MK ULTRA
Before departing, Richard Helms kept the secrets by ordering the destruction of all files relating to MK-ULTRA. He was a Machiavelli with a mission. An avid proponent of telemetry as a form of low-intensity warfare, Helms commandeered a vast research network in pursuit of such subtle depth persuasion techniques as the transmission of strategic subliminal messages to the brain of enemy populations. He advocated the use of high frequencies to affect memory and even the unconscious. Helms ordered up a scientific cabal to study automata theory. In a memo to the Warren Commission, he made mention of "biological radio communication".
The 1964 memo was prophetic. Helms : "Cybernetics can be used in molding of a child's character, the inculcation of knowledge and techniques, the amassing of experience, the establishment of social behavior patterns.... all functions which can be summarized as control of the growth process of the individual. Cybernetics technology that responds to thought was in the offing. In his memo, Helms diverted attention from CIA funded research and development by alluding to the Soviets. But then they had no technology the U.S. did not also have, he conceded.
A subsequent CIA directive, summarized in a brochure on the "Cybernetic Technique" distributed by Mankind Research Unlimited (MRU), a research front in the District of Columbia, gleefully discusses the Agency's development of a "means by which information in modest rate can be fed to humans utilizing other senses than sight or hearing." The Cybernetic Technique, "based on Eastern European research," involves beaming information to individual nerve cells. The purpose, the directive states, is the enhancement of mental and physical performance. The cyborg was born.
The 1964 memo was prophetic. Helms : "Cybernetics can be used in molding of a child's character, the inculcation of knowledge and techniques, the amassing of experience, the establishment of social behavior patterns.... all functions which can be summarized as control of the growth process of the individual. Cybernetics technology that responds to thought was in the offing. In his memo, Helms diverted attention from CIA funded research and development by alluding to the Soviets. But then they had no technology the U.S. did not also have, he conceded.
A subsequent CIA directive, summarized in a brochure on the "Cybernetic Technique" distributed by Mankind Research Unlimited (MRU), a research front in the District of Columbia, gleefully discusses the Agency's development of a "means by which information in modest rate can be fed to humans utilizing other senses than sight or hearing." The Cybernetic Technique, "based on Eastern European research," involves beaming information to individual nerve cells. The purpose, the directive states, is the enhancement of mental and physical performance. The cyborg was born.
http://mindofpower.com/129/remote-viewing-psychokinesis-psychotronics-oh-my/
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
GNN Guerrilla News Network MK ULTRA CIA Mind Control Operation MUST SEE Chemtrails HAARP Psychotronics Higher Quality
Prepared Statement of Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence
Mr. Chairman: In my letter to you of July 15, 1977, I reported our recent discovery of seven boxes of documents related to Project MKULTRA, a closely held CIA project conducted from 1953-1964. As you may recall, MKULTRA was an "umbrella project" under which certain sensitive subprojects were funded, involving among other things research on drugs and behavioral modification. During the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations in 1975, the cryptonym became publicly known when details of the drug-related death of Dr. Frank Olsen were publicized. In 1953 Dr. Olsen, a civilian employee of the Army at Fort Detrick, leaped to his death from a hotel room window in New York City about a week after having unwittingly consumed LSD administered to him as an experiment at a meeting of LSD researchers called by CIA.
Most of what was known about the Agency's involvement with behavioral drugs during the investigations in 1975 was contained in a report on Project MKULTRA prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963. As a result of that report's recommendations, unwitting testing of drugs on U.S. citizens was subsequently discontinued. The MKULTRA-related report was made available to the Church Committee investigators and to the staff of Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health. Until the recent discovery, it was believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the DCI, as has been previously reported. Almost all of the people who had had any connection with the aspects of the project which interested Senate investigators in 1975 were no longer with the Agency at that time. Thus, there was little detailed knowledge of the MKULTRA subprojects available to CIA during the Church Committee investigations. This lack of available details, moreover, was probably not wholly attributable to the destruction of MKULTRA files in 1973; the 1963 report on MKULTRA by the Inspector General notes on page 14: "Present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs."
When I reported to you last on this matter, my staff had not yet had an opportunity to review the newly located material in depth. This has now been accomplished, and I am in a position to give you a description of the contents of the recovered material. I believe you will be most interested in the following aspects of the recent discovery:
How the material was discovered and why it was not previously found;
The nature of this recently located material;
How much new information there is in the material which may not have been previously known and reported to Senate investigators; and
What we believe the most significant aspects of this find to be.
To begin, as to how we discovered these materials. The material had been sent to our Retired Records Center outside of Washington and was discovered sent to our Retired Records Center outside of Washington and was discovered there as a result of the extensive search efforts of an employee charged with responsibility for maintaining our holdings on behavioral drugs and for responding to Freedom of Information Act requests on this subject. During the Church Committee investigation in 1975, searches for MKULTRA-related material were made by examining both the active and retired records of all branches of CIA considered at all likely to have had association with MKULTRA documents. The retired records of the Budget and Fiscal Section of the Branch responsible for such work were not searched, however. This was because financial papers associated with sensitive projects such s MKULTRA were normally maintained by the Branch itself under the project file, not by the Budget and Fiscal Section. In the case at hand, however, the newly located material was sent to the Retired Records Center in 1970 by the Budget and Fiscal Section as part of its own retired holdings. The reason for this departure from normal procedure is not known. As a result of it, however, the material escaped retrieval and destruction in 1973 by the then-retiring Director of the Office as well as discovery in 1975 by CIA officials responding to Senate investigators.
The employee who located this material did so by leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to respond to FOIA requests. He reviewed all listings of material of this Branch stored at the Retired Records Center, including those of the Budget and Fiscal Section and, thus, discovered the MKULTRA-related documents which had been missed in the previous searches. In sum, the Agency failed to uncover these particular documents in 1973 in the process of attempting to destroy them; it similarly failed to locate them in 1975 in response to the Church Committee hearings. I am convinced that there was no attempt to conceal this material during the earlier searches.
Next, as to the nature of the recently located material, it is important to realize that the recovered folders are finance folders. The bulk of the material in them consists of approvals for advance of funds, vouchers, accountings, and the like -- most of which are not very informative as to the nature of the activities that were undertaken. Occasional project proposals or memoranda commenting on some aspect of a subproject are scattered throughout this material. In general, however, the recovered material does not include status reports or other documents relating to operational considerations or progress in the various subprojects, though some elaboration of the activities contemplated does appear. The recovered documents fall roughly into three categories:
First, there are 149 MKULTRA subprojects, many of which appear to have some connection with research into behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously.
Second, there are two boxes of miscellaneous MKULTRA papers, including audit reports and financial statements from "cut-out" (i.e., intermediary) funding mechanisms used to conceal CIA's sponsorship of various research projects.
Finally, there are 33 additional subprojects concerning certain intelligence activities previously funded under MKULTRA which have nothing to do either with behavioral modification, drugs, and toxins or with any other related matters.
We have attempted to group the activities covered by the 149 subprojects into categories under descriptive headings. In broad outline, at least, this presents the contents of these files. The activities are placed in the following 15 categories:
1. Research into the effects of behavioral drugs and/or alcohol:
17 subprojects probably not involving human testing;
14 subprojects definitely involving tests on human volunteers;
19 subprojects probably including tests on human volunteers. While not known, some of these subprojects may have included tests on unwitting subjects as well;
6 subprojects involving tests on unwitting subjects.
2. Research on hypnosis: 8 subprojects, including 2 involving hypnosis and drugs in combination.
3. Acquisition of chemicals or drugs: 7 subprojects.
4. Aspects of magicians' art useful in covert operations: e.g., surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials: 4 subprojects.
5. Studies of human behavior, sleep research, and behavioral changes during psychotherapy: 9 subprojects.
6. Library searches and attendance at seminars and international conferences on behavioral modification: 6 subprojects.
7. Motivational studies, studies of defectors, assessment, and training techniques: 23 subprojects.
8. Polygraph research: 3 subprojects.
9. Funding mechanisms for MKULTRA external research activities: 3 subprojects.
10. Research on drugs, toxins, and biologicals in human tissue; provision of exotic pathogens and the capability to incorporate them in effective delivery systems: 6 subprojects.
11. Activities whose objectives cannot be determined from available documentation: 3 subprojects.
12. Subprojects involving funding support for unspecified activities connected with the Army's Special Operations Division at Fr. Detrick, Md. This activity is outline in Book I of the Church Committee Report, pp. 388-389. (See Appendix A, pp. 68-69.) Under CIA's Project MKNAOMI, the Army Assisted CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems for use against humans as well as against animals and crops. The objectives of these subprojects cannot be identified from the recovered material beyond the fact that the money was to be used where normal funding channels would require more written or oral justification than appeared desirable for security reasons or where operational considerations dictated short lead times for purchases. About $11,000 was involved during this period 1953-1960: 3 subprojects.
13. Single subprojects in such areas as effects of electro-shock, harassment techniques for offensive use, analysis of extrasensory perception, gas propelled sprays and aerosols, and four subprojects involving crop and material sabotage.
14. One or two subprojects on each of the following:
"Blood Grouping" research, controlling the activity of animals, energy storage and transfer in organic systems; and
stimulus and response in biological systems.
15. Three subprojects canceled before any work was done on them having to do with laboratory drug screening, research on brain concussion, and research on biologically active materials to be tested through the skin on human volunteers.
Now, as to how much new the recovered material adds to what has previously been reported to the Church Committee and to Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health on these topics, the answer is additional detail, for the most part: e.g., the names of previously unidentified researchers and institutions associated on either a witting or unwitting basis with MKULTRA activities, and the names of CIA officials who approved or monitored the various subprojects. Some new substantive material is also present: e.g., details concerning proposals for experimentation and clinical testing associated with various research projects, and a possibly improper contribution by CIA to a private institution. However, the principal types of activities included have, for the most part, either been outlined to some extent or generally described in what was previously available to CIA in the way of documentation and was supplied by CIA to Senate investigators. For example:
Financial disbursement records for the period 1960-1964 for 76 of the 149 numbered MKULTRA subprojects had been recovered from the Office of Finance by CIA and were made available to the Church Committee investigators in August or September 1975.
