A Secret Agenda Leads to First Mind Control Programs

A declassified CIA document dated 7 January 1953 with a section heading “Outline of Special H Cases” describes the creation of multiple personality in two 19-year old girls.

“H” is shorthand for hypnotic, hypnotized, or hypnotism in these documents:

“These subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H controlled state … by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signal, or words and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes.”

After the end of World War II, German scientists were being held in a variety of detainment camps by the allies.

In 1946, President Truman authorized Project Paperclip to exploit German scientists for American research, and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union. Some reports bluntly pointed out that they were “ardent Nazis.”

They were considered so vital to the “Cold War” effort, that they would be brought into the US and Canada. Some of these experts participated in murderous medical experiments on human subjects at concentration camps.

A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said “between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the US under Paperclip and similar programs.”

According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Fact Book, the NSC (National Security Council) and the CIA were established under the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947. In December 1947, the NSC held its first meeting. James Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense, pushed for the CIA to begin a ‘secret war’ against the Soviets.

Forrestal’s initiative led to the execution of psychological warfare operations (psy-ops) in Europe. CIA personnel were not opposed to working with Nazi doctors who had proven to be proficient in breaking the mind and rebuilding it. In some cases military bases were used to hide these covert activities. It was decided that the communist threat was an issue that took priority over constitutional rights.

The concept of running a secret ‘black’ project was no longer novel. In 1941, Roosevelt had decided, without consulting Congress, that the US should proceed with the utmost secrecy to develop an atomic bomb.

Secrecy shrouded the Manhattan Project (the atomic bomb program) to the extent that Vice President Harry Truman knew nothing about it. The project meant that by 1947, the US Government had already gained vast experience in the initiation of secret operations.

The existence of ‘black projects’ funded by ‘black budgets’ was withheld not only from the public, but also from Congress for reasons of national security.

A declassified CIA document “Hypnotic Experimentation and Research, 10 February 1954” describes a simulation of relevance to the creation of unsuspecting assassins:

“Miss [deleted] was instructed (having previously expressed a fear of firearms in any fashion) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken Miss [deleted] (now in a deep hypnotic sleep) and failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss [deleted]. She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to “kill” [deleted] for failing to awaken. Miss [deleted] carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded) gun at [deleted] and then proceeding to fall into a deep sleep. Both were awakened and expressed complete amnesia for the entire sequence. Miss [deleted] was again handed the gun, which she refused (in an awakened state) to pick up or accept from the operator. She expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.”

One of the areas to be investigated by the CIA was mind control. The CIA’s human behavior control program was chiefly motivated by perceived Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques. Under the protection of ‘national security,’ many other branches of the government also took part in the study of this area.

The CIA originated its first program in 1950 under the name BLUEBIRD, which in 1951, after Canada and Britain had been included, was changed to ARTICHOKE. MKULTRA officially began in 1953. Technically it was closed in 1964, but some of its programs remained active under MKSEARCH well into the 1970s. In 1973, tipped off about forthcoming investigations, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of any MKULTRA records.

Diligent use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) helps to cast light on the advances that have been made in controlling the way people think and act. In 1977, through an FOIA request, 16,000 pages of documents were found, held as part of the Agency’s financial history.

That is how much of this information has been pieced together. The FOIA allows the most humble citizen to demand the disclosure of documents, although inevitably some will be heavily censored or not released at all.

Inevitably, however, it is an incomplete picture. Most of the important details were conveniently destroyed under orders of CIA Director Helms to conceal wrongdoing. What the mind controllers were and are doing may be only hinted at in a memo footnote or in the memoirs of a retired researcher.

Nevertheless, there is more than enough here to show that secret new techniques are being exploited that are no longer in the realm of science fiction. We must all be aware of this threat, so that those who wish to take liberties with democracy, and with our freedom to think, are deterred.

The CIA Mind Control Projects

Project BLUEBIRD was approved by the director of the CIA on April 20, 1950. In a 1951 memo, Bluebird states that practical research was to be conducted to include these specific problems:

Can we create by post-H [hypnotic] control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?

Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an H condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit?

Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.?

