4 Crazy Precursors to MK-ULTRA

If like me you enjoy the rantings of paranoid madmen from the safety of a Facebook account, you've probably heard by now of something called MK-ULTRA. You've probably dismissed it, but woah there - this one is actually good. If you're not aware, it was the codename for CIA experiments into mind control. That's a weird sentence to write, but this was the 50s, where neurology was basically interchangeable with sorcery, and where post-war paranoia led to absolute lunacy and terror. It's fascinating stuff. And it's becoming forgotten. Probably because the only people you hear still talking about it are the same ones who believe in lizard people. Flat Earth, Roswell, Jews, MK-ULTRA. It all gets lumped together.

This is a shame. Because the stuff that we know happened - as a matter of public record - is so off-the-wall mental it doesn't need Alex Jones screaming it at me.

FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND

Before the nuclear arms race came the bioweapons race. The main players in World War II were scrambling to achieve the security that a big enough store of terrifying toxins affords you - all spurred on by the panic of what the enemy might be up to. Believing (falsely) that the Nazis were planning a bioweapon attack on the UK, Churchill asked Roosevelt for help. (The Germans had indeed developed Sarin nerve gas, but Hitler refused to sanction it for use in war for fear of what the Allies may have to use in retaliation - again, the nuclear standoff logic.) The Japanese were also supplying anthrax to Germany for use at their concentration camps.

The research and manufacture of deadly germs on the scale Churchill requested was a massive undertaking (half a million laboratory mice, to give a flavour) and thus was born the top-secret Camp Detrick, in Maryland. By the time of the Axis' surrender in 1945, they were engaged in over 200 projects. They had "produced industrial quantities of anthrax spores, bred mosquitos infected with yellow fever, and even developed a 'pigeon bomb', a bird whose feathers were impregnated with toxic spores". They still feared the enemy were ahead of them, though. Which is why they pushed for what became...

1) OPERATION PAPERCLIP

Behold three of the worst people ever to exist. On the left is Kurt Blome, the Nazis' director of research into biological warfare. He headed human experiments at Auschwitz and Dachau, and produced gas for killing an estimated 35,000 prisoners in Polish camps. Oh yeah, not much of this will be all that funny. Middle is Walter Schreiber, the Nazi's former surgeon general. He approved experiments at these same camps in which "inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored. According to one American researcher, his experiments 'usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.'" The Mark Lamarr-looking guy on the right is Shiro Ishii, their equivalent and collaborator in Japan. As head of the infamous Unit 731 his war crimes were... (WARNING...) even worse. Oh God, so much worse. Seriously, tread lightly.

Have you ever played a Sid Meier strategy game and gained a new technology conquering an enemy city? What you've actually been doing is pardoning war criminals and recruiting them, you monster. Justice and morals be damned, they have a unique store of knowledge and you want it. Roosevelt actually refused to sanction this when asked. It would likely have happened anyway, but this is moot since he died in April 1945. On 3rd September 1946, President Truman authorised the secret Operation Paperclip, endorsing the practice already in place of marking the files of desirable Nazis with paperclips and earmarking them for employment by the US. In total, more than 700 would be recruited in this way. "They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as 'ardent Nazi' were re-categorized as 'not an ardent Nazi'."

It would take a few years, and not all were on board, but heads of Camp Detrick were delighted with these three gets. They were especially intrigued by Blome's disclosure at capture that Nazi scientists had been experimenting with mescaline as "a way to control minds". Not that they'd had the slightest success, mind you, just that they'd been trying. As for Ishii, once he'd secured immunity for himself and others involved, he "guided the Americans to temples and mountain retreats where he and his men had hidden fifteen thousand microscope slides as the war was ending. Each slide contained a sliver of tissue from [an organ] that had suffered some sort of deadly shock... Often the victims were still conscious when their organs were removed, because Ishii believed that the best data could be collected at the point of death." Exciting! He was hired as a lecturer at Camp Detrick, before returning to work for the US from Japan.

So the war was over, and to the victor the nightmarish spoils. But for a core of Americans, the real war hadn't ended. All that had changed was the enemy - which was now the Soviet Union (and soon, China). With Communism the new evil and the perceived threat so intense, Truman created the CIA in 1947.

