Catching Killers: The Unassumming Role of Mr. Salinger

In J. D. Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden Caulfield, imagines that he is standing in a field of rye next to a cliff and saving children who are playing in the field from falling over the edge. Holden Caulfield sees himself as the catcher in the rye.

Prior to ever writing The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger had served in the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (the precursor to the OSS/CIA). One of his fellow CIC officers had been Henry Kissinger, a Zioinist Jew who went on to become a major behind-the-scenes political heavyweight for many years. As a CIC officer, Salinger had been directly involved in conducting interrogations of Nazis at the end of WWII. He would therefore have been involved in identifying those lucky Nazis who would be brought over to the USA through Project Paperclip. He had a nervous breakdown after the war and was hospitalized for a short while because of it. This information about Salinger’s military past and his nervous breakdown has apparently only come out in recent years.

More than just being the imaginings of his main character, Salinger had been a real 'catcher in the rye', saving Nazis from a certain fate.

Even though his book was certainly no great literary work, it has always received high acclaim in the press and sold very well and has been on the required reading list in public schools for many years. Salinger never really produced much as a writer besides that one book, only having written a handful of short stories before it, and little else afterwards. With the assured financial success of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger became a recluse and closed himself off from the rest of the world for the remainder of his life.

Why was this mediocre book about teenage angst propelled to the top of the bestseller charts and forced on highschool students as required reading for so many years? Salinger had friends in high places and had served them well during the war, so perhaps this bit of good fortune was just a token of their appreciation. But it seems to have become more than just that...

The Catcher in the Rye has been a favorite book of a number of the media's most infamous 'lone-nut' killers/patsies/actors/hoaxes:

- Mark David Chapman was completely obsessed with the book and identified with the main character, and even intended to promote it at his trial, had he gotten one. After killing John Lennon, he sat down and calmly began reading it while he waited for the police to arrive.

- A copy of the book was found on a table in John Hinckley's hotel room where he was staying when he attempted to assassinate President Reagan.

- A copy of the book was found among Sirhan Sirhan's possessions as well.

- Adam Lanza had chosen the book as a school study project. He had also been researching past school shootings.

- Even Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly had a copy of the book on his bookshelves.

So what's the connection?

Many people suspect that this particular book has been used to trigger these killer's mind-control programming. Although this is probably true, it isn't very likely that particular passages in the book were meant to trigger particular responses in these programmed killers. Instead, it's more likely that the book itself is the trigger, and its overall content has been used to engender a particular feeling or attitude in the killers, a sense of affinity with the main character -- a young nihilist who is going through a personal crisis as he’s about to enter the real world for the first time and feels despondent about it. At the same time, he is someone who for whatever reason imagines himself saving innocents from a danger that only he is able to see.

That is what he feels he is required to do, or at least it's the best that he feels he can do.

Whatever might be made of any of this, one fact seems clear: In the programmed killer's eyes, this book was a sort of motivational trigger. The killer is Holden Caulfield, feeling what he feels, seeing himself in the same light that Holden does. A chatcher in the rye.

This is also how Salinger probably saw himself as well, at least during the time that he was in the CIC. But he had a nervous breakdown from that experience and spent some time recovering in a hospital, and then he spent the next number of years writing his book, which (because of his elitist connections) became an instant success and made him financially secure enough from its guaranteed revenues that he was able to just disappear from a world that he apparently wanted nothing further to do with.

And what about all the other catchers in the rye: Chapman, Hinckley, and the other killers/patsies/actors/hoaxes that have been used in high-profile government-assisted domestic terror operations over the years? Did they all find an escape from their perceived hopelessness by acting at the behest of their handlers?

Only they can decide.

In a very large number of cases, these 'lone-nut' killers have reported hearing voices that had tormented them and encouraged them to act out as they did. The voices usually increased over time and then suddenly stopped soon after they had been caught and put away. Hearing voices is a sure sign of mind-control programming. They can either be due to electronic technology that can transmit sounds and voices into a person's head, or they are the effect of multiple personalities that have been created using hypnosis, drugs, electroshock, ritual abuse, and/or any other forms of extreme trauma. In either case, the voices can be used to trigger certain responses far better than a book, but a book like The Catcher in the Rye can provide a more subtle motivational context for those responses, especially when the killer sees himself as the main character, as Chapman did.

Salinger probably thought he was just catching killers when he was a young CIC officer taking orders from his own handlers who he probably still thought at that point were good guys. Only later would he likely have discovered that they were actually as evil as some of those Nazis he was interrogating. Only later he would have realized that he had assisted in bringing some of the worst Nazis into the USA with new identities under Project Paperclip. Perhaps this is what caused his breakdown and later reclusiveness. Or perhaps it was from what he had seen or even taken part in himself as a CIC officer.

From the point of view of the Powers That Be -- those 'hidden masters' who orchestrate world affairs large and small from their shadowy enclaves of power -- Salinger was a mere pawn, just like the killers who have sometimes been found in possession of his book. The book itself has apparently been used as a prop, acting as a sort of trigger to keep certain other pawns in play before sacrificing them in order to gain a more powerful position on the board, or to eliminate a threatening piece on the opponent's side.

Salinger went completely incommunicado soon after his overnight success with The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, and was little heard from again, hiding away at his high-walled estate and eventually even going so far as to have his picture removed from the cover of his book so nobody would recognize him. The information about his past with the CIC only came out after his death.

This suggests a cover-up. Salinger got a very handsome payoff for his book by having it made required reading in schools. That would assure that there would be a certain number of guaranteed sales each year for years to come, on top of any sales in bookstores.

One thing is certain. By purposely associating Salinger’s book with a number of these high-profile killers, the Powers That Be would have effectively forced Salinger into one of two options: a) tell what he might know and face possible murder, or b) hide from any potential questions.