MK Ultra was bad

When Richard Helms poured lighter fluid on a yet another dustbin full of files and set fire to it, he considered what he was doing was in the National Interest. What those papers contained, should they leak out, would likely bring down the Government; it would certainly cause those overseeing the security apparatus of the United States to come under intense scrutiny, if not completely restructured. On those papers were accounts of LSD experiments, of emotional, physical and psychological torture. Of sensory deprivation and psychiatric experimentation every bit as sinister and evil as the Nazi’s carried out in World War 2.

And the reason they were as bad, if not worse, is because they were carried out and funded by the Government, however unwittingly through McGill University and overseen by Ewen Campbell. The U.S. Government was supposed to be the good guys, but under the veneer of decency and democracy, there were moves which were the opposite to all those visions of probity. And the only reason we know anything about it at all, was human error. The misfiling of a trove of documents which survived the flames, which were missed in the frantic search to bury the evidence. And in those papers, lay the most gruesome truth of all. It didn’t stop. The experiments went on. Hidden in other research, tucked away behind more respectable projects, funded by a lazy and inefficient budgetary system, which failed to recognise a packet of paper-clips could possibly be found for purchase for less than the $10m on the expenses and funding request, minds with the desire to control and to rule sat in quiet laboratories and developed something even worse.

To give some context to MKULTRA, the CIA were involved in illegal research into mind control between 1956 and 1964. Many of these experiments were carried out on psychiatric patients and other vulnerable people in the States’ control, people with no way of fighting back. They were subjected to the most appalling abuses, in an attempt to ‘program’ them. To place into some dark corner of their mind a command, an irresistible need to do as they are bid by their controllers. This could mean anything from minor civil infractions to political assassinations and terrorism.

The notion that a service as malign as the CIA could have effectively an army of servants, unaware they were servants, who could be called up using symbols, command or trigger words or sounds to commit whatever crime the service saw fit had some huge operational advantages. These links would be virtually untraceable, which meant any action they did perpetrate couldn’t be traced back to a Government Agency. Such an asset could be used and disposed of with minimum involvement of the authorities. It gave them the cover of distance and the luxury of plausible deniability.

But it got worse; the experiments which started with the blessing of Harry Truman, expanded exponentially. They could no longer use the mentally impaired; the use of American citizens, no matter their level of incapacity, was something which most Americans would be up in arms about. When Alan Dulles took the helm he stated he wanted to explore “augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc.”. The tests were moved abroad, where the oversight of the US Authorities and more importantly, the media, was far restricted. Prisons were utilised, with so-called incentives given to prisoners. And overseeing it all was Walter Schreiber.

Schreiber had risen in the US ranks to the level of General. But his career was as sinister as you would expect; he was the former surgeon general in Hitler’s Nazi regime. It was he who authorised the experiments on inmates detained in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. Free from the rigours of justice, he simply started working for the winning side; it could be argued he simply moved departments.

And so with the files laying there, years later, there was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode on the administration. And Helms, about to finish as CIA director knew what they would cause if they ever came to light. He and Sidney Gottlieb ordered all the files to be found and destroyed.

And so, with the ashes thrown in the garbage, he considered his heritage and position safe, and the agency could attend to other matters. The project was over, the answers were in, the matter was closed.

Except it wasn’t.

Hidden away, misfiled whether by accident or design, were papers which escaped the purge. What they detailed was horrific; but these were only a fraction of what was in the full paperwork. They were the tip of the iceberg in their revelations. With the drumbeat of Watergate in the headlines, they hardly broke surface.

But in those documents was something worse; a reference to something which spun off from the initial experiments. Subproject 119 was not about drugs, not about pain compliance or psychological manipulation; it was something far more insidious. No longer would they need to engage in weeks of psychological and physical abuse; this new research would not even require the subject to know they were even involved. The whole research was based on the direct electromagnetic manipulation of human neural activity from a remote location, without the subject’s knowledge or consent, using radio frequency signals targeted at the brain.

In the first couple of years of MK Ultra, there were many suggestions and ideas which were put forward along the same lines, with the same intention; manipulation of the citizen. Subproject 119 was first mooted in 1960, at least that’s the first mention of it in the surviving records. The report postulated interest in telemetric recording of bioelectric signals from human subject; brain waves, heart and muscle activity, eye movements and other data could be collected and, ultimately, interfered with. The manipulation of the central nervous system, the EEG data and behavioural monitoring and of course the use of opiates and other drugs to make subjects more accessible to the process. All this information is publicly available since the Senate investigated the whole MK Ultra scandal in 1977 in the Church Commission Files.

The media was, and remains, blissfully silent on the matter.

Subproject 119 was one of many projects, numbered before and after 119, most of which are lost to the mists of time. Unlike so many of the other exploits of the research – which was all undertaken or overseen by Universities or Research establishments – 119 didn’t need prisoners or inmates. It didn’t need drugs. It didn’t even need the subject to be aware an experiment was being conducted. What it set out to investigate was whether a person’s behaviour, opinions, actions or other activities could be remotely influenced by electronic or electromagnetic means. And, if that was the case, what methodology would be employed to do it reliably and remotely?

The kicker was it didn’t stop in 1966, and it still didn’t cease in 1973. In fact, it’s still an operational research project. There are hundreds of sites detailing the horrors that this whole operation oversaw, diligent research and some errant speculation on all areas of this topic and it’s implications. And I’m not about to dive into a long and somewhat involved diatribe about the entire subject.

What I am going to ask you is this; if you were in power or wanted power and you had access to the means to ‘instruct’ people to follow and support you, people who didn’t understand your policies, your intentions or your history of malfeasance, if you could manipulate swathes of people to act against their own self interest without knowing why, would you not use it? The implications that sixty years later, a growing percentage of people may not be in control of their own minds, is something that should concern us all.