One of the themes particularly dear to conspiracy theorists is the so-called assassination plan to eliminate politically "uncomfortable" characters and to ensure that the identity of the principals remains in the shadows, by brainwashing an unconscious "scapegoat" psychologically plagiarized by expert puppeteers to commit the wrongdoing.
What apparently may seem like a Hollywood movie scenario finds disturbing correspondences in reality: the very term "Brainwashing" in vogue...
... since the 1950s would in fact be the slavish translation of the Chinese "Hsi-Nao" with which the Maoists indicated thought reform techniques but was used, in this case, to refer to the practices of physical and especially mental pressure that the Chinese and North Koreans were accused of carrying out to manipulate the thought of political prisoners or war and popularized by the book "Brainwashing in Red China" by journalist and propaganda expert Edward Hunter (former employee of the Office of Strategic Services).
Hunter’s articles and books presented a new scarecrow to the public: the Communists were in possession of drugs and scientific techniques capable of controlling each individual.
In 1959 with the release of the novel and the homonymous film "The Manchurian Candidate" in which the son of an American political family undergoes brainwashing when he is captured in the Korean War and is "reprogrammed" to become a murderer, expressions like brainwashing and mental manipulation they would definitely enter the collective imagination.
Suspicions that even the then USSR had these innovative "weapons" arose following spectacular political trials in the Soviet bloc, in which the defendants confessed crimes they had never committed, somehow pushed the CIA to run for cover and bases of what would later become famous as MK ULTRA.
The MKULTRA or MK-ULTRA project, from the German "mind kontrolle ultra" (also called the CIA mind control program) was the code name given by Allen Welsh Dulles to an illegal and clandestine human experiment program designed and implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and 1960s with the aim of identifying drugs and procedures which, by integrating other torture techniques, were able to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control.
The program that led many illegal activities in that, similarly to what happened in the Tuskegee experiment, unconscious US, Canadian and Hispanic citizens (ordinary people, CIA employees, military personnel, government agents, prostitutes, patients with mental disorders, prisoners, homeless people and drug addicts) were used as guinea pigs, was born in 1953 from the evolution of pre-existing programs such as the Chatter project and the Bluebird project (later renamed Artichoke), which for some years had been studying military applications of chemicals and other treatments capable of alter mental states.
The project headed by Sidney Gottlieb ( known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster") was organized through the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and was formally approved in 1953 and officially discontinued only in 1973 following the panic created by the Watergate scandal, with CIA director Richard Helms ordering the destruction of all documents but without full success: some information has survived and been declassified under the Freedom of Information Act.
For over a decade Mkultra conducted all kinds of experiments on human behavior with a view to finding drugs or drugs that would allow a hypothetical prisoner to resist torture and ways to extract information from individuals or to erase them: the resulting discoveries should have brought numerous advantages, such as the creation of unwitting assassins or the control of "annoying" foreign leaders and would have allowed the development of techniques to be used during interrogations and tortures carried out by the army or secret services, forcing confessions through mind control, thanks to the weakening of the individual.
These experiments included the use of hypnosis, sound and electromagnetic waves, subliminal messages, sound pressure, psychotropic substances (especially LSD but also phencyclidine, scopolamine, heroin, morphine, temazepam, mescaline, psilocybin, cannabis, alcohol and sodium pentothal) and numerous other methods of manipulating the mental states of the chosen people and altering brain functions, including sensory deprivation, isolation, electroshock, lobotomy, verbal and sexual abuse, threats, forced abortions, as well as various forms of trauma and torture.
Often the CIA staff did not have enough skills to carry out the trials so the agency secretly began to finance universities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. The research of hundreds of scientists, unaware of the source of the funding, was in this way carried out and followed by the CIA, in the hope that it would be possible to exploit them in espionage.
The famous "Operation Midnight Climax" in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA “safe houses” where drug experiments took place and they were monitored behind one-way glass, is very regrettable.
The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then—while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror—watched the drug’s effects on the men’s behavior.
Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes’ rooms, disguised as electrical outlets.
In addition, the project aimed to build a sort of "interrogation practice" which took shape in 1963 with the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, a summary of the discoveries of researchers who participated in the project such as Donald Hebb and Donald Ewen Cameron. Many of the techniques described in the manual have been used in recent years in military and CIA prisons (Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib) as shown by the investigative commissions on the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques".
In 1964 the project was renamed MKSEARCH as it was specializing in the creation of the so-called truth serum, a substance that would later be used to interrogate KGB representatives during the Cold War.
Mkultra's existence became public in 1975 thanks to the work of the Senate Church Commission on illegal operations conducted by the CIA, NSA and FBI in the United States.
Although the CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned, Canadian investigative journalist Elizabeth Nickson (whose mother had been a subject) claims that they continue today under a different set of acronyms and Victor Marchetti also, who had held several positions at the CIA before resigning in 1969 stated in 1992 that the CIA routinely conducted disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. He called the claim that the program had been abandoned a cover story.
“Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.”
-Evita Ochel
Resources related to MKULTRA: when drugs, psychology, psychiatry and social sciences become weapons in government service
- WIKIPEDIA
- HISTORY
- WIRED
Cover image by Cesarleal Article image by Alex Yomare
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