Mind Control 101

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He's wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb's famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers were paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant that later he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

Order THE MAN NEXT DOOR

We now know that D.O. Hebb's sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb's research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous "rat" study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind controlled pedophiles with an interest in eugenics -- and probably still is today.

In 1951, when this photo was taken, Leonard Cohen was 17, i.e. still a minor. One wonders who signed the permission slip -- his mother? Or perhaps they just didn't bother with those little details, back then.

Leonard Cohen went on to become a poet of note. In fact, that same year, 1951, he published his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies. It would be interesting to do a textual analysis of all of Cohen's writing - someday when I have more time I plan to do that (:  -- combing his poetry and novels for references to the secret program that he has been part of for most of his life. Up to now, his biographers seem to have overlooked all the references to hospitals, (Nazi) doctors, psychiatric experiments, electroshock, etc. They also have failed to adequately explain the missing years (mid-1950s, i.e. peak years of the MKULTRA program) when Cohen did some sort of graduate work at Columbia University in New York.

McGill and Columbia happened to be co-epicenters of MKULTRA research into mind control. As were certain studios and film-making teams at the NFB, the arm of British intelligence that brought our Leonard to national attention in 1966, with the film LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MR. LEONARD COHEN. As was the Silva Mind Control organization, where Leonard met Suzanne in the late 1960s. As was Nashville, where his musical career took him later. And let's not forget the Chelsea Hotel, where he hobnobbed with musicians and CIA programmers like Kris Kristofferson, always mentioned whenever Cohen introduces his song "Chelsea Hotel" about the time he had sex with mind-controlled singer Janis Joplin. That night Janis was apparently looking for Kristofferson one of the "handsome men" she preferred, according to the song, one of the creepiest in Cohen's repertoire in my opinion.

It's very obvious to anyone who happens to have followed Cohen's career, that the singer-songwriter who composed I'm Your Man has spent most of his life surfing the mind control circuit that took him from McGill to New York and then Europe where he connected with the Rothschilds.

Let's just say that early on, he "volunteered" and the rest is musical history. This is a topic for a long article, but for now I'll keep it small and personal. Lately I've been thinking back to times when I witnessed Leonard Cohen's programming either in operation, or failing to operate properly. That is, when I lived next door to him and one or more of his handlers. By the mid-80s had many people grouped around him who seemed to be there to smooth things over. He also once told me depended heavily on doctors and psychiatrists at the (notorious MKULTRA hospital) Allan Memorial Institute, a half hour walk from his house near Saint Laurence Boulevard. In fact, during those years, he frequented the swimming pool behind the Allan, where doctors, nurses, and other hospital staffers hung out with people from the Entertainment scene -- I was told by a former orderly that the purest cocaine from the hospital pharmacy could be bought beside the pool on just about any summer day.

It is one thing to meet and get to know Leonard Cohen. It would be hard to imagine or find a more charming, generous, affable, funny guy to have as a neighbour. Unfortunately, though, that's only one of many personae, or "alters" -- Cohen has many. I wouldn't like to guess how many. I suspect there may be hundreds. What this means is, getting to know him is virtually impossible, because his various alters are not necessarily aware of one another. This explains why, while living next door, I witnessed events that sometimes made no sense, and would have been impossible if Cohen were a normal person, with a single core personality.

Mind controlled entertainers and public figures -- and this also applies to certain mind-controlled politicians, like Pierre Trudeau, a friend of Cohens -- require handlers to help them manage situations caused by their having various alters that don't all work together. These handlers, e.g. Kris Kristofferson, who likely was Janis Joplin's programmer -- are there to coordinate and conceal the fact that these public figures are "programmed multiples."

An incident comes to mind that occurred in about 1985, when I had been living next door to Cohen for two years. During that time, I had rarely seen him. I was busy, in those days,making a living by writing and editing. I also had a weekly program on local community radio, went out with friends most evenings. I had little to do with my neighbours who, in many ways, behaved like members of an exclusive club.

The incident I'm thinking of happened out of the blue, one day. I got a phone call from Leonard, whom I hadn't seen in several months. He invited me next door for tea. Cautiously pleased with the invitation, which seemed to suggest we were back on a friendly footing, I rang his doorbell, he opened the door, and we drank tea in his kitchen. We chatted, he may have played me a new song or two, or showed me a drawing. Just like in the old days when we'd been friends.

Then he said he had an appointment somewhere and needed to take a bath. I offered to leave. He said, No, just sit here for a few minutes in case the phone rings. He got in the bath, I sat in the kitchen, and sure enough, the phone rings. It's Hazel, the woman next door. I tell her Leonard is in the bath, and to please call back in a few minutes, which she does. At this point, the story becomes a bit extraordinary. I am standing a few feet from the phone, and I can hear Hazel shouting. I can't make out what she's saying, but she is screaming what appears to be verbal abuse, and Leonard, who has his ear to the phone, becomes rigid and just listens. The screaming goes on for, maybe, half a minute during which he does not move, does not respond, or react. When the screaming stops he says "OK" and hangs up. The phone rings again, He picks it up. More of the same shouting. Once again, he listens without affect, without moving, and says "OK." Then he hangs up, turns to me, and in a blank tone says "You'd better go now." Which I do.

But I'm upset with Hazel, so I phone her when I get home, and leave a one-line message on her answering machine suggesting that she stop doing whatever it was she was doing when she phoned him, shouting like a drill sergeant.

Later that night, there is a meeting in his front room. I happen to walk by, and unusually, the blinds are up and I see Leonard, encircled by the people I thought of as his "cult followers". He is speaking to them, gesturing dramatic. I only get a glimpse of this meeting as I pass the window, but my snapshot impression is that he is asking for their help in some difficult matter that is causing him great anxiety.

And sure enough, half an hour later, I get a phone call, from a woman called Birgit, whom I know quite well, but consider to be a fairly hardcore Cohen groupie. She has come from the meeting. She arrives as I'm cooking supper, sits in my kitchen, and goes straight to the point. I have to move from the neighbourhood, she says, and stop harrassing Leonard Cohen. I'm, well, stunned. It's the first time anyone has spoken to me in two years about how I came to be living next door. The first time anyone has suggested it might be a problem. But I'm not stupid. I'm quite aware that my presence in the neighbourhood has caused concern for certain people. The fact, however, is, that I am there as the result of a peculiar coincidence. That there is no way I could have found this apartment on my own -- I'm there, and I can't really explain how it happens, in a city of 1 million people, I manage to move in next door to Leonard Cohen -- it just happened. That's it, that's all.

I also knew, back then and today, that nobody in Cohen's circle believed this. And neither do I, to this day, really understand how things like that happen. But that day, he had invited me over, as if letting bygones be bygones, and it had appeared, for about an hour, that relations were back to normal -- until Hazel called, that is, and shouted into the phone, and he went numb.

And who called the meeting? And what was it about? No explanation was ever given. Another cult member, Charlie, phoned me the next day and invited me across the street to his place, for tea. We sat in silence. I didn't feel like talking until someone explained to me what was going on on that block.

No one ever did.

