A Seeming Caspar Milktoast in a Dr. Strangelove World

MK-ULTRA Mind Control Experiments

It was the 1950s, WWII was behind and America looked forward optimistically. But, the war experience and then “brain-washing” by Soviets who were running North Korean and China in their war against the U. S. and U. N. forced in Korea sinister things were afoot.

The most notorious was MK-ULTRA that sought to understand and apply mind control. Some charge this was all about U. S. government efforts to turn American soldiers into unthinking, unfeeling machines with help from brainwashing and LSD.

This became a frenzy symbolized by The Manchurian Candidate a 1959 thriller novel written by Richard Condon, adapted into films in 1962 and 2004. It is about the son of a prominent political family who has been brainwashed into becoming an unwilling assassin for the Communist Party.

A Science Channel story describes how the CIA, while learning how to bring down Communists, was also learning from them - specifically how they used mind control on Korean War prisoners. Could this mind control also create a zombie-like US soldier, one who would follow orders no matter how grisly, or withstand any amount of torture if captured?

The combination of hypnosis, shock therapy and drugs like LSD and Ketamine made this seem a possibility, and were investigated in a mind control research program called MK-ULTRA. MK-ULTRA was well-funded and led by a scientist named Sidney Gottlieb. In his book The Very Best Men, Evan Thomas describes Gottlieb as “born with a club foot and a stutter, he compensated by becoming an expert folk dancer and obtaining a Ph.D. from Cal Tech … he drank only goat’s milk and grew Christmas trees, which he sold at a roadside stand.” That is, when he wasn’t drugging research subjects.

Gottlieb used MK-ULTRA to investigate: :

• Ways to render hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
• Substances to enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing”.
• Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
• Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
• A knockout pill which could surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.

The fascination with LSD, bizarrely thought a wonder drug that could create zombie-like armies, and drive enemy leaders like Fidel Castro insane. Fizzled. Science Channel says LSD was secretly given to a range of people, from CIA employees to prostitutes and the mentally ill. Sometimes, agents even posed as prostitutes and secretly drugged their clients, while fellow agents watched in two-way mirrors.

LSD was ruled out as being too unpredictable, other drugs were tested; participants had barbiturates injected on one arm and amphetamines in the other - the net result being incoherent babble. Other drugs, including heroin, alcohol and sodium pentothal were tried, but ultimately none were the “dream drug” the government hungered for. MK-ULTRA was scrapped and the “Manchurian Candidate” never came to be. In 1973 most of the MK-ULTRA files were destroyed, and Sidney Gottlieb died in 1999.

Gottlied, who looked the world like a school master was a skilled chemist who spent his career with the CIA and was involved in some sinister schemes for instance:

In March I960, President  Eisenhower OK’d a plot to overthrow Fidel Castro. Gottlieb’s  schemes included: spraying a TV studio in which he was about to appear with an hallucinogenic drug (LSD);  contaminating his shoes with thallium which they believed would cause the hair in his beard to fall out, later poison his cigars and placing a exploding conch shellto kill Castro while was swimming underwater.

Gottlieb had the idea of planting a poisoned handkerchief in his suit pocket. (This was unsuccessfully used against General Abd al-Karim Kassem of Iraq.)

Gottlieb was also assigned the task of planning the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. His idea then was adding lethal biological agent to a tube of toothpaste.

Attempts to develop biological agents that would cause tularemia, brucelloisis, anthrax, smallpox, tuberculosis and equine encephalis. These experiments ended in failure.  Lumumba was murdered the old fashioned way by soldiers loyal to Moise Tshombe who shot him..

There are repercussions from MK-ULTRA, even today. In January 2007, a class action suit was filed against the Canadian government, which also took part in MK-ULTRA research, by former psychiatric patients who claim they were used as guinea pigs. Experiments included forced isolation, drug-induced comas and electro-shock therapy. One of the plaintiffs, a great-grandmother named Janine Huard, said, “They demolished me … they gave me terrible drugs, electroshocks, and made me stay in a bed with a mask over my face listening to recordings for hours a day. I was afraid.”

It may be a hard case to prove, as the government is notoriously closed-mouthed about MK-ULTRA. As one CIA reviewer wrote: “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.”