Can we by H and SI [sleep inducing] techniques force a subject to travel long distances, commit specified acts and return to us or bring documents or materials?

Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?

Can we “alter” a person’s personality?

Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs?

How can sodium A or P or any other sleep inducing agent be best concealed in a normal item, such as candy, cigarettes, coffee, tea, beer, medicines?

Officially, MKULTRA was established on 13 April 1953, at Richard Helms’ suggestion as “ultra sensitive” work. The operational wing of MKULTRA, known as MKDELTA, had as its mission to find out how to use chemical and biological weapon ingredients to alter the human mind.

Originally established as a supplementary funding mechanism to the ARTICHOKE project, MKULTRA quickly grew into a mammoth undertaking that outflanked earlier mind control initiatives.

A memorandum from Richard Helms, Acting Deputy Director to CIA Director Allen Dulles dated 3 April 1953 and entitled “Two Extremely Sensitive Research Programs” (MKULTRA and MKDELTA) includes the statement, “Even internally in CIA, as few individuals as possible should be aware of our interest in these fields and of the identity of those who are working for us. At present this results in ridiculous contracts which do not spell out the scope or intent of the work.”

The memorandum below was written 10 years later to Helms, who had become CIA Director.

26 July 1963, MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence

SUBJECT: Report of Inspection, MKULTRA

It was deemed advisable to prepare the report of the MKULTRA program in one copy only, in view of its unusual sensitivity. Normal procedures for project approval, funding, and accounting were waived.

The program requires the services of highly specialized authorities in many fields of natural science. The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical. Nevertheless, there have been major accomplishments both in research and operational employment.

Over the ten-year life of the program many additional avenues to the control of human behavior have been designated under the MKULTRA charter, including radiation, electro-shock, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices.

Some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality implicit in the original charter. A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of US citizens in jeopardy. Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious adverse reaction in US public opinion.

TSD [Technical Services Division of CIA] initiated a program for covert testing of materials on unwitting US citizens in 1955. TSD has pursued a philosophy of minimum documentation in keeping with the high sensitivity of some of the projects. Some files contained little or no data at all.

There are just two individuals in TSD who have full substantive knowledge of the program and most of that knowledge is unrecorded. In protecting the sensitive nature of the American intelligence capability to manipulate human behavior, they apply “need to know” doctrine to their professional associates. J.S. Earman, Inspector General and footnote.

The Senate Intelligence Committee did find some records during its investigation in 1976. However it noted that the practice of MKULTRA was “to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.”

Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer, said, “The congressional sub-committee which went into this got only the barest glimpse.” Senator Frank Church, who led the congressional investigations of the CIA’s unlawful actions, said that the agency was “a rogue elephant” operating above the law as it plotted assassinations, illegally spied on thousands of Americans, and even drugged our own citizens in its effort to develop new weapons for its covert arsenal.

“The focal point of MKULTRA was the use of humans as unwitting subjects [without their knowledge or consent]. The CIA sponsored numerous experiments of this kind. Regardless of a report by the CIA’s Inspector General in 1963 recommending the termination of testing on unwitting subjects, future CIA Director Richard Helms continued to advocate covert testing on the grounds that “we are less capable of staying up with the Soviet advances in this field.”

On the subject of moral issues, Helms commented, “we have no answer to the moral issue.”

The Experience of CIA Mind Control Victim Carol Rutz

The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four. Over the next 12 years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. Electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other types of trauma were used to make me compliant and split my personality [create multiple personalities for specific tasks].

Each alter or personality was created to respond to a post-hypnotic trigger, then perform an act and not remember it later. This “Manchurian Candidate” program was just one of the operational uses of the mind control scenario by the CIA. Your hard-earned tax dollars supported this.

As a survivor of CIA programs Bluebird/Artichoke and MKULTRA, I began my intense search to document some of the mind control experiments that I was made part of. Through a series of FOIA requests to various departments of the government, 48 years after I was first experimented on, I found solid proof of my memories—proof that was in the government vaults of the nearly 18,000 pages of declassified documents from the Bluebird/Artichoke and MKULTRA programs.

