Mind Games

Cheryl and Lynn Hersha with Dale Griffis and Ted Schwarz. Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country. Vision Paperbacks, 2002.
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In addition to those individuals, familiar to Magonia readers, who claim that between the interstices of their normal domestic lives they were regularly abducted into alien spaceships or were brood mares for vast untraceable cults, there is another category who claim that hidden from their normal memories, they were participants, willing or otherwise, in fantastic CIA conspiracies. This is what Dale Griffis, the actual author of this book claims has happened to the Hersha sisters: thev were being secretly trained as members of what looks like the US version of the SAS since they were four and six years old. The training is, of course, extremely brutal and not part of any regular special services regime, involving all sorts of sexual abuse and such like.

There are obvious elements of modem folklore in the stories, the mysterious Project Monarch for example (though stripped of the claim that its victims were meant to be sex slaves for Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr), the notorious 'Dr Green' and others. These are stock figures in the recovered memory community of which Griffis is a member. Other people the girls claim to have been victimised by are some well known to have been involved in the MKULTRA drug use scam in the 1950s. Others just happen to be opponents of the recovered memory crowd. All are very conveniently dead and unable to sue for libel.

The stories seem to be products of B-movie scripts than anything that is likely to go on in the real intelligence world. There are no recovered memories of endless days in stuffy offices listening to dozens of overseas radio broadcasts or clipping from newspapers. Needless to say, nothing like evidence is presented to back up the claims. Assuming that the whole thing has not been made up by Griffis, the most likely explanation is that these are fantasies of power and violence developed by two women who were probably sexually and physically abused by their alcoholic, schizophrenic father. 
  • Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 80, January 2003.

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