The 1963 Inspector General report on MKULTRA made available to both the Church Committee and Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee mentions electro-shock and harassment substances (pp. 4, 16); covert testing on unwitting U.S. citizens (pp. 7, 10-12); the search for new materials through arrangements with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations (pp. 7, 9); and the fact that the Technical Service Division of CIA had initiated 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior between 1953-1963 (p. 21).
The relevant section of a 1957 Inspector General report on the Technical Service Division was also made available to the Church Committee staff. That report discusses techniques for human assessment and unorthodox methods of communication (p. 201); discrediting and disabling materials which can be covertly administered (pp. 201-202); studies on magicians' arts as applied to covert operations (p. 202); specific funding mechanisms for research performed outside of CIA (pp. 202-203, 205); research being done on "K" (knockout) material, alcohol tolerance, and hypnotism (p. 203); research on LSD (p. 204); anti-personnel harassment and assassination delivery systems including aerosol generators and other spray devices (pp. 206-208); the role of Fort Detrick in support of CIA's Biological/Chemical Warfare capability (p. 208); and material sabotage research (p. 209). Much of this material is reflected in the Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 385-422. (See Appendix A, pp. 65-102).
The most significant new data discovered are, first, the names of researchers and institutions who participated in the MKULTRA project and, secondly, a possibly improper contribution by CIA to a private institution. We are now in possession of the names of 185 non-government researchers and assistants who are identified in the recovered material dealing with the 149 subprojects. The names of 80 institutions where work was done or with which these people were affiliated are also mentioned.
The institutions include 44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities), and 3 penal institutions. While the identities of some of these people and institutions were known previously, the discovery of the new identities adds to our knowledge of MKULTRA.
The facts as they pertain to the possibly improper contribution are as follows: One project involves a contribution of $375,000 to a building fund of a private medical institution. The fact that a contribution was made was previously known; indeed it was mentioned in a 1957 Inspector General report on the Technical Service Division of CIA, pertinent portions of which had been reviewed by the Church Committee staff. The newly discovered material, however, makes it clear that this contribution was made through an intermediary, which made it appear to be a private donation. As a private donation, the contribution was then matched by federal funds. The institution was not made aware of the true source of the gift. This project was approved by the then DCI, and concurred in by CIA's top management at the time, including the then General Counsel who wrote an opinion supporting the legality of the contribution.
The recently discovered documents give a greater insight into the scope of the unwitting drug testing but contribute little more than that. We now have collaborating information that some of the unwitting drug testing was carried on in safehouses in San Francisco and New York City, and we have identified that three individuals were involved in this undertaking as opposed to the previously reported one person. We also know now that some unwitting testing took place on criminal sexual psychopaths confined at a State hospital and that, additionally, research was done on knock-out or "K" drug in parallel with research to develop pain killers for cancer patients.
These, then are the principal findings identified to date in our review of the recovered material. As noted earlier, we believe the detail on the identities of researchers and institutions involved in CIA's sponsorship of drugs and behavioral modification is a new element and one which poses a considerable problem. Most of the people and institutions involved are not aware of Agency sponsorship. We should certainly assume that the researchers and institutions which cooperate with CIA on a witting basis acted in good faith and in the belief that they were aiding their government in a legitimate and proper purpose. I believe we all have a moral obligation to these researchers and institutions to protect them from any unjustified embarrassment or damage to their reputations which revelation of their identities might bring. In addition, I have a legal obligation under the Privacy Act not to publicly disclose the names of the individual researchers without their consent. This is especially true, of course, for those researchers and institutions which were unwitting participants in CIA-sponsored activities.
Nevertheless, recognizing the right and the need of both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health to investigate the circumstances of these activities in whatever detail they consider necessary. I am providing your Committee with all of the names on a classified basis. I hope that this will facilitate your investigation while protecting the individuals and institutions involved. Let me emphasize that the MKULTRA events are 12 to 25 years in the past. I assure you that the CIA is in no way engaged in either witting or unwitting testing of drugs today.
Finally, I am working closely with the Attorney General and with the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare on this matter. We are making available to the Attorney General whatever materials he may deem necessary to any investigation he may elect to undertake. We are working with both the Attorney General and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to determine whether it is practicable from this new evidence to attempt to identify any of the persons to whom drugs may have been administered unwittingly. No such names are part of these records, but we are working to determine if there are adequate clues to lead to their identification; and if so, how to go about fulfilling the Government's responsibilities in the matter. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/Hearing02.htm
> MK-ULTRA
>
> MKULTRA was the principal CIA program involving the research and development
> of chemical and biological agents. It was "concerned with the research and
> development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of
> employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior." [11]
>
> In January 1973, MKULTRA records were destroyed by Technical Services Division
> personnel acting on the verbal orders of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of TSD.
> Dr. Gottlieb has testified, and former Director Helms has confirmed, that in
> ordering the records destroyed, Dr. Gottlieb was carrying out the verbal order
> of then DCI Helms.
>
> MKULTRA began with a proposal from the Assistant Deputy Director for Plans,
> Richard Helms, to the DCI, outlining a special funding mechanism for highly
> sensitive CIA research and development projects that studied the use of
> biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior. The projects
> involved:
>
> Research to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical
> materials. This area involves the production of various physiological
> conditions which could support present or future clandestine operations. Aside
> from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in
> this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough
> knowledge of the enemy's theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend
> ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these
> techniques as we are.
>
> MKULTRA was approved by the DCI on April 13, 1953 along the lines proposed by
> ADDP Helms.
>
> Part of the rationale for the establishment of this special funding mechanism
> was its extreme sensitivity. The Inspector General's survey of MKULTRA in 1963
> noted the following reasons for this sensitivity:
>
> a. Research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many
> authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical,
> therefore the reputation of professional participants in the MKULTRA program
> are on occasion in jeopardy.
>
> b. Some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality implicit in the,
> original charter.
>
> c. A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and
> interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
>
> d. Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious
> adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion. as well as stimulate offensive and
> defensive action in this field on the part of foreign intelligence services.
>
> Over the ten-year life of the program, many "additional avenues to the control
> of human behavior" were designated as appropriate for investigation under the
> MKULTRA charter. These include "radiation, electroshock, various fields of
> psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment
> substances, and paramilitary devices and materials."
>
> The research and development of materials to be used for altering human
> behavior consisted of three phases: first, the search for materials suitable
> for study; second, laboratory testing on voluntary human subjects in various
> types of institutions; third, the application of MKULTRA materials in normal
> everyday life settings.
>
> The search for suitable materials was conducted through standing arrangements
> with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and
> federal institutions, and private research organi-zations. The annual grants
> of funds to these specialists were made under ostensible research foundation
> auspices, thereby concealing the CIA's interest from the specialist's
> institution.
>
> The next phase of the MKULTRA program involved physicians, toxicologists, and
> other specialists in mental, narcotics, and general hospitals, and in prisons.
> Utilizing the products and findings of the basic research phase, they
> conducted intensive tests on human subjects.
>
> One of the first studies was conducted by the National Institute of Mental
> Health. This study was intended to test various drugs, including
> hallucinogenics, at the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky.
> The "Lexington Rehabilitation Center," as it was then called, was a prison for
> drug addicts serving sentences for drug violations.
>
> The test subjects were volunteer prisoners who, after taking a brief physical
> examination and signing a general consent form, were administered
> hallucinogenic drugs. As a reward for participation in the program, the
> addicts were provided with the drug of their addiction.
>
> LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of
> LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvolunteer
> subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of
> Narcotics acting for the CIA.
>
> The rationale for such testing was "that testing of materials under accepted
> scientific procedures fails to disclose the full pattern of reactions and
> attributions that may occur in operational situations."
>
> According to the CIA, the advantage of the relationship with the Bureau was
> that
>
>>
>>
>> test subjects could be sought and cultivated within the setting of narcotics
>> control. Some subjects have been informers or members of suspect criminal
>> elements from whom the [Bureau of Narcotics] has obtained results of
>> operational value through the tests. On the other hand, the effectiveness of
>> the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native
>> American and foreign, is of great significance and testing has been
>> performed on a variety of individuals within these categories. [Emphasis
>> added.] [16]
>
> A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of
> MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions.
> Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the
> operational use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been
> determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly
> as early as 1950.
>
> Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA
> materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.
> According to an Inspector General Survey of the Technical Services Division of
> the CIA in 1957 -- an inspection which did not discover the MKULTRA project
> involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting, nonvolunteer
> subjects -- the CIA had developed six drugs for operational use* and they had
> been used in six different operations on a total of thirty-three subjects. By
> 1963 the number of operations and subjects had increased substantially.
>
> *The Inspector General's Report of 1957 on the Technical Services Division
> noted that "Six specific products have been developed and are available for
> operational use. Three of them are discrediting and disabling materials which
> can be administered unwittingly and permit the exercise of a measure of
> control over the actions of the subject."
>
>
> 5. The Testing of LSD by the Army
>
> There were three major phases in the Army's testing of LSD. In the first, LSD
> was administered to more than 1,000 American soldiers who volunteered to be
> subjects in chemical warfare experiments. In the second phase, Material
> Testing Program EA 1729, 95 volunteers received LSD in clinical experiments
> designed to evaluate potential intelligence uses of the drug. In the third
> phase, Projects THIRD CHANCE and DERBY HAT, 16 unwitting nonvolunteer subjects
> were interrogated after receiving LSD as part of operational field tests.
>
> B. CIA DRUG TESTING PROGRAMS
>
> 1. The Rationale for the Testing Programs
>
> The late 1910s and early 1950s were marked by concern over the threat posed by
> the activities of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and other
> Communist bloc countries. United States concern over the use of chemical and
> biological agents by these powers was acute. The belief that hostile powers
> had used chemical and biological agents in interrogations, brainwashing, and
> in attacks designed to harass, disable, or kill Allied personnel created
> considerable pressure for a "defensive" program to investigate chemical and
> biological agents so that the intelligence community could understand the
> mechanisms by which these substances worked and how their effects could be
> defeated.
