Colin Bennett
On 31 December 1972, in the lavish apartment suite of a New
York lawyer friend, the well-known 61year-old radio presenter
Long John Nebel married Candy Jones, 47, an internationally
famous fashion model. The guests on this happy occasion certainly
had plenty of things to talk about. The five men who broke into
the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate
office building in Washington DC the previous summer were facing
charges of burglary, conspiracy and wire-tapping. Already, there
were rumours that this affair might go all the way to the White
House. Though the guests were no doubt happy, the Vietnam campaign
still had two years to run, and almost all Americans knew what
the result was going to be.
Nebel was the Art Bell of his day, and his all-night radio
show had an audience of several millions, but that night, his
mind was not on Watergate or Vietnam. He had just married a
woman whose face had graced the covers of 11 major national
magazines in a single month in 1943. During the Pacific campaign
in World War 11, photos of Candy in a white polka-dot bathing
suit adorned the interiors of ships, tanks, and foxholes.
It had been a lightning courtship - barely 28 days - so Nebel
did not know his wife all that well. During the reception, he
noticed a curious change come over her; within a very short
time, she lost all her natural charm and exuberance. Her voice
changed to that of another woman entirely and her normally fluid
posture stiffened. Dining in the Ho Ho Chinese restaurant later
that evening, Nebel noticed the transformation again; it was
as if she were uncomfortable with the Chinese decor, wallmirrors
and candles.
While preparing for bed, Candy began speaking again in the
voice Nebel had heard earlier. Even more alarming, this strange
personality within Candy had a completely different attitude
towards him; `she' sounded cruel, mocking and cold. When Nebel
asked her about it, Candy was astonished; she hadn't noticed
the emergence of another voice or personality.
However, a few weeks after their marriage, she did tell Nebel
that she had worked for the FBI for some time, adding mysteriously
that she might have to go out of town on occasion without giving
a reason. This left Nebel wondering whether there was a connection
between the `other' personality within Candy and the strange
trips she said she made for the FBI.
Candy was born Jessica Wilcox in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
in 1925. She grew into a striking blonde, some six feet four
inches (1.93m) in height. Her classic American ice-queen
face was fashionable before the more accessible faces of Grace
Kelly, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe came about. Though
she was brought up in a fairly affluent environment, her father
and her manic-depressive mother physically, if not sexually,
abused her. [Footnote 1] Once, her divorced father, on a home
visit, crushed her fingers in a nutmeg grater, and her vicious
mother beat her on the legs so badly that Candy had to wear
thick stockings to conceal the welts. She was not allowed to
associate with other children and was often shut in darkened
rooms by her mother. It was within such rooms that the very
young, panicstricken Candy developed a family of fantasy
figures to keep her company.
In her prison gloom, she visualised these characters appearing
in the twilight reflections of a large wall mirror. The name
of one of these magical friends was Arlene, and she was to figure
crucially in Candy's later life. Unlike the other figures of
this imagined world, Arlene didn't fade away with Candy's childhood.
As a secondary personality, she grew up and matured with Candy.
Arlene's personality was a sort of mirror-reverse of Candy's.
She had some of the characteristics of Candy's mother: she was
tough and ruthless, sarcastic and cruel, with a grating low
voice, quite different from Candy's own.
This was the voice that Nebel first heard on his wedding day.
When she was herself, Candy was the most loving, sociable
and charming of
women; when she was Arlene, she could become dangerously vicious,
even attempting one night to strangle her new husband in a professional
military-style manner. Nebel concluded, not unreasonably,
that the mind of his new wife had been grossly interfered with.
Candy seemed to be mortally afraid of anything Chinese; she
was also afraid of doctors, psychiatrists and dentists, all
of whom used drugs of one sort or another. Drugs were what Candy
was afraid of above all things; whenever drugs were mentioned,
in any respect, Candy's 'protector' Arlene would appear, to
vehemently deny that such things should ever enter "her"
(Candy's) body.
Nebel discovered that the changes within Candy had a long history
and their trail led right into the heart of an organisation
that many of his telephone callers had been talking about for
years: the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States
of America. Nebel then took a grave risk: for many years, he
had been an amateur hypnotist, and he decided to put Candy in
a light trance, ask a few simple questions, and tape the results.
