*Originally published at Grand Theft World.
“It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don’t agree. The wounds remain. Time – the mind, protecting its sanity – covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.”
-Rose Kennedy
Quotes like the one above, commonly made by individuals who would seemingly be in positions to truly understand the depth of the sentiment behind the words they are speaking, always make me curious to know what truly lies behind the sentiment being conveyed. The human mind is a remarkable system that can perform a multitude of functions, some of them simultaneous with others. Research regarding how the human mind works and mastering its full capabilities has occupied our greatest scholars and philosophers for centuries, and it has also drawn attention from segments of our society whose main pre-occupation appears to be control and domination.
The subject of mind control is typically dismissed as pure fantasy by the spheres of corporate media and academia. It often conjures up images of magicians executing slight-of-hand demonstrations on bedazzled audiences, or Hollywood villains employing cutting edge technology to obtain power through nefarious means. You know what I’m talking about – the kind of stuff that can’t possibly exist outside the realm of science fiction; or so we are often told. But how often do we stop to consider that even those notions could be the result of an orchestrated campaign; an idea crafted specifically to serve as subterfuge to mask a greater purpose? I would argue that this concept is not considered nearly often enough, and certainly not by “credible sources.” After all, most of us would be reluctant to admit that our thoughts and desires could originate from somewhere outside of our own minds – and I include myself in that statement.
I would imagine that most of us are likely already familiar with the MK-ULTRA program conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. After being exposed to public view in the 1970s, it became one of the pillars of the lexicon of the so-called conspiracy community. Even traditionally information-stingy Wikipedia offers relatively copious details on the clandestine program carried out on volunteers as well as unwitting individuals over more than two decades during the 20th century. The information contained on this page of the online encyclopedia has been widely disseminated since the conclusion of the Church Committee hearings in 1975, and the revelations of 20,000 pages of documentation uncovered by a FOIA request in 1977. One of the common themes of this “public-facing” version of the MK-ULTRA narrative is a heavy focus on the use of illicit substances employed to produce the desired outcomes of the program. And even Wikipedia refers to the “illegal human experimentation” conducted, yet not one prominent government official seems to have faced serious prosecution for it – at the time or after.
Perhaps We Should Start At The Beginning
Contrary to what Wikipedia – and many other sources – would have us believe, MK-ULTRA seems to have originated well before 1953. In 1941, the Chemical Warfare Service of the United States Army merged with the Committee on Medical Research, and came under the direction of progressive liberal Dr. Alfred Newton Richards – a Yale graduate and consultant for pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck & Co. The following year, Dr. Richards made a request of War Secretary Henry Stimson, and received approval to begin experimenting on military personnel with various poisonous gases. Subsequently, in 1943, Dr. Richards again requested of the U.S. government for the ability to conduct medical experimentation and research on human subjects. This request was granted by then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, and Dr. Richards was given access to the population at the federal prison facility in Terre Haute, IN. These two decisions would set the precedents needed for further experimentation – sanctioned by the government – that would eventually follow.
At the conclusion of the European campaign of World War II in 1944, some of the Nazi scientists who had perpetrated the atrocities in the concentration camps were arrested and convicted during the Nuremburg trials. Many more were evacuated from the European theater by the U.S. government under Operation Paperclip, a secret undertaking designed to recruit the “best and brightest” of the Nazi regime’s scientists and provide them safe passage and employment in the aftermath of the Reich’s defeat at the hands of the Allied forces. Many of these scientists would go on to continue work in their chosen fields of expertise, with a percentage of them being absorbed into the Office of Strategic Services – the precursor to what we know today as the Central Intelligence Agency. Others would be placed into positions to assist in building the space program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA), and yet others would gain passage to countries in South America that could serve as safe havens. None of these scientists would ever be legally held to account for their participation in human experimentation during the war or after, and many were provided with new identities and credentials from the U.S. government to obscure their backgrounds.
Following the official creation of the CIA in 1947, secret human experimentation – away from the view of the public and in direct violation of the newly enshrined Nuremberg Code – would continue under a variety of codenames. Project Bluebird would have it’s name changed to Project Artichoke; which would in turn become known as Project Naomi, sometimes also called MK-Naomi. While the names may have appeared different, the players and the methods would remain the same. The scope of willing and unwilling project participants would also expand to include prisoners from conflicts with other nations, like the often historically overlooked Korean war.
