Candy Jones was a sex symbol during World War II. Born Jessica Wilcox, with her catchy stage name and shapely legs she rose to a standing second only to Betty Grable as America's most popular pinup.
Like other pinup girls, she was a favorite of the troops at the front, and she felt it a duty to entertain them near the battlefields. After her advertised beauty faded and she could no longer serve to raise the morale of the troops with her appearance, she served her country in another way. She served under MKULTRA as a hypno-programmed CIA courier for twelve years.
While on a USO tour in the Pacific in 1945 Candy contracted a case of undulant fever and, shortly thereafter, malaria. On top of that, she caught the contagious fungus known as "jungle rot." Within a week, her hair had begun to fall out, and her complexion had turned a sickly yellow.
The combination of these diseases sent her to a military hospital in Manila, where she met a young medical officer whom she identifies only by the pseudonym "Gilbert Jensen." He would, later, offer her the opportunity to become a CIA courier.
In 1959 Candy started a modeling school in New York. She rented office space in a modern skyscraper across the hall from an office occupied by the one-time heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney. One night Candy noticed a "cleaning lady" fumbling for keys to open Tunney's door.
The next day Tunney reported that his office had been burglarized, but that nothing important had been stolen.
Later the same week Candy observed a young couple approaching Tunney's door. She watched as the young man took out a set of keys and went through the same trial-and-error process that the cleaning lady had performed a few nights earlier. Candy went into the hallway and asked the young man what he was doing. He told her that he was supposed to meet Tunney there. Candy informed him that Tunney had left hours before and was not expected back that evening. The couple hurriedly left.
The next day Candy told Tunney about the incident. He was not alarmed nor did he even seem to be interested that a second burglary of his office had been attempted.
One day later, in the lobby of her building, Candy ran into a retired army general she'd known in the South Pacific. The general had not known her well in the past, but now he was more than courteous.
He mentioned that he was on his way to have lunch with Tunney so Candy invited him to her office first and showed him around. Then
she brought him across the hall to Tunney. Tunney seemed quite surprised that Candy had known the general, and, after a brief conversation, the two men went to lunch and Candy continued with her business.
A few days later Candy was visited by a man who introduced himself as an FBI agent. He asked her about the burglary of Tunney's office, and Candy told him what she had told both Tunney and the superintendent of the building. The FBI man then unexpectedly went over to the window ledge and picked up a microphone Candy had obtained from Allen Funt of "Candid Camera" fame.
The agent wanted to know what use Candy had for the microphone. She explained that she used it to tape her models' voices to help them develop their speech. The agent said that he'd been looking for just such a microphone to use in a surveillance job on Fifty-Seventh Street. He asked Candy if she would mind if he borrowed it. Flattered that she'd been asked to help the FBI, Candy offered it for as long as it was needed. The FBI man thanked her and left with the microphone. When he returned a month later, he was accompanied by another agent. After making casual conversation for a few minutes, the FBI men asked Candy if she would allow them to have some of their mail delivered to her office. There would be letters addressed to fictitious names in care of her modeling school. Some of the letters, he said, might be mailed from Europe and addressed to her, or to a specified fictitious man's name. If that happened she was supposed to call a number and report the arrival of the mail.
Candy, once again flattered, said she'd be happy to help.
Two weeks after Candy took the job with the FBI, Gene Tunney moved out of his office. The general, however, kept in touch with her all during that year. He invited her to several parties, and even sent her a Christmas card.
In the summer of 1960, Candy received a letter at her apartment from the first FBI man, and the next day the general called her at her office. Somehow he knew that she was taking a trip to speak at the all-male Tuesday Night Supper Club in Denver, and afterwards going on to San Francisco to attend a fashion show. The general wondered if, since she was going to California anyway, she would mind carrying a letter from a government agency. He told her the letter was to be delivered to a man who would call at her hotel and identify himself.
Again flattered to be called upon to serve her country, Candy agreed to act as a courier. The
important letter was hand-delivered to Candy's office a few days after the general's phone call. There were two envelopes--a large one inside of which were her instructions and a smaller one which contained the actual letter. Candy carried the letter with her to Denver, then on to San Francisco where she waited for her contact.
Within a few days she received a call at her hotel from a man who identified himself as Gil Jensen; it was the same man who had been Candy's doctor in the Philippines. Jensen invited her to dinner that evening at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. During dinner Candy brought up the subject of the letter, but Jensen avoided the subject, saying that they could better talk about it at his office the next day.
Candy protested that she had to go back to New York the next day, but Jensen would not take no for an answer. He told her that it would be worth her while to stay on for a few days. "There's some interesting work you could do for the Central Intelligence Agency, Candy, without interfering with your business."
He told her that the work could be quite lucrative and since at that time she needed money, she decided to stay and find out what the CIA was offering.
