11 ms·

Project MKUltra

229 points by rasengan 7y ago

nickthemagicman 7y ago
This is unreal. It feels like something out of the Marvel universe.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Freight train! But yeah, I usually tell people, MK Ultra is legit just cause tinfoil people talk about it doesnt make it made up. The question to the person interested is how much was proven?
  - dijit 7y ago
    It always interests me how we discount the ideas of “tinfoil” people because they are “tinfoil” people. If we take some radical examples, Snowden proved what we all assumed was possible- if you had said what he proved then people would have assumed you were a tinfoil hatter. And how many times was Stallman proved correct? Even I considered him too much, but he’s also often right.
    - krapp 7y ago
      On the other hand, just because MKUltra existed, it doesn't follow that it was successful and that the CIA can control your mind through your television and through chemicals in the food and water supply. Yet "tinfoil" people assume the latter from the former almost universally. Let's not abandon the premise that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in favor of assuming that any conspiracy theory, however outlandish, should be assumed correct simply because some conspiracies have been proven to exist in the past. People don't doubt "tinfoil hat people" because of who they are, but because they don't care to present evidence to back up their claims, or accept evidence to the contrary.
      - dijit 7y ago
        But let’s take the original premise: the US government wanted a means of controlling how people thought. Do you believe they abandoned that pursuit after a failed experiment 50 years ago? Do you believe they abandoned it forever?
        krapp 7y ago
        >Do you believe they abandoned that pursuit after a failed experiment 50 years ago? I believe direct mind control of that sort is infeasible, certainly likely impossible at the scale of entire populations, so I do believe they abandoned that specific pursuit after discovering that the human brain and LSD didn't work the way they hoped. The government also looked into remote viewing and psychic assassinations, but I don't believe they just kept on trying that either. >Do you believe they abandoned it forever? The goal? Probably not. The means? Probably. I believe it's more effective in modern society to influence people through disinformation campaigns and popular culture, particularly though social media, than attempt to control them like puppets by secretly dosing them with LSD and barbiturates.
        mistermann 7y ago
        > I believe it's more effective in modern society to influence people through disinformation campaigns and popular culture, particularly though social media, than attempt to control them like puppets by secretly dosing them with LSD and barbiturates. I agree. What's interesting about LSD though is that it can provide extremely useful insight into the underlying nature of beliefs, or how an individual came to believe certain things, or why they feel a certain way. Knowing more of these details seems like it would be extremely useful in the development of propaganda campaigns.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Indeed, Guantanamo victims do not report drug use. But the widespread, in some cases (Ted Koppel, Tom Friedman) rabid support for the Iraq debacle is prima facie evidence for its continued use.
        7y ago
    - jgrowl 7y ago
      Maybe someone can help me because the exact details seem to escape me... but I remember hearing a story about a man that stumbled upon a secret government signal and he reported it thinking that it might be Russian spies. Well the government basically misled him into thinking it was an alien signal for years. The guy never could believe the truth even after his handlers told him that it was all lies. Sometimes crazy is just crazy; other times it is nurtured along. Intelligence ops use this as a tool for sure.
      - cerealbad 7y ago
        Mirage Men.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      This is identity politics and tribalism in it's most basic form. Rationality and individual thinking being pushed to the margins, lest you be labeled a "tinfoil" person and become a social outcast as well.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
      we generally discount the ideas of "tinfoil" people because their ideas have a very low signal-to-noise ratio. if you say all kinds of crazy stuff, some of it will eventually be true. this doesn't make it a good idea to conduct your life as if these claims were true. you'll be prepared for the small number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, but you'll likely incur a far larger cost by avoiding all sorts of threats that aren't actually real. maybe there's a guy outside waiting to kill me when I go out to lunch. it's possible, but it's much more likely that I'll die of starvation if I avoid him by never going outside. when it comes to the government in particular, if it's possible to do X and it's possible to keep X secret, they're probably already doing it. if X is relevant to you, you should certainly take it into account regarding your threat model, but you should probably mitigate known risks first.
      - mistermann 7y ago
        > you'll be prepared for the small number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, but you'll likely incur a far larger cost by avoiding all sorts of threats that aren't actually real. This seems like a false dichotomy....it is possible (well, for some people at least, or at least in theory) to consider conspiracy theories using disciplined reasoning, perhaps assigning a "likelihood score" to each one. I believe that by society avoiding them altogether, and their oddly visceral (natural, or conditioned?) reaction of disgust to them when they do encounter them, it allows those who are conducting covert operations of any kind a very great degree of latitude. I mean, look at how long a subset of society knew about Epstein, and even once it does accidentally burst into the mainstream, poof it's forgotten, even though it involves the sexual abuse of children, one of societies most emotional traumatizing topics. There's a lot of very interesting human psychology involved here.
        leetcrew 7y ago
        > This seems like a false dichotomy....it is possible (well, for some people at least, or at least in theory) to consider conspiracy theories using disciplined reasoning, perhaps assigning a "likelihood score" to each one. the problem is that most conspiracy theories are internally consistent; they tie up a lot of loose ends if you're willing to assume a couple wild premises. the flat earth conspiracy is plausible if you're willing to believe that every astronaut, airline pilot, and everyone else in a position to verify the curvature of the earth is in on it. to me the unreasonable premises are what make a theory have the "tinfoil" quality. the idea that there's an international ring of powerful child sex traffickers is plausible; the idea that a specific person is involved is not as plausible until you have more evidence than a bunch of emails about pizza.
  - chvid 7y ago