In 1953, under the guidance of the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, MK-ULTRA would be officially created and incorporate all of the methodologies of its predecessor programs. It would become the CIA’s umbrella operation for developing successful techniques for interrogation, behavior modification, and mind control. At least 149 different sub-projects would fall under the MK umbrella, and most of these sub-projects employed a combination of psychoactive drugs, electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical trauma in order to achieve their stated goals. Those goals also ran the gambit of operationally purposeful outcomes for the agency, such as:
- the brainwashing and re-patriotization of foreign nationals for clandestine operations in other countries
- creating couriers who could easily transport classified information across borders without raising suspicion(often referred to as “carrier pigeons”)
- training programmed assassins who could be triggered to kill remotely, yet were themselves unaware of their own programming(Manchurian Candidates)
- producing assets that could be employed to blackmail foreign leaders, sometimes called the “ultimate prostitutes for diplomatic espionage”
Under the leadership of Dulles, the budget for the MK-ULTRA program would quickly swell and exceed $1,000,000,000 annually – which is still a considerable amount of money in 2022, but remember that this was the 1950s. This exorbitant funding would allow the CIA and the scientists conducting its experiments nearly unlimited access to any resources deemed necessary to accomplish their desired ambitions. An internal agency document from 1955 indicates at least one of the sub-projects was in search of “substances which will cause permanent brain damage as well as memory loss.” Substances that were deemed illegal and forbidden from public use were routinely administered to program subjects, and often without the knowledge of the person receiving them. It is not uncommon to find documentation of MK-ULTRA subjects being dosed with LSD, marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine, mescaline, seconal, atropine, and a variety of other substances – sometimes even in concurrence with each other.
Other MK sub-projects attempted to achieve program goals by implanting electronic hardware in the brains of its subjects, using sounds inaudible to the human ear as stimuli, embedding subliminal messaging in unconscious individuals, and many other methods that would still be considered outside the bounds of ethical scientific practices. And it appears that CIA leadership at the time was well aware of how their enterprise might be interpreted by the general public. A 1957 Inspector General report notes that administrators advised “precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.”
In the early 1970s, a series of events exposed to the American public some of the stark realities of what the intelligence community was actually doing with their budgets of American tax dollars. This led to an inevitable Congressional investigation by what came to be known as the Church Committee, which was alleged to be a bi-partisan effort to uncover and punish the abuses of power by the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI), the National Security Agency(NSA), the CIA and the Internal Revenue Service(IRS). Among the activities investigated by the committee were COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird, Family Jewels, Project Shamrock and MK-ULTRA. It was the first time many Americans would be confronted by the fact that their own government – whom they believed to be so egalitarian – might actually be more interested in self-preservation than the protection of the Republic and the rule of law.
The main outcome of the Senate investigation would be the newly created Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was enacted ostensibly to provide Congressional oversight to the activities of the intelligence agencies and prevent these kinds of abuses from ever happening again. While MK-ULTRA was a main focus of the investigation, then CIA Director William Colby testified before the committee that the program had been disbanded in 1973 and all documents related to the program were destroyed by his predecessor. This obviously made the release of 20,000 pages of program documents in response to a 1977 FOIA request a little awkward to be sure, but Colby had since moved on from the agency by the time that occurred. As far as the public needed to be concerned, this dark chapter of government malfeasance in American history could be considered over.
This Is Where The Plot Sickens
The problem with the official story – that the MK-ULTRA program ended in 1973 – is there has been no shortage of people who have come forward in the following decades to tell their personal stories of being part of one of the largest psychological experiments in human history. Even prior to the Church Committee investigation in 1975, details were beginning to leak out into the public’s view about secret programs being conducted under the protection of “national security.” In an interview published by Science Digest in April of 1971, Dr. George H. Estabrooks, Ph.D., details work that he had personally been conducting for the U.S. military in the field of hypnosis. In this interview, Dr. Estabrooks claims to have assisted in developing guidelines for creating “hypnotic couriers” for the military, and outlines one of the objectives of his research:
“Communication in war is always a headache. Codes can be broken. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. Your own man may have unquestionable loyalty, but his judgement is always open to question. The ‘hypnotic courier,’ on the other hand, provides a unique solution. I was involved in preparing many subjects for this work during World War II. One successful case involved an Army Service Corps Captain whom we’ll call George Smith.
George Smith had undergone months of training. He was an excellent subject but did not realize it. I had removed from him, by post-hypnotic suggestion, all recollection of ever having been hypnotized.
First I had the Service Corps call the captain to Washington and tell him they needed a report of the mechanical equipment of Division X headquartered in Tokyo. Smith was ordered to leave by jet next morning, pick up the report and return at once. Consciously, that was all he knew, and it was the story he gave to his wife and friends. Then I put him under deep hypnosis, and gave him – orally – a vital message to be delivered directly on his arrival in Japan to a certain colonel – let’s say his name was Brown – of military intelligence. Outside of myself, Colonel Brown was the only person who could hypnotize Captain Smith. This is ‘locking.’ I performed it by saying to the hypnotized Captain: ‘Until further orders from me, only Colonel Brown and I can hypnotize you. We will use a signal phrase “the moon is clear.” Whenever you hear this phrase from Brown or myself you will pass instantly into deep hypnosis.’ When Captain Smith re-awakened, he had no conscious memory of what happened in trance. All that he was aware of was that he must head for Tokyo to pick up a division report.
