Invisible Government: The CIA's Secret Mind Control Program

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It took the CIA years to learn how to control the human mind. The American secret services used the methods used in the Nazi concentration camps, as well as a whole arsenal of poisons.

However, the secret program failed - the experimenters only destroyed the minds of the test subjects, but could not subdue it. At the same time, many of the developments obtained were subsequently used in the Guantanamo prison, as well as military campaigns in Vietnam and the Middle East. American journalist and writer Stephen Kinzer, who devoted his book “The Main Poisoner. Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA In Search of Mind Control.

© Charles Ommanney / Getty Images

There are two types of government in the United States. The first, visible, is the White House, Congress, courts, state legislatures, governors. The second type is the so-called deep state, which continues to operate regardless of which party won the election. Its most powerful organs are intelligence services. They control a huge shadow world, whose task is to maintain the functioning of the "invisible" government. Can you tell us more about this?

- In fact, my entire career is devoted to what you just talked about - trying to understand what is hidden behind the facade of foreign and domestic politics. And I discovered a lot of amazing things. I can't believe what it was and this person really existed.

But let's start in order. Even before Gottlieb (Sidney Gottlieb is an American chemist who took part in secret CIA programs. - RT) appeared on the scene, propagandists from the CIA coined the term "brainwashing". It was first used by a man who worked for this service, who tried to convince the Americans that the USSR wanted to "brainwash them." And the tsereushniki believed in their own invention. There were a number of reasons for this. First of all, there were events that were completely misinterpreted in the intelligence department.

What events are we talking about?

- One of them is the trial of the Catholic cardinal in Hungary in 1949. During the process, it sometimes seemed that his speech was too monotonous, and his gaze was "glazed", and in general he confesses to what he actually did not do. And then the USA decided: he was "brainwashed".

• Stephen Kinzer
• © RTD

It was later revealed that the cardinal was forced to confess guilt by methods that investigators have used for centuries.

But the CIA too wanted to believe in their inventions, so they decided that in the USSR they invented a kind of "pill" that allows you to control the mind. The situation with American prisoners of war released after the Korean War, as they signed statements condemning the United States, prompted the same thoughts.

Plus, some of them admitted to using bacteriological weapons, which, according to Washington, the United States did not use. Again, the only explanation the CIA wanted to see was "they were brainwashed." And then the director of management, Allen Dulles, came up with the idea: the key to world domination is in mind control. And if you find a way to control someone else's mind, you can control the world! He really believed that this was possible. Partly because of the events I mentioned. But there was also another circumstance.

I'm talking about popular culture - all these films, books and stories about manipulative hypnotists or those who dripped something into someone else's glass, and the person who drank the drink committed murder, but this later disappeared without a trace from his memory. And the CIA decided that what fiction writers can come up with, scientists are likely to be able to bring to life.

They needed a chemist who was forward-thinking and who was willing to ignore ethical standards that most seem obligatory. And so they came to an amazing man named Sidney Gottlieb, who is central to my book.

Let's go back to the post-war period. Operation Paperclip: The US recruits and whitewashes war criminals who have led medical experiments on humans in concentration camps and in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Tell us about the scientists who have been included in this program

- Gottlieb reasoned like this: before you put a new mind into someone's brain, you need to somehow demolish the previous one, destroy the human psyche, his soul and body, if possible. Where to begin? Are there experts in such matters? Of course - the doctors of the Nazi concentration camps! And those who were engaged in vivisection in Manchuria (during the Second World War, the Japanese military created Detachment 731 in the occupied territory of China, which conducted experiments on people. - RT). Instead of hanging these people, the US decided to hire them. It was they who became the foundation of the American mind control program.

You write that the Americans became available to their research, including tissue samples, which in Japan were often taken from people who were still living …

“The United States was overjoyed at the opportunity to learn about the results of the fatal experiments. And the people who performed them became valuable colleagues of the CIA doctors. While researching the materials for the book, I found what looks like the first secret CIA prison - a cute chalet in Germany. At first glance, you might think that this is a hotel. The owner, a young German entrepreneur, was very helpful: he let me in and took me to the basement. There he said: "There were cameras where the CIA medics, along with fellow Nazis, set up experiments that were just a continuation of experiments in concentration camps." According to him, all the old people living in the vicinity know perfectly well what exactly happened in this building. They told me about the burials. Previously, there was a forest where the bodies lie, and now they are under high-rise buildings.

American activists demand from the CIA to disclose all materials on the MK-Ultra program, during which the agency conducted experiments …

These people were even described with the term "consumable" …

- That was the name of those who could be tortured to death or used in experiments that led to the death of the victim. They were people from Europe and East Asia: alleged enemy agents, refugees with no known connections to anyone who could make a complaint. On such "material" Sidney Gottlieb and his team set up the most outrageous experiments.

What exactly did they want?

- They wanted to understand how to destroy a person mentally. Gottlieb's projects were carried out both in the United States and abroad. In America, he preferred to experiment on prisoners.

African American?