Looking back, in the light of what I know now, but had no notion of back then, I would say: yes, there was a cult. Leonard seemed to be at the head of it. His word held great weight, then and now. But the man who invited me over for tea and chatted normally earlier that day, was not the same man who addressed the meeting later that evening.

These were separate "alters" that might not have known of each other's existence. The alter that addressed the meeting did not recall having phoned me that day, and may not have recalled the two phone calls that came from Hazel -- which was when they "switched" --

A few years later, when I had all but forgotten this incident, Leonard phoned me again from next door. This time, he told me, he was in very bad shape. "I can't get from one second to the next," he said. "Can you come over? You're the only one who understands me."

Worried, I rang his doorbell and he let me in. He asked me to go shopping for him, to buy food because he didn't feel able to leave his house. "I'm on this new anti-depressant, but it's not working. I'm in an incredible state of anxiety."

Remembering that other day, five years earlier, I said "You must be doing something wrong. You need to be in some kind of therapy to figure it out."

That suggestion just seemed to alarm him. "The doctors at the Allan are doing everything they can for me. Drugs are the only solution."

That was in about 1990. It was one of the last times I saw Leonard in person. Every so often, I'd read an interview with him, but over the next 20 years it seemed he just kept giving the same interview over and over.

We live in an age of totalitarian Mind Control, and entertainers like Leonard are front-line soldiers -- as well as victims. We listen to them at our own risk.

Mysterious Doctor Fischer

Another doctor who came to Canada from Nazi Germany is Dr. Martin Fischer, whose stellar career left a "harmful legacy" that some of his students are apparently still sorting out.

I learned about Dr. Fischer last year in a roundabout kind of way, when a judge, living in a small city in south-eastern Germany, suddenly contacted me. The judge, whom I will call Henry, had heard I was writing about secret Cold war experiments on children in Canada.

Henry appears to have been born in a Toronto mental hospital in 1959 or 1960, one of a series of illegitimate children fathered by Dr. Martin Fischer in bizarre experiments at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto.

When Henry was nearly 50, his adoptive parents told him the truth they had somehow managed to hide for decades: that he had been adopted, after his birth mother, a patient at Lakeshore, died in childbirth or shortly after. "Your real father was a Jewish doctor," said his adoptive mother, attempting to set the record straight on her deathbed. "They were experimenting on pregnant women at that hospital." After these cryptic remarks, his mother refused to speak any further on the question of Henry's birth, and remained silent til her death last year, in Germany, of cancer. His father had already died some years earlier.

Not long after the funeral, Henry flew to Toronto, and began contacting people there -- including the Jewish Genealogical Society, who told him the most likely candidate, and the only Jewish doctor at Lakeshore in the 1950s, was the celebrated Dr. Martin Fischer.

Anyone looking at Henry ought to have noticed he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the couple who had masqueraded as his parents all his life. But he happens to look quite a lot like Dr. Fischer, who became an influential figure through his work with the Children's Aid Society and later as the founder of the Canadian Art Therapy Institute with branches in Toronto and British Columbia. Dr. Fischer died in 1994, and his children, including a daughter who is a plastic surgeon in Toronto, refused to meet with Henry -- but sent their lawyer to question him.

During his brief conversation with the Fischer family attorney, Henry gathered that he was only one of a series of illegitimate Fischer children who have turned up over the years, looking for their father. He learned that Dr. Fischer came to Canada as a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1940, and spent time in a POW camp in Quebec before studying medicine in Toronto where he was "famous" for a time, after appearing in the 1967 NFB film, WARRENDALE.

Henry also learned a few strange facts about Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, and its associated cemetery which contains the unidentified bodies of 1500 "patients" who died there during the Cold War.

Not knowing what else to do with these disturbing bits of information, Henry returned to Germany, where I met him last June.

He showed me documents which reveal his adoptive parents both worked at Lakeshore Psychiatric, and were in Canada during the exact same period -- 1953-64 -- when the MKULTRA program was in operation. His birth certificate, dated January 1960, appears to be a fake -- he believes he was actually born in 1959, and showed me a bizarre home movie from 1960 in which he appears as a large, talkative baby in a high chair at their home in New Toronto. His arrival was filmed by a friend of the family, and there is a voice-over narrative in German and broken English: "Der ist der Vater; this is the father; Die ist die Mutti -- she is the mother." Seriously, who films their own baby with a voice-over stating "I am this baby's mother" --

There was other footage of Henry as a boy on the ship back to Germany in June 1964 -- looking more like a 6-year-old than the 4-year-old he was supposed to be, not to mention that he was big for his age and very blond, unlike either parent.

Back in Germany, the family spent a year in Gottingen, and then moved to a town near Mannheim where they bought a new car and a large house. Not your typical struggling hospital workers. His father, a jack-of-all-trades who sidelined as a smuggler, went back to work for I.G. Farben -- yes, his dad had been an employee of the famous chemical firm in the early 1950s. Henry's mother went back to nursing, and with money that mysteriously arrived every month in a special bank account in Bremen, Henry was sent to the best schools in Germany. After a stint in the Air Force -- he failed to pass his officers' exams and was judged 'too emotional' for a military career -- he studied political science and co-founded the German Liberal Party with its current leader. From there, he began a career in media, which foundered when his partner suddenly died. In his late twenties, he went back to university to study law and is now a judge in Child Protection court.

Ironic, perhaps, that he now sometimes takes children away from their parents and places them in foster care.


Henry suggested I write about his story. But he strongly recommended I not mention anything about Nazi medicine. "Everyone is tired of hearing about that," he said. "And you need to make money."

Instead, he recommended I tell the story of his adoptive parents, and how his mother came to Canada aboard a refugee ship with several hundred patients who, Henry believes, were Jewish concentration camp survivors who spoke German. This would explain the fact that many of the nurses and staff at Lakeshore Psychiatric were German speaking. Henry believes these Jewish patients, for whom all records were destroyed in 1962 by the then-director, are the same people who are buried, three-deep, in unmarked graves in the hospital cemetery, which a group in Toronto are now attempting to "memorialize."

His theory: they were too badly damaged by their concentration camp experience, too sick and insane, to function anywhere other than a mental hospital run by German staff. Sending them on a ship to Canada was the easiest way to get rid of these victims, who otherwise would have posed a burden on Germany's struggling post-war economy -- or Israel's.

Henry's mother has a letter from a Jewish Refugee organization showing she had worked at one of their hospitals in Munich. The letter is signed by a doctor whose first name was Moses.

"Make it a story of hope," Henry exorted me. "Jewish refugees, insane and disoriented, travelling on a ship to Canada, to be taken care of for the rest of their lives at a mental hospital on a lake. Listening to the doctors and nurses, and looking out the window at the lawn and the trees, they probably think they are still in Germany."

"And the experiments on pregnant woomen?" I asked.

"Yes, mention those. And the fact that all 1500 of them ended up in a mass grave, with their names missing."

"And the fact that this hospital was run by doctors who worked for the Canadian military?"

