Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MKULTRA
I absolutely love America, land of the free, home of the brave, but what I don’t love is all the bullshit Congress spends the money on that they extort from hardworking American’s every year. So this month, we’re looking at some of the documented bullshit, starting with this weeks book, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle. So let’s do this!
Now, while MKULTRA has been in the public sphere since like the 1980’s, with the earliest lawsuit being settled out of court in 1976, it leapt to pop culture popularity with Netflix’s hit, Stranger Things, which was inspired by some MKULTRA experiments. Sort of. Namely the use of LSD. We’ll come back to that.
Project Mind Control, which is commonly known as MKULTRA, begins and ends with Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was born in New York City on August 3, 1918. He was born with two club feet, which would later preclude him from serving in WWII, which he very much wanted to do, and he had a stutter when he was nervous. He was incredibly bright and liked spending time at his brother’s makeshift laboratory in the family basement.
He attended various colleges, City College of New York, Arkansas Polytechnic College, University of Wisconsin, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1940, before moving to California Institute of Technology, where he would attend graduate school, eventually earning his PhD in biochemistry and meet Margaret Moore, who was the love of his life and eventual wife.
Moore was the daughter of missionaries and grew up in India. It was the missionary lifestyle in India that led her to be a free thinking individual, who was delighted to marry the son of Orthodox Hungarian Jews in 1942.
He did try to join the Army but was barred due to the limp caused by his clubbed feet. He would work for the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Research Council, and the University of Maryland, before applying to the CIA at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
Fortunately, he was hired immediately, given his background in biochemistry. Unfortunately, his culturally Jewish background made him feel like an outsider at his new job. Which ok, I get that. Most of the alphabet soup at that time preferred to hire from the Ivy Leagues, or as the author puts it “pale, male, and Yale.”
But, a few years after he was hired, so 1953, he was made head of the Chemical Branch of CIA’s Technical Services Staff.
Now, the same time Gottlieb is advancing at the CIA, the Korean War is going on, and the North had captured American pilots Kenneth Enoch and John Quinn by shooting them out of the sky, where they were captured by the Chinese when they landed. And shortly after that the pilots appeared to confess to a bunch of war crimes, claiming they were dropping bio-weapons over North Korea. Now...for whatever reason….which we will never really know...Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, couldn’t grasp why they would confess to such things that were not true.
The obvious answer, which is what was going on, is that the pilots were being brutally tortured and would confess to anything to make the pain stop.
Dulles didn’t buy it. And when he stepped into the head role on February 26, 1953, he started trying to figure out how to manage mind control, and in April, he initiated project MKULTRA. This was the overarching umbrella which would grow to oversee 149 subprojects. And it was handed to Gottlieb to oversee the entire thing.
Now, the book does not go into detail of all 149 subprojects. But it does cover the big ones. The LSD. The prostitutes in the Bay Area. The electroshock treatments of psychiatric patients in Canada. Yes. Canada. The testing of various drugs on inmates in Atlanta GA. The assassination plots, although as far as we know, no assassination ever actually took place. They just thought really hard about how to do it.
Now, I’ve talked about LSD a couple of times before, with the Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman and DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, with The Road to Eleusis by Hoffman, Wassan and Ruck, with The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
Here’s the thing. Out of all of those, the most important, to me, would be The Psychedelic Handbook. Why? Because Strassman talks about the importance of Set, Setting, and Dose. All of which were never even a thought in the minds of MKULTRA researchers. Set, Setting, and Dose can help lead to a pleasant experience.
Or, as would happen with the CIA….just for funsies….they would spike the office punch at the annual holiday party with LSD. I mean, they also experimented on themselves, like within days of receiving their first batch of LSD from Sandoz lab in Switzerland, Gottlieb and his underlings rented a hotel room and took various doses “usually with a physician present, not always.”
As one might imagine, when absolutely no thought is given to set, setting, and dose, in a culture that breeds and thrives on conspiracy and paranoia, very few of them had pleasant experiences. Most of them experienced, “bummers.” As the author quotes in the book.
