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Pseudonym: Eloriaga, Antonio

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Definition:
Luis Angel Castillo - the CIA states that Castillo claimed to trade identities with Antonio Eloriaga, a Cuban intelligence officer. CIA and FBI documents state that Castillo was given a "light truth serum" and hypnotized by Philippine intelligence, during which he claimed that he was in Dallas with other Cubans on 11/22/63 to shoot the President.
Category:
pseudonym
Status:
Documented
Discussion:
In his book "On the Trail of the JFK Assassins" referred to below, Dick Russell found an MKULTRA program in Bordentown using LSD on participants between 1955-64 - Castillo was sent to "a reformatory in New Jersey" in 1964, and he was paroled from New Jersey's Bordentown Reformatory on 1/14/66.

Dick Russell asks in this book, p. 26: "Had he also been a back-up rifleman in the Kennedy assassination? He would, after all, only have been eighteen at the time. But if he was not an actual participant, he seemed to have been at least programmed with such information (or disinformation) as part of some type of experiment - perhaps to determine his retentive capacities, or to obscure the mission that he really was on in the Philippines. (The hypnotist who deprogrammed Castillo) Victor Arcega, however, believed that Castillo really had been part of a 'hit team' in Dallas that day."

178-10002-10315: This six page Castillo document is was released as blank upon its release on 4/26/18. The NARA list describes it as a 5/19/75 document. An earlier transcribed version of it obtained by Bill Kelly from the Gerald Ford Library can be found below at https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/12/smoking-castillo-doc.html This document quotes Scott Breckinridge from the legal office of the CIA: "In the opinion of Breckenridge, Castillo’s story as documented in these files, probably cannot be dismissed out of hand as inherently incredible."
Sources:

178-10002-10315: LUIS ANGEL CASTILLO

Circa 1960-67: 5/19/75 Rockefeller Commission memo from Mason Cargill to David W. Belin, six pages summarizing the Castillo file documents...blank upon its release on 4/26/18. NARA lists it as a 5/19/75 document. The Ford Library copy: https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/12/smoking-castillo-doc.html "In the opinion of Breckenridge, Castillo’s story as documented in these files, probably cannot be dismissed out of hand as inherently incredible. Breckenridge still has no present memory of how the team preparing the 1967 IG report on assassinations came to be aware of Castillo or what follow-up action, if any, was taken...another person who worked on the 1967 report, Ken Greer, may have worked on this Castillo angle and would be the person to contact for such information...The Agency’s documents on Castillo are contained in two manila-type folders, legal size. The first is entitled “Luis Angel Castillo, 201-817248, thru April 1967.” The second bears the identical title except for the date, which is May 67 - ..His parents were Cuban nationals. He left Puerto Rico to attend school in Cuba in about 1960. He states he was trained for several years as a Cuban intelligence agent. In late 1966, he changed identities with a Filipino living in Chicago named Antonio Reyes Eloriaga, at the direction of the Cuban Intelligence Service, for the purpose of using Eloriaga’s Philippine passport to go to the Philippines, where he was supposed to contact the Huk guerrillas...During first two weeks of April, subject underwent consecutively truth serum, truth serum-hypnotism, and hypnotism during interrogations at [REDACTED]." While confirming some earlier points in his sworn statement, subject consistently maintained he among 14 other Cuban intel agents who deployed along street in Dallas on day President Kennedy was assassinated. He stated plot and operation were directed by Russian looking woman named Jean Dole (note: Bolf) of Two Chipawa Court, Madison, Wisconsin..."

Record: ELORIAGA, ANTONIO REYES

Re 1963-1967: Sources: Manila Times, Sat, Apr 22, 1967; Manila Times, Wed Apr 26, 1967, p. 1 - Mary's Comments: (Antonio Reyes) Eloriaga's parents live in Polo, Bulacan, Philippines. U.S. Immigration records show Eloriaga entered US on Sept 21, 1963, as visitor for business or pleasure. Alleged friend of...Luis Angel Castillo.

FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ File, Section A11

Re 10/22/66: "Peace Justice Elmer Bassett of Edgewood said Castillo was brought before him (on 10/22/66) by a state patrolman. Bassett said the charge was driving without proper registration. 'He (Castillo) was as nervous as a cat in a creamery.' Bassett said. 'Maybe I shouldn't use those words, but he sure was nervous.' Bassett said Castillo 'also had a hard time remembering what his name was. The reason I gave him a jail sentence was because I figured when a fellow has a hard time remembering what his name is, there's something wrong with him...(Santa Fe police chief George) Craig said Castillo was turned over to immigration authorities after serving three days in jail because he could show no proof of citizenship. Craig said Castillo said he was from Madison, Wis., but was born in the Philippines. 'He couldn't show he was from the Philippines or that he wasn't...'" 4/24/67 Albuquerque Journal, page B-10. See p. 83: Photo of Castillo and accompanying 4/22/67 Washington Post article.

FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ File, Section 128

A 4/21/67 UPI dispatch: "The Philippine National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) stated today it had arrested an American who claimed under truth serum that he took part in an alleged assassination plot against President John F. Kennedy. The NBI identified the man as Luis Angel Castillo...The NBI said Castillo was a Cuban-trained Communist agent sent to the Philippines to contact Communist Huk guerrillas. An NBI report said Castillo admitted under truth serum and under 'hypnotic grilling' that he was in Dallas at the time of the assassination and had been given a rifle by an unidentified man and told to shoot 'a man in an open car' during a motorcade. The report said that Castillo did not use the rifle because 'he heard that somebody else had already shot the man in the open car...that he tried to remember the man who shot the President and that he knew him just as Joe.' The report said Castillo claimed there were 15 other men stationed along the motorcade route. Castillo appeared before newsmen in the Manila NBI office and gave evasive answers to most questions. Asked if he was involved in an assassination plot Castillo replied, 'I don't want to answer that question.' He said he did not know anyone named Lee Harvey Oswald but did recall being in Dallas the day of Kennedy's assassination." p. 86: 4/24/67 FBI memo: "According to (the above UPI dispatch), Castillo, while under truth serum, admitted that he had been in Dallas at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy where he had been given a rifle by an unidentified man who told him to 'shoot a man in an open car'. Our investigation to date has identified Castillo as a Puerto Rican-born individual of low moral character and a fabricator."

FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ File, Additional Releases, Part 2 of 3

4/22/67 telegram from "Wilson" at State Dept., Manila to State Dept., Washington DC: "...It is apparently true that Castillo did get himself deported from the US to the Philippines under the identity of Eloriaga. However, Castillo's veracity re his complicity in the assassination and re his role as Cuban agent is questionable. REDACTED Castillo's account of his activities in Cuba do not repeat not check out."

FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ File, Section 128

4/24/67 FBI memo from Ray Wannall to Bill Sullivan: "(Castillo's) recent arrest in the Philippines concerning association with the Cuban Intelligence Service (CIS) and the assassination of President Kennedy have come to the attention of the press. We have not yet interviewed subject, but our investigation to date suggests that he is a (REDACTED - "fabricator" fits perfectly) who had no connection with assassination or Cuban intelligence...Subject was deported to the Philippines in early 1967 and was detained by PNBI...Subject claimed to be a United States citizen associated with CIS who had been deported to the Philippines under the identity of a Philippine alien in the United States. He claimed this had been a prearranged plan to enable him to carry out a mission in the Philippines by acting as liaison between Philippine and Cuban governments. Subject also claimed to have been in Dallas at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy taking pictures of buildings, youths, a grocery store and park, which he furnished to CIS after which he had been given shock treatment to test his resistance. When reinterviewed by PNBI under a light injection of truth serum, he furnished substantially the same story concerning his association with CIS. As to the assassination he stated he was one of several Cuban agents and had been taken to the second or third floor of a building in Dallas, was placed in a room with books, given a rifle and told to wait. Later someone came into the room, told him the President had been shot and to flee. He claimed to remember nothing more until he became conscious in Florida...his identification record...lists arrests in the United States beginning in 1962 for burglary, carrying a concealed weapon, robbery and larceny...Records of Bordentown Reformatory (show) subject was paroled 1/14/66...We interviewed (the alien Antonio Eloriaga)...(he) denied knowing subject and stated that his wallet...had been lost or stolen in the past."

FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ File, Section 131

5/18/67 file re Angel Luis Castillo Vazquez, aka IS-CU - 100-446775 - information re the interview in Manila with Luis Angel Castillo is going into this file. Also see 124-10187-10208 - 5/9/67 memo, refers to the 16 pages of NBI interrogations of Castillo that have yet to be released, also has a handwritten reference to the Angel Luis Castillo Vazquez 100-446775-60 file - also see 104-10408-10425, 1/3/68 memo stating that Castillo is being returned to US and that NBI has officially stricken Castillo's allegations about the CIA as "utterly false". See FBI 62-109060 JFK HQ File, Section 179, p. 218: Researcher Richard Popkin claimed the tape recordings of Castillo interrogations are in the custody of the FBI Los Angeles office. See 104-10303-10006, p. 134, 6/3/75: Scott Breckenridge writes that the Castillo file "is available at CIA headquarters."

