Commander Narut

Thomas E. Narut was a U.S. Navy clinical psychologist stationed at the US Naval Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy, who in June or July 1975 disclosed in private conversation at a NATO conference in Oslo that the Navy operated a program to select, condition, and deploy personnel as covert assassins. The disclosure appeared in the London Sunday Times on July 6, 1975, under the headline "The Strange Tale of Commander Narut," authored by Peter Watson, the paper's science correspondent. It was denied the same day by the Pentagon, and Narut partially retracted his most specific claim within days under institutional pressure. Watson never retracted the story.¹

The NATO Conference

The conference was the NATO-sponsored "International Conference on Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety," organized by Charles Spielberger of the University of South Florida and Irwin Sarason of the University of Washington. The event had originally been scheduled for Athens but was relocated to Oslo following the 1974 Cyprus crisis. It was held at the Voksenasen hotel and conference center outside Oslo, bringing together approximately 120 psychologists from eleven NATO member nations. The published proceedings appeared as Stress and Anxiety, Vol. 1, edited by Spielberger and Sarason (Hemisphere/Wiley, 1975). Narut's official conference paper was titled "The Use of a Symbolic Model and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress," and was funded by the Department of the Navy.¹

The Disclosure

Narut's disclosure did not occur during his formal presentation but in a private conversation during a break, primarily with Watson and a New Jersey psychologist, Dr. Alfred Zitani, who was present throughout and later corroborated the account. Watson described the conversation as lasting approximately ninety minutes without interruption while Narut prepared for dinner. A third line of corroboration came from conference co-organizer Sarason himself, who confirmed to Watson after publication that the Navy had previously solicited his participation in related research, independently establishing that the Navy had approached the conference's own organizers for work in the same methodological area Narut described. Narut's official paper subject, the use of filmed stimuli and verbal intervention to reduce stress responses measured through heart rate and skin conductance, was the published research version of the techniques he then described in operational terms.¹

The Conditioning Program

Narut described a three-phase program for producing what he called "combat psychopaths": men psychologically conditioned to kill without remorse on demand.

The selection process used computerized Navy personnel records screened against Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and Rorschach results. The preferred personality profile was passive-aggressive, with strongly controlled drives capable of explosive release. Source populations included submarine crews, paratroopers, Medal of Honor recipients, and convicted murderers drawn from military prisons. Narut stated that convicted murderers had been taken from military prisons, reprogrammed, and deployed to US embassies overseas as operatives available for "special missions should the need arise."¹

The conditioning itself proceeded in three phases. In the first, subjects were physically restrained in chairs with their eyelids held open by devices preventing blinking, then forced to watch films of injury and death in escalating intensity while physiological responses were continuously monitored. The opening film was footage of an African youth undergoing ritual circumcision with a dull knife and no anesthetic; subsequent films escalated to battlefield mutilations. The second phase continued until physiological responses normalized, the subject showing no elevated heart rate or stress reaction to the most extreme material. The third phase employed lectures and films designed to portray the target country's population as inferior, removing psychological inhibitions against killing specific foreign nationals. Narut stated the complete program took only a few weeks. He named two facilities: the US Navy Neuropsychiatric Laboratory in San Diego, California, and the US Naval Medical Center in Naples, where he was himself stationed. He mentioned the Athens embassy as an example deployment location and identified late 1973, the period of the Yom Kippur War, as the program's busiest period.¹

Press Coverage and Navy Denial

Watson's Sunday Times article appeared July 6, 1975. Reuters issued a Navy denial the same day, in which a Pentagon spokesman categorically denied that the Navy "is or has been engaged in psychological or any other type of training of personnel as assassins." The denial stated that investigators had checked both the Naples and San Diego facilities and interviewed approximately forty people without finding evidence of such a program. The Pentagon confirmed Narut's employment at Naples but said they were unable to locate him for comment.¹

Dr. Zitani's independent corroboration was included in Watson's article, lending the story a second named witness. Secondary coverage ran in Newsday on July 7, The Age in Melbourne on July 12, and the Leader-Post in Regina on July 9.¹

An independent line of corroboration emerged after publication: a San Diego-area psychologist contacted Watson to report that the Navy's neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego had borrowed the specific African circumcision film Narut had described approximately six months before the Oslo conference. The stress-film stimuli Narut described, including both the circumcision film and the sawmill accident film, were standard stimuli in legitimate published academic stress research, most prominently in the laboratory work of Richard Lazarus at Berkeley, lending the account a grounding in documented real-world research methodology.¹

Retraction

After the Sunday Times story broke, Narut was summoned to London by Admiral Thomas Engen, US Navy Chief of Staff in Europe, before making any public statement. He then held a press conference in London at which he stated: "The assertion attributed to me that convicted murderers have been assigned to embassies as assassins is totally and blatantly false and absurd." He characterized his Oslo statements as "theoretical and not practical terms." US Naval Headquarters in London issued a statement characterizing Narut's original remarks as unreliable on the grounds that he had "personal problems," a formulation Watson and others interpreted as an institutional attempt to discredit him rather than a substantive rebuttal.¹

Watson publicly replied: "I stand by every word.... It's true we carried on talking while he got ready for dinner, but we talked nonstop for 1-1/2 hours." Watson later included the Narut account in War on the Mind (Basic Books, 1978) with a footnote stating he remained "of two minds as to what credence to attach to Dr. Narut's tale." He did not retract the reporting but acknowledged uncertainty about whether Narut had been describing an active program or ongoing research in theoretical development.¹

Academic Work and Career

Narut's dissertation and official conference paper both examined whether symbolic models (specifically filmed stimuli) combined with verbal intervention techniques including cognitive rehearsal and relaxation could reduce physiological stress responses. The Navy funded the dissertation research. This body of work was, on its face, the theoretical and experimental basis for the operational conditioning program he described at Oslo: the same films, the same physiological monitoring, the same desensitization methodology, in an explicitly military-funded research context.¹

After his London press conference, Narut returned to Naples and continued at the Regional Medical Center. No further public statements, disciplinary actions, or career documentation are available in accessible records. He died on April 19, 1994, in Orlando, Florida, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident, at age 59, and was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando. His obituary in the Orlando Sentinel identified him as "a clinical psychologist and a retired U.S. Navy lieutenant commander."¹

Absence of Congressional Investigation

No congressional investigation specifically addressed Narut's claims. The Church Committee was active in 1975 and in November of that year issued its interim report on CIA assassination plots, documenting programs targeting Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, and René Schneider, but the committee's focus was on CIA operations rather than Navy psychological conditioning programs. In January 1976 the committee did examine a CIA assassination unit designated PB/7, a parallel to Narut's claims involving a different agency. President Ford issued Executive Order 11905 in February 1976 banning US government-sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders. The absence of specific congressional pursuit of Narut's disclosures, despite their timing during the Church Committee investigation, remains one of the unresolved gaps in the record.¹