Some of them had ok trips. Some of them had bad trips. Universally, those who did not know they had been dosed had horrifying nightmare trips. MKULTRA ultimately would discontinue blind LSD experiments on their fellow operatives when they would dose Frank Olson without telling him, resulting in Olson jumping from a 13th floor hotel room window. This happened on November 28, 1953. This would result in the first MKULTRA lawsuit when Olson’s family would sue the CIA in 1976.
However, they did not entirely abandon the use of LSD outside the organization. In fact, they ramped it up and in 1954 Gottlieb would authorize Operation Midnight Climax, where in one George White, who was a pervy little sex addict, would dose various criminals with LSD and then watch from a two way mirror as they had sex with prostitutes. This happened in New York City in a safe house in Greenwich Village. In 1955, the operation would be transferred to San Francisco and White given a cover with the Bureau of Narcotics. To allow some distance between what he was doing and the CIA who were funding his experiments.
This went on for a decade, and after Midnight Climax ended, White would write a letter to Gottlieb that read, in part “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
The CIA did attempt dosing operations overseas, but almost nothing is known about this. Part of this is Gottlieb was basically given carte blanche to destroy MKULTRA files. Almost everything we know about MKULTRA comes to us from depositions of the various law suits filed against the CIA in regards to MKULTRA.
Which includes the Canadian Montreal Experiments, which were funded by the CIA and overseen by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute.
Cameron was a catch for MKULTRA. He had been on the psychiatric team which evaluated Rudolf Hess and deemed him fit to stand trial at Nuremberg. The same Nuremberg that spawned the Nuremberg Codes, the first point of which is The Voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The fourth point declares that any experiment involving humans should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
Yet for all his knowledge of the psychological horrors inflicted by the Nazi’s on their poor victims, Cameron became a proponent of “psychic driving.” What is Psychic Driving? Subjecting mental patients to repeated auditory messages to induce enough stress in them to reprogram their behavior.
What do you think the key word in the above sentence is?
Stress.
Because really, this is no different than playing positive affirmations on a loop trying to affect a change. “You are beautiful. You are strong. You are kind.” You can literally go to YouTube and listen to a 3 hour loop of positive mind affirmations.
But when the motivating force is stress...well, the repeated auditory messages were not positive affirmations. One female patient had a message that repeated, on an endless loop, “Do you realize that you are a very hostile person? Do you know that you are hostile to the nurses? Do you know that you are hostile with the patients? Why do you think you are so hostile? Did you hate your mother? Did you hate your father?”
Now...apparently, her hostile reaction to hearing this over and over and over again was shocking to the doctors. And when she would rip the headphones off her head, they would put her in a leather helmet that was strapped to her head and force her to keep listening.
Attempts to escape resulted in sedation and more messaging. Chemically induced comas, with the message now permeating your subconscious while you slept.
Or sensory deprivation chambers. Those were used.
Electroshock therapy was prescribed for postpartum depression to depattern the depression. Ironically, lobotomies were seen as inhumane.
They did testing on hypnosis, resulting in Jimmy Shaver, a 29 year old airman with a wife, two children, and no criminal history and no history of violence, confessing to the rape and murder of a three year old girl, under the careful questioning of Louis Jolyon West. West...was a narcissist. And West had been approached by Gottlieb and MKULTRA to determine if drugs or hypnosis could induce a false confession. And could false memories be implanted. To the first two, the answer is no. Sort of. We’ll circle back to the drugs in a bit. But false memories? That’s easy. Human memory is so fail-able it’s the easiest thing to induce a false memory. Witness the Satanic Panic in the 1980’s, which is referenced in this book as the premier example of implanting false memories.
Now, the author does not say if Shaver did or did not kill that child. The only ones who will ever know the answer to that are Shaver, three year old Chere Jo Horton, and possibly the real killer. Two of the three ain’t talking, since Shaver was executed in TX by electrocution on July 25, 1958.
But West’s involvement in Shaver’s interrogation is highly sus.