Walter H. Bowart, "Operation Mind Control", p. 301: https://archive.org/details/OperationMindControlResearchersEdition/page/n305/mode/2up/search/castillo

1967: "Eliciting information from Castillo was no easy task. Over the course of many interrogations, the hypnotist discovered that Castillo could be taken to four different hypnotic levels. It appeared to the hypnotist that each level came closer to the truth. He labeled these states 'Zombie I, Zombie II, Zombie III, and Zombie IV.' Depending upon which 'Zombie' state Castillo was in, his mannerism and identity changed. In the first state, 'Zombie I', Castillo believed he was Eloriaga, and he told tales of anti-American espionage. During 'Zombie II', he took on the identity of a tough talking CIA agent in trouble. While in 'Zombie III', Castillo again emerged as an agent whose cover had been blown. At this level, however, he experienced a compulsion to kill himself. On the day he was to have assassinated Marcos, Castillo responded to a program he had revealed in an earlier interrogation. He attempted suicide in his jail cell by swallowing a bottle of epoxy. The 'Zombie IV' state revealed that Castillo's true name was Manuel Angel Ramirez, a 29-year old native of the Bronx, New York. (Note: This was also untrue.) In this state he had no recollection of his youth, except for a hazy memory of his father, who 'Ramirez' believed was a highly placed official at 'the Agency'. As Ramirez, Castillo said that most of his life had been spent in training with or on missions for the Special Operations Group of the CIA..." The report goes into some detail about these hypnotic states and how the hypnotist uncovered the key that unlocked the programmed assassin's mind. Note: In the following chapter, the first page provides adjoining photos of Sirhan Sirhan and Luis Angel Castillo - the author claims with justification that there is a physical resemblance.

Dick Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins (Skyhorse, 2008), Chapter 2: The Programming of Luis Castillo

1967-1975: "...Professor (Richard) Popkin not only had 500 pages of transcripts detailing 'deprogramming' sessions conducted in the Philippines, but the hypnotist himself had flown into San Diego from Canada to reminisce about what transpired there in 1967. Victor Arcega had been enlisted by Philippine intelligence to look into the case of a man being held in custody for spying. During three months that included more than 90 hours of taped sessions under hypnosis, Arcega had unlocked what he called a 'zombie' state inside the mind of Luis Angel Castillo - a form of conditioning that caused Castillo to perform acts and deliver messages at the utterance of certain key words and phrases. A Puerto Rican American born in 1945, Castillo was an apparent victim in the 1960s of individuals connected with US intelligence...over the course of that summer of 1975, along with another young researcher named Jeff Cohen (later to become a well-known media critic and cable news commentator) I reviewed the documents at Popkin's home and conducted a series of taped interviews with Arcega there and in L.A. There seemed no question that the transcripts of Arcega's nienty-some hours with Castillo were authentic. Finally, Cohen and I traveled throughout the Midwest seeking to verify names and places described in trance by Castillo; they were real. We also spent several days with Castillo's family in Chicago, and later tracked down his ex-wife, all of whom added further corroboration for the existing material. Here's what we learned initially: In Feb. 1967, using a passport bearing the name of Antonio Eloriaga, Castillo was deported to the Philippines from New Mexico, allegedly fo overstaying an American visit and stealing a car. One month later, having made suspicious contact with members of the left-wing Huk movement, he was brought to Manila for interrogation by the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation..." (Continued below.)

Dick Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins (Skyhorse, 2008), Chapter 2: The Programming of Luis Castillo

1967-1975, continued from above: "Administering truth serum, the authorities discovered Castillo's real name and began to observe a peculiarity in certain of his behavioral reactions. So Arcega, a businessman whose brother was a high official in Philippine intelligence, was called in to exert his skills with hypnosis...the tale he related while in deep trance...he had walked to a room on the second story. There the American produced a rifle from a black suitcase, assembled it and set the scope at 500 yards, and handed it to Castillo. His instructions were to shoot at a man seated beside a lady in the back seat of an open car, in the middle of a 'caravan'...the American returned and said, 'they got him already. Let's get out of here.'...Although Arcega himself expressed early reservations...as time passed it became obvious that Castillo was indeed in the Philippines on some kind of espionage mission. He recalled in trance countless contacts and places, both in the Philippines and other countries like Cuba and South Vietnam...The problem was the sifting of truth from false information. For Arcega managed to unlock as many as three separate identities at work inside Castillo's mind...Castillo seemed to remember nothing before the age of 18...the central figures behind his mission were a man and a woman from separate areas of Wisconsin: the man gave the orders, the woman conducted the preparatory sessions. In FBI interviews that summer of 1967, both James (R. Myers) and Jean (Bole) admitted that Luis Castillo had worked for them as a kind of chauffeur but denied any involvement with him beyond that...Jeff Cohen and I, in our many hours with Arcega (in 1975) found him to be sincere and scientific in his approach, with no reason we could surmise to be concocting a fictional story..." Russell then found an MKULTRA program in Bordentown using LSD on participants between 1955-64 - Castillo was sent to a reformatory in New Jersey in 1964.

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Contributors:
Bill Simpich

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