    The Church committee hearing documented a lot of this stuff so it is proven in that sense. Another question is whether these techniques actually work in the sense that you can hypnotise someone to commit a murder using lsd or something. Probably not is my guess.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Very evidently you can hypnotise the public to support mass murder, using the techniques they finally evolved. It has worked again and again, most prominently in driving support for invading Iraq. As it was taught in other places in the world, we may guess that ISIS, FARC, and other movements learned to apply the methods for their own purposes. Anywhere you find ordinary people committing extreme atrocities, there are its (or its Soviet or Chinese counterparts') fingerprints.
      - detaro 7y ago
        So people were more opposed to mass-murder before the 1950s?
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Before the 90s. Yes.
      - chvid 7y ago
        I believe that is done using old-fashioned lies and bullshit ... not LSD.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        LSD was a method tried, under the program, that failed. The program moved on to more effective methods.
- afandian 7y ago
  This is why nationalism / patriotism is so destructive (edit: in blinding us to the possibility). We are all humans no matter where we live. Humans, in aggregate, have repeatedly over the years committed atrocities. And we will again, unless actively prevented. Being 'the best country in the world' (which ever one) is irrelevant. Then again tribal exceptionalism is in our nature too. I'm still troubled by the memory of a well educated intelligent American refuse to believe that the US uses torture when the Guantanamo revelations came to light.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    What does this have to do specifically with nationalism? A globalist government could conceivably do the same things.
    - afandian 7y ago
      Specifically the belief that "my country would never do that". It's crucial to be able to believe that it can happen.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
        That seems like a very minor connection to nationalism. Also, lots of other political ideologies put a similar amount of faith in their government. I don't see a reason to single out nationalism at all beyond maybe pushing your agenda. The real lesson to be learned from this is not that nationalism is bad but that people should not trust their governments.
        afandian 7y ago
        Who cares what the precise political ideology is? It's the same human characteristic.
- codr7 7y ago
  Which is why we're taking our sweet time accepting it. This is pretty much our world in a nutshell. Wherever you start digging you run into the same level of insanity, abuse and lies to gain more power using whatever means possible.
Synaesthesia 7y ago
Terrifying stuff including torture with psychedelics, and attempts at “mind control” >In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were often carried on patients who entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Was this person put on trial for those crimes?
  - grekain1 7y ago
    There is no mention of it on his Wikipedia page, he died 1967 while mountain climbing. Only later people would be aware of Project MKUltra.
  - naringas 7y ago
    you must be joking, what crimes? /s they probably payed him a big bonus and set about incorporating his results into standarized procedures to be used against "enemies of the state" he apparently served as president for several Psychiatric Associations.. yikes
rollthehard6 7y ago
Recommended https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1824.The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1824.The_Men_Who_Stare_a...
Synaesthesia 7y ago
Also relevant, “The CIA’s Secret History of Psychological Torture.” https://www.salon.com/2009/06/11/mccoy/ https://www.salon.com/2009/06/11/mccoy/ > Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to drug-induced hallucinations and psychosis in just 48 hours -- without drugs, hypnosis or electric shock. Instead, for two days student volunteers at McGill University simply sat in a comfortable cubicle deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves and earmuffs. "It scared the hell out of us," Hebb said later, "to see how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support." >During the 1950s, two neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, under CIA contract, found that the most devastating torture technique of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, was simply to force a victim to stand for days while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, and hallucinations began -- a procedure which we now politely refer to as "stress positions."
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Still used today at Guantanamo bay.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    And no one prosecuted for it, to date.
mikece 7y ago
"But the Russians were doing it and might use it against us in war!" I think projects like this are the logical outcome of a society or entities which constantly look forward to the next war instead of seeking to spread peace through cooperation. It's also a statement of trying to win a war through subterfuge instead of straight-up defeating your enemy in combat should it come to that. Either way, I think it reeks of pusillanimity.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Either way, I think it reeks of pusillanimity. It does, but "courage" is something you tell your troops they should have, to get them to kill and die for you. Tactics and strategy are all about cheating and seeking unfair advantage as much as possible (manipulating your own troops with tales of courage is such cheating too).
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Telling troops that they must be courageous is fairly obvious and transparent, I find it much more interesting how the impression of primarily seeking cooperation is communicated to the general public, while what's going on behind the scenes is often (but not always) counter to that....and how effective it is, to the degree that the very same people who advocate cooperation passionately refuse to recognize counter behavior when it is pointed out to them. An example I would give is the "diplomatic" actions of the US with countries along the Russian border.
- auxym 7y ago
  War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength
- EstoniaTechLead 7y ago
  It is not pusillanimity. If you are the lone society that tries to cooperate and spread peace you will be eaten out. It is rational and logical behaviour to survive.
  - 7y ago
foobar_ 7y ago
Check out the movies - The Manchurian Candidate and The Game.
- UncleSlacky 7y ago
  And "The Men Who Stare at Goats": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/
Iv 7y ago
> Ted Kaczynski, a domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, was said to be a subject of a voluntary psychological study alleged by some sources to have been a part of MKUltra.[95][96][97] As a sophomore at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alton Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment", led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray.[98][99] In total, Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[100]
- soufron 7y ago
  I teach about Ted Kaczynski in my course at Sciences-Po in Paris. Do you have more info on that? I'll guess I'll find out easily by myself, but if you like the topic you might have good clues about where to go.