>
> But the defensive orientation soon became secondary. Chemical and biological
> agents were to be studied in order "to perfect techniques... for the
> abstraction of information from individuals whether willing or not" and in
> order to "develop means for the control of the activities and mental
> capacities of individuals whether willing or not." One Agency official noted
> that drugs would be useful in order to "gain control of bodies whether they
> were willing or not" in the process of removing personnel from Europe in the
> event of a Soviet attack. In other programs, the CIA began to develop,
> produce, stockpile, and maintain in operational readiness materials which
> could be used to harass, disable, or kill specific targets.
>
> Reports of research and development in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic
> of China, and the Communist Bloc countries provided the basis for the
> transmutation of American programs from a defensive to an offensive
> orientation. As the Chief of the Medical Staff of the Central Intelligence
> Agency wrote in 1952:
>>
>>
>> There is ample evidence in the reports of innumerable interrogations that
>> the Communists were utilizing drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and
>> possibly hypnosis against their enemies. With such evidence it is difficult
>> not to keep from becoming rabid about our apparent laxity. We are forced by
>> this mounting evidence to assume a more aggressive role in the development of
>> these techniques, but must be cautious to maintain strict inviolable control
>> because of the havoc that could be wrought by such techniques in unscrupulous
>> hands.
>
> In order to meet the perceived threat to the national security, substantial
> programs for the testing and use of chemical and biological agents --
> including projects involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to
> unwitting nonvolunteer subjects "at all social levels, high and low, native
> American and foreign" -- were conceived, and implemented. These programs
> resulted in substantial violations of the rights of individuals within the
> United States.
>
> There were no attempts to secure approval for the most controversial aspects
> of these programs from the executive branch or Congress. The nature and extent
> of the programs were closely held secrets; even [CIA Director] McCone was not
> briefed on all the details of the program involving the surreptitious
> administration of LSD until 1963. It was deemed imperative that these
> programs be concealed from the American people. As the CIA's Inspector
> General wrote in 1957:
>
> "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 and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission."
MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 46 Notes: The following is reproduced here with the express permission of the author. Permission is given to reproduce and redistribute, for non-commercial purposes only, provided this information and the copy remain intact and unedited. The views and opinions expressed below are not necessarily the views and opinions of VERICOMM, MindNet, or the editors unless otherwise noted. Editor: Mike Coyle Contributing Editors: Walter Bowart Alex Constantine Martin Cannon Assistant Editor: Rick Lawler Research: Darrell Bross Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from the Web page ofDeep Black Magic: Government Research into ESP & Mind Control: URL: Government Research into ESP & Mind Control By Tom Porter Mar. 1996HISTORY OF MK-ULTRA: CIA PROGRAM ON MIND CONTROL. Started during WWII with research on hypnosis for interrogation, secure courier duties, and reducing fatigue. Also research into effects of primitive drugs like barbiturates and cannabis as far as drug-assisted interrogation goes. George Estabrooks was the leading proponent of hypnosis as the be-all and end-all of manipulating peoples minds. His book, 'Hypnotism', published in the early forties, has been decried as too fantastic and improbable in terms of describing the capabilities of hypnosis with certain very suggestible subjects, but his arguments and examples remain valid to this day. Start of Cold War and Korean War in particular gave a big boost to mind control research with the emergence of 'Brain Washing' as a common term. Supposedly a development of the dastardly Chi-Coms, the term was actually coined by a magazine writer later found to be on the CIA payroll as an agent of influence. Postulating a 'brainwashing gap' The CIA got the go-ahead for research into countering communist mind control efforts and developing their own to aid in the espionage wars. Hypnosis, drugs, and psycho-surgery; separately and combined, were the tools of this quest for the ultimate truth serum on the one hand, and the capability to create an agent who could not have his or her mission tortured out of them, or even be aware that they were carrying secret information given to them in an altered state of consciousness. More and more sophisticated drugs were experimented with, such as LSD, Ketamine, and Psilocybine. Lobotomy and the implantation of electrodes were considered as methods for creating a compliant agent. Electro-Convulsive Shock, combined with LSD, sedation for days at a time, and constantly replaying the patient's own voice through helmet-mounted headphones was a notorious Canadian researcher's recipe for mind control. One of the most remarkable cases of mind control involves a famous model of the late 40's and 50's named Candy Jones. In the book, "The Control of Candy Jones" the author reviewed hours of tapes made by Candy Jones and her husband which revealed a systematic program to create and manipulate alter personalities as the foundation for programmed couriers resistant to torture, where the primary personality would not even be aware of the secret information being carried. The information could be summoned forth via a post-hypnotic command or response to a pre-programmed cue. Research continued into early 70's by CIA's own admission during the Church hearings. John Marks, author of the best study of CIA mind control experiments, makes the subtle differentiation that the CIA congressional witnesses might truthfully say that all research done by the TSS Directorate had ended, since the programs were moved into other areas once operational techniques had been developed. Many of the names mentioned in reference to mind control research turn up in the few references to supposed dead-end research in ESP. There have been persistent rumors of Navy research involving attempts at telepathy from submarines under water, the Nautilus being the most famous of these. Detection of enemy submarines, and communicating with our own, has continued to be an important area of conventional research for the Navy, so it is no surprise that researching the use of ESP for these purposes would be of interest. Communicating with a submerged submarine is the only kind of communications where the very act of receiving puts the receiver in danger, since submarines must normally stick an antenna out of the water for high speed radio traffic, or rely on trailing a long wire antenna under water relatively near the surface to receive very slow speed traffic using ELF radio waves. Newer techniques may involve the use of blue-green wavelength lasers, but evidently penetration to any depth is still a problem. If you look at telepathy as a problem in the transfer of information in a very noisy environment, then certain existing solutions suggest themselves: There have already been experiments in the transmission of five distinct symbols via telepathy, namely Zener card symbols. I suggest that there is already a way of transmitting information using two symbols only, namely Morse Code. Current ELF or VLF radio transmission methods for communicating with fleet ballistic missile submarines to issue them their launch orders involve very low data transfer rates, on the order of 3 to 30 bits per minute, if I am not mistaken. Messages are very short, consisting of pre-formulated action or targeting codes. I suggest that telepathic 'Zener Morse' is an operational technique for information transfer under severe signal to noise conditions. In fact the use of five Zener symbols would increase data transfer rates, but at the expense of a higher error rate due to the problems in discriminating between five and just two symbols. CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AND REPORTS. Reports of Project SCANNATE in 70's, most likely done by Swann, since his method for RV is very similar to that reportedly used in this project; namely providing lat. & long. coords and telling what is there. Later changed to assigning random number for unique session number and Swann picked up location anyway. "The New Age Army:" Over the past 10 - 15 years a number of military personnel, most in significant positions in Military Intelligence, have expressed interest in and directed programs or projects that have explored paranormal activities and capabilities. Several government studies on Enhancing Human Performance took place during this time. Most, if not all of them, were savaged in the NRC study on Enhancing Human Performance, but recent critiques and rebuttals of this study have indicated severe irregularities in the evaluation procedures for papers submitted to the NRC study, suppression of favorable results, and a definitely one-sided evaluation panel. Much modern research in parapsychology tends to support the idea that Enhanced Perception is a survival-related trait from our distant past, not the tip of the iceberg as far as new emerging human powers go. This is supported by the observation that many psychic episodes center around catastrophic or traumatic events. Studies of Siberian and Eskimo shamans also show the development of ESP or similar shamanic powers due to injury, exposure to cold, and isolation. Dissociation with tendencies towards Multiple Personality Disorder also occurs in these Shamans due to their ordeals. This is in contrast to the experiences of most tropical shamans who tend to find their powers through exposure to mind-altering drugs. The Vietnam war, with its exceedingly stressful combat environment of no clear-cut enemies combined with ambush being the normal way of making contact, produced a large body of individual reports stressing enhanced perception and awareness. This showed up as detecting ambushes and booby-traps before they were sprung; detecting the presence of enemy soldiers without any conscious sign of them; time dilation when bullets could be seen slowly traveling around the battlefield, and even reports of soldiers avoiding those bullets by jumping out of their paths as they were shot at. Dr. Ian Wickramasekera of Eastern Virginia Medical School has studied the expansion of sensory input during trauma which would lead to time dilation, etc. This gentleman has also studied the effects of sensory deprivation on hypnotic susceptibility in young women. In a recent article in U.S. News & World Report, John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist associated with a CIA front organization, the Human Ecology Society admitted to knowledge of experiments in developing ESP by giving electric shocks to subjects when they gave wrong answers. Recently, a Russian researcher in psychotronics, Dr. Igor Smirnov, has helped to start up a new Virginia company, called Psycho-Technologies, I believe. It is supposed to conduct research on various kinds of LTL technology, with a concentration on Soviet-developed psychotronic warfare capabilities involving the use of electromagnetic and sonic waves to influence and disable individuals or crowds. Supposedly this ranges from simply falling to influencing peoples thoughts via audio or visual subliminal messages. SOME OF THE PLAYERS: The Monroe Institute, located near Charlottesville, Virginia. Bob Monroe, author of many books on Out of Body experiences, has long and close ties with the C.I.A. James Monroe, Bob's father, if I'm not mistaken, was involved with the Human Ecology Society, a C.I.A. front organization of the late 50's and 60's. The Monroe Institute has done research on accelerated learning and foreign language learning through the use of altered states of consciousness for the C.I.A. and other government organizations. Government interest in the more radical research going on at the institute remains only tantalizing speculation. Official classified document storage boxes have been seen at their mail-order outlet located in Lovingston, VA. Albert Stubblebine and John Alexander. Both retired Army officers, a General and Colonel respectively. Both worked at U.S. Army Intelligence & Security Command, or INSCOM, Stubblebine as its head at one time. Stubblebine has publicly stated that an enlisted man under his command inadvertently 'mentally