2) OPERATION SEA-SPRAY

Blome's earlier mention that the Nazis had been experimenting with mind control had already set the CIA on a path. Then in February 1949, world leaders watched the Soviet show trial of this guy:

I'm not sure why I can't find it now, and God knows I'd never heard of him, but this is Cardinal József Mindszenty. He was the leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary. Long story short, he was a monarchist who'd been unhappy with the Nazi occupation of his country, but was equally unhappy with the Soviets who followed - and they arrested him. His life-imprisonment verdict sparked outrage among Western leaders - but top CIA officers responded differently. "They focused on the way Mindszenty had behaved during his trial. He appeared disorientated, spoke in a flat monotone, and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. He had clearly been coerced - but how?" Through beatings, like with every other forced confession ever? Yes, as it turned out. But, "At the CIA, the answer seemed terrifyingly obvious: the Soviets had developed drugs or mind control techniques that could make people say things they did not believe." It sent them into an urgent, stupid panic. They asked President Truman to authorise a collaboration between themselves and Camp Detrick. Detrick's scientists would develop all manner of wacky James Bond weapons and potions to order, and the CIA would put them to use at home and abroad. This was approved, and called MK-NAOMI.

One of their first ventures was a mock bioweapon attack on their own soil. They wanted to know how vulnerable their cities might be to attack, and chose San Francisco because its fog would disguise germ clouds. Under the top-secret Operation Sea-Spray, they asked the US Navy to spray a red-tinted bacteria, thought to be harmless, which would be unnoticed but easily traceable. They did so from an offshore ship over the course of a week, from 20th September 1950. Covert testing later showed that all 800,000 residents, plus residents of 8 other cities, were infected. "Over the next couple of weeks, eleven people checked into a hospital with urinary tract infections and were found to have red drops in their urine. One of them, who was recovering from prostate surgery, died. Doctors were mystified." As were the CIA, presumably. What were the chances that some out of a million-or-so people may be medically fragile and not up for a random dose of bacteria? Who could possibly have foreseen that?

Regardless, they considered this a huge success. It was done without detection and proved their cities were vulnerable. This would be the first, but not the last time the US would test biological weapons on its own people. The CIA now returned to its bigger goal of researching mind control. Their next endeavour was...

3) PROJECT BLUEBIRD

Launched in 1950, Project Bluebird's stated goal was experiments aimed at "investigating the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques." In January 1951, Allen Dulles was brought in to oversee covert ops at the CIA, and he just threw himself at this. A big fan of Carl Jung (and also a maniac - but more on this later), he would obsess over this holy grail of mind control for the rest of his career. Under Bluebird, "willing and unwilling subjects" would be used both at home and abroad. In a memo, Dulles noted that some of the stuff he had planned was "not permitted by the United States government (i.e., anthrax etc)." He would need bases overseas.

In a German village north of Frankfurt lay Camp King, a captured Nazi prison. There, US agents proudly calling themselves "The Rough Boys" had been torturing prisoners since 1946. "Some of their methods were traditional, like immersing victims in freezing water or forcing them to run through gauntlets of soldiers who beat them with baseball bats and other weapons. Others were pharmacological. They injected some victims with Metrazol, which was thought to loosen tongues but also causes violent contortions, and others with cocktails of mescaline, heroin, and amphetamines. Victims' screams sometimes echoed throughout the base." Dulles saw here a perfect starting point for his expansion, and he sent Bluebird agents to join them immediately. Another bonus for them was that the staff doctor being relied on for guidance there was our old friend Walter Schreiber. That's right. Former surgeon general of the SS. Other nations might try to cancel him for his unorthodox views and his war crimes, but America believes in second chances... to keep doing the exact same thing for them! Naturally they sent Blome to join the party, and the two old friends continued where they'd left off.

Very soon, a second prison was established nearby at Villa Schuster, named for its Jewish builders and owners forced to sell up and flee during the war. Camp king prisoners began to include refugees. Some were captured Soviet agents. "The guilty were mixed with the simply unfortunate. All were what the CIA called 'expendable,' meaning that if they disappeared, no one would inquire too closely." The especially expendable, or those thought to be guarding useful info, were sent to Villa Schuster for "the most extreme experiments on human beings that had ever been carried out by officers of the United States."