  - cerealbad 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6fb59XFbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6fb59XFbQ (The Net 2003)
  - Iv 7y ago
    Just follow the articles referenced in the wikipedia articles. When I had read about it, I concluded the claims were credible but unproven. I consider it likely true. I am interested if you find out more about it.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    You'll have to sort through some chaff, but most of the most compelling evidence can almost surely be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=mkultra&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=mkultra&restric... https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=Kaczynski&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=Kaczynski&restr... I think it's a cosmic shame most people seem unable to consider conspiracy theories ("It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"), especially since most everyone seems to believe in many conspiracies, the only difference being they're covered in the MSM rather than discussed in online forums. I imagine this is due to conditioning to some degree, so I guess one shouldn't cast too much blame.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Craighead 7y ago
Hey look an influence operation.
hos234 7y ago
For those interested in parapsychology check out Dean Radin's talk on whats new since the 70s - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19EVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19EVc
- agota 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing!
CapitalistCartr 7y ago
Relevant stuff: How a deadly fall revealed CIA secrets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20893452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20893452 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_poisoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_... 'Poisoner In Chief' Details The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control : NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...
spraak 7y ago
It makes me wonder what projects are happening now, or recently that are not yet known.
- cerealbad 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S051A8doXP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S051A8doXP0 (mind control) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m6dldvNECI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m6dldvNECI (heart attack gun) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVF8YGFcJWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVF8YGFcJWU (electronic weapons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT9-Z_p84b0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT9-Z_p84b0 (active denial system) it's not hard to find out since it's all public domain. the discovery is a trivial search away, and there are a lot of threads you can start pulling on which eventually leads to to books written by pseudo-credible people with some alphabet intelligence agency background. here's the catch, verification is nearly impossible. what is a prototype, what is in production, what is just a rough sketch idea of something that was never implemented, what is wild fantasy. in the game of secrecy and asymmetric information, it pays to be deceptive and ambiguous. to the point most of the people publicly discussing these topics are they themselves compromised and largely act as misdirection. you are not need to know.
  - bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
    > here's the catch, verification is nearly impossible. what is a prototype, what is in production, what is just a rough sketch idea of something that was never implemented, what is wild fantasy. 100% agree. I learned this as well. For example, if you search the U.S. Patent system, you can find a lot of crazy things, because the patent office never actually verifies them! One example is a mind control patent by displaying a certain images using Visual Basic, making the CRT to emit electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies. It even has some code! Nobody cannot tell if it's just a work by a fantasist engineer, or the surface of a deeper real project. I bet my specific example is the former one. I also believe the remote mind control stuff is bullshit. But nobody can differentiate every single thing in general. We cannot tell. This process also effectively makes conspiracy theorists be able to claim they're always correct: If you try to interpret all actions by the governments to be huge conspiracies, naturally, many of your predictions will be true! Unfortunately, things like the shape of the Earth or vaccines will be victims as well. I think this is a very effective strategy by the governments in an information age with relatively free flow of information: You don't need to censor anything, you simply misdirects all, to the point that the SNR is so low that almost no one can decode the real signal successfully.
dudul 7y ago
The english page of this article barely mentions experimentations on children. Other languages highlight sexual abuses and drug based experiments as part of sub-projects number 102, 103, 112 and 117. Apparently International Children Summer Camp was part of the project and were provided the children. Sickening.
- codr7 7y ago
  What's sickening is that they've been getting away with this and worse for a long, long time; despite all sorts of evidence leaking of acts that are so insanely inhuman and twisted it's pretty damn obvious where the path ultimately leads. The US imported all real psychos from Nazi Germany as part of operation Paperclip and let them loose on the local population to test their insane ideas about how to break and bend innocent people to whatever purpose using trauma. Paperclip is also supposedly where the missing pieces for the nuclear bomb came from, which explains the sudden need to blow Japan into little pieces before the war was officially over. These people are clearly insane, and will eventually have their power taken away and be tried for their crimes; or burned at stakes and torn into pieces by angry mobs, depending on how much forgiveness we're capable of collectively.
  - fnenrjfkdke 7y ago
    Too late. There is no "enemy" to lynch or forgive because most of the individuals responsible for such abuses are long dead. Their legacy has now subtly ingrained itself into the edifice of Western culture, our norms and institutions. (Now _that_ is really scary stuff. Like "ubiquitous totalitarian death cults, complete with loyal oposition" level of scary, at least if you have an aversion to cognitive dissonance and want your culture and ethics to make sense anyway, only we call it business as usual. Either way, it's disheartening to realize how humanity can ruin things sometimes.)
    - codr7 7y ago
      Agreed, this so called society is rotten to the core. Even our official history admits several incidences of the same scenario. Once all possibilities have been explored, the corrupt end result dies in no time; since there is no substance left holding it together. I'm not after revenge, it just leads back to square 1. But I have an idea how far out the truth will appear to most once fully revealed, and I don't claim to know half of it myself. Truth always finds a way. The natural tendency then is to find someone to project your pain on, someone to hang for it.
dekken_ 7y ago