fried' an intelligence gathering computer located in Augsberg Germany. This was Lynn Buchanan, discussed later. Alexander wrote the rebuttal to the NRC paper on Enhancing Human Performance. He used this rebuttal as the basis for a book he co-authored called "The Warrior's Edge" which describes various techniques for enhancing performance and perception utilizing the power of the mind. Alexander currently heads up research on Less Than Lethal weapons at Los Alamos Nation Laboratories. Jack Houk, Aerospace Engineer, and his Spoon bending parties, done for last 12 - 15 years. Stubblebine, Alexander, and others have attended and hosted these parties. While even Houk admits that much of the bending activity that occurs is due to hysterical strength, people getting excited, etc. there are always a few really perplexing feats of bending at each party. Curled and twisted hacksaw blades comes to mind, since these normally snap if they are bent. Ed Dames and PSI-TECH, Military Intelligence alumni as contract RV'ers. Promises to provide RV services to corporate and government clients for $5,000 - $8,000 per week. Has supposedly spotted Iraqi chemical weapons depots, among others. S.A.I.C. involvement in 1993 American Parapsychological Association meeting arrangements, via their 'Cognitive Sciences Laboratory'. Science Applications International Corporation is a big time defense contractor, has held the largest number of research contracts of any defense contractor. Bobby Ray Inman is on its board of directors, among others. Startup of TREAT, Center for Treatment and Research into Experienced Anomalous Trauma, by Rima Leibow. Leibow is a psychiatrist who started studying trauma associated with alien abductions, noting its similarities to PTSD. She has hosted open and closed meetings for the past six years. Leibow is a close friend of/ or married to Stubblebine, which certainly raises some interesting questions. Another abduction researcher and friend is Victoria Lacas, who happens to be married to Alexander. One other TREAT hanger-on, and friend of Stubblebine's, is Lynn Buchanan. Buchanan offers services similar to PSI-TECH and has worked with Ed Dames on a contract basis. He taught a Remote Viewing workshop at the latest TREAT conference. Also offers continued training in RV skills to those whom he decides to work with. Veteran of INSCOM, and the famous 'computer frier' mentioned by Stubblebine. A real mystery man in all of this is C.B. Scott Jones: Ex-Navy Intelligence officer, one time aide to Senator Claiborne Pell, founder of the Human Potential Foundation; Jones appears to have his fingers in every 'weird' pie around. He has been involved with several UFO research organizations, dolphin-human communications research, served on the boards of several scholarly parapsychological research organizations. Jones strikes many people as a 'Cardinal Richelieu' figure, manipulating events behind the scenes, but rarely emerging into the spotlight. There is literally no conference on parapsychology that he does not attend. He has traveled and done research with Alexander and Rima Leibow. He works at keeping very well informed about the 'pulse' of the New Age community and about UFO and parapsychological research in particular. He rarely writes anything for print, but keeps in contact with many of the players in the fields. He has presented papers to many conferences, most of the examples I have seen are complex, lengthy, and elaborate pieces of dis-information which leave the listeners more confused than when he started.
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
GNN Guerrilla News Network MK ULTRA CIA Mind Control Operation MUST SEE Chemtrails HAARP Psychotronics Higher Quality
Prepared Statement of Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence
Mr. Chairman: In my letter to you of July 15, 1977, I reported our recent discovery of seven boxes of documents related to Project MKULTRA, a closely held CIA project conducted from 1953-1964. As you may recall, MKULTRA was an "umbrella project" under which certain sensitive subprojects were funded, involving among other things research on drugs and behavioral modification. During the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations in 1975, the cryptonym became publicly known when details of the drug-related death of Dr. Frank Olsen were publicized. In 1953 Dr. Olsen, a civilian employee of the Army at Fort Detrick, leaped to his death from a hotel room window in New York City about a week after having unwittingly consumed LSD administered to him as an experiment at a meeting of LSD researchers called by CIA.
Most of what was known about the Agency's involvement with behavioral drugs during the investigations in 1975 was contained in a report on Project MKULTRA prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963. As a result of that report's recommendations, unwitting testing of drugs on U.S. citizens was subsequently discontinued. The MKULTRA-related report was made available to the Church Committee investigators and to the staff of Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health. Until the recent discovery, it was believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the DCI, as has been previously reported. Almost all of the people who had had any connection with the aspects of the project which interested Senate investigators in 1975 were no longer with the Agency at that time. Thus, there was little detailed knowledge of the MKULTRA subprojects available to CIA during the Church Committee investigations. This lack of available details, moreover, was probably not wholly attributable to the destruction of MKULTRA files in 1973; the 1963 report on MKULTRA by the Inspector General notes on page 14: "Present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs."
When I reported to you last on this matter, my staff had not yet had an opportunity to review the newly located material in depth. This has now been accomplished, and I am in a position to give you a description of the contents of the recovered material. I believe you will be most interested in the following aspects of the recent discovery:
How the material was discovered and why it was not previously found;
The nature of this recently located material;
How much new information there is in the material which may not have been previously known and reported to Senate investigators; and
What we believe the most significant aspects of this find to be.
To begin, as to how we discovered these materials. The material had been sent to our Retired Records Center outside of Washington and was discovered sent to our Retired Records Center outside of Washington and was discovered there as a result of the extensive search efforts of an employee charged with responsibility for maintaining our holdings on behavioral drugs and for responding to Freedom of Information Act requests on this subject. During the Church Committee investigation in 1975, searches for MKULTRA-related material were made by examining both the active and retired records of all branches of CIA considered at all likely to have had association with MKULTRA documents. The retired records of the Budget and Fiscal Section of the Branch responsible for such work were not searched, however. This was because financial papers associated with sensitive projects such s MKULTRA were normally maintained by the Branch itself under the project file, not by the Budget and Fiscal Section. In the case at hand, however, the newly located material was sent to the Retired Records Center in 1970 by the Budget and Fiscal Section as part of its own retired holdings. The reason for this departure from normal procedure is not known. As a result of it, however, the material escaped retrieval and destruction in 1973 by the then-retiring Director of the Office as well as discovery in 1975 by CIA officials responding to Senate investigators.
The employee who located this material did so by leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to respond to FOIA requests. He reviewed all listings of material of this Branch stored at the Retired Records Center, including those of the Budget and Fiscal Section and, thus, discovered the MKULTRA-related documents which had been missed in the previous searches. In sum, the Agency failed to uncover these particular documents in 1973 in the process of attempting to destroy them; it similarly failed to locate them in 1975 in response to the Church Committee hearings. I am convinced that there was no attempt to conceal this material during the earlier searches.
Next, as to the nature of the recently located material, it is important to realize that the recovered folders are finance folders. The bulk of the material in them consists of approvals for advance of funds, vouchers, accountings, and the like -- most of which are not very informative as to the nature of the activities that were undertaken. Occasional project proposals or memoranda commenting on some aspect of a subproject are scattered throughout this material. In general, however, the recovered material does not include status reports or other documents relating to operational considerations or progress in the various subprojects, though some elaboration of the activities contemplated does appear. The recovered documents fall roughly into three categories:
First, there are 149 MKULTRA subprojects, many of which appear to have some connection with research into behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously.
Second, there are two boxes of miscellaneous MKULTRA papers, including audit reports and financial statements from "cut-out" (i.e., intermediary) funding mechanisms used to conceal CIA's sponsorship of various research projects.
Finally, there are 33 additional subprojects concerning certain intelligence activities previously funded under MKULTRA which have nothing to do either with behavioral modification, drugs, and toxins or with any other related matters.
We have attempted to group the activities covered by the 149 subprojects into categories under descriptive headings. In broad outline, at least, this presents the contents of these files. The activities are placed in the following 15 categories:
1. Research into the effects of behavioral drugs and/or alcohol:
17 subprojects probably not involving human testing;
14 subprojects definitely involving tests on human volunteers;
19 subprojects probably including tests on human volunteers. While not known, some of these subprojects may have included tests on unwitting subjects as well;
6 subprojects involving tests on unwitting subjects.
2. Research on hypnosis: 8 subprojects, including 2 involving hypnosis and drugs in combination.
3. Acquisition of chemicals or drugs: 7 subprojects.
4. Aspects of magicians' art useful in covert operations: e.g., surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials: 4 subprojects.
5. Studies of human behavior, sleep research, and behavioral changes during psychotherapy: 9 subprojects.
6. Library searches and attendance at seminars and international conferences on behavioral modification: 6 subprojects.
7. Motivational studies, studies of defectors, assessment, and training techniques: 23 subprojects.
8. Polygraph research: 3 subprojects.
9. Funding mechanisms for MKULTRA external research activities: 3 subprojects.
10. Research on drugs, toxins, and biologicals in human tissue; provision of exotic pathogens and the capability to incorporate them in effective delivery systems: 6 subprojects.
11. Activities whose objectives cannot be determined from available documentation: 3 subprojects.
12. Subprojects involving funding support for unspecified activities connected with the Army's Special Operations Division at Fr. Detrick, Md. This activity is outline in Book I of the Church Committee Report, pp. 388-389. (See Appendix A, pp. 68-69.) Under CIA's Project MKNAOMI, the Army Assisted CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems for use against humans as well as against animals and crops. The objectives of these subprojects cannot be identified from the recovered material beyond the fact that the money was to be used where normal funding channels would require more written or oral justification than appeared desirable for security reasons or where operational considerations dictated short lead times for purchases. About $11,000 was involved during this period 1953-1960: 3 subprojects.
13. Single subprojects in such areas as effects of electro-shock, harassment techniques for offensive use, analysis of extrasensory perception, gas propelled sprays and aerosols, and four subprojects involving crop and material sabotage.
14. One or two subprojects on each of the following:
"Blood Grouping" research, controlling the activity of animals, energy storage and transfer in organic systems; and
stimulus and response in biological systems.