They experimented on drug abuse, addiction, and withdrawal, on prison inmates in Atlanta, GA and I think it was KY. Possibly other prisons as well. This yielded the useful possibility of getting targets addicted then withholding the drug of choice to elicit cooperation. So, yes. In a round about way, drugs can be used to get a false confession. But truth serums? Don’t actually seem to exist. The power behind truth serums, and I’m paraphrasing the author here, is that they alleviate the guilt that comes from talking. I had no choice, they shot me full of truth serum. I had to tell them everything.
Given the recent conspiracy theory about Bill Gates and the red star tick and Alpha Gal syndrome, I was fascinated and disturbed to see that Sub-project 70 involved catching ticks and milking their salivary glands for a “neurotropic toxic substance” that could serve as an effective knockout drug. Because if anyone would have the ability to fund a program through the CIA, it would be Bill Gates.
I do love a good conspiracy theory, but Lisle cautions that the danger with conspiracy theories is that they can be neither proven nor dis-proven. And any evidence against, is seen as evidence for...the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Mind control is not directly possible. You can get anyone to say anything with the application of enough pain. Human memory is infinitely fail-able, which is why there is no such thing as Your Truth. There’s what you believe, there’s what the other party believes, and somewhere in the middle is the truth.
The records that Gottlieb destroyed would be the only record of what actually happened. The closest the CIA ever came to admitting culpability was when they sent CIA Archivist Frank Laubinger to track down the people specifically named in George White’s journals...he of Midnight Climax infamy…. to offer apologies to anyone he could find. He traveled with CIA credentials, which is practically unheard of. Most seemed to treat it like water under the bridge, and ultimately the only settlement was made to Clarice Stein. Stein was dosed with LSD by White and when she called him wanting to know what was going on, he told her to go to sleep and hung up the phone on her.
Stein and her husband are patriots of another breed. They settled for $15,000 payment and lunch in the Rendezvous Room at CIA headquarters.
The Victims Task Force was focused solely on Midnight Climax. According to the CIA, the other sub-projects were run by “reputable, some even eminent, scientists.”
One of the most fascinating cycles highlighted by the author was in the second to last chapter, the Vicious Cycle of Secrecy. 1. Secrecy lead to plausible deniability. 2. Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior. 3. Reckless behavior leads to embarrassment. 4. Embarrassment leads to secrecy.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
He outlined how the above cycle works through various political scandals, namely Iran-Contra, the Patriot Act, Bush 43’s authorization of extraordinary rendition.
How do we break this cycle? Well, Lisle provided some insight there too. The first is absolute freedom of speech. We need the first amendment more than ever. ALL speech needs to be free, not just speech you personally agree with. Because once they start outlawing disagreeable speech, the nation is lost. Just look at Great Britain.
The second point is to “realign the incentives of the elected representatives so that they take seriously their role as overseers. Gerrymandering, closed primaries, plurality voting, and winner-take-all elections currently incentivize these representatives to engage in political theater at the expense of actual governance.”
Bingo. Open primaries would leave the extremes in both parties on the outside looking in because the wide gap in the middle would ensure more moderate candidates were selected. Gerrymandering has been a problem for like 150 years, a practice both sides engage in. First past the post and winner takes all leaves the majority disillusioned with democracy.
MKULTRA spanned a wide variety of sub-projects. From the fairly benign hiring of a magician to teach slight of hand to operatives, which is how the office punch became spiked with untold doses of LSD….the staff were merely practicing their new taught skills. To conducting library searches, consultations, assessments, and evaluations of data submitted by the TSS (Technical Services Staff). Studying how food delays the absorption of alcohol. Interviewing Hungarian refugees to understand the sociology of the Communist system.
There are all benign. Even useful. I have nothing but respect for our operatives, and yes, knowing how to spike a drink could potentially save their lives, so I have nothing against that. And interviewing refugees from enemy states is well within the purview of the CIA. But the effects of torture and the plotting of assassinations were included in the list of sub-projects for MKULTRA. And yeah...I have a big problem with my tax dollars being used thusly.
This book was riveting. It was well written, fast paced, each chapter flowed smoothly into the next, and I recommend this if you want to know more about MKULTRA and how the CIA spent it’s formative years.