Tangential: Interview with Chris Morris on his new movie exposing the malfeasance of the FBI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8
xigency 7y ago
It's also worth watching Wormwood [0], where Eric Olson investigates the death of his father, Frank Olson. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7306056/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7306056/
bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
One also needs to look some of the experiments in terms of LSD. In the 60s an 70s, psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, were believed to have mind-changing power, both the counter-culture activists and the CIA establishment were experimenting with the drugs, the former group wants to use it as a tool to look beyond "The Matrix" and authority, and a gateway to a new spiritual world. While the establishment were trying to use it as a tool for psychological manipulation. A good book that cover the history is Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. If you want to learn more about LSD and computer culture, read What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff. The history was quite interesting. For example, Kary Mullis claimed his discovery of PCR was inspirited by LSD, Whitfield Diffie is said to be active in the anti-war movement and knew about LSD, Dan Ingalls jokingly implied some features in Smalltalk were inspirited by LSD when journalists asked. Later, the psychedelic subculture was appropriated, commercialized, mainstreamed, losing the original countercultural context and message ("The early years of the 1970s saw advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful acts of pseudo-rebellion"), slowly disintegrated it, also, and the drugs didn't show such great power as previously promised, finally government had banned drugs as well. Later, the personal computing in the mid-70s was literally seen as the new LSD, but this time not by chemistry, but by networks, building the cyberspace, a civilization of mind. Now we see the history repeats again, full cycle. The advertisers and companies use it to make big money and push for pseudo-rebellions. Technically, the potential of Internet as a force of liberation is correct, but too overrated. Politically, the establishment like the NSA and CIA are trying to use it as a tool for psychological manipulation, and calls for more regulations (especially the anti-Fake News measures, the intention is good, but its implementation can be dangerous if the system is abused). I believe the next failed revolution will be biohacking and transhumanism.
smileypete 7y ago
Timothy Leary was in on it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32TU6yLwqrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32TU6yLwqrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i4ALdMSt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i4ALdMSt0 Wiki section about their unethical experiments on people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States#MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... Makes me think that where there's a well funded covert organization (CIA) operating in a climate of fear (cold war), the sociopaths and psychopaths therein can easily rise to the top. :(
throwwwwwwaway 7y ago
This is one of those things where explaining it makes you look like a tinfoil conspirationist and you have to swear it's true and documented on Wikipedia or whatever. Frankly I wonder why people bother with conspiracy crap when the actual documented reality is crazy enough as it is.
jp_sc 7y ago
But they hate us for our freedom.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
Such a disgraceful project and I’m sure we only know the half of it. I recently heard a good long form interview with an author who spent 20 years studying Charles Manson’s connection to this program. It’s pretty shocking: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/bonus-interview-tom-oneill-and-chaos https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/bonus-interview-tom-...
carapace 7y ago
I'm an old-school fringe aficionado. I wish I could express to you how weird it feels that, first, MKUltra turned out to be real, and second, knowledge of it is going mainstream. It is fucking fascinating watching y'all go through the psychic gyrations induce by confrontation with this knowledge. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to the flip side my friends. Pull up a lawn chair and pop some popcorn, everything you know is wrong, and things only get stranger from here on out. Just remember, if you see strange lights in the sky run like hell. (Or just close the tab, click away, lower the curtain and forget the strange little man you saw, the Wizard of Oz is talking. He is so important and powerful you know.)
- trevyn 7y ago
  As a seasoned traveler, any advice for how to navigate in the strange new world?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - carapace 7y ago
    Well, as the Cat said to Alice... Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where. Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere. Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough. Where do you want to navigate to?
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Please explain. Hurting our fellow human being by torturing them in different ways like 'stress positions' as discussed on around this article is pretty different than mystical space ships coming. Yes, the us gave lsd to people to see what would happen. It's terrible. Also the us kidnapped teenagers all of the world who were accused of being terrorists and tortured them in black prisons, on my behalf, and I hate that. So what is the next step you forsee happening know that more people know about this?
cpr 7y ago
If you look at the various testimonies of MK Ultra victims now surfacing, it's clear that the program is ongoing.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Yes. People assume that since it was reported on, it was shut down, but there was never any evidence of that. The principals got promotions on schedule, and retired with pensions. Jon Ronson's "Men Who Stare at Goats" is an exploration of the recent state of the program, terrifying if read carefully. Certain of the principals retired very, very wealthy. How they got that way is not revealed, but access to damaging secrets is not hard to convert into wealth. That so many people today believe that it was all about ESP experiments is evidence of its success, because it included tests conducted against the public. We may reasonably infer that its success led to its regular deployment. Public approval of the Iraq invasion, despite proof before the event that it was unjustified, may be counted as evidence of its continued misuse. Public acceptance of universal surveillance, post-Snowden, might qualify.
teilo 7y ago
I recommend the Netflix series Wormwood, a documentary about Frank Olson, a CIA agent who was "suicided" when he learned what the CIA was doing with MK Ultra, and started expressing his discomfort about it.
dang 7y ago
Stephen Kinzer has a new book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Poisoner-Chief-Sidney-Gottlieb-Control/dp/1250140439/ https://www.amazon.com/Poisoner-Chief-Sidney-Gottlieb-Contro... https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/poisoner-in-chief-stephen-kinzer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/poisoner-in-...

