On 28 November 1953, a delusional and depressed Dr Frank Olson threw himself out of the tenth floor window of his New York hotel. Olson was a long-serving scientist for the US Army's secretive Chimical Corps Special Operations Division, whose problems began at a meeting 9 days earlier. The meeting had been orchestrated by Sidnet Gottlieb, Head of the CIA's Technical Services Staff. Unknown to those present at the meeting, Gottlieb had aquired a quantity of LSD and secretly wanted to test it. Spiking Olson's drink with the LSD, he passed the bottle around and sat back waiting for results. Olson, an outgoing personality who loved practical jokes, soon began to suffer jarring side effects. One of those present at the meeting, Ben Wilson, later recalled that Olson 'was psychotic'. Gottlieb and his boss, the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, initiated a 20-year cover-up of the circumstances surrounding Olson's death. At stake was the CIA's super secret project, MK-ULTRA. The project had grown out of an earlier secret programme, known as Bluebird, that was officially formed to counter Soviet advances in brainwashing. In reality the CIA had other objectives. An earlier aim was to study methods 'through which control of an individual may be attained'. The emphasis of experimentation was 'narco-hypnosis', the blending of mind altering drugs with careful hypnotic programming. Ever evolving, project Bluebird was later renamed Project Artichoke, after a vegetable that Dulles was particularly fond of. Artichoke was an 'offensive' programme of mind control that gathered together the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Farce and FBI.
The scope of the project was outlined in a memorandum dated January 1952 that ominously asked: "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation?" The race was on to create a programmable assassin! A crack CIA team was formed that could travel, at a moments notice, to anywhere in the world. Their task was to test the new interrogation techniques, and ensure that victims would not remember being interrogated and programmed. All manner of narcotics, from marijuana to LSD, heroin and sodium pentathol (the so called 'truth drug') were regularly used. Despite poor initial results, CIA-sponsored mind control programmes flourished. On 13 April 1953, the super-secret project MK-ULTRA was born. Its scope was broader than ever before, and only those in the top echelon of the CIA were privy to it. Official CIA documents describe MK-ULTRA as an 'umbrella project' with 149 'sub-projects'. Many of these sub-projects dealt with testing illegal drugs for potential field use. Others dealt with electronics. One explored the possibility of activating 'the human organism by remote control'. Throughout, it remained a major goal to brainwash individuals to become couriers and spies without their knowledge. When it was formed in 1947, the CIA was forbidden to have any domestic police or internal security powers. In short, it was authorized only to operate 'overseas'. From the very start MK-ULTRA staff broke this Congressional stipulation and began testing on unwitting US citizens.
Precisely how extensive illegal testing became will never be known. Richard Helms, CIA Director and chief architect of the programme, ordered the destruction of all MK-ULTRA records shortly before leaving office in 1973. Despite these precautions some documents were misfiled and came to light in the late 1970's. They laid bare the spy agency's cynicism. One particularly odious project was run by Dr Harris Isabel, Director of the Public Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky - a facility specializing in drug abuse. Asked by the CIA to discover a range of 'synthetic' drugs, Isabel began experimenting on captive black inmates. Anxious to please his CIA bosses he daily fed his guinea pigs large doses of LSD, mescaline, marijuana, scopolamine and other substances. In exchange for participating in the experiments, the inmates received injections fo high quality morphine, sometimes getting 'shot-up' three times a day, depending on their co-operation. Brought before the Senate subcommittees in 1975, Isabel saw no contradiction in providing hard drugs to the very addicts he was employed to cure. Following public outrage, the CIA announced it had ceased its mind manipulation programmes. Victor Marchetti, a CIA veteran of 14 years who turned 'whistle-blower', exposed this to be untrue.
In 1977, Marchetti said the CIA claims to have ceased were a cover story. Under scrutiny, the agency were quick to downplay the success of MK-ULTRA - claiming no real advances were achieved. Miles Copeland, another long-serving CIA officer disputed this. Speaking to a reporter, Copeland revealed that 'the congressional subcommittee which went into this sort of thing only got the barest glimpse'. Another source within the intelligence community says that after 1963, CIA efforts increasingly focused on psychoelectronics. Narcohypnosis had been drained dry. Dr Jose Delgado, a neurophsiologist at Yale University School, was especially interested in Electronic Stimulation of the Brain. By implanting a small probe into the brain, Delgado discovered that he could wield enormous power over his subject. Using a device he called the 'stimoceiver' which operated by FM radio waves, he was able to electrically orchestrate a wide range of human emotions. These included rage, lust and fatigue.
- Artichoke Project
- Bluebird Project
- Pandora Project
- Mk-Delta Project
- Mk-Naomi Project
- Mk-Action Project
- Mk-Search Project
- Mk-Ultra Project
During 1966, Delgado announced that his findings supported 'the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion and behaviour can be directed by electrical forces'. He added that 'humans can be controlled like robots by push buttons'. Funded by the Office of Naval Research, Delgado looked forward to a future when society could be 'psychocivilised'. Despite the miniturization of implants, the next major advance forward was microwaves. By placing a volunteer (???) in an electromagnetic field, Dr Ross Adey of the University of California, made a startling discovery. Using specific radio waves, Adey was able to influence his subjects' brainwaves. Another scientist, Allen Frey, took this research a step further. Frey found he could remotely induce sleep in his subjects by subjecting them to electromagnetic waves. He also learned he could produce acoustic noises - booming, buzzing and hissing, directly inside a volunteer's (????) head. Developing on Frey's earlier work, Joseph Sharp, a doctor at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, was able to transmit spoken words via pulsed microwaves. Sitting inside an electromagnetic field, Sharp clearly heard and understood words transmitted to him by a colleague. For the medical profession this was a major breakthrough, and would be of immense benefit to the deaf. [Could the buzzing and hissing got anything to do with what people hear in the USA with regard to the HAARP project? Lots of people told me that they were hearing humming sounds both inside and outside their homes. We know that HAARP uses EM waves, but still don't know for FACT what HAARP is capable of - Jeroen]
However, the US military and interlligence community were quick to capitalize on these new discoveries. Secret research programmes on electromagnetics have never been made available under the Freedom of Information Act. In 1974, J. F. Scapitz, a scientist funded by the Department of Defense, had a chilling vision. He sought to combine earlier MK-ULTRA hypnosis studies with emerging microwave technologies. In an outline to the DoD, Scapitz said "It will be shown the spoken word of the hynotist my be conveyed by modulated electromagnetic energy directly into the subconscious parts of the brain". He claimed this could be achieved without emplying any technical devices for 'receiving or transcoding messages'. For the first time, US agents had the ability to remotely tamper with an individual's mind. Scapitz went even further, claiming that this could be achieved without the target even becoming aware of what was happening. Since then, little public information has been revealed in scientific literature, following the imposition of the strict security classification. Despite this, significant pieces of information - more usually from non-US sources - continue to be published. What is available paints a bleak picture.
Evidence exists that mind-control and behavious modification technology is presently concealed behind Non Lethal Defense (NLD) initiatives. In annoncement in 1995 that non-leathal weapons - including high powered microwaves and radio frequency devices - are to be 'transited' to the law enforcement sector was met with dismay in some quarters. This joint programme, known as 'Operations Other Than War', opens the way for the military to move into the civilian domain - a move precluded by the American constitution. The stated aim is to more effectively tackle narcotics trafficking, terrorism and other criminal activity. Many citizens consider this to be a lame excuse. They fear of widespread use of mind-altering technologies, and believe democracy is under serious assault. In the light of past government evilness and abuse, who could blame them??? - Richard Gall, Scotland (Mind Control & MK-ULTRA).
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