There begins one of the most amazing tales of our time, as told
in Donald Bain's book, The Control of Candy Jones.
While touring military bases in 1945, Candy. fell sick in the
Philippines and was admitted to hospital in Leyte Gulf. There
she met a Dr Gilbert Jensen 2, a young medical officer who gave
her vitamin injections which probably saved her life, or at
least her looks. Jensen left her his card and said he hoped
she would write to him. Many years after this event she was
to meet Jensen again, with almost disastrous consequences.
In 1946, she entered a rather loveless marriage to the tricky
(and bisexual) fashion czar Harry Conover, who was jailed eventually
for fraud. 3 The marriage ended in divorce, in 1959, leaving
her with custody of her three sons and her own fashion business
with an office in New York. Some time in 1960, an old acquaintance,
a retired army general, dropped into this office and, in
the cause of casual conversation, asked Candy if she would allow
the FBI to use her office as a mail drop. She assented, and
also agreed to deliver mail for the FBI when travelling on business
because, at the time, she thought of this arrangement as a simple
patriotic activity. She had no idea what she was getting into.
One of her first tasks for this (unnamed) general was to deliver
a letter to a man in San Francisco while she was on business
there. The man was Dr Gilbert Jensen, whom she vaguely remembered.
She had dinner with Jensen in San Francisco on 16 November 1960,
a day which was to affect the rest of her life. Jensen said
that he now worked for the CIA and had an office in Oakland,
across Bay Bridge. He said that if Candy wanted to, she could
get far deeper into the covert Intelligence business, adding
that it could prove lucrative for her. With three sons at private
schools, Candy was short of cash and accepted.
The first thing Jensen did was to hypnotise Candy. In doing
so, he found Arlene and developed her, using hypnotic techniques
and intravenous injections of highly experimental drugs. He
succeeded in bringing Arlene forward in Candy's mind so that
she could take Candy over almost completely. This done, he was
able to send Candy (with Arlene's voice and manner) on
various experimental missions at home and abroad. Candy would
change into Arlene in appearance too, wearing a wig and using
a different make-up style. Jensen aimed to create a 'perfect
messenger', one who could not reveal - even under torture -
anything about the message she carried, where she came from
or who had sent her.
This operation was vast and highly organised. Candy - as Arlene,
the virtual zombie - visited training camps, military bases
and secret medical facilities all over America. She was studied
and trained in every aspect of covert action, including explosives,
close combat with improvised weaponry, disguise and communications.
She was taught how to kill with her bare hands, conditioned
to resist pain, and shown how to counter interrogation techniques.
She was shown off by a proud Jensen to the military on many
occasions as an example of narco-hypnotic success: the perfect
warrior. Jensen's piece de resistance was to demonstrate
that his conditioning was so deep that Arlene would kill
herself on command. An idea of the kind of moral values of the
people involved here is illustrated by Jensen putting a lighted
candle inside Candy's open vagina without her registering pain
or fear. He demonstrated this before 24 doctors in an auditorium
at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Candy, as Arlene, was sent to Taiwan at least twice on test
missions, delivering envelopes. There, she was tortured with
electric prods to see if she would crack; she did not. Deeply
perverted sexuality appears to have been an implicit element
in the covert agenda. In episodes which are disturbing to read,
she was frequently stripped, put to bed, drugged, hypnotised
and tortured by various parties, including native Americans
on American soil. She was put onto medical examination tables,
suffered Gestapo-like interrogations, and was sexually toyed
with by women against her will. Sexual approaches were made
under hypnosis by Jensen himself, but Candy appears to have
fought him off.
Of course none of this was about fighting communism. It was
more
an example of Churchill called “perverted science" operating
in an old style Intelligence regime. The hypnotising of Candy
was a gimmick-stcucture like the 'spin' put on the American
tactical and strategic failure in Vietnam: the infamous bodycount,
the village 'pacification' programme, the useless saturation
bombing, and the use of defoliants. The Americans would have
been better giving the Vietnamese free Japanese television sets
and putting them to sleep the easy way. But perhaps we are dealing
here with something more sinister than a failed Cold War weapons
system. The system might have failed against the Communists,
but did it fail when it turned its head against the American
State itself? Mark Chapman, Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinckley, James
Earl Ray, and Lee Harvey Oswald are said to be evidence that
there were other 'Jensens' at work in America.