15. Three subprojects canceled before any work was done on them having to do with laboratory drug screening, research on brain concussion, and research on biologically active materials to be tested through the skin on human volunteers.
Now, as to how much new the recovered material adds to what has previously been reported to the Church Committee and to Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health on these topics, the answer is additional detail, for the most part: e.g., the names of previously unidentified researchers and institutions associated on either a witting or unwitting basis with MKULTRA activities, and the names of CIA officials who approved or monitored the various subprojects. Some new substantive material is also present: e.g., details concerning proposals for experimentation and clinical testing associated with various research projects, and a possibly improper contribution by CIA to a private institution. However, the principal types of activities included have, for the most part, either been outlined to some extent or generally described in what was previously available to CIA in the way of documentation and was supplied by CIA to Senate investigators. For example:
Financial disbursement records for the period 1960-1964 for 76 of the 149 numbered MKULTRA subprojects had been recovered from the Office of Finance by CIA and were made available to the Church Committee investigators in August or September 1975.
The 1963 Inspector General report on MKULTRA made available to both the Church Committee and Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee mentions electro-shock and harassment substances (pp. 4, 16); covert testing on unwitting U.S. citizens (pp. 7, 10-12); the search for new materials through arrangements with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations (pp. 7, 9); and the fact that the Technical Service Division of CIA had initiated 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior between 1953-1963 (p. 21).
The relevant section of a 1957 Inspector General report on the Technical Service Division was also made available to the Church Committee staff. That report discusses techniques for human assessment and unorthodox methods of communication (p. 201); discrediting and disabling materials which can be covertly administered (pp. 201-202); studies on magicians' arts as applied to covert operations (p. 202); specific funding mechanisms for research performed outside of CIA (pp. 202-203, 205); research being done on "K" (knockout) material, alcohol tolerance, and hypnotism (p. 203); research on LSD (p. 204); anti-personnel harassment and assassination delivery systems including aerosol generators and other spray devices (pp. 206-208); the role of Fort Detrick in support of CIA's Biological/Chemical Warfare capability (p. 208); and material sabotage research (p. 209). Much of this material is reflected in the Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 385-422. (See Appendix A, pp. 65-102).
The most significant new data discovered are, first, the names of researchers and institutions who participated in the MKULTRA project and, secondly, a possibly improper contribution by CIA to a private institution. We are now in possession of the names of 185 non-government researchers and assistants who are identified in the recovered material dealing with the 149 subprojects. The names of 80 institutions where work was done or with which these people were affiliated are also mentioned.
The institutions include 44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities), and 3 penal institutions. While the identities of some of these people and institutions were known previously, the discovery of the new identities adds to our knowledge of MKULTRA.
The facts as they pertain to the possibly improper contribution are as follows: One project involves a contribution of $375,000 to a building fund of a private medical institution. The fact that a contribution was made was previously known; indeed it was mentioned in a 1957 Inspector General report on the Technical Service Division of CIA, pertinent portions of which had been reviewed by the Church Committee staff. The newly discovered material, however, makes it clear that this contribution was made through an intermediary, which made it appear to be a private donation. As a private donation, the contribution was then matched by federal funds. The institution was not made aware of the true source of the gift. This project was approved by the then DCI, and concurred in by CIA's top management at the time, including the then General Counsel who wrote an opinion supporting the legality of the contribution.
The recently discovered documents give a greater insight into the scope of the unwitting drug testing but contribute little more than that. We now have collaborating information that some of the unwitting drug testing was carried on in safehouses in San Francisco and New York City, and we have identified that three individuals were involved in this undertaking as opposed to the previously reported one person. We also know now that some unwitting testing took place on criminal sexual psychopaths confined at a State hospital and that, additionally, research was done on knock-out or "K" drug in parallel with research to develop pain killers for cancer patients.
These, then are the principal findings identified to date in our review of the recovered material. As noted earlier, we believe the detail on the identities of researchers and institutions involved in CIA's sponsorship of drugs and behavioral modification is a new element and one which poses a considerable problem. Most of the people and institutions involved are not aware of Agency sponsorship. We should certainly assume that the researchers and institutions which cooperate with CIA on a witting basis acted in good faith and in the belief that they were aiding their government in a legitimate and proper purpose. I believe we all have a moral obligation to these researchers and institutions to protect them from any unjustified embarrassment or damage to their reputations which revelation of their identities might bring. In addition, I have a legal obligation under the Privacy Act not to publicly disclose the names of the individual researchers without their consent. This is especially true, of course, for those researchers and institutions which were unwitting participants in CIA-sponsored activities.
Nevertheless, recognizing the right and the need of both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health to investigate the circumstances of these activities in whatever detail they consider necessary. I am providing your Committee with all of the names on a classified basis. I hope that this will facilitate your investigation while protecting the individuals and institutions involved. Let me emphasize that the MKULTRA events are 12 to 25 years in the past. I assure you that the CIA is in no way engaged in either witting or unwitting testing of drugs today.
Finally, I am working closely with the Attorney General and with the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare on this matter. We are making available to the Attorney General whatever materials he may deem necessary to any investigation he may elect to undertake. We are working with both the Attorney General and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to determine whether it is practicable from this new evidence to attempt to identify any of the persons to whom drugs may have been administered unwittingly. No such names are part of these records, but we are working to determine if there are adequate clues to lead to their identification; and if so, how to go about fulfilling the Government's responsibilities in the matter. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/Hearing02.htm
> MK-ULTRA
>
> MKULTRA was the principal CIA program involving the research and development
> of chemical and biological agents. It was "concerned with the research and
> development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of
> employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior." [11]
>
> In January 1973, MKULTRA records were destroyed by Technical Services Division
> personnel acting on the verbal orders of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of TSD.
> Dr. Gottlieb has testified, and former Director Helms has confirmed, that in
> ordering the records destroyed, Dr. Gottlieb was carrying out the verbal order
> of then DCI Helms.
>
> MKULTRA began with a proposal from the Assistant Deputy Director for Plans,
> Richard Helms, to the DCI, outlining a special funding mechanism for highly
> sensitive CIA research and development projects that studied the use of
> biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior. The projects
> involved:
>
> Research to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical
> materials. This area involves the production of various physiological
> conditions which could support present or future clandestine operations. Aside
> from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in
> this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough
> knowledge of the enemy's theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend
> ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these
> techniques as we are.
>
> MKULTRA was approved by the DCI on April 13, 1953 along the lines proposed by
> ADDP Helms.
>
> Part of the rationale for the establishment of this special funding mechanism
> was its extreme sensitivity. The Inspector General's survey of MKULTRA in 1963
> noted the following reasons for this sensitivity:
>
> a. Research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many
> authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical,
> therefore the reputation of professional participants in the MKULTRA program
> are on occasion in jeopardy.
>
> b. Some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality implicit in the,
> original charter.
>
> c. A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and
> interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
>
> d. Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious
> adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion. as well as stimulate offensive and
> defensive action in this field on the part of foreign intelligence services.
>
> Over the ten-year life of the program, many "additional avenues to the control
> of human behavior" were designated as appropriate for investigation under the
> MKULTRA charter. These include "radiation, electroshock, various fields of
> psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment
> substances, and paramilitary devices and materials."
>
> The research and development of materials to be used for altering human
> behavior consisted of three phases: first, the search for materials suitable
> for study; second, laboratory testing on voluntary human subjects in various
> types of institutions; third, the application of MKULTRA materials in normal
> everyday life settings.
>
> The search for suitable materials was conducted through standing arrangements
> with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and
> federal institutions, and private research organi-zations. The annual grants
> of funds to these specialists were made under ostensible research foundation
> auspices, thereby concealing the CIA's interest from the specialist's
> institution.
>
> The next phase of the MKULTRA program involved physicians, toxicologists, and
> other specialists in mental, narcotics, and general hospitals, and in prisons.
> Utilizing the products and findings of the basic research phase, they
> conducted intensive tests on human subjects.
>
> One of the first studies was conducted by the National Institute of Mental
> Health. This study was intended to test various drugs, including
> hallucinogenics, at the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky.
> The "Lexington Rehabilitation Center," as it was then called, was a prison for
> drug addicts serving sentences for drug violations.
>
> The test subjects were volunteer prisoners who, after taking a brief physical
> examination and signing a general consent form, were administered
> hallucinogenic drugs. As a reward for participation in the program, the
> addicts were provided with the drug of their addiction.
>
> LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of
> LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvolunteer
> subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of
> Narcotics acting for the CIA.
>
> The rationale for such testing was "that testing of materials under accepted
> scientific procedures fails to disclose the full pattern of reactions and
> attributions that may occur in operational situations."
>
> According to the CIA, the advantage of the relationship with the Bureau was
> that
>
>>
>>
>> test subjects could be sought and cultivated within the setting of narcotics
>> control. Some subjects have been informers or members of suspect criminal
>> elements from whom the [Bureau of Narcotics] has obtained results of
>> operational value through the tests. On the other hand, the effectiveness of
>> the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native
>> American and foreign, is of great significance and testing has been
>> performed on a variety of individuals within these categories. [Emphasis
>> added.] [16]
>
> A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of
> MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions.
> Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the
> operational use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been
> determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly
> as early as 1950.
>
> Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA
> materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.
> According to an Inspector General Survey of the Technical Services Division of
> the CIA in 1957 -- an inspection which did not discover the MKULTRA project
> involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting, nonvolunteer
> subjects -- the CIA had developed six drugs for operational use* and they had
> been used in six different operations on a total of thirty-three subjects. By
> 1963 the number of operations and subjects had increased substantially.
>
> *The Inspector General's Report of 1957 on the Technical Services Division
> noted that "Six specific products have been developed and are available for
> operational use. Three of them are discrediting and disabling materials which
> can be administered unwittingly and permit the exercise of a measure of
> control over the actions of the subject."
