D.C. and I started sending out letters. Hello, welcome aboard, hello, this is stuff that hasn't been looked at under the Nixon administration, and the Reagan administration. Eventually what happened with that was the U.S. Senate Oversight Intelligence Committee, whose Vice-Chair is Senator Bob Kerry from Nebraska, he wrote me back and basically he said, Ron are you a straight-shooter, I'll have somebody check it out. WAYNE MORRIS: This is under Clinton. Had you been in contact with Kerry before? RONALD HOWARD COHEN: No he was a new Senator. If you have ever been in a Senator's office, and I have, they have lots of files and papers and lots of stuff so they have a staff person. That's really whom you work with. So there was a gentleman who was on the Senate Oversight Intelligence Committee ... they are the ones who supposedly, in the back room, or in camera, are saying "what's going on?" and they are supposed to be told what's going on. Bob Carey was in his 30's and he said I'm really busy, taking this on my plate ... it's a little heavy for me to be doing, but I gotta do what I gotta do ... But as he said, he even called me on the phone, and said Hey man, I'm open. As far as I know from what I found out anything's possible. That's from the horse at the stable. At some point there was some headway, since I had ben sandbagged for so long ... yeah, positive feedback ... I felt there was some movement. But then I got a letter back most relatively recently which was much more formal and it was basically a turndown. I got on the phone with him and I said Hey what's shakin'? It was a much more formal response. I had the company names of all the set-up situations, I had the dates. I went home and I scribbled. I had the names of these people who they identified themselves as. This guy said he's from the CIA, this guy said he's from the FBI, he met me on such and such a date, at such and such a time. I had all of that which is pretty good something to look into ... I had sent that and Carey writes me back and he says well if you have something, but right now there's nothing. I write him back Dear Robert, man-to- man. Do you think I'm an asshole enough to maybe go back to New York or Washington or whatever the hell it is ... what exactly would you like me to bring you on your desk? So he hasn't written back to that. Maybe it was the Dear Robert, I don't know ... END OF INTERVIEW WAYNE MORRIS: We have been listening to an interview with Ronald Howard Cohen, a survivor of abduction and drugging by the CIA and U.S. military and subsequent harassment by agencies of the U.S. government in his efforts to publish a book about his ordeal. Please excuse the strong language that was used in the show, but I felt it was important to include what Ronald's account of what was actually said in his interactions with the U.S. government agents. This has been Part 8 of a series about mind control on The International Connection on CKLN. Next week, we are featuring a panel discussion entitled "An Overview of Ritual Abuse, Mind Control and Dissociation" with Walter Bowart, Alan Scheflin and Randy Noblitt. You have been tuned in to The International Connection on 88.l.