One of the declassified documents states, “Learning studies will be instituted in which the subject will be rewarded or punished for overall performance and reinforced in various ways—with electric shock, etc. In other cases, drugs and psychological tricks will be used to modify attitudes.

The experimenters will be particularly interested in dissociative states [multiple personality]. An attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.” The government had finally handed me the validation I had been searching for.

The basic premise of the book The Manchurian Candidate is that a group of American POWs in the Korean War is brainwashed while crossing through Manchuria to freedom. They arrive back in the US amnesic for the period of brainwashing. One is programmed to be an assassin. His target is a candidate for president. His handlers control him with a hypnotically implanted trigger.

In an experiment described in a document entitled “SI and H experimentation (25 September 1951),” two female subjects took part in an exercise involving the planting of a bomb. Both subjects performed perfectly and were fully amnesic for the exercise:

“[Deleted] was instructed that upon awakening, she would proceed to [deleted] room where she would wait at the desk for a telephone call. Upon receiving the call, a person known as “Jim” would engage her in normal conversation. During the course of the conversation, this individual would mention a code word. When she heard this code word, she would pass into a SI trance state, but would not close her eyes and remain perfectly normal and continue the telephone conversation. She was told that upon conclusion of the telephone conversation, she would carry out instructions: [Deleted] was shown an electric timing device. She was informed that this device was a bomb, and was then instructed how to attach and set the device. After [deleted] learned how to set and attach the device, she was told to take the timing device which was in a briefcase, and proceed to the ladies room. In the ladies room, she would be met by a girl whom she had never seen who would identify herself by the code word “New York.” [Deleted] was then to show this individual how to attach and set the timing device and further instructions would be given that the timing device was to be carried in the briefcase to [deleted] room, placed in the nearest empty electric-light plug and concealed in the bottom, left-hand drawer of [deleted] desk, with the device set for 82 seconds and turned on.”

The Mind Control Doctors

In the second half of the 20th century, mind control projects resulted in extensive political abuse of psychiatry in North America. Many thousands of prisoners and mental patients were subjected to unethical mind control experiments by leading psychiatrists and medical schools.

Organized academic psychiatry has never acknowledged this history. The network of mind control doctors involved has done a great deal of harm to the field of psychiatry and to psychiatric patients.

The work of the mind control doctors did not occur in a vacuum. The importation of Nazi doctors to the US through secret programs like PAPERCLIP is part of the context. Mind control experimentation was not only tolerated by medical professionals, but published in psychiatric and medical journals. The climate was permissive, supportive, and approving of mind control experimentation.

Dr. William Sweet participated in both brain electrode implant experiments and the injection of uranium into medical patients at Harvard University. The 925-page Final Report. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments tells the story of radiation experiments, and their linkage to mind control.

Martin Orne is one of the leading experts on hypnosis of the 20th century. For about 30 years, he was the editor of The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.

Dr. Orne is one of two psychiatrists professionally still active into the late 1990’s who is a documented CIA mind control contractor (along with Dr. Louis Jolyon West)

P. Janet asked a “deeply hypnotized female to commit several murders before a distinguished group of judges, stabbing some victims with rubber daggers and poisoning others with sugar tablets.”

The subject did all these without hesitation.

Army doctors were actively involved in LSD testing at least until the late 1970’s. Subjects of LSD experiments included children as young as five years old, and brain electrodes were implanted in children as young as 11 years of age. Four of the CIA’s MKULTRA Subprojects were on children.

The mind control doctors included presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and psychiatrists who received full-page obituaries in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Responsibility for the unethical experimentation lies first with the individual doctors, but also collectively with the medical profession, and with academia as a whole.

The MKULTRA contractor about whom the most has been written is Dr. Ewen Cameron. At various times, Dr. Cameron was President of the American, Canadian, and World Psychiatric Associations. He was one of four co-founders of the World Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Cameron began conducting unethical, unscientific, and inhumane brainwashing experiments in the 1930’s. Schizophrenic patients were forced to lie naked in red light for eight hours a day for periods as long as eight months. Another experiment involved overheating patients in an electric cage until their body temperatures reached 102 degrees