Project MKUltra

229 points by rasengan 7y ago

nickthemagicman 7y ago

This is unreal. It feels like something out of the Marvel universe.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
Freight train! But yeah, I usually tell people, MK Ultra is legit just cause tinfoil people talk about it doesnt make it made up. The question to the person interested is how much was proven?
- dijit 7y ago
  It always interests me how we discount the ideas of “tinfoil” people because they are “tinfoil” people. If we take some radical examples, Snowden proved what we all assumed was possible- if you had said what he proved then people would have assumed you were a tinfoil hatter. And how many times was Stallman proved correct? Even I considered him too much, but he’s also often right.
  - krapp 7y ago
    On the other hand, just because MKUltra existed, it doesn't follow that it was successful and that the CIA can control your mind through your television and through chemicals in the food and water supply. Yet "tinfoil" people assume the latter from the former almost universally. Let's not abandon the premise that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in favor of assuming that any conspiracy theory, however outlandish, should be assumed correct simply because some conspiracies have been proven to exist in the past. People don't doubt "tinfoil hat people" because of who they are, but because they don't care to present evidence to back up their claims, or accept evidence to the contrary.
    - dijit 7y ago
      But let’s take the original premise: the US government wanted a means of controlling how people thought. Do you believe they abandoned that pursuit after a failed experiment 50 years ago? Do you believe they abandoned it forever?
      - krapp 7y ago
        >Do you believe they abandoned that pursuit after a failed experiment 50 years ago? I believe direct mind control of that sort is infeasible, certainly likely impossible at the scale of entire populations, so I do believe they abandoned that specific pursuit after discovering that the human brain and LSD didn't work the way they hoped. The government also looked into remote viewing and psychic assassinations, but I don't believe they just kept on trying that either. >Do you believe they abandoned it forever? The goal? Probably not. The means? Probably. I believe it's more effective in modern society to influence people through disinformation campaigns and popular culture, particularly though social media, than attempt to control them like puppets by secretly dosing them with LSD and barbiturates.
        mistermann 7y ago
        > I believe it's more effective in modern society to influence people through disinformation campaigns and popular culture, particularly though social media, than attempt to control them like puppets by secretly dosing them with LSD and barbiturates. I agree. What's interesting about LSD though is that it can provide extremely useful insight into the underlying nature of beliefs, or how an individual came to believe certain things, or why they feel a certain way. Knowing more of these details seems like it would be extremely useful in the development of propaganda campaigns.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Indeed, Guantanamo victims do not report drug use. But the widespread, in some cases (Ted Koppel, Tom Friedman) rabid support for the Iraq debacle is prima facie evidence for its continued use.
      - 7y ago
  - jgrowl 7y ago
    Maybe someone can help me because the exact details seem to escape me... but I remember hearing a story about a man that stumbled upon a secret government signal and he reported it thinking that it might be Russian spies. Well the government basically misled him into thinking it was an alien signal for years. The guy never could believe the truth even after his handlers told him that it was all lies. Sometimes crazy is just crazy; other times it is nurtured along. Intelligence ops use this as a tool for sure.
    - cerealbad 7y ago
      Mirage Men.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    This is identity politics and tribalism in it's most basic form. Rationality and individual thinking being pushed to the margins, lest you be labeled a "tinfoil" person and become a social outcast as well.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    we generally discount the ideas of "tinfoil" people because their ideas have a very low signal-to-noise ratio. if you say all kinds of crazy stuff, some of it will eventually be true. this doesn't make it a good idea to conduct your life as if these claims were true. you'll be prepared for the small number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, but you'll likely incur a far larger cost by avoiding all sorts of threats that aren't actually real. maybe there's a guy outside waiting to kill me when I go out to lunch. it's possible, but it's much more likely that I'll die of starvation if I avoid him by never going outside. when it comes to the government in particular, if it's possible to do X and it's possible to keep X secret, they're probably already doing it. if X is relevant to you, you should certainly take it into account regarding your threat model, but you should probably mitigate known risks first.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      > you'll be prepared for the small number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, but you'll likely incur a far larger cost by avoiding all sorts of threats that aren't actually real. This seems like a false dichotomy....it is possible (well, for some people at least, or at least in theory) to consider conspiracy theories using disciplined reasoning, perhaps assigning a "likelihood score" to each one. I believe that by society avoiding them altogether, and their oddly visceral (natural, or conditioned?) reaction of disgust to them when they do encounter them, it allows those who are conducting covert operations of any kind a very great degree of latitude. I mean, look at how long a subset of society knew about Epstein, and even once it does accidentally burst into the mainstream, poof it's forgotten, even though it involves the sexual abuse of children, one of societies most emotional traumatizing topics. There's a lot of very interesting human psychology involved here.
      - leetcrew 7y ago
        > This seems like a false dichotomy....it is possible (well, for some people at least, or at least in theory) to consider conspiracy theories using disciplined reasoning, perhaps assigning a "likelihood score" to each one. the problem is that most conspiracy theories are internally consistent; they tie up a lot of loose ends if you're willing to assume a couple wild premises. the flat earth conspiracy is plausible if you're willing to believe that every astronaut, airline pilot, and everyone else in a position to verify the curvature of the earth is in on it. to me the unreasonable premises are what make a theory have the "tinfoil" quality. the idea that there's an international ring of powerful child sex traffickers is plausible; the idea that a specific person is involved is not as plausible until you have more evidence than a bunch of emails about pizza.
- chvid 7y ago
  The Church committee hearing documented a lot of this stuff so it is proven in that sense. Another question is whether these techniques actually work in the sense that you can hypnotise someone to commit a murder using lsd or something. Probably not is my guess.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Very evidently you can hypnotise the public to support mass murder, using the techniques they finally evolved. It has worked again and again, most prominently in driving support for invading Iraq. As it was taught in other places in the world, we may guess that ISIS, FARC, and other movements learned to apply the methods for their own purposes. Anywhere you find ordinary people committing extreme atrocities, there are its (or its Soviet or Chinese counterparts') fingerprints.
    - detaro 7y ago
      So people were more opposed to mass-murder before the 1950s?
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        Before the 90s. Yes.
    - chvid 7y ago
      I believe that is done using old-fashioned lies and bullshit ... not LSD.
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        LSD was a method tried, under the program, that failed. The program moved on to more effective methods.
afandian 7y ago
This is why nationalism / patriotism is so destructive (edit: in blinding us to the possibility). We are all humans no matter where we live. Humans, in aggregate, have repeatedly over the years committed atrocities. And we will again, unless actively prevented. Being 'the best country in the world' (which ever one) is irrelevant. Then again tribal exceptionalism is in our nature too. I'm still troubled by the memory of a well educated intelligent American refuse to believe that the US uses torture when the Guantanamo revelations came to light.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  What does this have to do specifically with nationalism? A globalist government could conceivably do the same things.
  - afandian 7y ago
    Specifically the belief that "my country would never do that". It's crucial to be able to believe that it can happen.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
      That seems like a very minor connection to nationalism. Also, lots of other political ideologies put a similar amount of faith in their government. I don't see a reason to single out nationalism at all beyond maybe pushing your agenda. The real lesson to be learned from this is not that nationalism is bad but that people should not trust their governments.
      - afandian 7y ago
        Who cares what the precise political ideology is? It's the same human characteristic.
codr7 7y ago
Which is why we're taking our sweet time accepting it. This is pretty much our world in a nutshell. Wherever you start digging you run into the same level of insanity, abuse and lies to gain more power using whatever means possible.

