What is MK Ultra?
- Davina Kaur
- Jul 15, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 19, 2020
After the response to my article on the Amazon and Wayfair scandal, Conspiracy theories have been at the forefront of my mind and I wanted to know more. So I asked my friends to give me something to write about, and they told me about MK Ultra.
My first response being “What the hell is that?”
So, after a deep internet dive, here are my thoughts and questions about MK Ultra.
What is MK-Ultra?
During the height and paranoia of the Cold War, 1953, the United States Government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U. S prisoners of war in Korea.
So, what better way to tackle it than to do the same thing?
So in 1953 MK-Ultra was born and raised by the director of the CIA, Richard Helms. The furtive operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against the Soviet Bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.
In laymen’s terms, the agency wanted to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind-control and psychological torture.
Over 150 experiments on willing and unwilling participants took place between 1953 - 1964. They took place in universities, hospitals or prisons in the USA and Canada. Academics and researchers even helped fund the program without knowing its purpose, which is the gathering of data from American citizens at the expense of their lives.
The program involved over 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Only sometimes did the test subjects know they were taking part in a study, and when they did, it singled them out for extreme tests.
For example, the people who consented to the use of LSD, were singled out for the extreme cases, for example, they gave seven volunteers in Kentucky LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days!
Another technique investigated was the intravenous administration of a barbiturate into one arm and an amphetamine into the other. It released the barbiturates into the person first and as soon as the person began to fall asleep; they released the amphetamines. The person would babble incoherently and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.
It gets worse.
The CIA captured people suspected of being enemy agents and other people it deemed “expendable” to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. They interrogated the prisoners while being administered psychoactive drugs, electro-shocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.
They also used unwitting test subjects like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers, and terminal cancer patients. Or in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, “people who could not fight back.”
"People who could not fight back."
Who was Sidney Gottlieb?
According to prominent Journalist in this field, Stephen Kinzer, Sidney Gottlieb was the agency chemist and poison expert in this operation who pointed the agency toward LSD which he believed could be harnessed for brainwashing or psychological torture.
Kinzer defined Gottlieb as having a “Licence to kill.”
“He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder.”
It is blatant here that Gottlieb had a blatant disregard for human life, especially in the case of Frank Olson.
Gottlieb also came to the realization there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory and using it in clandestine operations, so he started a series of experiment where LSD was given to people in “normal” settings without warning.
Dr. Frank Olson, an army chemist who has never taken LSD was covertly dosed by his CIA supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from a window of a 13th story New York City Hotel Room, supposedly because of deep depression induced by the drug.
Kinzer confirms that Olson has approached his superiors some time earlier, doubting the morality of the project, and asked to resign from the CIA. Is this just a coincidence?
Another important and shocking thing to note is that in areas under American control in the early 1950s in Europe, and East Asia, mostly Japan, Germany and the Philippines, the CIA created secret detention centres so the U. S could avoid criminal prosecution.
Gottlieb did not have to worry about any legal entanglement in these places....
MK Ultra went on for 10 years. So what made it end?
In 1973, amid a government wide panic caused by Watergate (a case I will go into another time), CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra’s files destroyed. Which in consequence made a full investigation impossible.
A cache of 20,000 documents survived Helm’s purge as they had been incorrectly stored. These documents were fully investigated in Senate Hearings of 1977.
December 1974, The New York Times alleged that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S Citizens.
Which prompted an investigation in the form of the Church Committee that looked into the illegal domestic activities of the CIA.
In the summer of 1975, the Church Committee reports reveal to the public for the first time that the CIA and had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to find out how to influence and control human behaviour through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and Mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject, Frank Olson had died after administration of LSD.
What happened next?
Investigations into MK-Ultra are still prominent in conspiracy circles. With, even allegations of child and sexual abuse coming to the forefront.
According to a catalogue of cases alleged against MK Ultra, several victims have yet to come forward.
The catalogue writes: “Are you one of the thousands of people used as a human guinea pig by your own government during the Cold War? A Nation Betrayed is the culmination of documentation got from over 18,000 pages of declassified documents and testimony from survivors of these experiments.” And goes further to state that to counter the threat of communism, the country also tried to build the perfect spy from children, take that as you will.
In the book, “Secret Weapons: Two Sisters’ Terrifying True Story of Sex, Spies and Sabotage,” there are horrific, yet, informative narratives of Cheryl and Lynn Hersha, as they describe tortuous programming beginning at the tender ages of four and six years, and continuing into adulthood.
Important Quotes from the book to note:
“By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always sexual…”
“The government researchers, aware of the information in the professional journals, reversed the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They used selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing acts desired for national security and defense.”
Why is this important now?
Why are we still talking about MK Ultra, apart from the blatant disregard for human life to where people were pawns for the government's own gain? Conspiracy circles still believe that testing is going on. To the point where even celebrities have been under mind control!
For example, during a red carpet interview at the 2018 Grammy’s, Cardi B unexpectedly stared into space. It was not blamed on nerves or exhaustion but a glitch of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program.
Believers are convinced that whenever a celebrity or politician acts strangely on camera, they aren’t just nervous or butchering their lines, but are victims of a top secret mind control division of the US government.
The conspiracy theory extends to more sinister acts and is often referenced in combination with other conspiracy theories: there are dozens of Reddit threads suggesting the gunmen behind attacks including Sandy Hook and Columbine were not terrorists or fanatics but “MK-Ultra puppets” conducted by sinister forces to carry out these atrocities.
References in films:
Potential Spoilers
Jordan Peele:
In Get Out (2017) Jordan Peele used the framework of MK Ultra, the very pivot of the film which is a mind control scheme to which Chris, the protagonist, is subjected to; hypnosis.
They try to use science to create black bodies without blackness, black minds devoid of black consciousness. They want to make conscious slaves and they take unwilling people and experiment on them - does this sound familiar?
The basement underneath is reminiscent to an MK Ultra facility!
Peele continues with his masterful mythology and depicts the It similarly does this with his film US (2019), he uses his masterful mythology to depict the doppelgangers in the film as test subjects of a government conspiracy.
He even states in the beginning of the film that no one knows what is done with the tunnels that make out a huge pivotal point in the plot.
In the last act of the movie, the character; Red quickly explains that a government experiment gone wrong is why there are a bunch of shadow-selves lurking about underground. To control the populace, the government created a class of tethered individuals, but it abandoned the project upon realizing that two bodies had to share one soul.
To conclude this article, Project MK Ultra is still a heavily guarded CIA open secret. So, as well as the information willingly released by the CIA, what has not been released? Are they any truths to the conspiracy theories about people being under mind-control?
On a more humanitarian perspective, why was and is there such a disregard for human life, especially regarding those who cannot fight back?
Why are human beings used as pawns for a higher up's gain?
Is it really for the greater good?
Let me know what you think.
References:
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