On arrival there, Smith reported to Brown, who hypnotized him with the signal phrase. Under hypnosis, Smith delivered my message and received one to bring back. Awakened, he was given the division report and returned home by jet. There I hypnotized him once more with the signal phrase, and he spieled off Brown’s answer that had been dutifully tucked away in his unconscious mind. The system is virtually foolproof. As exemplified by this case, the information was ‘locked’ in Smith’s unconscious for retrieval by the only two people who knew the combination. The subject had no conscious memory of what happened, so could not spill the beans. No one else could hypnotize him even if they night know the signal phrase.”
The process explained above for creating subliminally programmed couriers has been echoed by many people who call themselves survivors of the MK-ULTRA program. Not the least of which would be Cathy O’Brien, whose 1995 book Trance-formation of America details her own experiences through several decades of being an unwitting “carrier pigeon” for world leaders – the least distasteful function she was programmed to perform for these people. In order for the events Cathy presents in her book to be considered genuine, one of two suppositions would almost certainly have to be true: either A) Cathy is a gifted storyteller with a powerful imagination and an incredible attention to historical detail, or B) she is relaying details that have been unlocked from memory using a process very similar to what originally locked them there in the first place. I will let you decide which of those choices is more likely to be valid.
Echoing the chronicles laid out by Cathy O’Brien, the website indybay.org proposes one possible explanation as to why this autobiographical account could be true despite MK-ULTRA having been allegedly shuttered in the early 1970s. In the prior decade of the 1960s, the U.S. military is rumored to have begun it’s own experiments in mind control as an offshoot of the MK-ULTRA program, known as Project Monarch. Monarch subjects were not unique in terms of the techniques that would be utilized in their programming, but they were an evolution of sorts in that a single subject would be programmed to serve multiple purposes. Typically recruited from orphanages, foster care homes, families linked to military intelligence, families with a history of abuse, and even socially prominent families, a single Monarch subject could be programmed to simultaneously fulfill the roles of sex slave, assassin, courier, serial killer, diplomat, and anything else a twisted imagination might be able to conjure up.
This was accomplished by creating multiple compartments within the mind of a single subject. Through hypnosis, administration of psychoactive drugs, and especially generous amounts of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, the Monarch controller could induce the subject’s mind to fracture – thereby creating the compartments needed to store the different personality types. Those compartments could then be effectively locked until needed with a post-hypnotic suggestion, very much like the process described by Dr. Estabrooks. Since the personalities could only be triggered by an experienced controller – or “handler” as they are often known – the subject is never aware of what other programming may be locked inside their own subconscious. It seems the real technological breakthrough came when it was discovered that electricity greatly assists the completion of the compartmentalization process. This would be an obvious reason why so many survivors of the program report being abused with cattle prods and stun guns.
Putting The Pieces Back Together
While several survivors of the Monarch programs have been able to achieve successful deprogramming, and have graciously chosen to share their experiences and memories, they tell us that there are still many more people in the program and that it continues to this day. They have revealed that programming centers are in place all over the country, including: Cornell University, Duke University, Princeton, UCLA, University of Rochester, MIT, Georgetown University Hospital, Maimonides Medical Center, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., Bell Laboratories, Stanford Research Institute, Westinghouse Friendship Laboratories, General Electric, ARCO, Manking Research Unlimited, China Lake Naval Weapons Center, the Presidio, Fort Detrick, Fort Campbell, Fort Lewis, Fort Hood, Redstone Arsenal, Offutt AFB, Patrick AFB, McClellan AFB, McGill AFB, Kirkland AFB, Nellis AFB, Homestead AFB, Grissom AFB, Maxwell AFB, Tinker AFB, Langley Research Center, Los Alamos National Lab, and the Tavistock Institute – just to name a few. There are also reported to be secret programming facilities located in the areas near Mt. Shasta, CA, Lampe, MO and Las Vegas, NV.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb is universally recognized as the father of MK-ULTRA, since he was the man placed in charge of the program by CIA Director Dulles in 1953. Gottlieb was himself one of the Nazi scientists identified as being brought to America through Operation Paperclip in 1944. Undoubtedly, many of his contemporaries were almost certainly involved as well, although that is much more difficult to determine given that many of the “doctors” were given titles to further obscure their participation(i.e. Dr. “Brown,” Dr. “Green,” Dr. “White”). Through the work of many intrepid researchers, as well as survivors who have chosen to go on the record, we can compile a list of participants that includes: Dr. Harold Wolff, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, Dr. George H. Estabrooks, Dr. Frank Putnam, Dr. Karl Pribram, Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, Dr. John Cunningham Lilly, Dr. John Gittinger, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron(McGill Univ.- Canada), and Dr. Kenneth Milner. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and will likely feature many additions in the coming years as more information becomes available.