"Yes, but leave out the Nazi stuff. Nobody's interested. And for the conclusion, you can add my other theory," continued Henry, who has a computer-like mind which he claims actually whirrs like a hard disk when it's working at top capacity. "That they destroyed the records in order to steal these Jewish patients' identities, and gave them to war criminals who were trying to enter Canada."

"War criminals, such as Nazi doctors."

"Yes, probably," said Henry. "But I want you to sell this book -- so leave that part out of it."

Dr. Ruth

This photo shows a group of doctors standing on the steps of a notorious Montreal orphanage, ca. 1960. Circled, from left to right, are Dr. Ewen Cameron (CIA-funded head of psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute), Dr. Ruth Kajander (Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, Toronto) and Dr. Heinz Lehmann (Head of Research at McGill's Allan Memorial, Director of the Douglas Hospital, Verdun, Quebec).

A survivor of military mind control now living in Ontario helped identified Dr. Ruth, the only woman in the photo. I later learned more about her through another survivor living in Thunder Bay, where Dr. Ruth, now in her mid-80s, still practices psychiatry.

If you google her name, you can find out what her patients think of her here:

According to survivor advocate Lynne Sharman, Dr. Ruth (Koeppe) Kajander's career began in Nazi Germany where, as the grand daughter of the "father of German pediatrics," and daughter of a Nazi physicians, she studied medicine at the University of Gottingen. An auspicious beginning: Gottingen had an interesting relationship with Columbia University in NYC, where much MKULTRA research was conducted. After the war she moved to Finland where she married her husband, Arthur Kajander. She emigrated to Canada in 1951, taking a job at Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, which she soon left for a better position in research.

Why does a young Dr. Ruth Kajander appear in a photo on the steps of a Montreal Orphanage in 1960, along with another Nazi-trained psychiatrist (Heinz Lehmann) and MKULTRA programmer Ewen Cameron? What kind of "research" was Dr. Kajander doing on children in Canada at the time?

Allegedly Dr. Ruth Kajander has programmed children at Lakeshore Psychiatric in Toronto, and elsewhere around Canada, including Thunder Bay where she recently celebrated her 50th year in psychiatry and was honoured for her contribution.

Lynne Sharman says: "When the False Memory Syndrome Foundation emerged, it came out of nowhere and formed in every state in the United States and also here in Canada. At the time Dr. Kajander was quoted saying she did not believe what children say about sexual abuse. She joined a breakaway group of psychiatrists in Ontario who believed the children lied and that false memories were being implanted. Therapists across Canada were being sued by the F.M.S. Foundation. I believe this foundation was a C.I.A. funded operation, because it rose up so quickly, and the funds and legal monies they had access to were unheard of."




Dr. Kajander was awarded the Order of Canada on June 30, 2011, only days after this blog post first appeared.


A NOTE ON REMOTE VIEWING

Dr. Ruth first surfaced on my radar during a remote viewing experiment I participated in with Harley Monte in Montreal. At the time, I had never heard of her -- and neither had anyone else in this remarkable remote viewing session. Harley and other remote viewers described a group photo in which a woman bearing a remarkable resemblance to Dr. Kajander appeared with several other MKULTRA doctors associated with McGill in 1960.

Harley even came up with her husband's first name: Arthur. With amazing accuracy, Harley and others described her as looking very much like Cruella DeVille in Disney's 101 Dalmations -- due to her severe hairstyle, and pronounced widow's peak. The information he and the group spontaneously channelled suggested she was involved in experiments on children, along with Lehmann (named in the session as "Leeman") and several others, possibly part of an international team of scientists conducting lethal experiments on Canadian children.

Remote viewing is used by the military for various purposes, and one of MKULTRA's covert aims was to train children as remote viewers. I view information that comes through remote viewers as a form of witness testimony, not a substitute for fact-checking. In my experience, Harley and his group score high in accuracy. Here is a sample of their work from that session:


PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF REMOTE VIEWING SESSION, November 2004.

Just let me take one more look around here. Oh! On the wall there’s a picture of six men in white coats. You want to meet the doctors?

There’s a Chinese doctor. The names aren’t there that I can see, they may have been added later but at this time when the picture was taken they’re not there.

There’s a short man, wide shouldered, blackish grey hair, glasses.

The older woman, the shape of her face. You know the 101 Dalmations? The actress? Very similar there, the eyes... there is a situation in her own family at the present time and she’s not bearing up very well, rumour has it she will be leaving in the next month or so.

She’s not Canadian is she?

She looks very British but it’s more just how she has made herself up to be, and her shoes are weird, I have never seen shoes like that before, you know the old type that button up the side, she has a mark on her hand, right here.

Birthmark?

No it’s an injury. I don’t know if she had her hand crushed or something to an extent, and when she writes she writes like this. And there’s something happening to a child in her family at the present time. The time, wherever I am (1960).

I’m getting a name Leeman...

Arthur. There’s an “Arthur” here.

Cold, very cold. A lot of cold air around him. A mean person. I just feel he was totally disconnected, had no empathy, no, just cold, no feelings for these children.

Was he doing a job or was he out to make a name for himself?

I’m not sure, I just know whatever happened did not bother him at all. They weren’t human to him. They were like animals. They were like subject for tests.

I’m getting Russia. I think one of the people, maybe Arthur, I’m seeing a coat with long, buttons all the way down the front, double breasted. I think experiments, lots were going on there, I see snow, I see very wide steps, a very large building, very big square stones and very wide stairs where there are railings not just two on the side, more railings, going on, I got the word “government” -- whoever, someone wore that coat, it’s like an army green. Drab green and brass buttons wool coat

Indications are this was an international program involving secret factions of government and military, that targeted minority children in Canada, especially aboriginal and French Canadian orphans. Since so much of the evidence has been hidden, remote viewing seems a legitimate way to try to gather information. Dr. Ruth is still alive, still honoured by her peers for her pioneering work -- part of Canada's secretive elite which has never been called to account for crimes against humanity. This needs to change.

Dr. Mengele Comes to Quebec, 1949

These photos from a yearbook published in 1949 by Hopital Saint Michel Archange in Quebec city, were sent to me by a friend in Ontario. I believe the man on the left in the first photo, bending down to examine a boy in a wheelchair, is Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, who had interned in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig.

My friend Jane obtained the yearbook from the daughter of a Duplessis orphan who lives near Ottawa. It lay in a trunk for years. I'm extremely grateful to the women involved in bringing these images to light.

The other two images, from the same section of the yearbook, show recent achievements at that hospital in the field of neurology at the time.

Saint Michel Archange Hospital is notorious as a place where many Duplessis orphans disappeared in secret experiments. Its 1949 yearbook is festooned with dedications and photos of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, then Canadian Prime Minister Louis Saint Laurent, and various dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church including Cardinal Leger. This is not entirely surprising, since Dr. Mengele escaped Europe in 1948 with the help of the Vatican "Rat Line" which brought him safely to Argentina. From there, he moved to Brazil, Paraguay, and points beyond -- including, some have said, Montreal.