>
>
> 5. The Testing of LSD by the Army
>
> There were three major phases in the Army's testing of LSD. In the first, LSD
> was administered to more than 1,000 American soldiers who volunteered to be
> subjects in chemical warfare experiments. In the second phase, Material
> Testing Program EA 1729, 95 volunteers received LSD in clinical experiments
> designed to evaluate potential intelligence uses of the drug. In the third
> phase, Projects THIRD CHANCE and DERBY HAT, 16 unwitting nonvolunteer subjects
> were interrogated after receiving LSD as part of operational field tests.
>
> B. CIA DRUG TESTING PROGRAMS
>
> 1. The Rationale for the Testing Programs
>
> The late 1910s and early 1950s were marked by concern over the threat posed by
> the activities of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and other
> Communist bloc countries. United States concern over the use of chemical and
> biological agents by these powers was acute. The belief that hostile powers
> had used chemical and biological agents in interrogations, brainwashing, and
> in attacks designed to harass, disable, or kill Allied personnel created
> considerable pressure for a "defensive" program to investigate chemical and
> biological agents so that the intelligence community could understand the
> mechanisms by which these substances worked and how their effects could be
> defeated.
>
> But the defensive orientation soon became secondary. Chemical and biological
> agents were to be studied in order "to perfect techniques... for the
> abstraction of information from individuals whether willing or not" and in
> order to "develop means for the control of the activities and mental
> capacities of individuals whether willing or not." One Agency official noted
> that drugs would be useful in order to "gain control of bodies whether they
> were willing or not" in the process of removing personnel from Europe in the
> event of a Soviet attack. In other programs, the CIA began to develop,
> produce, stockpile, and maintain in operational readiness materials which
> could be used to harass, disable, or kill specific targets.
>
> Reports of research and development in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic
> of China, and the Communist Bloc countries provided the basis for the
> transmutation of American programs from a defensive to an offensive
> orientation. As the Chief of the Medical Staff of the Central Intelligence
> Agency wrote in 1952:
>>
>>
>> There is ample evidence in the reports of innumerable interrogations that
>> the Communists were utilizing drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and
>> possibly hypnosis against their enemies. With such evidence it is difficult
>> not to keep from becoming rabid about our apparent laxity. We are forced by
>> this mounting evidence to assume a more aggressive role in the development of
>> these techniques, but must be cautious to maintain strict inviolable control
>> because of the havoc that could be wrought by such techniques in unscrupulous
>> hands.
>
> In order to meet the perceived threat to the national security, substantial
> programs for the testing and use of chemical and biological agents --
> including projects involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to
> unwitting nonvolunteer subjects "at all social levels, high and low, native
> American and foreign" -- were conceived, and implemented. These programs
> resulted in substantial violations of the rights of individuals within the
> United States.
>
> There were no attempts to secure approval for the most controversial aspects
> of these programs from the executive branch or Congress. The nature and extent
> of the programs were closely held secrets; even [CIA Director] McCone was not
> briefed on all the details of the program involving the surreptitious
> administration of LSD until 1963. It was deemed imperative that these
> programs be concealed from the American people. As the CIA's Inspector
> General wrote in 1957:
>
> "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 and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission."
MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 46 Notes: The following is reproduced here with the express permission of the author. Permission is given to reproduce and redistribute, for non-commercial purposes only, provided this information and the copy remain intact and unedited. The views and opinions expressed below are not necessarily the views and opinions of VERICOMM, MindNet, or the editors unless otherwise noted. Editor: Mike Coyle Contributing Editors: Walter Bowart Alex Constantine Martin Cannon Assistant Editor: Rick Lawler Research: Darrell Bross Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from the Web page ofDeep Black Magic: Government Research into ESP & Mind Control: URL: Government Research into ESP & Mind Control By Tom Porter Mar. 1996HISTORY OF MK-ULTRA: CIA PROGRAM ON MIND CONTROL. Started during WWII with research on hypnosis for interrogation, secure courier duties, and reducing fatigue. Also research into effects of primitive drugs like barbiturates and cannabis as far as drug-assisted interrogation goes. George Estabrooks was the leading proponent of hypnosis as the be-all and end-all of manipulating peoples minds. His book, 'Hypnotism', published in the early forties, has been decried as too fantastic and improbable in terms of describing the capabilities of hypnosis with certain very suggestible subjects, but his arguments and examples remain valid to this day. Start of Cold War and Korean War in particular gave a big boost to mind control research with the emergence of 'Brain Washing' as a common term. Supposedly a development of the dastardly Chi-Coms, the term was actually coined by a magazine writer later found to be on the CIA payroll as an agent of influence. Postulating a 'brainwashing gap' The CIA got the go-ahead for research into countering communist mind control efforts and developing their own to aid in the espionage wars. Hypnosis, drugs, and psycho-surgery; separately and combined, were the tools of this quest for the ultimate truth serum on the one hand, and the capability to create an agent who could not have his or her mission tortured out of them, or even be aware that they were carrying secret information given to them in an altered state of consciousness. More and more sophisticated drugs were experimented with, such as LSD, Ketamine, and Psilocybine. Lobotomy and the implantation of electrodes were considered as methods for creating a compliant agent. Electro-Convulsive Shock, combined with LSD, sedation for days at a time, and constantly replaying the patient's own voice through helmet-mounted headphones was a notorious Canadian researcher's recipe for mind control. One of the most remarkable cases of mind control involves a famous model of the late 40's and 50's named Candy Jones. In the book, "The Control of Candy Jones" the author reviewed hours of tapes made by Candy Jones and her husband which revealed a systematic program to create and manipulate alter personalities as the foundation for programmed couriers resistant to torture, where the primary personality would not even be aware of the secret information being carried. The information could be summoned forth via a post-hypnotic command or response to a pre-programmed cue. Research continued into early 70's by CIA's own admission during the Church hearings. John Marks, author of the best study of CIA mind control experiments, makes the subtle differentiation that the CIA congressional witnesses might truthfully say that all research done by the TSS Directorate had ended, since the programs were moved into other areas once operational techniques had been developed. Many of the names mentioned in reference to mind control research turn up in the few references to supposed dead-end research in ESP. There have been persistent rumors of Navy research involving attempts at telepathy from submarines under water, the Nautilus being the most famous of these. Detection of enemy submarines, and communicating with our own, has continued to be an important area of conventional research for the Navy, so it is no surprise that researching the use of ESP for these purposes would be of interest. Communicating with a submerged submarine is the only kind of communications where the very act of receiving puts the receiver in danger, since submarines must normally stick an antenna out of the water for high speed radio traffic, or rely on trailing a long wire antenna under water relatively near the surface to receive very slow speed traffic using ELF radio waves. Newer techniques may involve the use of blue-green wavelength lasers, but evidently penetration to any depth is still a problem. If you look at telepathy as a problem in the transfer of information in a very noisy environment, then certain existing solutions suggest themselves: There have already been experiments in the transmission of five distinct symbols via telepathy, namely Zener card symbols. I suggest that there is already a way of transmitting information using two symbols only, namely Morse Code. Current ELF or VLF radio transmission methods for communicating with fleet ballistic missile submarines to issue them their launch orders involve very low data transfer rates, on the order of 3 to 30 bits per minute, if I am not mistaken. Messages are very short, consisting of pre-formulated action or targeting codes. I suggest that telepathic 'Zener Morse' is an operational technique for information transfer under severe signal to noise conditions. In fact the use of five Zener symbols would increase data transfer rates, but at the expense of a higher error rate due to the problems in discriminating between five and just two symbols. CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AND REPORTS. Reports of Project SCANNATE in 70's, most likely done by Swann, since his method for RV is very similar to that reportedly used in this project; namely providing lat. & long. coords and telling what is there. Later changed to assigning random number for unique session number and Swann picked up location anyway. "The New Age Army:" Over the past 10 - 15 years a number of military personnel, most in significant positions in Military Intelligence, have expressed interest in and directed programs or projects that have explored paranormal activities and capabilities. Several government studies on Enhancing Human Performance took place during this time. Most, if not all of them, were savaged in the NRC study on Enhancing Human Performance, but recent critiques and rebuttals of this study have indicated severe irregularities in the evaluation procedures for papers submitted to the NRC study, suppression of favorable results, and a definitely one-sided evaluation panel. Much modern research in parapsychology tends to support the idea that Enhanced Perception is a survival-related trait from our distant past, not the tip of the iceberg as far as new emerging human powers go. This is supported by the observation that many psychic episodes center around catastrophic or traumatic events. Studies of Siberian and Eskimo shamans also show the development of ESP or similar shamanic powers due to injury, exposure to cold, and isolation. Dissociation with tendencies towards Multiple Personality Disorder also occurs in these Shamans due to their ordeals. This is in contrast to the experiences of most tropical shamans who tend to find their powers through exposure to mind-altering drugs. The Vietnam war, with its exceedingly stressful combat environment of no clear-cut enemies combined with ambush being the normal way of making contact, produced a large body of individual reports stressing enhanced perception and awareness. This showed up as detecting ambushes and booby-traps before they were sprung; detecting the presence of enemy soldiers without any conscious sign of them; time dilation when bullets could be seen slowly traveling around the battlefield, and even reports of soldiers avoiding those bullets by jumping out of their paths as they were shot at. Dr. Ian Wickramasekera of Eastern Virginia Medical School has studied the expansion of sensory input during trauma which would lead to time dilation, etc. This gentleman has also studied the effects of sensory deprivation on hypnotic susceptibility in young women. In a recent article in U.S. News & World Report, John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist associated with a CIA front organization, the Human Ecology Society admitted to knowledge of experiments in developing ESP by giving electric shocks to subjects when they gave wrong answers. Recently, a Russian researcher in psychotronics, Dr. Igor Smirnov, has helped to start up a new Virginia company, called Psycho-Technologies, I believe. It is supposed to conduct research on various kinds of LTL technology, with a concentration on Soviet-developed psychotronic warfare capabilities involving the use of