“CLOCKWORK ORANGE” ASSASSINS

In the summer of 1975, British clinical psychologist and writer Peter Watson attended a NATO-sponsored conference on stress and anxiety in Oslo, Norway. Watson sat in on a lecture about ‘symbolic modeling’ given by Dr. Thomas Narut from the U.S. Naval Hospital at its southern NATO headquarters in Naples, Italy. Symbolic modeling, according to Watson, is a “process whereby anxious people could be taught to cope with certain stresses by watching others (usually on film) cope with these stresses.”

During his prepared remarks, Narut strayed from his script and made a few comments that made Watson sit up straight in his chair and listen all the more attentively. Narut remarked that such coping techniques were being employed with “combat readiness units” to “train people to cope with the stress of killing.”

Intrigued by Narut’s presentation, Watson and another psychologist approached the Navy physician after his talk, wanting to ask him questions about the types of military units he was referring to. Dr. Narut, according to Watson, “said that he was referring to two types of combat readiness units: the ordinary commando unit, and also to naval men inserted into embassies abroad, under cover, ready to kill.” Dr. Narut told the two psychologists “that men were being sought from military prisons to act as assassins in overseas embassies.”

After Watson and his colleague, Dr. Alfred Zitani, concluded their questions and Narut departed, Zitani turned to Watson and asked, “Does that guy realize what he just said?”

Watson met again with Dr. Narut for a longer interview during which he took detailed notes. He wrote:

Dr. Narut told Watson that the method “was to screen films specifically designed to show people being killed or injured in violent ways. By being acclimatized through these films, the men were supposed eventually to become able to disassociate their emotions from such a situation.” Dr. Narut also added that U.S. naval psychologists specially selected men for these commando tasks from submarine crews, paratroops, and some were convicted murderers from military prisons.

Narut further explained to Watson that the process had three phases. First was selection which involved looking for men “who had shown themselves capable of killing” in premeditated ways. Dr. Narut said the best killers were men with “passive-aggressive personalities” and men with “a lot of drive” who are well disciplined, not nervous, and “who periodically experience bursts of explosive energy when they can literally kill without remorse.” Second was stress reduction training, which involved taking selected trainees to special wards in Navy hospitals and to the Naval Neuropsychiatric Laboratory Center in San Diego, California. Here the men were “given a special type of Clockwork Orange training aimed at reducing and eliminating any qualms they had about killing. In this pursuit, the men were shown a series of gruesome films, which get progressively more horrific.” The men were forced to watch every frame of the films and to avoid their looking away they were fitted into head harnesses with devices that kept their eyelids always open. Said Dr. Narut:

The third phase was dehumanization of the enemy. This was aimed at getting the men “to think of the potential enemies” they will have to kill “as inferior forms of life.” Narut told Watson that the films used “are biased to present the enemy as less than human” and that “the stupidity of local customs is ridiculed, [and that] local personalities are presented as evil demigods rather than as legitimate figures.” Narut said the entire process took a few weeks, and that its most recent usage had been “towards the end of 1973—at the time of the Yom Kippur War.”

After Watson wrote an article for London’s about Dr. Narut’s remarks, several American journalists attempted to interview the doctor. Contacted at home by one writer, an irritated Narut said, “I can’t say a word about the conference. I have nothing at all to add to things,” and he hung up. Other reporters who tried to reach Narut were less successful and were told that he was no longer employed at the Naples naval facility; one reporter was told that the facility had “nobody with the name Narut on staff.” Within days, Navy and Pentagon officials emphatically denied everything that Dr. Narut had said. Eventually, one persistent journalist was informed off the record that the Navy “kept elite units of trained assassins at secret locations across the world,” and that the overall designation for some of the units was Project Pelican. “The project is a matter of national security,” said one Navy official in the Pentagon. Not long after Watson’s article appeared, a psychologist at the San Diego Neuropsychiatric Center contacted him to say that the films indeed existed and that they were loaned out to other facilities."

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