There is a stunning similarity between these photos, and my 2004 interview with Duplessis orphan Silvio Day who worked as an orderly in 1960 at another Quebec hospital, where he transported bodies of children murdered in Nazi-style medical experiments from the operating room to the "Locker Room of the Dead" and burial behind the hospital. The scenes he describes from memory – of nuns and orderlies in a zombie-like state, working together with doctors in experiments on young orphans – are perfectly illustrated in these photos taken ten years earlier. It's also interesting that a man bearing a strong resemblance to Dr. Mengele appears in both Day's account, and the yearbook photos.

A bizarre discovery – but is it proof?

I went to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre with the photo of Dr. Mengele examining the boy in the wheelchair, and they quickly dismissed it for predictable reasons: the vast quantity of bogus Mengele sightings, and the poor quality of the jpeg image I produced.

On the other hand, these experts could not prove it is not Mengele. The white-coated man in the photo appears to be exactly the right age (late 30s), slim build, and general appearance (note the hairline) as Dr. Mengele who was 38 in 1949, had escaped from Europe that same year and gone into hiding in South America. Mengele is known to have used various aliases, as well as his own name, and to have travelled around North America and Europe during the Cold War years when he allegedly worked for the US Department of Defence and even (for a time) McGill University.

His sponsors at the Vatican were high officials and member of the P-2 Lodge, which helped many leading Nazis escape prosecution for war crimes. Quebec’s Prime Minister, Maurice Duplessis was known for his pro-Nazi sympathies, and had corresponded with Hitler's Foreign Minister, Von Ribbentrop, before WW2, when the Nazis offered to send some of their young scientists to Quebec.

"So what if it's Mengele?" asked one of the Holocaust experts -- a question that had not occurred to me.

My guess is, the hospital published this yearbook, and included these photos, to demonstrate that it was making progress with the secret program laid out in 1944 at the Quebec Conference, the year Maurice Duplessis, re-elected as Quebec premier, sat at the table with Roosevelt, Churchill, MacKenzie King and Allen Dulles, to iron out details of a clandestine agreement by which Quebec’s orphan population would be placed at the disposal of the British and American military in their top secret program of chemical and biological warfare weapons development, some of which was based downriver at Grosse Ile. Some of these experiments involved psychosurgery, e.g. lobotomies, which witnesses like Silvio Day say were performed on orphans. Mengele’s work at Auschwitz involved Trauma-Based Mind Control would become the basis of the covert MKULTRA program in 1953, signed into effect by Allen Dulles in 1953, a few months before thousands of Quebec’s institutionalized orphans were relabelled “mental patients” and transported to hospital like Saint-Michel Archange in Quebec City, where many disappeared in drug trials and other criminal experiments.

Fascist-leaning Maurice Duplessis would have been happy to allow Mengele enter Quebec, in return for a place at the table of the Secret Government. So goes the “conspiracy theory” that explains how Canadian officials sold out a generation of children in order to profit from illegal weapons research

Below are photos of Mengele, probably taken in the late 1930s when he was graduating from medical school.

THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES

Here in Greece, my friend and I have been making little orgone generators to try to improve the energy field around our house, because there is so much electromagnetic radiation coming from the cell phone towers and the military, making people sick.

These orgone cones are quite easy to make if you have quartz crystals -- and we do -- and after I had made a few I started "distributing" them around to the tower sites within a 3 or 4 km radius of our house. I used a pendulum to help me find the right spots to leave the generators (also known as Holy Hand Grenades, named by Don Croft who devised the method I am following) -- the first few times, I was impressed at how helpful the pendulum was at directing me to places which turned out to be perfect, and which I could not have found on my own.

We also have noticed a major decrease in the negative energy we are feeling, and since we started doing this the whole area seems to be changing -- it's hard to say if this is really happening, but it just seems that things are more harmonious, and nature is looking more and more beautiful.

So last week, I suddenly felt the urge to visit Samothrace, a 2-3 hour ferry ride from Lemnos. Themis tried to discourage me, by telling me that there is a lot of black magic on that island. He mentioned reports that members of the British Royal Family are frequent visitors to certain sites on the island, where they participate in secret rituals. My intuition still kept telling me to go, and to bring along one of our orgone generators and plant it there, to improve the energy and foil the dark schemes of Charles and Camilla...

So on Saturday June 4 at 6:30 am I took the ferry, and after a very gloomy voyage through fog, landed in the port of Samothrace where the sun finally appeared and the sea was throwing off sparks while the whole island seemed to shimmer with energy and light.

Once off the boat, though, it was just another Greek island, with bars and cafes and men sitting around drinking coffee. I had not done any research, so I bought a guide book in one of the shops and quickly read about the ancient mystery site on the north coast of the island, a mere 11 km. from the port. I found a bike rental place, rented an old clunker for 6 euro, and took off pedalling along the coastal road in the direction of the ruined temple of the “Great Gods.”

These sites on the north coast of Samotrace were used by a mystery cult which was second only to the one at Eleusis, built to the goddesses Demeter, Athena and Cybele (Cybele being another name for Artemis or Diana), with Hades (Pluto) and Persephone in there somewhere. There's a ruined temple on Samotrace, and various circular ruins where initiations were enacted.

It took me about half an hour to reach these famous archaeological sites, but for some reason (it was early June) they were all locked up and the entire mountainside surrounding them was enclosed behind high fences.

It was only 10:30 a.m., and I figured all I had to do was find a path that would get me close to the place where the Royal Family held its rituals. I cycled onward, enjoying the beautiful weather and the waves crashing on the beach until I came to a forested area which was heavily populated by strange black goats, all peering from the hillside as I pedalled past. Normally in Greece I like seeing goats, but these jet black ones were an odd looking breed, somewhat Satanic in appearance. It seemed a bit creepy that they should be showing up on the way to an ancient mystery site known for animal sacrifice.

The guidebook didn’t say anything about human sacrifice. I decided “I will let the pendulum guide me to an appropriate spot on a mountainside, perhaps overlooking one of the ruins.” You can ask a pendulum for anything. I specifically asked to be shown to the spot used for rituals by the Prince of Wales and his sweetheart the Duchess. I had visualized some hilly area in the open, with lots of old stones baking in the sun, but really I had no idea where I was headed or what I would find.

After I'd been cycling for around ten minutes, I got off my bike to consult the pendulum, which gives yes and no answers and also can count. Counting off by tens, I got it to indicate how far down this seaside road I would need to go before I reached my destination: the ritual site.

It said to keep going another 260 meters. I walked the bike so as to pace it out exactly. At 200 meters, I came to a shaded roadside area with picnic tables and a rushing spring. I asked the pendulum if I could drink the water as I had forgotten to bring a water bottle. It said no. So I plodded on with the bike for the last 60 - 70 more meters.

The north side of Samothrace is relatively lush, and has sulphurous hot springs descending the mountains. I was approaching this wild area, thick with spooky-looking plane trees which can grow very big and twisted and often have hollowed-out centres. Some of them look almost human like the Ents in Lord of the Rings.

All this time I was walking alongside the 2-meter high wire fence that encircles the sacred ruins for several kilometers (preventing people from entering from the woods and circling back to the ancient ruins). But as I counted down the last of the 60 pages, the fence suddenly dipped to less than half a meter higher. This was the place.