Synaesthesia 7y ago

Terrifying stuff including torture with psychedelics, and attempts at “mind control” >In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were often carried on patients who entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions.

jacquesm 7y ago
Was this person put on trial for those crimes?
- grekain1 7y ago
  There is no mention of it on his Wikipedia page, he died 1967 while mountain climbing. Only later people would be aware of Project MKUltra.
- naringas 7y ago
  you must be joking, what crimes? /s they probably payed him a big bonus and set about incorporating his results into standarized procedures to be used against "enemies of the state" he apparently served as president for several Psychiatric Associations.. yikes

rollthehard6 7y ago

Recommended https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1824.The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1824.The_Men_Who_Stare_a...

Synaesthesia 7y ago

Also relevant, “The CIA’s Secret History of Psychological Torture.” https://www.salon.com/2009/06/11/mccoy/ https://www.salon.com/2009/06/11/mccoy/ > Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to drug-induced hallucinations and psychosis in just 48 hours -- without drugs, hypnosis or electric shock. Instead, for two days student volunteers at McGill University simply sat in a comfortable cubicle deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves and earmuffs. "It scared the hell out of us," Hebb said later, "to see how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support." >During the 1950s, two neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, under CIA contract, found that the most devastating torture technique of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, was simply to force a victim to stand for days while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, and hallucinations began -- a procedure which we now politely refer to as "stress positions."

jacquesm 7y ago
Still used today at Guantanamo bay.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  And no one prosecuted for it, to date.

mikece 7y ago

"But the Russians were doing it and might use it against us in war!" I think projects like this are the logical outcome of a society or entities which constantly look forward to the next war instead of seeking to spread peace through cooperation. It's also a statement of trying to win a war through subterfuge instead of straight-up defeating your enemy in combat should it come to that. Either way, I think it reeks of pusillanimity.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Either way, I think it reeks of pusillanimity. It does, but "courage" is something you tell your troops they should have, to get them to kill and die for you. Tactics and strategy are all about cheating and seeking unfair advantage as much as possible (manipulating your own troops with tales of courage is such cheating too).
- mistermann 7y ago
  Telling troops that they must be courageous is fairly obvious and transparent, I find it much more interesting how the impression of primarily seeking cooperation is communicated to the general public, while what's going on behind the scenes is often (but not always) counter to that....and how effective it is, to the degree that the very same people who advocate cooperation passionately refuse to recognize counter behavior when it is pointed out to them. An example I would give is the "diplomatic" actions of the US with countries along the Russian border.
auxym 7y ago
War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength
EstoniaTechLead 7y ago
It is not pusillanimity. If you are the lone society that tries to cooperate and spread peace you will be eaten out. It is rational and logical behaviour to survive.
- 7y ago

foobar_ 7y ago

Check out the movies - The Manchurian Candidate and The Game.