The next day a car picked Candy up at her hotel and drove her across the Bay Bridge to the Oakland office of Dr. Jensen. That was the beginning of what Candy's biographer Donald Bain (who told Candy's story in the book The Control of Candy Jones) described as twelve years of adventure which would eventually take her to the Far East as a covert operative of the CIA.
"She would be harassed, badgered and even tortured." Bain wrote. "Her role was small, a carrier of messages, and the fact that she chose initially to perform such duties, for pay, renders the
misfortunes that befell her 'occupational hazards.'
"What Candy hadn't bargained for, however, was becoming a human guinea pig in a secret CIA scientific project in which mind control was the goal.
"She was an unwilling and unknowing laboratory subject for twelve years, and only her chance marriage saved her from the final stage of her adventure--her own suicide as choreographed by Dr.
Gilbert Jensen."
In 1973 Candy Jones married an old friend, "Long John" Nebel, the host of a New York all-night radio talk show. Candy had met John in 1941, at the height of her career, when he was working as a free-lance photographer assigned by a magazine to photograph her. After losing contact with each other for more than a decade, they accidentally renewed their acquaintance and were married twenty-eight days later.
On their wedding night, John noticed that his bride was suddenly acting out of character. She had left the bed and gone into the bathroom to look in the mirror. When she returned, John said, "I saw somebody who only resembled the woman I'd married." He stressed the word "resembled" because, although the body which walked out of the bathroom belonged to Candy, the being inside it did not.
Her voice was cold and distant, and her expression was cruel.
Soon the strange bitter mood passed and the warm and loving Candy returned. The next evening Candy's strange "mood" returned. John naturally became curious about his wife's psycho- history and began asking questions about her past. Candy told him about her contact with the FBI in 1959. She also told him that from time to time she would still have to take little trips for the government.
On June 3, 1973, John and Candy came home early in the morning after doing one of his all-night talk shows. Candy tried to sleep, but found that she could not. She tossed and turned and when she complained to John of her sleeplessness, she was near tears.
John told Candy that he'd read that hypnosis could relax insomniacs, and although he never had tried to put anyone into the trance state, he'd read a lot about it and he suggested perhaps they ought to try it. Candy laughed and said, "I can't be hypnotized, John." But a short while after John began to hypnotize her, Candy was deeply asleep. Although John had no way of knowing it then, Candy was already a highly suggestible subject since she had been hypnotized on many previous occasions by the CIA. Because of this, whenever John sought to induce trance in Candy, she rapidly became relaxed and was able to get a full night's natural sleep.
One night, while under John's hypnosis, Candy suddenly and spontaneously began to relive her childhood. During these age regressions, she revealed many terrible incidents in what had been, obviously, a lonely and troubled past. In dreamlike monologues she related how her father had abused her. Once when she was eleven he'd crushed her fingers, one by one, in a nutcracker because she wouldn't cry when he was about to leave.
Candy's portrayal of her mother depicted a person only a little less cruel than her father. A calculating woman, she often locked Candy inside a closet as a form of punishment.
In several hypnotic monologues Candy revealed how she had developed an alter ego named Arlene to defend her from the blows of her formative years. Later, John was to discover that the despicable personality which he had observed taking over his wife's consciousness on their wedding night was the same alter ego she'd developed in her childhood.* John Nebel began tape-recording his wife's hypnotic monologues.
(* Bain fails to say whether or not Candy's alter ego playmate was a manifestation of true schizoid behavior, or if Jensen developed a monster from a harmless childhood fantasy.)
One day, while under hypnosis, Candy told John about Working with Dr. Jensen in California. She revealed that Jensen worked for the CIA and she did, too, but John was not interested in the CIA story.
John became interested, however, when his wife described how Dr. Jensen had tried to hypnotize her.
According to Candy, when Jensen had suggested that she submit to hypnosis and she had told him with great certainty that she couldn't be hypnotized, he had agreed with her that this was probably true, judging from what he knew of her personality.
John had read that the best way to deal with a subject who believes he cannot be hypnotized is first to agree with him, then to proceed to demonstrate how a hypnotist might try to induce trance. John's subsequent hypnotic sessions with Candy verified that that was exactly what Jensen had done. But he'd gone one step further.
According to the memories dredged up from Candy's subconscious, Jensen had regularly given her injections of "vitamins." John thought these might actually have been hypnotic drugs. Although Candy had probably always been a good hypnotic subject, narco-hypnosis provided access to greater depths in her already pliable personality.
When John began asking Candy about Jensen in her conscious state he found that she could provide little information about him. She could only recall visiting Jensen on that first trip for the CIA. She had no memory of what had happened in his office, nor of the events of her life which immediately followed that visit. John began to fear that the
CIA doctor still possessed a hold over his wife's mind. Over the course of many hypnotic sessions with Candy, John Nebel gathered up her fragments of memory and wove them into a picture of a satanic CIA doctor. But, reports Donald Bain, "the major difficulty in dredging up this material is that Candy Jones was programmed by Jensen not to remember, and this programming proved
frighteningly effective."