I was looking up at a sandy cliff, twice my height and covered with small trees and brush. There was a narrow path, possibly a goat track, winding upward from the bottom where the fence dipped down and it was easy to step over the wire, stash my bike behind a bush, and climb the sandy bluff. It was only a matter of grabbing onto bushes and not slipping off the edge.

Up above was all thick forest but I was now standing in a small clearing. Around were low wide bushes that looked like round coffee tables. They spread in circles along the ground and resembled trimmed shrubs set like topiary tables set among large clumps of ferns.

The pendulum told me to hang a right, although this meant walking into some of the taller bushes which were dry with spreading branches that blocked the path in all directions. I had to get past these dead bushes and into another area of very large trees. With each step, the branches made loud snapping noises, and it occurred to me these bushes were there as a natural barrier to trap intruders and spies who could not advance without making a racket. Whoever might be gathered in the space ahead would hear them coming.

It was 11 a.m., broad daylight, and there was no one to hear me and I quickly broke through into a deserted grove which was at the extreme far end of the raised cliff. This had to be the place. Three large granite boulders stood on the ground in a semi-circle, and it was clear they did not originate there but had been there for many years. One was a flat smooth rectangle lying horizontally on the ground. Opposite it was a huge round stone, and a taller more irregular one stood at the far edge of the thicket.

These stones were lined up facing two enormous hollowed-out trees which guarded the cliff edge. Both trees had their backs to the sea, and looked like humans with upraised arms. The hollowed out part of each tree was large enough to hold a fully grown adult. It was impossible to look at them without imagining someone tied to them with arms and legs extended.

On the ground near the boulders were two round pits which had recently been filled with twigs and leaves, neatly arranged.I have never seen or felt anything like what I felt standing in that place. It had to be the site of something awful and ancient. It seemed like a space designed by nature for some twisted purpose -- not nature as we know it, but something Gothic and alien. I've seen similar places in the woods in England, and also in Louisiana, but never in Greece.

The trees might have been 100 years old, or much older. The three boulders seemed to have been rolled or carried in from the archaeological site. The flat rectangular stone looked like an altar -- maybe the twin fire pits were for roasting organs and entrails! My imagination was running a bit wild and there was a horrible vibration in this clearing.

I had been guided to this spot in the midst of a forest overlooking a road used by fishermen and what little tourism there is on Samotrace -- but whatever happened in this grove was not for tourists. Defended on all sides by those strange circular bushes, it was invisible from the road because it was perched on a fenced-off cliff, The likelihood of coming across it by accident while tramping illegally through the forest was virtually nil -- but even if you were lost and happened to stumble onto it, you might not notice what sort of place it was until you were in it. You would have to be led in, or you would never find it.

As I absorbed the weird reality, I broke out in a cold sweat. I had my bicycle helmet on, with the name DAVID engraved on the front -- I hoped it would protect me while I pulled my Holy Hand Grenade out of my knapsack, wondering where to hide it so I could get out of there.

Just then, something behind me shouted "Baaaah!!!!" I nearly fainted on the spot. To my left, 10 metres away at the edge of the clearing, a white long-horned goat stood watching from behind a bush. It didnt occur to me that it was tied there -- I only thought about that later. Up to that moment, since the bushes had stopped crackling, there had been nothing but dead silence. Now, a bird gave out a very disturbing, broken-up noise from one of the treetops. I realized I was surrounded and being watched by fearful animals who had witnessed things here here and now they were waiting to see what came next.

I looked around for an obvious place to hide my orgone contraption from whoever was coming here after me -- I sensed it would be soon. There were several possible spots: I went to the tree, but the pendulum was saying 'negative'. It directed me to the farthest of the three boulders where there was a space with loose dirt and small stones -- a good place to bury a small object, which I did, in about two seconds.

Another bird-call came from overhead – I recognized the pigeon that the Greeks call "Dekaocturo" because it makes a soothing sound like "Dekaocto" which is Greek for number 18. This seemed to be the all-clear signal because then other birds started singing in chorus, and I could feel the fear dissipating.

I backed away and stumbled through the crackling bushes, breaking lots of branches in my hurry to leave. I looked down from the top of the bluff, saw the road and then saw my bike still down in the gully. Getting back down the crumbling sandy path seemed a lot harder than coming up, but before I had time to think, the rocks and gravel simply gave way and I slid all the way to the flowing stream at the bottom. What a relief to get out of there fast, without any scratches.

I jumped on the bike and pedaled as fast as I could along the road till I came to another picnic spot, also totally deserted, and stopped to catch my breath. It was 11:30 a.m. I was in a state of total amazement that all this had happened, and what did it mean? On the way back to the port, I saw only one black goat. It was kneeling by the roadside. This also seemed weird at the time. I had never seen a goat do that before. It seemed to be saying, Hats off to you, Lady, and thanks for dropping by. I wondered if some of those wild black goats are actually human victims trapped in animal bodies.

When I got back to the port, I had a swim near a little roadside chapel dedicated to St. John. For the rest of the day, I did healthy, tourist-y things, such as climb Mount Saos in the scorching sun, arriving half-dead at 3 pm in the beautiful village of Chora which hangs off a mountainside, where I had lunch. For that hour or two it was like being in heaven, and I partly forgot about the Satanic grove by the sea. In general, Samothrace seemed like a wonderful, unspoiled place, full of lovely people -- except for one local man who sat near me in a cafe, who acted bizarrely, inviting a passerby to play cards with him and then cheating -- he wasn't drunk but his speech was slurred and he wore this permanent smirk -- later it occurred to me he might be "possessed." The locals treated him with caution although the waiter told him off after he apparently blurted out something obscene in Greek and scared away an older lady.

The pendulum continued giving me good, accurate directions for the rest of the afternoon: predicting where I would eat lunch, and the reliability of my rented bike, and several other little "tests" that proved it does work. It told me not to visit the sulphurous springs, and also not to try to eat lunch in the village on the south side of the island which has a miracle chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary -- which I later found out was mainly empty and deserted.

So I feel certain that place really is connected to the British Royal Family. I asked to be guided to the site of their secret rituals -- imagining this would lead me to the entrance to some archaeological relic, or maybe a lodge in the hills with sunburned people lawn-bowling then sneaking off at night to some tacky ceremony with torches and silly costumes. I certainly never imagined I would end up in the epicentre of evil.

I hope I don't sound hysterical! I have no doubts about the meaning and purpose of what I saw.

I got back to Lemnos on the boat at 10 pm, exhausted. Themis and I went out to a taverna and I told him all about my strange adventure. He’s never really surprised by anything, so he just said to be careful, as I could “lose power” if I keep this up.

The next day, the energy was a little crazy. We went picking mulberries and Themis had a flat tire. Later, I dreamed about Samothrace and being at the Church of the Virgin Mary in the village of Chora, and everywhere were bright, pink flowers. I also dreamed someone handed me a sealed, thick glass container filled with creepy, crawly centipedes and other poisonous creatures -- they were visible inside, but could not get out. And I hope this is a metaphor for the future: that these dark secrets will be known, but not unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Today I'm writing this -- later, I'm going to make 2-3 more orgone generators. They clear away negative energy, which I am noticing more and more. They work in spirals. When placed in areas where there is a lot of negative, or even Satanic, activity, they first neutralize the area and then they turn it to positive.