UncleSlacky 7y ago
And "The Men Who Stare at Goats": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/

Iv 7y ago

> Ted Kaczynski, a domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, was said to be a subject of a voluntary psychological study alleged by some sources to have been a part of MKUltra.[95][96][97] As a sophomore at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alton Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment", led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray.[98][99] In total, Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[100]

soufron 7y ago
I teach about Ted Kaczynski in my course at Sciences-Po in Paris. Do you have more info on that? I'll guess I'll find out easily by myself, but if you like the topic you might have good clues about where to go.
- cerealbad 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6fb59XFbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6fb59XFbQ (The Net 2003)
- Iv 7y ago
  Just follow the articles referenced in the wikipedia articles. When I had read about it, I concluded the claims were credible but unproven. I consider it likely true. I am interested if you find out more about it.
- mistermann 7y ago
  You'll have to sort through some chaff, but most of the most compelling evidence can almost surely be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=mkultra&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=mkultra&restric... https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=Kaczynski&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/search?q=Kaczynski&restr... I think it's a cosmic shame most people seem unable to consider conspiracy theories ("It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"), especially since most everyone seems to believe in many conspiracies, the only difference being they're covered in the MSM rather than discussed in online forums. I imagine this is due to conditioning to some degree, so I guess one shouldn't cast too much blame.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Craighead 7y ago

Hey look an influence operation.

hos234 7y ago

For those interested in parapsychology check out Dean Radin's talk on whats new since the 70s - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19EVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19EVc

agota 7y ago
Thank you for sharing!

CapitalistCartr 7y ago

Relevant stuff: How a deadly fall revealed CIA secrets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20893452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20893452 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_poisoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_... 'Poisoner In Chief' Details The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control : NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...

spraak 7y ago

It makes me wonder what projects are happening now, or recently that are not yet known.

cerealbad 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S051A8doXP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S051A8doXP0 (mind control) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m6dldvNECI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m6dldvNECI (heart attack gun) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVF8YGFcJWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVF8YGFcJWU (electronic weapons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT9-Z_p84b0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT9-Z_p84b0 (active denial system) it's not hard to find out since it's all public domain. the discovery is a trivial search away, and there are a lot of threads you can start pulling on which eventually leads to to books written by pseudo-credible people with some alphabet intelligence agency background. here's the catch, verification is nearly impossible. what is a prototype, what is in production, what is just a rough sketch idea of something that was never implemented, what is wild fantasy. in the game of secrecy and asymmetric information, it pays to be deceptive and ambiguous. to the point most of the people publicly discussing these topics are they themselves compromised and largely act as misdirection. you are not need to know.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
  > here's the catch, verification is nearly impossible. what is a prototype, what is in production, what is just a rough sketch idea of something that was never implemented, what is wild fantasy. 100% agree. I learned this as well. For example, if you search the U.S. Patent system, you can find a lot of crazy things, because the patent office never actually verifies them! One example is a mind control patent by displaying a certain images using Visual Basic, making the CRT to emit electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies. It even has some code! Nobody cannot tell if it's just a work by a fantasist engineer, or the surface of a deeper real project. I bet my specific example is the former one. I also believe the remote mind control stuff is bullshit. But nobody can differentiate every single thing in general. We cannot tell. This process also effectively makes conspiracy theorists be able to claim they're always correct: If you try to interpret all actions by the governments to be huge conspiracies, naturally, many of your predictions will be true! Unfortunately, things like the shape of the Earth or vaccines will be victims as well. I think this is a very effective strategy by the governments in an information age with relatively free flow of information: You don't need to censor anything, you simply misdirects all, to the point that the SNR is so low that almost no one can decode the real signal successfully.

dudul 7y ago

The english page of this article barely mentions experimentations on children. Other languages highlight sexual abuses and drug based experiments as part of sub-projects number 102, 103, 112 and 117. Apparently International Children Summer Camp was part of the project and were provided the children. Sickening.

codr7 7y ago
What's sickening is that they've been getting away with this and worse for a long, long time; despite all sorts of evidence leaking of acts that are so insanely inhuman and twisted it's pretty damn obvious where the path ultimately leads. The US imported all real psychos from Nazi Germany as part of operation Paperclip and let them loose on the local population to test their insane ideas about how to break and bend innocent people to whatever purpose using trauma. Paperclip is also supposedly where the missing pieces for the nuclear bomb came from, which explains the sudden need to blow Japan into little pieces before the war was officially over. These people are clearly insane, and will eventually have their power taken away and be tried for their crimes; or burned at stakes and torn into pieces by angry mobs, depending on how much forgiveness we're capable of collectively.
- fnenrjfkdke 7y ago
  Too late. There is no "enemy" to lynch or forgive because most of the individuals responsible for such abuses are long dead. Their legacy has now subtly ingrained itself into the edifice of Western culture, our norms and institutions. (Now _that_ is really scary stuff. Like "ubiquitous totalitarian death cults, complete with loyal oposition" level of scary, at least if you have an aversion to cognitive dissonance and want your culture and ethics to make sense anyway, only we call it business as usual. Either way, it's disheartening to realize how humanity can ruin things sometimes.)
  - codr7 7y ago
    Agreed, this so called society is rotten to the core. Even our official history admits several incidences of the same scenario. Once all possibilities have been explored, the corrupt end result dies in no time; since there is no substance left holding it together. I'm not after revenge, it just leads back to square 1. But I have an idea how far out the truth will appear to most once fully revealed, and I don't claim to know half of it myself. Truth always finds a way. The natural tendency then is to find someone to project your pain on, someone to hang for it.

dekken_ 7y ago

Tangential: Interview with Chris Morris on his new movie exposing the malfeasance of the FBI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liV5wKAihh8

xigency 7y ago

It's also worth watching Wormwood [0], where Eric Olson investigates the death of his father, Frank Olson. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7306056/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7306056/

