MK-ULTRA
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
by Mark Zepezauer
The CIA says its mind-control experiments
were a strictly defensive response to Chinese 'brainwashing"
of US POWs during the Korean War (captured US pilots were making
public statements denouncing US germ warfare against civilians).
Actually, US brainwashing experiments predate the CIA itself.
CIA mind control activities (also called
behavior control) did accelerate in 1953, under a program that
was exempt from the usual oversight procedures. Code-named MK-ULTRA,
many of its files were destroyed by CIA Director Richard Helms
(who was with it from the start) when he left office in 1973,
but the surviving history is nasty enough..
MK-ULTRA spooks and shrinks tested radiation,
electric shocks, electrode implants, microwaves, ultrasound and
a wide range of drugs on unwitting subjects, including hundreds
of prisoners at California's infamous Vacaville State Prison.
The CIA saw mind control as a way to create
torture-proof couriers (by implanting memories that can only be
retrieved with a prearranged signal) and programmed assassins,
as in The Manchurian Candidate. There's evidence Sirhan was treated
by a CIA-linked shrink before killing RFK.
The agency also wondered if it could disorient
its adversaries with mind-altering substances like LSD. It was
so fascinated with LSD that, in 1953, it tried to buy up the entire
world supply. For many years, the agency was the principal source
of LSD in the US, both legal and otherwise (one ClA-connected
dealer produced tens of millions of doses).
Before ultimately dismissing LSD as unpredictable,
the CIA tested it on countless people-including its own-without
their consent, provoking several suicides. One CIA germ warfare
expert hurled himself out of a tenth-story window after a "surprise"
dose. It was 22 years before his family found out the real reason
for his death.
The agency also rented a series of apartments,
staffed them with prostitutes and watched through one way mirrors
to see the effects of various substances the prostitutes slipped
to the unlucky johns. When CIA auditors found out about this (in
1963), MK-ULTRA was supposedly shut down. In fact, it was simply
renamed MKSEARCH, and some of it s more exotic projects were trimmed.
The CIA says all its behavior control
operations ended when Helms left in 1973. If you believe that,
maybe they did learn some useful techniques from all those brainwashing
experiments.
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