"Buckingham Palace" came up in a couple of remote viewing sessions, as the source of the secret experiments on children and others. I did not try to "remote view" the scene in the grove last night, although I was tempted. Instead I asked for protection and fell asleep. Around midnight, in the opening moments of 06.06.06, I suddenly felt a strong jolt of energy which woke me up. I have no idea what that was -- it was a bit like a gun going off in my head. I'm just hoping the Holy Hand Grenade in the Glade had a dampening effect on the proceedings.

And that Charles and Camilla had a nice weekend, lawn-bowling,

Diana on Hydra, August 1997

I also happened to be on Hydra when Princess Diana visited in her yacht, just two weeks before her death. It was early August, 1997, at the height of the tourist season, and from my rented apartment, I barely noticed the noise of a helicopter circling the island. Airborne paparazzi were keeping tabs on her from the sky, and later than day they caught her strolling along the road to Mandraki, the same road I had walked on the day John Lennon died. The photos of Diana on Hydra were sent out over the internet, and appeared in media around the world the following day. I met a store-owner who said she had come into his shop to browse, but he hadn’t recognized her until someone pointed her out. She and Dodi Fayed had sailed away soon afterward, and the excitement of her visit slid into the back pages of Hydra gossip.

Two weeks later, a few hours before she was killed in the Alma Tunnel, I went on one of my aimless walks along the sea wall. I was feeling decidedly strange that night. I’d just mistaken what day it was, thinking it the night I had agreed to gallery-sit for a friend who had a show of paintings at one of the hotels. But when I arrived, the gallery was closed, so I thought I would go have a beer somewhere and watch the sunset. Arriving at a seaside tavern, which was deserted, before I even sat down I felt a sense that things in the world were about to shift. I can’t quite explain what I experienced that evening. I didn’t see haloes or auras, but nature and the objects in it suddenly appeared flooded by some invisible substance. There was a one-ness about everything, as if I were viewing life through the lens of death. Not “death” in the sense of loss and sadness, but death as the dead experience it: a liberation into a world where boundaries dissolve and things – like the little fishing boat that was chugging into the harbour – merge with their surroundings as if we all partook of the same great Mother. I looked around for someone to share this feeling with, but I was completely alone. I drank half my beer – the feeling persisted. It had nothing to do with an alcoholic buzz, or a sense of well-being. It was rather as if the structure of reality had reorganized itself, or my own brain patterns were being altered by a sudden tidal wave of insight into how things really are. I really can’t put words on it, nor could I then, so I stood up and continued walking, thinking I would pass report this experience to the first acquaintance I laid eyes on. Which is what I did.

Seeing Roger Green at his usual table in the Pyrofani, I invited myself over and said “I just want to go on record this evening, as having had a very strange experience while I was looking at the sea.” He listened and said he’d take note of it. Before I left him to finish his dinner in peace, I added, “I just have the feeling, that some major event, or shift, is about to happen, and we need to prepare for it.”

I woke up the next morning at about 5:30, at the first light. Normally I would have turned over and gone back to sleep, but something didn’t feel right. I went to the front door and opened it onto a cloudless morning. Usually, the local cats were waiting nearby, but this morning they failed to show up screaming for scraps. I imagined the worst: that the neighbours had poisoned them, and now they were gone forever. Not just the cats, I suddenly thought, but everything in my life that had ever meant anything, had now come to a sudden, sad end. It was as if I were staring down the length of a long tunnel that led straight into nothingness. Compared with my sense of lightness the previous evening, this was dark and disturbing, like my dreams during the night which had woken me several times.

All day, I stayed indoors, and saw no one till evening when I was due to meet my friend at the gallery. At the hotel, the television was on and they were showing images of Diana. I soon caught on to what had just happened.

A few days before, I’d been at the magazine stand in the port of Hydra, looking at the headlines from all over Europe and the UK. The British papers, in those days, often carried photos of the princess, but that day there was a computer-generated image of her with her mouth zipped up. One headline screamed “Diana has gone too far!” Diana had been speaking about landmines in the House of Lords that week, and the press was up in arms, it seemed. Along with the rest of the British establishment.

It was the second time in two decades that an earth-shaking death had occurred while I was on Hydra – and each time, I had picked up the signal beforehand.

What was it about that island that seemed – to me, at least – to link it to the sudden, violent deaths of people who proposed to change the world? First Lennon, then Diana.

First, we take Manhattan

On the day John Lennon died, I was living on the Greek island of Hydra. Hearing “Try to See it My Way” sung by a 20-something girl sitting next to me on the hydrofoil going back to Hydra just last week, I suddenly realized that song – whose lyrics I barely remembered until she started harmonizing with the Beatles on her IPod – had once been important to me.

“Try to see it my way – only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong. Why d’you see it your way? There's a risk that we may fall apart before too long. We can work it out. We can work it out...”

It dawned on me that those half-forgotten lines were woven into my way of looking at the world. And that until John Lennon was shot, it had never occurred to me that things would not get worked out, in ways that did not include putting on uniforms and marching off to destroy other people in distant countries in order to “defend our way of life.” Or the assassination of gentle, confused souls like Michael Jackson.

But all that seems to have changed – at least in the outside world.

On the day John Lennon died, December 8, 1980, I happened to be living on Hydra. I had been in my room for days, reading, writing or trying to write. It was cold and damp and all I had to heat my room was a small electric coil heater, which Leonard Cohen had lent me two weeks earlier. I was afraid to plug it in because electricity was so expensive on that island. So to stay warm, I began taking afternoon walks. A two-hour walk up a mountain would generate enough body heat to last until evening when I could either go out to the only taverna that had a stove, or bundle up in bed and read myself to sleep.

Since the end of September, I had been visiting a few Greek islands, and travelling around Egypt and Israel. In Tel Aviv, in late November, I had hooked up with Leonard and his band, who were performing their final concerts in Israel after a two-month tour of Europe. Now I was on Hydra, and so was Leonard. I was planning to spend the winter, writing a novel. What else does one do on a Greek island in winter, and what better place than Hydra? I knew the island from a 3-month visit the previous year. And this time I had a Canada Council grant, enough to cover rent and food for the next ten months, at least.

I had been living without a radio, let alone TV, since arriving on Hydra in the third week of November, at about the time the weather changed, making it necessary to find permanent shelter and a warm haven to work through the winter.

In the early afternoon of December 9, I had had enough of writing. I needed a break from my tiny cement room, which had nothing in it but the basic necessities: bed, table, frig and hotplate. I decided to take a long walk northeast along the sea coast to the village of Mandraki. At that moment, people in New York were waking up to the news of John Lennon's death, but I had heard nothing.