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago

One also needs to look some of the experiments in terms of LSD. In the 60s an 70s, psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, were believed to have mind-changing power, both the counter-culture activists and the CIA establishment were experimenting with the drugs, the former group wants to use it as a tool to look beyond "The Matrix" and authority, and a gateway to a new spiritual world. While the establishment were trying to use it as a tool for psychological manipulation. A good book that cover the history is Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. If you want to learn more about LSD and computer culture, read What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff. The history was quite interesting. For example, Kary Mullis claimed his discovery of PCR was inspirited by LSD, Whitfield Diffie is said to be active in the anti-war movement and knew about LSD, Dan Ingalls jokingly implied some features in Smalltalk were inspirited by LSD when journalists asked. Later, the psychedelic subculture was appropriated, commercialized, mainstreamed, losing the original countercultural context and message ("The early years of the 1970s saw advertisers using psychedelic art to sell a limitless array of consumer goods. Hair products, cars, cigarettes, and even pantyhose became colorful acts of pseudo-rebellion"), slowly disintegrated it, also, and the drugs didn't show such great power as previously promised, finally government had banned drugs as well. Later, the personal computing in the mid-70s was literally seen as the new LSD, but this time not by chemistry, but by networks, building the cyberspace, a civilization of mind. Now we see the history repeats again, full cycle. The advertisers and companies use it to make big money and push for pseudo-rebellions. Technically, the potential of Internet as a force of liberation is correct, but too overrated. Politically, the establishment like the NSA and CIA are trying to use it as a tool for psychological manipulation, and calls for more regulations (especially the anti-Fake News measures, the intention is good, but its implementation can be dangerous if the system is abused). I believe the next failed revolution will be biohacking and transhumanism.

smileypete 7y ago

Timothy Leary was in on it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32TU6yLwqrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32TU6yLwqrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i4ALdMSt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i4ALdMSt0 Wiki section about their unethical experiments on people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States#MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... Makes me think that where there's a well funded covert organization (CIA) operating in a climate of fear (cold war), the sociopaths and psychopaths therein can easily rise to the top. :(

throwwwwwwaway 7y ago

This is one of those things where explaining it makes you look like a tinfoil conspirationist and you have to swear it's true and documented on Wikipedia or whatever. Frankly I wonder why people bother with conspiracy crap when the actual documented reality is crazy enough as it is.

jp_sc 7y ago

But they hate us for our freedom.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

Such a disgraceful project and I’m sure we only know the half of it. I recently heard a good long form interview with an author who spent 20 years studying Charles Manson’s connection to this program. It’s pretty shocking: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/bonus-interview-tom-oneill-and-chaos https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/bonus-interview-tom-...

carapace 7y ago

I'm an old-school fringe aficionado. I wish I could express to you how weird it feels that, first, MKUltra turned out to be real, and second, knowledge of it is going mainstream. It is fucking fascinating watching y'all go through the psychic gyrations induce by confrontation with this knowledge. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to the flip side my friends. Pull up a lawn chair and pop some popcorn, everything you know is wrong, and things only get stranger from here on out. Just remember, if you see strange lights in the sky run like hell. (Or just close the tab, click away, lower the curtain and forget the strange little man you saw, the Wizard of Oz is talking. He is so important and powerful you know.)

trevyn 7y ago
As a seasoned traveler, any advice for how to navigate in the strange new world?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- carapace 7y ago
  Well, as the Cat said to Alice... Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where. Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere. Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough. Where do you want to navigate to?
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
Please explain. Hurting our fellow human being by torturing them in different ways like 'stress positions' as discussed on around this article is pretty different than mystical space ships coming. Yes, the us gave lsd to people to see what would happen. It's terrible. Also the us kidnapped teenagers all of the world who were accused of being terrorists and tortured them in black prisons, on my behalf, and I hate that. So what is the next step you forsee happening know that more people know about this?

cpr 7y ago

If you look at the various testimonies of MK Ultra victims now surfacing, it's clear that the program is ongoing.

ncmncm 7y ago
Yes. People assume that since it was reported on, it was shut down, but there was never any evidence of that. The principals got promotions on schedule, and retired with pensions. Jon Ronson's "Men Who Stare at Goats" is an exploration of the recent state of the program, terrifying if read carefully. Certain of the principals retired very, very wealthy. How they got that way is not revealed, but access to damaging secrets is not hard to convert into wealth. That so many people today believe that it was all about ESP experiments is evidence of its success, because it included tests conducted against the public. We may reasonably infer that its success led to its regular deployment. Public approval of the Iraq invasion, despite proof before the event that it was unjustified, may be counted as evidence of its continued misuse. Public acceptance of universal surveillance, post-Snowden, might qualify.

teilo 7y ago

I recommend the Netflix series Wormwood, a documentary about Frank Olson, a CIA agent who was "suicided" when he learned what the CIA was doing with MK Ultra, and started expressing his discomfort about it.

dang 7y ago

Stephen Kinzer has a new book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Poisoner-Chief-Sidney-Gottlieb-Control/dp/1250140439/ https://www.amazon.com/Poisoner-Chief-Sidney-Gottlieb-Contro... https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/poisoner-in-chief-stephen-kinzer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/poisoner-in-...