electromagnetic and sonic waves to influence and disable individuals or crowds. Supposedly this ranges from simply falling to influencing peoples thoughts via audio or visual subliminal messages. SOME OF THE PLAYERS: The Monroe Institute, located near Charlottesville, Virginia. Bob Monroe, author of many books on Out of Body experiences, has long and close ties with the C.I.A. James Monroe, Bob's father, if I'm not mistaken, was involved with the Human Ecology Society, a C.I.A. front organization of the late 50's and 60's. The Monroe Institute has done research on accelerated learning and foreign language learning through the use of altered states of consciousness for the C.I.A. and other government organizations. Government interest in the more radical research going on at the institute remains only tantalizing speculation. Official classified document storage boxes have been seen at their mail-order outlet located in Lovingston, VA. Albert Stubblebine and John Alexander. Both retired Army officers, a General and Colonel respectively. Both worked at U.S. Army Intelligence & Security Command, or INSCOM, Stubblebine as its head at one time. Stubblebine has publicly stated that an enlisted man under his command inadvertently 'mentally fried' an intelligence gathering computer located in Augsberg Germany. This was Lynn Buchanan, discussed later. Alexander wrote the rebuttal to the NRC paper on Enhancing Human Performance. He used this rebuttal as the basis for a book he co-authored called "The Warrior's Edge" which describes various techniques for enhancing performance and perception utilizing the power of the mind. Alexander currently heads up research on Less Than Lethal weapons at Los Alamos Nation Laboratories. Jack Houk, Aerospace Engineer, and his Spoon bending parties, done for last 12 - 15 years. Stubblebine, Alexander, and others have attended and hosted these parties. While even Houk admits that much of the bending activity that occurs is due to hysterical strength, people getting excited, etc. there are always a few really perplexing feats of bending at each party. Curled and twisted hacksaw blades comes to mind, since these normally snap if they are bent. Ed Dames and PSI-TECH, Military Intelligence alumni as contract RV'ers. Promises to provide RV services to corporate and government clients for $5,000 - $8,000 per week. Has supposedly spotted Iraqi chemical weapons depots, among others. S.A.I.C. involvement in 1993 American Parapsychological Association meeting arrangements, via their 'Cognitive Sciences Laboratory'. Science Applications International Corporation is a big time defense contractor, has held the largest number of research contracts of any defense contractor. Bobby Ray Inman is on its board of directors, among others. Startup of TREAT, Center for Treatment and Research into Experienced Anomalous Trauma, by Rima Leibow. Leibow is a psychiatrist who started studying trauma associated with alien abductions, noting its similarities to PTSD. She has hosted open and closed meetings for the past six years. Leibow is a close friend of/ or married to Stubblebine, which certainly raises some interesting questions. Another abduction researcher and friend is Victoria Lacas, who happens to be married to Alexander. One other TREAT hanger-on, and friend of Stubblebine's, is Lynn Buchanan. Buchanan offers services similar to PSI-TECH and has worked with Ed Dames on a contract basis. He taught a Remote Viewing workshop at the latest TREAT conference. Also offers continued training in RV skills to those whom he decides to work with. Veteran of INSCOM, and the famous 'computer frier' mentioned by Stubblebine. A real mystery man in all of this is C.B. Scott Jones: Ex-Navy Intelligence officer, one time aide to Senator Claiborne Pell, founder of the Human Potential Foundation; Jones appears to have his fingers in every 'weird' pie around. He has been involved with several UFO research organizations, dolphin-human communications research, served on the boards of several scholarly parapsychological research organizations. Jones strikes many people as a 'Cardinal Richelieu' figure, manipulating events behind the scenes, but rarely emerging into the spotlight. There is literally no conference on parapsychology that he does not attend. He has traveled and done research with Alexander and Rima Leibow. He works at keeping very well informed about the 'pulse' of the New Age community and about UFO and parapsychological research in particular. He rarely writes anything for print, but keeps in contact with many of the players in the fields. He has presented papers to many conferences, most of the examples I have seen are complex, lengthy, and elaborate pieces of dis-information which leave the listeners more confused than when he started.
http://pubrecord.org/torture/7730/obama-interrogation-official-linked/
Obama Interrogation Official Linked to U.S. Mind Control Research By Jeffrey Kaye
The Public Record
May 25th, 2010
Susan E. Brandon, the Obama administration's Chief for Research in the DCHC’s Behavioral Science Program.
A new article at Truthout I co-wrote with author and investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli describes how the CIA’s Artichoke Project* was the contemporaneous and operational side of the MK-ULTRA mind control research program. It was not superceded by MK-ULTRA in the 1950s, as often supposed.
Even more, Artichoke-derived methods of using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and overload, behavioral modification techniques and other methods of mind control have resurfaced as a primary component of U.S. interrogation practice.
The Truthout article includes some amazing revelations, including the largest description to date of the roles of then-Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in working hand-in-glove with the CIA to suppress information on Artichoke from surfacing.
The article also references the November 2006 release of an “Instruction” from the Secretary of the Navy (3900.39D) regarding its “Human Research Protection Program.” While this memo specifically prohibits the use of research upon prisoners, including so-called “unlawful enemy combatants,” waivers of informed consent for research, or suspension of the protections enumerated in the memo can be made by the Secretary of the Navy under conditions of “operational contingency or during times of national emergency.” It is likely the latter rests upon the legislative language within the September 18, 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, where terrorist acts are said to “continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
The waivers allowed for normal human research testing gains further piquancy when one considers the kinds of research referenced in the Secretary of the Navy’s memo. Section 7(a)(2)(a) describes the Undersecretary of the Navy as the “approval authority” for research done upon prisoners, as well as “Severe or unusual intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects (such as consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques)” [emphasis added].
This referencing of “mind-control techniques” in a document specifically discussing human subjects protections by then Secretary of the Navy, Donald C. Winter, is not an anomaly, but a rare instance in which the actual activities of the government in this area are openly revealed. Some of these activities can be documented via publicly available materials. This article describes how some of the individuals involved in U.S. government mind control and torture activities can be tracked and identified.
APA, CIA: “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses…?”
Another instance in which the curtain was pulled back on mind control research by the U.S. government involved the online description by the American Psychological Association (APA) of a CIA and Rand Corporation workshop which it co-sponsored in July 2003 at Rand’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters. The event was attended by approximately 40 research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, as well as “representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations.”
One of these workshops, ostensibly on detection of deception, specifically described how participants should consider “sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors,” including the use of “pharmacological agents. “How might we,” the workshop asked, “overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?”
The man in charge of “recruiting the operational expertise” for the workshop was Kirk Hubbard, Chief of the Research & Analysis Branch, Operational Assessment Division of the CIA. It appears likely that Hubbard was responsible for the presence at the workshop of SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were instrumental in the construction of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program. Hubbard was also reported (by Scott Shane of the New York Times) to have brought James Mitchell to an informal meeting “of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers… to brainstorm about Muslim extremism” at the home of former APA president Martin Seligman in November 2001.
Sometime in the past six months, the APA eliminated all references to the webpage described above, even going so far as to eliminate linked references to it on other webpages on its site. While the webpage that described the workshops has been scrubbed, mirrored images of the site remain available at well-known web archive sites, as I described in a recent article on this attempt to rewrite or hide APA’s offensive history. In one sense, this attempt to hide its history is not surprising, because the kind of activities discussed in these workshops are exactly like those that involved CIA and military mind control torture programs going back fifty years or more, and evidently still operational today.
The Role of Government Psychologist Susan Brandon
In a recent article, Scott Horton at Harper’s picked up on the unique link between the APA/CIA workshop and the recent revelations about torture at a hitherto unknown black site prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. That link was an individual, Susan Brandon.
Referenced by Horton as working for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA), Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), a recent publication identified Brandon more fully as Chief for Research in the DCHC’s Behavioral Science Program. As Horton notes, a recent column by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic described the DCHC as providing “intelligence operatives and interrogators….. [performing] interrogations for a sub-unit of Task Force 714, an elite counter-terrorism brigade.” Interrogations at the Afghan black site reportedly have included use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, brutality, isolation, relying on the guidelines of the Army Field Manual, including its Appendix M. Many human rights groups have criticized Appendix M as including techniques tantamount to torture and/or cruel, inhumane and degrading and illegal by domestic and international law.
Back in 2003, according to an APA news article, Brandon “jointly conceived” the APA/CIA workshops with Rand Associate Policy Analyst, Scott Gerwehr. (Mr. Gerwehr reportedly died a few years ago.) At the time, psychologist Susan Brandon was the Program Officer for Affect and Biobehavioral Regulation at the National Institute of Mental Health, and worked on the APA/CIA program while also serving as “Senior Scientist” at the APA.
In the early 2000s, Dr. Brandon served as Behavioral and Social Science Principal at the Mitre Corporation, a company highly linked to U.S. Air Defense. Subsequent to her stint as APA’s Senior Scientist, she went on to work in for the Bush administration as Assistant Director of Social, Behavioral, and Educational Sciences for the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. In addition, she became an instrumental member of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBES) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committees on Science and Homeland and National Security.
Subsequently, as described in an important article by Stephen Soldz that extends many of the points in this essay, Brandon joined the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity group (CIFA), which was later disbanded and reformed as part of the DCHC. Soldz also reminds us that Brandon was “one of the silent observers at the [APA] PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] taskforce described by dissident taskforce member Jean Maria Arrigo as exerting pressure on members to adopt a likely pre-approved policy in favor of participation in Guantánamo, CIA, and other interrogations. According to a 2005 article by Geoff Mumford, APA’s Director of Science Policy, Dr. Branford “helped steer much of the association’s scientific outreach relevant to counter-terrorism after 9/11.”