It was a cold, windy day and the sky was streaked with clouds. Here and there the sun would break out without really warming the earth or the rocks. After half an hour I reached Mandraki, with its beach and scattering of houses abandoned for the winter. At the limits of the village, the road ended abruptly, so I turned right and continued on up one of the hills where I found a goat path to follow. The rocky slopes around Mandraki are known for quartz deposits, and chunks of crystal lie scattered on the ground. It’s said the crystal layer on Hydra is closer to the surface than elsewhere on earth, which gives rise to the idea that the island acts as a kind of radio receiver/ transmitter. People who come to live there often say they notice changes in their patterns of dreaming, or increased sensitivity to psychic experiences.

On that day, I was too engrossed in my own thoughts to notice crystals or rocks, let alone a shift in energy. I was feeling lonely and anxious, wondering how I would make it through a whole winter on this increasingly gloomy island. Once I reached the top of the hill, I sat down on a boulder to ponder the view: sea the colour of iron, stretching all the way to the bleak shores of the Peloponnesus. I could have walked along the ridge all the way to the nearest monastery, but smoke rising from a distant fire told me shepherds were camped up there. I decided to stay put and just meditate for a while.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I began thinking of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Where were they? What were they doing? I had not thought about them in years, really not since their “Bed-in for Peace” when they came to Montreal in 1969 and stayed at the Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel, talking to the media and entertaining guests. A friend of mine had gone downtown to meet them, and had spent a few hours in their room.

Since then, I had lost track of Lennon and his music, especially after the breakup of the Beatles. I much preferred Leonard’s style of music, and his songs. Still, for some reason that day, I could not get John and Yoko out of my mind. I heard the news of his shooting some hours later, either from the newspapers (which always arrived on Hydra from Europe and America the following day) or through a friend on Hydra who heard it on the radio. And then, like everyone else, I set about absorbing it.

My first thought was, it’s not true. And then: Lennon could not be dead, because I had just been talking to him on a mountaintop in Greece. Forever after, I would associate John Lennon’s death with climbing that hill at Mandraki, and sitting down on a boulder in a clearing on a remote island seeming to float between sea and sky. On the rare occasions on Hydra when I ran into someone of my generation, I told them that story. It made me feel better, to focus on that incident rather than the actual assassination.

Alone in my room, I told myself it didn’t matter that he was dead. His music would live on -- they were playing it everywhere in the cafes and bars that week and all through December. Besides, John had never been my hero, I thought, or even my favourite Beatle. I never had a favourite Beatle. The most I could say was thatI had liked him the way you might like an older boy several grades ahead of you in school, who was goodlooking and performed well on stage. I had listened to him sing, laughed at his quick, ironic wit – my friends and I had absorbed and tried to imitate his Liverpool accent and brand of humour. The Beatles had blown into our lives via the Ed Sullivan Show, and their music accompanied us through puberty and high school and later university, where it lost ground to the darker, more dangerous Rolling Stones. Ten years older than my graduating class, who in 1980 were just turning thirty, the Beatles were still too young to die. Their music defined our environment and values in ways we rarely stopped to think about.

I hadn't been following Lennon’s activities in New York, where he was becoming more political. Whatever I thought about his campaign for “Peace” – which struck me as a bit simple-minded – I never doubted Peace was worth fighting for, in non-violent ways, because it was better than the alternative. War in our time is for robots, not humans -- I still believe that, although ideologies have changed since 1980. What Mark David Chapman did that day was an act of war, and it was fuelled by a massive delusion. Whether or not he was a mind-controlled patsy – I believe he was -- Mark David Chapman failed miserably in his supposed mission. He ended a life that could have gone on to accomplish great things: we’ll never know. But he did not kill John Lennon – he shattered the vehicle in which the soul known as John Lennon was getting around at the time. It was a pointless act that accomplished nothing, unless the goal was to traumatize innocent fans and others, like myself, who were bystanders.

In death, Lennon grew larger than life. He symbolized lost hope, and the images generated by his murder worked their way into the structure of our thoughts and feelings. Thirty years later, I feel I am still processing the effects of that event which coloured the following decade in ways that were hard to fathom at the time.

Lennon’s assassination came a few weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan, about which I felt much cynicism and also foreboding. But at that time I was far from Washington, where schemes were being laid to alter the future. I was on Hydra, a paradise of isolation even in winter when it can be so cold and damp at night, you shiver till your bed rattles.

My bed had been rattling only the week before as I lay alone in my empty room, under a pile of damp woollen blankets, unable to sleep. That’s when I’d got the idea of going over to Leonard’s place for comfort and consolation. After all, we were friends. It wasn’t yet midnight. Maybe he’d still be up, reading. Maybe he would invite me in, make me a hot cup of Ovomaltine – the Greek version of Ovaltine -- as he had a few days before, with his characteristic friendly humour. His place was always warm. He could afford electricity.

I slipped out of bed, pulled on a couple of sweaters and headed up the stone road that led to Leonard’s L-shaped stone house, which stood at the top of Donkeyshit Lane, the main thoroughfare connecting the port to the labyrinth of narrow lanes that form a kind of amphitheatre on Hydra. In no time I was at his door. The upstairs windows looked dark, but I knocked anyway. Several times. I called out “Leonard! Are you there?” Finally, a muffled voice from the upstairs bed room answered, “Go away! I need my sleep!”

I hadn’t expected such blank rejection. I turned, devastated, and ran back home. The run warmed me up. Back in my clammy bed, I felt had blown things, badly. I resolved not to bother Leonard again, not to visit him, or cook him another vegetarian dinner. Instead I would wait until our next chance encounter in the port – which might be days or weeks away. In the meantime, I would keep on running and walking to stay warm. I would get down to business, write my book, survive on my own.

For the next few days I stuck to my resolution. I wrote in my room. I worked at making other friends among the tiny population of winter residents clinging to the rock called Hydra. And I made sure my walks took me away from the town and the embarrassment of another encounter with Leonard.

John Lennon was shot on a Monday. The following Sunday, I was out for another walk, this time through the port, just as a hydrofoil from Athens was pulling away from the dock. Some pieces of baggage were piled on the quayside, awaiting a donkey. And Leonard was just sitting down in one of the nearby cafes. He was dressed in black, and wore dark glasses and I saw he had been growing a beard since I last saw him, 10 days before. His children, Adam and Lorca, 8 and 6 years old, were with him.

His odd appearance, along with the presence of his two young children, made me shy so I paused some distance away. He saw me, and waved. It felt very awkward, but I went to greet him. I had thought he was still on the island, all that time, avoiding the weather by staying in his house. Were those his bags on the quay? Or were they his children’s? Had they just come from their mother’s place in Paris on their own, or had he gone to get them himself? I started to apologize for not coming to see him for over a week. I'd been in my room writing, I said.

He seemed to hesitate. “Oh, so you’ve been inside?” Then he repeated it a different way: "You've been on the inside?"

He seemed to be peering into me, as if trying to pick up on my thoughts. I found his behaviour off-putting. The last time I’d gone around to see him,he hadn't exactly been friendly. Now I wasn’t sure he even remembered shouting at me from the upstairs window to go away.