To accelerate all this, similar "black sites" were set up all over Germany and Japan. In Japan, they of course had help from Shiro Ishii, that greasy lover who headed the horrors in that link I hope you didn't click on. There, "Bluebird interrogation teams injected captured North Korean soldiers with drugs including sodium amytal, a depressant that can have hypnotic effects, and with three potent stimulants: Benzedrine, which affects the central nervous system; Coramine, which acts on the lungs; and Picrotoxin, a convulsant that can cause seizures and respiratory paralysis. While they were in the weakened state of transition between the effects of depressants and stimulants, CIA experimenters subjected them to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat. Their goal, according to one report, was 'to induce violent cathartic reactions, alternately putting subjects to sleep, then waking them up until they were sufficiently confused to be coerced into reliving an experience from their past.' CIA officials in Washington ordered the officers who carried out these experiments to keep their true nature a secret even from the American military units with which they were working, and to say only that they were conducting 'intensive polygraph work.'"

By August 1951, a mere 8 months after he'd started, Dulles was becoming frustrated at the lack of progress. He wanted his magic Manchurian Candidate sleeper agents and he wanted them now. He saw Bluebird as too disorganised and lacking focus, and so a passionate new scientist was hired to take the lead, and the project renamed...

4) PROJECT ARTICHOKE

This new specialist was called Sidney Gottlieb, and this is him. He was Mr MK-ULTRA (or "Doctor Death" as his own defence lawyer would call him decades later). He was the guy. A club-footed goat farmer with a penchant for folk dancing, he's perhaps the most morally-complex man in history. Again, more on him later. Around the same time, in addition to the new black sites in Germany and Japan, the CIA opened another at Fort Clayton, Panama. With the interrogators themselves massively unqualified in psychology and even the ones working overseas usually not speaking a foreign language, what was termed "Artichoke work" was largely just chemical torture to no scientific avail.

CIA heads were also driven by an article written in 1950 by one Edward Hunter. He was an overseas journalist, and later, propaganda specialist with the Agency. In it, he claimed the Chinese had developed "brain washing" techniques. It was the first time the phrase had been used in English, and it quickly caught on in American pop culture. He would then double down in a follow-up book, in which he wrote, "The Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels...[intent on turning Americans into] "subjects of a 'new world order' for the benefit of a mad little knot of despots in the Kremlin." Few experts took his fantastical ramblings seriously, but the CIA worked to promote this belief, making a minor celebrity out of him and falling under their own spell in the process. This echo chamber of career-climbing and unchecked paranoia saw Project Artichoke receive a boost of funding for their madness.

One senior officer called Morse Allen had been fixated on the idea of an "electro-sleep" machine which would be able to lull subjects into a trance. He directed experiments in electroshock, radiation, extreme temperatures and ultrasonic noise. He was also fascinated with hypnosis. "He found 'a famous stage hypnotist' in New York who told him that he often had sex with otherwise unwilling women after placing them in a 'hypnotic trance'." A dubious claim, to be sure. Who the hell says this to try to impress a stranger? Someone smarter than me I suppose, because it worked, and rather than arrange for him to be monitored / punished, Allen instead signed up for a four-day course with the aspiring rapist. He then tried these techniques out on CIA secretaries, and "several times managed to place them in trances and induce them to do things they might not otherwise consider, like flirting with strangers and revealing office secrets." What he probably assumed was low-level mind control, we would recognise today as just straightforward harassment, with these frightened women compelled to play along for the big boss.

As Artichoke progressed, the belief in total mind control and its potential to conquer the world, became a solid faith at the CIA. They were trying everything imaginable with no regard to human cost - but drugs interested them the most. They would experiment most notably with THC, cocaine, heroin and mescaline. Then Gottlieb learned of a drug created some 20 years previously in a Swiss lab : LSD.

Over the next 20 years, with a budget of millions and no oversight, Gottlieb and his CIA associates would use LSD on themselves, black site prisoners, unsuspecting patients and random people off the street as their ungodly purpose was given a suitably intense name: MK-ULTRA. Stay tuned for part 2!