-Primarily. It was over them, by the way, that one of the most unimaginable experiments was performed. A physician from Gottlieb's team selected seven African Americans from among the inmates of the Kentucky federal prison and fed them triple doses of LSD daily for 77 days, which, of course, they did not know about. The task at the same time was to find out whether such mockery of a person can destroy his psyche. It turned out that it can. We do not know the fate of those seven, we do not know their names either - all the documents were destroyed.

And in Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb's team conducted even more horrific experiments in which people were tortured to death. In one of them, the "consumable" was first immersed in a deep coma with the help of barbiturates, and then colossal doses of stimulants were injected. And during the transition from coma to hyperactivity, they were shocked and arranged sudden changes in temperature from extremely low to extremely high. Did such a test destroy the psyche? Certainly!

“Gottlieb is known to have set up so-called shelters in New York, San Francisco, and Marin County. How did it work?

- He organized a whole series of experiments - 149 so-called "subprojects". The goal of one of them was to find out if a person could be “split” by using sex and drugs together, but in different combinations. To do this, he opened a brothel in San Francisco - in the Telegraph Hill area.

Here we must mention White, who was in charge of the brothel …

- Yes. By Gottlieb's decision, George Hunter White, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, became the manager of the brothel in San Francisco. This whole experiment was called Operation Midnight Climax.

• Reuters
• © Stephen Lam

White was a guardian of the law, but he himself did not follow it. His position did not prevent him from using drugs and alcohol in large quantities.

By the way, earlier he broke the life of the jazz star Billie Holiday …

- Yes, in New York he pursued jazzmen, and then moved to San Francisco. A group of prostitutes was hired to work in the brothel, who were paid to lure men there. And George Hunter White, a man with no psychology training or experience, watched through the mirror while drinking martinis.

Over ten years of experiments, Gottlieb came to the conclusion that there are many ways to physically and mentally destroy a person. But he never found a way to put a new mind into the resulting emptiness. In fact, he came to the conclusion that mind control is a myth. For ten years he mocked people in vain.

But later it turned out that he left a noticeable mark on the work of the CIA. He even wrote a number of materials on interrogation techniques. I also note that Gottlieb knew about poisons, perhaps the best in America, and perhaps in the world.

Yes, Gottlieb's people worked with biological agents, with sarin, they had a whole arsenal of such weapons. I think it's worth mentioning CIA scientist Olson here …

“Yes, there was chemist Frank Olson in Gottlieb's group, who worked in the laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and he had great doubts about all this activity.

American senators will carefully study the biography of the candidate for the post of CIA director Gina Haspel, Republican John said …

In the summer of 1953, Olson traveled to Europe, where he saw people being tortured, possibly to death, with poisons of his own design. He was so impressed by this picture that he decided to leave the CIA, telling his colleagues about it. The information quickly reached Gottlieb. Of the group, Olson was the only one with a conscience. And a few weeks after he began to talk about his doubts, Olson died, falling out of a window on the thirteenth floor.

“But Gottlieb secretly gave LSD even to his subordinates, including Olson, to assess the effect …

Gottlieb was delighted with LSD. Only 22 years later, the Olson family was informed that it was not just a suicide due to depression: “We must confess that we secretly gave him LSD. He had a narcotic psychosis, which we contributed to. US President Gerald Ford then invited his relatives to his place to apologize - this had never happened before! However, now the family believes that even the LSD circumstance is just another attempt to hide information and that Olson did not commit suicide - he was pushed out of the window.

Exhumated. And what happened?

- A huge hematoma was found on his forehead …

And he landed on his back …

“Later we found the murder 'manual' written by Gottlieb at the time. It states that the most effective way is to throw a person from a great height. But first it must be "turned off" with a blow to the forehead. So it all fits together.

Now - about McGill University, which studied how to break a person. Subsequently, this found application in the so-called "emergency transfer of people" - in Guantanamo and so on

- Yes. All the methods that Gottlieb used and described became the basis of the methodology used in Vietnam, Latin America and the Middle East.

Applied extreme isolation, sensory overload, deprivation. And it turned out that with their help you can very quickly make a person almost fall into childhood and become completely dependent on whoever interrogates him …

- Addiction plays a key role. Gottlieb was the first in the CIA to develop the following idea: for a person to do your will, you need to cut him off from all sensory stimuli and make him believe that you are his only way to return to the real world. This is exactly what they did in Vietnam and Latin America, and then - in a very sophisticated way - in places like Guantanamo.

• At the mental hospital at San Quentin State Penitentiary, California.
• Reuters
• © Stephen Lam

So this is, in essence, an updated version of the same training manual?

“This is just one example of how Gottlieb's work continues to make itself felt.

At the beginning of the Cold War, the authorities said that in the event of an emergency, in the face of an incredible threat to the United States, Americans would have to compromise some of the legal, ethical and moral principles that we usually adhere to. Now we are being told the same thing.

There are constant emergencies that make us vulnerable to statements like: “We need to strengthen surveillance, increase control, limit civil liberties. When the threat disappears, everything will return to its place. But this, of course, is not happening.