Of course, Jensen knew he was taking terrible risks; he could
not be sure whether Arlene wouldn't put in an unplanned appearance
at any time in Candy's everyday life. Despite his precautions,
this, of course, happened, otherwise nothing would be known
of her experiences; Candy had no idea that she had been elsewhere
or had done anything different from her normal round, apart
from her visits to Jensen and to deliver mail. That was all
she knew; the rest was a blank. After her adventures and tests
were over, Jensen took her out of trance, and her conscious
life became a seamless robe once more.
We only know this story from the audio tapes of Candy speaking
under hypnosis and being questioned by Nebel. When Candy
herself heard these tapes, she could not believe that she her
self had undergone the experiences that Arlene described. From
many tapes over a number of years, author Donald Bain skilfully
constructed a complex four-character play between Arlene and
Nebel, Jensen and Candy. Arlene is an abstraction in the
head of Candy; Nebel is substance and Jensen is a shadow-figure.
This drama was heightened by increasing external evidence that
Jensen did indeed exist and was certainly engaged in the kind
of activity Candy described. By the mid-70s, Nebel had terminal
cancer and, distraught over Candy's terrible victimisation and
the suspicion that Candy had secretly seen Jensen several times
since their marriage, thought of exacting revenge. He told Bain
that he was going to kill Jensen, but Bain managed to dissuade
him.
As a prototype for later books such as Cathy O'Brien's Trance
Formation of America and Annie McKenna's Paperclip Dolls, Bain's
book (above) is a brilliant achievement. Scorning a popular
commercial framework, he spent a considerable amount of
time extracting Candy Jones's story from hundreds of cassette
tapes. His approach was to juxtapose the abstract world in Candy's
head against John Nebel's deepening questions, cross-referenced
by the shadow-figure of Jensen. The tale went back over many
years, but lacked the voice of Jensen himself; information about
him and his intentions had to be reconstructed from one
side of the dialogue only. Although he was only a shadow persona,
Nebel was convinced that there was enough external evidence
to show that he was more substantial than Arlene.
A more difficult problem was the removal of the many blocks
placed, like layers of ancient brickwork, inside Candy's mind
by Jensen. Nebel tried posing as Jensen when questioning the
entranced Candy; however, Arlene often noticed this tactic and
warned Nebel that she knew he was tricking Candy. Arlene herself
liked Jensen, whereas Candy did not. Nebel fared better when
he pretended to be her alter ego, Arlene. Candy was far more
comfortable talking to 'herself' in this way and, revealed much
information about Jensen's activities.
Donald Bain suggests that Candy, as Arlene, carried out many
more experimental missions for Jensen than ever were discovered.
He checked out her office attendance hours throughout the 1960s
with her business manager. Over a period of 10 years, she was
frequently absent under the cover of business trips on which
it appeared no business was done. Fragments of these trips emerged
under hypnosis, such as one occasion when she said that she
carried a gun for Jensen.
Bain ends his book with a cliffhanger. Despite finally accepting
treatment from straight doctors, Candy misses her Jensen fix,
and becomes a secret junkie for her Arlene transformations.
She tries to hide her attempts to contact Jensen and the CIA
from Nebel. But what worried Nebel more, before he died, were
the attempts by the CIA and Jensen to contact Candy. Her adventures
apparently took place between 1960 and 1971, but Bain declared
that he could not be quite sure they had ended.
The courageous Nebel died of cancer soon after Bain's book
was published, still without the answers he sought about his
wife's secret life. He drew some consolation from the fact that,
for a brief historical moment, he had torn the mask off the
hidden controllers of America.
In a similar way to other glamorous figures, Candy Jones entered
unwittingly into that mysterium of power which forever
belies the conscious social democratic view of nature and
society. If Jane Mansfield fell prey to the forces of schlock
consumerism, and Marilyn Monroe was a victim of high State
intrigue, Candy Jones was certainly a casualty of the interface
of the American Intelligence and ultra-right medical / psychiatric
establishments. Both these national sectors were a vital part
of the burgeoning American military industrial complex
which was flexing its new-found muscles in the 19505 and 1960s.
4
Even in adult life, such high-profile women as Candy Jones
remain fairychildren, like the junior mannequin Jon Benet
Ramsey, or Sylvia Plath. 5 Candy was chosen, most probably,
not only because she was found to be very easily hypnotised
6, but because also she was one of the early prototype media-dolls.