One example of such outreach would include the June 11, 2002 meeting between Branford, and other top APA officials with “two senior staff members in the National Security Council’s (NSC’s) Office of Combating Terrorism” (OCT). Since Vice Admiral William McRaven was head of OCT at that time, perhaps Brandon’s acquaintance with the world of Special Operations dates to that time, as McRaven was to become Commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
JSOC is the other Defense Department component, besides DIA, that has been linked currently with the management of the black site prisons run by the Obama administration, subsequent to President Obama’s apparent closure of the CIA black sites. One reputable source has informed me that there are eight such black site prisons in Afghanistan alone. A recent report by the BBC corroborated earlier reports by the New York Times and the Washington Post. The article by Ambinder further elaborated upon this story.
Why is the Obama Administration Still Involved in Torture?
It is not known if Dr. Brandon has been involved in any of the reported abuses of prisoners coming out of Bagram’s Tor prison, or elsewhere. Yet one would think the Obama administration and the Pentagon has a lot to explain in utilizing as their behavioral chief of research for an agency involved in intelligence operations, including interrogation. But then, why is the Obama administration involved in torture or operating secret prisons at all? President Obama has manifestly broken his promise to the American people to end torture and close all secret prisons. Nor has Congress done their due diligence in investigating these matters. Only when the American people fully understand the extent to which these activities have occupied the government and their various collaborators, like the APA, will society be able to take the necessary steps to end these abuses, and hold those accountable for what amount to crimes against humanity.
As for psychologists, Dr. Soldz rightly notes, “Psychology as a profession is at a crossroads.” The same holds true for other professions involved with this abusive and criminal history, including the activities of anthropologists in the military’s Human Terrain System teams in Afghanistan, researchers in numerous academic departments across the country, and the many reports of doctors and other medical personnel involved in the monitoring of torture activities for the CIA and Defense Department. The use of torture has suborned U.S. civil society as a whole in activities that are dark and evil, and the society as a whole must make a tremendous effort if it is to extirpate such evil from its midst.
*For an early document referring to Artichoke’s history, see CIA, Memorandum for the Record, Subject: Project ARTICHOKE, January 31, 1975. While this MOR downplays Artichoke’s history, it represents the degree to which the CIA was willing to reveal such operations. The Truthout article discusses Operation Dormouse, where then Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked with the CIA to limit revelations about Artichoke and other CIA torture and assassination operations.
Originally published on Firedoglake.
Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com
The Public Record
May 25th, 2010
Susan E. Brandon, the Obama administration's Chief for Research in the DCHC’s Behavioral Science Program.
A new article at Truthout I co-wrote with author and investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli describes how the CIA’s Artichoke Project* was the contemporaneous and operational side of the MK-ULTRA mind control research program. It was not superceded by MK-ULTRA in the 1950s, as often supposed.
Even more, Artichoke-derived methods of using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and overload, behavioral modification techniques and other methods of mind control have resurfaced as a primary component of U.S. interrogation practice.
The Truthout article includes some amazing revelations, including the largest description to date of the roles of then-Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in working hand-in-glove with the CIA to suppress information on Artichoke from surfacing.
The article also references the November 2006 release of an “Instruction” from the Secretary of the Navy (3900.39D) regarding its “Human Research Protection Program.” While this memo specifically prohibits the use of research upon prisoners, including so-called “unlawful enemy combatants,” waivers of informed consent for research, or suspension of the protections enumerated in the memo can be made by the Secretary of the Navy under conditions of “operational contingency or during times of national emergency.” It is likely the latter rests upon the legislative language within the September 18, 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, where terrorist acts are said to “continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
The waivers allowed for normal human research testing gains further piquancy when one considers the kinds of research referenced in the Secretary of the Navy’s memo. Section 7(a)(2)(a) describes the Undersecretary of the Navy as the “approval authority” for research done upon prisoners, as well as “Severe or unusual intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects (such as consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques)” [emphasis added].
This referencing of “mind-control techniques” in a document specifically discussing human subjects protections by then Secretary of the Navy, Donald C. Winter, is not an anomaly, but a rare instance in which the actual activities of the government in this area are openly revealed. Some of these activities can be documented via publicly available materials. This article describes how some of the individuals involved in U.S. government mind control and torture activities can be tracked and identified.
APA, CIA: “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses…?”
Another instance in which the curtain was pulled back on mind control research by the U.S. government involved the online description by the American Psychological Association (APA) of a CIA and Rand Corporation workshop which it co-sponsored in July 2003 at Rand’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters. The event was attended by approximately 40 research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, as well as “representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations.”
One of these workshops, ostensibly on detection of deception, specifically described how participants should consider “sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors,” including the use of “pharmacological agents. “How might we,” the workshop asked, “overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?”
The man in charge of “recruiting the operational expertise” for the workshop was Kirk Hubbard, Chief of the Research & Analysis Branch, Operational Assessment Division of the CIA. It appears likely that Hubbard was responsible for the presence at the workshop of SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were instrumental in the construction of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program. Hubbard was also reported (by Scott Shane of the New York Times) to have brought James Mitchell to an informal meeting “of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers… to brainstorm about Muslim extremism” at the home of former APA president Martin Seligman in November 2001.
Sometime in the past six months, the APA eliminated all references to the webpage described above, even going so far as to eliminate linked references to it on other webpages on its site. While the webpage that described the workshops has been scrubbed, mirrored images of the site remain available at well-known web archive sites, as I described in a recent article on this attempt to rewrite or hide APA’s offensive history. In one sense, this attempt to hide its history is not surprising, because the kind of activities discussed in these workshops are exactly like those that involved CIA and military mind control torture programs going back fifty years or more, and evidently still operational today.
The Role of Government Psychologist Susan Brandon
In a recent article, Scott Horton at Harper’s picked up on the unique link between the APA/CIA workshop and the recent revelations about torture at a hitherto unknown black site prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. That link was an individual, Susan Brandon.
Referenced by Horton as working for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA), Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), a recent publication identified Brandon more fully as Chief for Research in the DCHC’s Behavioral Science Program. As Horton notes, a recent column by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic described the DCHC as providing “intelligence operatives and interrogators….. [performing] interrogations for a sub-unit of Task Force 714, an elite counter-terrorism brigade.” Interrogations at the Afghan black site reportedly have included use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, brutality, isolation, relying on the guidelines of the Army Field Manual, including its Appendix M. Many human rights groups have criticized Appendix M as including techniques tantamount to torture and/or cruel, inhumane and degrading and illegal by domestic and international law.
Back in 2003, according to an APA news article, Brandon “jointly conceived” the APA/CIA workshops with Rand Associate Policy Analyst, Scott Gerwehr. (Mr. Gerwehr reportedly died a few years ago.) At the time, psychologist Susan Brandon was the Program Officer for Affect and Biobehavioral Regulation at the National Institute of Mental Health, and worked on the APA/CIA program while also serving as “Senior Scientist” at the APA.
In the early 2000s, Dr. Brandon served as Behavioral and Social Science Principal at the Mitre Corporation, a company highly linked to U.S. Air Defense. Subsequent to her stint as APA’s Senior Scientist, she went on to work in for the Bush administration as Assistant Director of Social, Behavioral, and Educational Sciences for the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. In addition, she became an instrumental member of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBES) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committees on Science and Homeland and National Security.
Subsequently, as described in an important article by Stephen Soldz that extends many of the points in this essay, Brandon joined the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity group (CIFA), which was later disbanded and reformed as part of the DCHC. Soldz also reminds us that Brandon was “one of the silent observers at the [APA] PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] taskforce described by dissident taskforce member Jean Maria Arrigo as exerting pressure on members to adopt a likely pre-approved policy in favor of participation in Guantánamo, CIA, and other interrogations. According to a 2005 article by Geoff Mumford, APA’s Director of Science Policy, Dr. Branford “helped steer much of the association’s scientific outreach relevant to counter-terrorism after 9/11.”
One example of such outreach would include the June 11, 2002 meeting between Branford, and other top APA officials with “two senior staff members in the National Security Council’s (NSC’s) Office of Combating Terrorism” (OCT). Since Vice Admiral William McRaven was head of OCT at that time, perhaps Brandon’s acquaintance with the world of Special Operations dates to that time, as McRaven was to become Commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
JSOC is the other Defense Department component, besides DIA, that has been linked currently with the management of the black site prisons run by the Obama administration, subsequent to President Obama’s apparent closure of the CIA black sites. One reputable source has informed me that there are eight such black site prisons in Afghanistan alone. A recent report by the BBC corroborated earlier reports by the New York Times and the Washington Post. The article by Ambinder further elaborated upon this story.
Why is the Obama Administration Still Involved in Torture?
It is not known if Dr. Brandon has been involved in any of the reported abuses of prisoners coming out of Bagram’s Tor prison, or elsewhere. Yet one would think the Obama administration and the Pentagon has a lot to explain in utilizing as their behavioral chief of research for an agency involved in intelligence operations, including interrogation. But then, why is the Obama administration involved in torture or operating secret prisons at all? President Obama has manifestly broken his promise to the American people to end torture and close all secret prisons. Nor has Congress done their due diligence in investigating these matters. Only when the American people fully understand the extent to which these activities have occupied the government and their various collaborators, like the APA, will society be able to take the necessary steps to end these abuses, and hold those accountable for what amount to crimes against humanity.
As for psychologists, Dr. Soldz rightly notes, “Psychology as a profession is at a crossroads.” The same holds true for other professions involved with this abusive and criminal history, including the activities of anthropologists in the military’s Human Terrain System teams in Afghanistan, researchers in numerous academic departments across the country, and the many reports of doctors and other medical personnel involved in the monitoring of torture activities for the CIA and Defense Department. The use of torture has suborned U.S. civil society as a whole in activities that are dark and evil, and the society as a whole must make a tremendous effort if it is to extirpate such evil from its midst.
*For an early document referring to Artichoke’s history, see CIA, Memorandum for the Record, Subject: Project ARTICHOKE, January 31, 1975. While this MOR downplays Artichoke’s history, it represents the degree to which the CIA was willing to reveal such operations. The Truthout article discusses Operation Dormouse, where then Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked with the CIA to limit revelations about Artichoke and other CIA torture and assassination operations.
Originally published on Firedoglake.
Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com