Candy Becomes CIA’s Powerful “Weapon”
In the sixties, Candy started to work for NBC radio which helped her to earn enough income to enroll her sons in an expensive boarding school. Through her news interviews, she met people in the entertainment business, politics, and the military; many of whom she’d already known from touring with the USO. During this time, an old acquaintance, a retired army general she knew from the South Pacific, dropped into her modeling agency and, in the course of casual conversation, asked Candy if she would allow the FBI to use her office as a mail drop location. At the time, she thought of this arrangement as a simple patriotic undertaking, and so she agreed to deliver mail for the FBI when traveling on business.
Shortly thereafter, she was approached by another old acquaintance, Dr. Jensen, who was creating and managing a unit of undercover agents for the CIA through mind-control experiments. He considered Candy an excellent prospect for recruitment. She was a celebrity, a patriot, single, traveled for business, in need of money, and most of all, she was considered to be susceptible to hypnosis. She already had an imaginary childhood playmate that he could build into a separate personality, tough enough to endure physical pain and vicious enough to kill with her bare hands. Candy eventually joined Dr. Jensen’s “unit,” becoming one of thousands of CIA employees not listed in headquarters’ records.
Dr. Jensen became her control agent, and while he submitted Candy to hypnosis, using hypnotic techniques and intravenous injections of highly experimental drugs, he found “Arlene” and developed her. He succeeded in bringing Arlene forward in Candy’s mind so that she could take Candy over almost completely and send her on various experimental missions at home and abroad. This way he created a “perfect messenger,” one who could not reveal, even under torture, anything about the mission. As Arlene, she visited training camps, military bases, and secret medical facilities across America.
According to Donald Bain’s book, The Control of Candy Jones, Arlene was trained to use explosives, to fight in close combat with improvised weaponry such as a hatpin, and taught about disguises and communications. She learned how to kill with her bare hands, how to resist pain, and how to deal with interrogation techniques. As Arlene, she claimed to have visited many training camps, military bases and secret medical facilities across America, while her visit to South Vietnam in 1970 with the USO would later make her suspect that it had some connection to a failed attempt to free American prisoners of war from North Vietnam.
Bain also describes in his book that another piece of evidence surfaced when “Candy inadvertently held onto a passport of Arlene Grant: Candy in a dark wig and dark makeup.” Jones, however, claimed no recollection of posing for the passport. Arlene always carried lipstick that contained poison, which could be used to commit suicide if she were captured. According to Bain’s book, in order to demonstrate his work on “Arlene” in front of a full auditorium at CIA headquarters, Dr. Jensen put a lit candle inside Candy’s vagina without her registering pain or fear.