Many of the most infamous names and faces from 20th century American history can also be connected with MK-ULTRA. Though more difficult to document direct connections in some cases, the explosion of violence that seemed to begin in the United States with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is often associated to this program. Indeed, we have already uncovered that one of the goals was to develop the means for creating pre-programmed killers that could be deployed around the world at a moment’s notice. Among the figures commonly suspected of being subjects of the program, we see names like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, John Hinckley, Jr., Mark David Chapman, David Koresh, John Salvi, and Timothy McVeigh.
One survivor of the program even claims that many of our modern celebrities are products of MK-ULTRA, and have been deliberately planted in the various sectors of the entertainment industry with the expectation of influencing the public. Some of these individuals may even have been groomed for this role from early childhood. This particular survivor provides Leonardo DiCaprio as an example that they had personally met and interacted with while still an active subject of the program. This survivor also points to the Disney Corporation as a willing partner in MK-ULTRA, with their various theme parks around the world – such as Disneyland in southern California – serving a hidden purpose as programming centers. Other survivors have also indicated the use of Disney productions and themes in their own programming sessions.
Many of these programming centers were designed to appear completely innocuous to an unsuspecting public. For example, Dr. Jolly West is regularly connected to an MK-ULTRA sub-program known as Operation Midnight Climax, which was a network of CIA-controlled brothels designed specifically for the development of blackmail techniques. Similar to his work at Stanford Research Institute, Dr. West was able to conduct secret tests in these locations – with various techniques that allegedly “enabled the subjects of mind-control conditioning to adapt to trauma” – on individuals that believed they were just paying for a good time. No doubt some of them got much more than they had bargained for. Records of these tests that eventually found their way to the public indicate that Dr. West was indeed successful in creating methods for triggering amnesia, false memories, altered personas and even pseudo-identities in test subjects.
A common theme from the stories of survivors who have chosen to come forward is that subjects are carefully selected based on a number of different attributes. In his own writing, Dr. West referred to these people as “changelings” – individuals who could produce multiple induced personalities in response to “prolonged environmental stress.” However, the potential for psychological disassociation is apparently not equal in all people, and may actually be most reliably indicated by an individual’s genetic heritage. This hypothesis would go a long way toward explaining why bloodlines appear to be a never-ending obsession of the people who hold the reigns of power in this world. A recent interview with Dr. Juliette Engel – who herself claims to be a survivor of the program – lends a considerable amount of credence to these assertions made by other survivors.
Peering Through The Other Side Of The Looking Glass
As much as we have been able to uncover about this CIA program that began well over 50 years ago – and was never supposed to become public knowledge – there is still much more that we may never know. Thanks to the destruction of official documents from the early years of the program, as well as the restructuring that likely occurred after the conclusion of the Church Committee investigation in 1975, this is an area of research that still proves incredibly difficult to quantify. Some clues – while initially promising – can suddenly lead to dead ends. Others reveals themselves as well-crafted disinformation, but only after exhausting precious time and energy in the process of researching them.
This is also not a subject for the novice investigator to pursue haphazardly, which may be why so very few in the independent research community are even willing to entertain the idea. However, the proprietors of the website theblackvault.com have spent decades submitting and re-submitting FOIA requests to the government in order to archive the available CIA documents still in existence relating to the MK-ULTRA program. Thousands of pages of de-classified government documents are available for viewing as well as downloading, and more requests have been submitted to uncover the true extent of the documentation that may still be unreleased.
Plenty of loose ends remain to be unraveled from the MK-ULTRA narrative. Some of those threads appear to reach into the very foundations of institutions we have been indoctrinated to be believe exist only to serve the public’s interests. If it can ultimately be determined that the faces and voices being presented to us as benevolent leaders or influential innovators are actually unwitting puppets themselves, what does that say about the image of reality we are presented with? And with the rapid advancement and proliferation of communications technology we have experienced over the last 50 years – the ability to broadcast a multitude of signals anywhere at any time – how can we know for certain that we are not constantly under assault from subliminal influence every day?
Additional Resources:
The History of MK-ULTRA – How the Nazis Won World War II https://fort-russ.com/2019/09/the-history-of-mk-ultra-how-the-nazis-won-wwii/
CIA Project MK-ULTRA https://themadtruther.com/2020/07/02/cia-project-mk-ultra/
…What is MK-ULTRA? https://mormonmonarch.com/what-is-mk-ultra/
MK-ULTRA Franklin Scandal: Deposition of Paul Bonacci https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1qnZwgQCB0
Black Widow Breakdown – MK-ULTRA Monarch Mind Control! https://grandtheftworld.com/2021/07/15/black-widow-breakdown-mk-ultra-monarch-mind-control-jay-dyer/
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