I thought he looked unwell. Thinner, almost exhausted. Was he recovering from the flu, I wondered? Maybe he'd been starving, all alone in his chilly mansion. He didn’t tell me he had been away, or where he had been. He walked me away from the cafe tables and over to the corner where a closed shop window displayed an old collection of Greek military medals. We stood there for a moment and to lighten the tension, I joked: “Leonard, you look like you deserve a medal!” He seemed startled, as if he read some other meaning into this offhand comment.

Just then the donkey driver arrived. He left me standing there as he strolled back to the cafe where his children were waiting to be taken up Donkeyshit Lane, to the house.

Leonard Cohen on Hydra with his children, Adam and Lorca, in December 1980.

 [source: the Sunday Telegraph]

A few days later, I ran into him again and we had coffee. It was two weeks since the tragedy in New York, and I had hardly spoken to anyone. I said, “Too bad about John Lennon.” I was expecting him to weigh in eloquently on the deeper meaning of that event. After all, he too was a singer. There but for fortune.

All he said was: “I never liked the Beatles."

He happened to be carrying a copy of TIME magazine, which had articles on Ronald Reagan’s recent victory, paired with news and commentary on Lennon`s death. He had me read the article that quoted a poem Reagan had written in high school. One line rang particularly sappy and ironic: “Life should be a song.” I handed it back. But Leonard appeared impressed, or at least he praised the new president for his support of Israel, his bold new vision, his approach to the economy. Seeing my opposition, he pointed out the cowboy theme in Reagan’s career – this was something they shared in common, because Leonard had been in a cowboy band at one time. He even sang a few lines from “Red River Valley” to make me laugh.

The unexpected news that he was a fan of Ronald Reagan suddenly made me want to cry. Tears streamed down my face and I wiped them away with my fingers. Maybe I was just overwhelmed by the cold and isolation, my general sense of being a castaway on an island in the middle of nowhere, or maybe I was still getting over my mother’s death the previous February.

Seeing my fragile state, Leonard tried another line of argument. According to the Kabala, he said, the Messiah would arrive either in a time of light, or of great darkness. This almost made sense. It sounded like the Leonard I knew, and calmed me down like a magical formula. I took it to mean that Reagan’s victory was a catastrophe that would end up generating a powerful reaction toward the light. Perhaps things would turn out well, in the end. Perhaps what we all needed was a jolt of Reaganomics, a return to fundamentals, a visit from the Headless Horseman to scare us into shape. Maybe my generation was spoiled and lazy. Maybe that was why John Lennon had to die...

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt Leonard was panicked about his finances, grabbing at straws, supporting a charlatan like Reagan. He told me he was seriously embracing orthodox Judaism, and suddenly suggested I also convert – especially if I wanted our relationship to continue. A strange thing to say, I thought, and it made me uneasy.

I later heard he had started hanging out with a group of drinkers and gamblers on the island. One was a former mercenary who, when drunk, would boast of killing blacks in the Congo in 1962. It was easy to see why such people would seek out Leonard’s company, but what could possibly draw him to theirs? By then, I had made other friends to help me through the terrible Greek winter. I saw Leonard rarely, and feared our relationship was over. Part of me wanted it to be. He used to read me snippets from the libretto he was composing for Lewis Furey, who came for a visit later that spring.  He often reassured me that this peculiar situation on Hydra was only temporary, and that I should just be patient and wait. Wait for what? Meanwhile, other women sometimes stayed at his house, and kept coming and going all winter.

I survived the next several months,alternating between hope and misery. When I stayed away from Leonard, and just wrote, things went back to normal. But social life there was so sparse, I often withdrew into my own world, and in such places that can be dangerous. I was turning 30, having to face many unpleasant truths. I saw Leonard occasionally, and he would talk, or rather lecture, on various subjects: the Bible, the Kabala, Sufi poetry. Once he said the world was created 6,000 years ago, from a collision between black and white fire.

He never told me about being in New York on the day John Lennon was shot. If I brought up the assassination, he changed the subject to Ronald Reagan’s victory, how it signalled the start of a brand new era.

“I never liked the sixties," he said, although his career began in that decade. Or was he the anti-Beatle? Had he come along to lead a lost generation back to the straight and narrow path of religious and political orthodoxy? I found that thought embarrassing. I lay awake, sometimes, asking myself what sort of future awaited me with a man who adored Ronald Reagan.

It was 15 years later that I reviewed Ira Nadel’s biography where I found a line stating that on December 11, 1980, Leonard Cohen had been in Manhattan, “putting on phylacteries” and attending a religious ceremony. John Lennon’s assassination that same week is not mentioned. In 1995, when I reviewed the book, I thought the biographer had got his facts wrong. I was a witness to the fact Leonard could not have been in Manhattan, because he was staying on Hydra at that time and I saw him often.

I forgot about the second week in December, when I hid out in my room, writing, purposely avoiding Leonard, or the odd encounter in the port a few days after Lennon’s death, when I saw him arriving with his children from some unknown destination – possibly Athens airport, or Paris, as I imagined at the time.

And why would he leave Hydra and travel to New York that week, when his kids were living in France with their mother? Unless he had some special business in New York.

Sylvie Simmons, in her 2012 biography (I'm Your Man) puts Leonard in a room at the Algonquin Hotel on Central Park, 2 km. from the Dakota, on December 11 1980. She has him buying candles in preparation to celebrate the holiday with his children. The problem with that alibi is: in 1980 Hannukah began on December 3 and was over on December 11. 

Most of all, I wonder why he kept his New York trip a secret? Unless he did not want people to know he was there when Lennon was shot. On Hydra, where any item about Leonard was precious currency, such tantalizing news would have been the talk of the island. Leonard in Manhattan on the day Lennon died? What a coincidence. Like the time he was in Cuba just in time for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Or in Israel two weeks ahead of the Yom Kippur War (said to have been a "surprise attack" but possibly orchestrated ahead of time by Henry Kissinger.)
 
Over Christmas, Alberto Manzano visited Hydra and interviewed Leonard. He also took photos. I have one he took of me at Kamini beach on a cold, windy day in December 1980, and also the one I took of him, using his camera.

I kept a notebook in those days, where I sometimes recorded encounters with Leonard and others on the island. It was mainly an exercise to get me working on my novel. I lived just down the lane from a man who used to be such amusing company, but seemed to have lost his sense of humour. Now he was pressuring me to change my thinking and climb on the neo-conservative bandwagon because “Money is the long hair of the eighties.” Sometimes he hinted he might soon be creating his own religious movement, and wouldn’t mind having me as a disciple. It seemed we no longer had a personal relationship, or perhaps I had imagined that -- although he implied we would again if I would quit being a child of the sixties, and grew up. I could help take care of his children, and gain readmittance to his household. But even that would not erase the 17-year age difference that separated me from his generation, and its way of thinking.

All these questions and differences played havoc with my mind. As winter dragged on, I began having nightmares, and what seemed an intense flashback to my death in a past life in Nazi Germany. It was as if time were shifting backwards. A huge gulf had opened between my old life in Montreal, and the one I was living on Hydra. The shift began with John Lennon’s death, which was a turning point. It was as if a crack had opened allowing much darkness to flood my world – although Leonard might have preferred to call it “light.”