John later discovered that on that first visit, Jensen had obtained from Candy the important piece of information that she had had an imaginary playmate named Arlene. This single fact provided the basis for the methodical splitting of her personality, for it was Arlene that Jensen wished to cultivate as a courier, not Candy.
Candy's willingness to carry messages was the extent of her conscious cooperation with the CIA. But from the first visit to Jensen's office she had become an unwitting victim of Operation Mind Control.
Jensen had her sign a security oath which officially made her an employee of the government, and as such she forfeited her right to legal compensation for the harm done her by the ruthless mind-control operation.
Jensen also placed her against a large sheet of paper and traced her silhouette. Then he
photographed her and asked her to pick a pseudonym for a new passport. She suggested her actual middle name, Arline.
In answer to Jensen's questions she revealed that her imaginary playmate had spelled her name A-r-1-e-n-e. Jensen said that he didn't care which way she spelled it and asked her to pick a last name as well. Candy suggested the name Grant, which was the last part of her grandmother's name,
Rosengrant and "Arlene Grant" was agreed upon. It would be an easy name for Candy to remember since that was the very name she had given her alter ego in childhood.
As time went on, John found that he was talking more to Arlene than to Candy. In one session John asked Arlene if she thought Jensen had in any way crippled her. Arlene scornfully replied that Candy had not wanted to be programmed, but that she "didn't know what end was up."
John asked Arlene who had developed her, and she replied, "Mother Jensen. He hatched me like a mother hen." Jensen had told her to come up through Candy's stomach, she said. He'd say, "A. G.! A.
G.!" and Candy would experience a severe stomach pain before Arlene took over her personality.
When she refused to come when she was called, Jensen would give Candy an injection, and one day he miscalculated and gave her three injections, which put Candy to sleep for fourteen hours. Jensen had quite a scare because he had a difficult time reviving her.
Under John's hypnosis, Candy revealed that she had been given a number of drugs by Jensen:
possibly aminazin, reserpine, and sulfazin, as well as the "truth drugs" sodium amytal and sodium pentothal. She was programmed not to allow any doctor except Jensen to treat her, and never to allow anyone to give her thorazine, the powerful tranquillizer.
The details of Candy's role as a mind-controlled CIA courier were pieced together from hundreds of hours of tapes of her hypnotic monologues. She worked for the CIA under her professional name Candy Jones, under the name Arlene Grant, and under her given name, Jessica Wilcox. She was first ordered to lease a post-office box at Grand Central Station in the name of Jessica Wilcox in August of 1961. She maintained this box until 1968 or 1969 and paid for it herself. Mail seldom arrived at the box, but when it did Candy would take it to her office and hold it for an unidentified man who always made the pickup, or sometimes, a phone call would order Candy to deliver certain letters to various locations around the city.
Slowly it began to dawn on Candy that some of the people she was delivering mail to might be just the kind of people who could kill her for reasons of their own. To protect herself, she wrote a letter to her attorney and put two copies in safe deposit boxes at different banks. The letter stated that for reasons she couldn't disclose she often used the names Arlene Grant, Jessica Wilcox, and Candy Jones. She wanted to put on record the fact that these different names all referred to her. In the event of her death, she wrote, whether it was due to accident or sudden illness, whether it happened in the United States or outside the country, there should be a thorough investigation. She wrote that
although she was not at liberty to divulge her sideline activities, she was not performing illegal, immoral, or unpatriotic acts.
Candy holds that assumption to this day, even after hearing her own voice under hypnosis tell tales of physical torture, of illegal entries and exits from the country, and of the most shocking kind of abuse at the hands of the CIA. Candy probably still would do almost anything out of this hypno-cultivated sense of patriotism.
Eventually John tried to get his wife to see a psychiatrist, but she refused, saying that if she did so she would get very sick and might even have a convulsion. Evidently Jensen had told her this. Even talking about possible therapy gave Candy severe stomach cramps.
Candy had been programmed so that she would not only be protected from foreign intelligence operations, but from everyone, the CIA included. Jensen planned to use her for some evil design of his own.
Candy Jones was, in fact, not one, but two zombies. Candy and Arlene, sibling rivals trapped inside the same skin. They would talk to each other but never about each other to anyone but Jensen. They traveled together on CIA assignments, Candy Jones being the person who acted within the United
Candy Jones was, in fact, not one, but two zombies. Candy and Arlene, sibling rivals trapped inside the same skin. They would talk to each other but never about each other to anyone but Jensen. They traveled together on CIA assignments, Candy Jones being the person who acted within the United