America first gave birth to this brood, and all its assassins
share similar characteristics. American culture is still
the main generator of the controls and designs of the world's
dream-machine, and its consumer products, like television, are
doll's house furniture. As dolls, such characters are more
system-animals than human, and all kinds of experimental processes
and changes occur within the hinterland of these two states,
making the half-trance their natural condition.
It could well be that Jensen was conducting the first experiments
in mythological engineering as part of the emerging MKULTRA
7 programme. Candy's first husband had already made her into
a superdoll, something that Jensen could work on Bain's
conclusion is that Jensen's work was within and for the
1 n t e I 1 i g e n c e sector; but Jensen may have had an altogether
more sophisticated agenda. If Candy represents the innocent
imagination, suspended somewhere between the worlds
of Jules Verne and George Adamski, Jensen represents the evil
side of science. This is the dark world of Auschwitz which,
as we know, was run as a joint-stock company by scientists,
doctors, and corporate industrialists.
The artificial creation and manipulation of media-sirens may
have been his primary objective. Like Monroe, Candy could therefore
have been part of the early-middle development of what the American
armed forces now call `non-lethal weaponry'. Perhaps Big Brother,
like the coal-miner, has become an industrial relic; and perhaps
Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right. Limitless cheap pleasure,
not pain or suffering, is to be the ultimate weapon used
in breaking the will of a population, without a drop of blood
being shed.
Donald Bain shows that when sex and glamour are' mixed with
conspiracy and science (in this case experimental narco-technology),
a `reality' is enthroned which begins to look like a cover from
the kind of science-fiction magazine both Jensen and Nebel must
have read in their youth. On these covers, beautiful female
bodies are snared and entangled with wires, consoles and aerials,
well-endowed girls in torn blouses run from clanking cyberclones,
and lizard-like figures wield hypodermic needles.
Long John Nebel must have wondered, at some point, just how
close to such covers his life with Candy had become. For many
years, sleepless New Yorkers had heard Nebel's late night
callers rant about the very things that the entranced Candy
described. As soon as Nebel heard the voice of Arlene, he entered
the world of trance-state America. It is a world in which exit
wounds become entrance wounds, and in which Jack Ruby's last
hours as a free man remain as enigmatic as the last phone calls
of Marilyn Monroe... or the mysterious travels of Candy Jones.
NOTES
1. See Paul Chambers' 'First Person Plural' in FT130:34-40.
2. This is a pseudonym chosen by Donald Bains for legal reasons.
He reports that Nebel told him that he knew who Jensen was and
many times had thought of shooting him.
3. Conover, a homosexual, was the original creator of the 'cover
girl' concept. After World War II, he started off his business
with a matching loan of $500 from none other than Gerald Ford,
who became President
of the USA (1974-1977) after Richard Nixon resigned. At the
time he knew Conover, Ford was a room-mate and a male model.
Like President Carter, Ford in later years promised he would
open secret government files on UFOs, and called for a
congressional enquiry into such matters, but none of these things
came about.
4. For a detailed story of such activity, see Alan W Scheflin
and Edward M Opton's definitive The Mind Manipulators (Paddington
Press, 1978) and Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control (New
York, 1978).
5. In a certain sense, Candy's life reflects aspects of the
tragic life of the American poet Sylvia Plath. Though Plath
was not used by the CIA, she nevertheless became a victim of
the exploitative sexual psychodrama of the fashion world. This
world builds and sells dolls and toys; it is the very last place
in the world for women of high intelligence such as Plain and
Jones. In both cases deep personal conflicts were present. In
Candy Jones' case, Arlene liked the rough, tough masculine 'meaningful'
world of the Special Agent and often scorned that softer part
of her which was Candy.
6. Candy's Hypnotic Induction Profile, compiled by Drs DeBetz,
Spiegel and London, confirmed that she was easily hypnotised.
Their examination was also an independent confirmation of the
'work' that Jensen had done on her.
7. The Mind Manipulators contains a detailed analysis of the
CIA's MKULTRA programme of the 1950s. See also Sid Que's 'Radio
Head' in FT113:34-39, and David Guyatt's 'Police State of Mind'
in FT95:34-39.
