Have you heard that the US government conducted secret experiments exploring the depths of mind control?
SOME CONTEXT
After World War II, the US Department of Defense secretly offered "employment" through the "PAPERCLIP Project" to most of the best Nazi scientists they could find.
Their purpose was to recruit leading Nazi scientists, including those who excelled in their mind control research. The Americans wanted to understand their methodologies.
Among the notable people they recruited was the German General Reinhardt Gehlen, who had served as Hitler's director of intelligence against the Soviets.
After arriving in Washington in 1945, Gehlen had meetings with President Truman and General William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Their goal was to revamp American intelligence operations into a highly efficient covert operation. This led to the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947.
MENTAL GAMES
In response to reports of the Soviet Union's alleged success in employing "truth drugs" for interrogation purposes, the US Navy launched Project CHATTER in the fall of 1947 as the first in a series of covert programs focused on mind control.
The main goal of this project was to develop effective mind manipulation tools that could be used against America's adversaries, primarily the Soviets, Chinese, and North Koreans.
The ambitious goals of these projects encompassed a variety of objectives:
- Discover methods to condition staff against the unauthorized extraction of information.
- Investigate the potential of special interrogation techniques for individual control.
- Exploration of techniques to improve memory.
- Establish defensive measures to protect agency personnel from hostile control.
- Know how to control the enemy’s minds.
THE “MK”
On April 13, 1953, Richard Helms, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, proposed Project MK ULTRA. This initiative was largely based on the experience of numerous German doctors.
There is a clear connection between the various side projects of MK ULTRA and the experiments carried out in the concentration camps.
Both projects used methods such as radiation, electroshock, psychology, and hallucinogenic substances to manipulate human behavior.
The early stages of MK Ultra's investigations revolved around the administration of LSD, a very popular psychedelic drug at the time. For example, a Kentucky patient was given the drug for 174 days in a row, to observe the effects this would have on his brain.
The agency used front organizations to reach out to more than 80 institutions and scientists in the US, UK and Canada. Patients in psychiatric hospitals, civilians, university students and prisoners in federal institutions received drugs and were part of experiments without their knowledge or consent.On April 13, 1953, Richard Helms, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, proposed Project MK ULTRA. This initiative was largely based on the experience of numerous German doctors.
There is a clear connection between the various side projects of MK ULTRA and the experiments carried out in the concentration camps.
Both projects used methods such as radiation, electroshock, psychology, and hallucinogenic substances to manipulate human behavior.
The early stages of MK Ultra's investigations revolved around the administration of LSD, a very popular psychedelic drug at the time. For example, a Kentucky patient was given the drug for 174 days in a row, to observe the effects this would have on his brain.
The program aimed to create a variant of the drug that could effectively erase the memories of those who used it, allowing for later reprogramming.
STAGED SITUATIONS TO EXPERIMENT ON PEOPLE
A prominent experiment associated with MK Ultra was the infamous operation "Midnight Climax". Brothels were established where prostitutes would bring men who, without knowing, would be intoxicated with LSD so that CIA scientists could study them, usually from behind a two-way mirror.
Another common practice was to host and observe LSD-induced parties with live music. Those parties were called "acid tests" and the culture that grew out of them played a key role in the development of the hippie and psychedelic movements a few years later.
Some of the most horrific experiments occurred at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, a mental hospital in Canada, where the minds of an as yet unknown number of patients were systematically destroyed.
Interrogation-related studies were another important aspect of MK Ultra. War prisoners in the United States were subjected to high doses of LSD and placed in altered environments designed to induce grotesque and disturbing hallucinations.
The war prisoners were told that the drug administration would persist until they confessed or cooperated with the agency. The MK-Ultra program was curtailed in 1964, and added to the Watergate scandal, CIA Director Richard Helms issued an order to destroy all MK Ultra files in 1973.
It was all discovered thanks to a journalist named John Marks, who wrote the first book (in 1979) about the project, called 'In Search of Manchuria's Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control'.
Most of the records related to the program were erased, making impossible a thorough investigation into MK Ultra. And coupled with the marginal interest in the subject in popular culture, most of the survivors suffered in silence, taking their trauma to the grave with them.