Mind Control in America – What the CIA Did and Why They Did It (Part One)

The disturbing saga of mind control begins with the science of Ivan Pavlov early in the twentieth century – the famous Russian who tested dogs with bells and food pellets.  His goal was simple:  to understand how behavior is trained.  Derived from his work was the psychological theory of Behaviorism based upon reflex conditioning.  Pavlov’s dogs are a famous tidbit most of us recall from our high school psychology class.

However, the pertinent part of his story commences with the lesser known fact that whatever is learned can be ‘unlearned’ if the individual being trained is subjected to sufficient fear, mental anguish, and physical pain.  In essence, fear can wipe out memory.  Pavlov discovered this when his pack of well-trained laboratory dogs forgot all their learned behavior as waters rose higher and higher in his lab (rising waters caused by a local flood), creating so much anxiety in his laboratory’s canines it figuratively ‘washed their brains’.  Subsequently, Pavlov asserted (and history has shown it to be so), that fear stands as a supremely powerful force in human conditioning, both individually and collectively in our society.

Post-World War II, from the 1940s through 1960s, America’s national psyche exhibited behaviors driven by fear.  Our society was so transfixed with apprehension of the Soviets and the threat they posed to western civilization that sections of the Unites States government embarked upon illegal, irrational, and wholly wicked policies.  To be specific, this fear was behind the malfeasance of more than a few American leaders in our military, intelligence service, State Department and Department of Justice, working in concert to migrate thousands of Nazis into America against specific presidential order.  Project Paperclip (the paper clipping of false dossiers to individual files of Nazis deemed valuable to Cold War efforts) illegally brought those selected Nazis, many of them war criminals, into the United States in the decade following the War.  Our leaders did this deal with such accomplished Nazi devils because they feared the Soviets and their Bolshevik ways more than they feared the consequences of how the Nazi weltanschauung (that is the menacing Nazi worldview – both political and spiritual) would affect our mild-mannered and usually moral culture.  Despite the hard realities that we had fought fascism for four years costing millions of lives and billions of dollars, it was the deliberate decision of influential American leaders that Nazis and their technologies were necessary imports to serve as a bulwark against what was considered the greater of two evils – Marxism.

What is seldom realized is that key military and intelligence leaders wanted more than just Nazi rocket science whose learning and leadership was featured at NASA with Werner von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and Herman Oberth.  Dozens of Nazi inventions were coveted and carried away as spoils of war.  What is least known of all is how important it was to America that we acquire Nazi Germany’s science of the mind.

Since early in the Second World War, America and Britain had been studying the possible use of drugs in ‘controlling the mind’ – with the goal to understand how one could force persons to take actions against their will.  But with the capture of Nazi research, the West acquired a bonanza of morbid applied technology, much of which was unmistakably obtained in methods out-of-bounds for Anglo-American scientists.  Nevertheless, although we would never have approved of the Nazi scientific method as practiced its death camps, we sought the findings of their ghoulish research.  Indeed, in spite of the horrific ways in which it was accumulated, our government justified exploiting this research to promote the American cause against the spread of Marxist ideology.

Mescaline was the first mind altering drug popularly studied by the Germans.  When tested at Auschwitz in 1943, this drug had been available for four decades.  In fact, author Trevor Ravenscroft had written in his book, The Spear of Destiny, that Hitler had himself used mescaline in his youthful quest to encounter occult entities and acquire ‘higher consciousness’.[i]  However, in their World War II death camps, Nazi scientists tested the substance to investigate its effectiveness as a ‘truth serum’.  As we know now, merely seeking a ‘truth serum’ with mescaline was perhaps the mildest of thousands of horrific experiments which sought to further Nazi learning centered on human physiology and psychology at the cost of destroying human dignity and setting new lows in human cruelty, not to mention the extinction of millions of precious and innocent image-bearers of God.

However, as stated at the outset, the Nazis weren’t the original source of mind control.  This strange science of mind began with the Russian Pavlov.[ii]  Because of his ground breaking studies, after the war the Russian Marxists were considered a significant threat to exploit such techniques.   Importantly, Pavlov did more than train dogs with food pellets.  Edward Hunter, who coined the term ‘brainwashing’ as part of a 1954 article in a Miami daily newspaper (based upon a 1951 book by the same author), conveyed a more troubling chapter in the history of Pavlov.  Hunter stated that Pavlov had written a 400-page treatise on how behavioral conditioning could be used on humans.  He alleged Pavlov’s paper became the basis for communist expansionism.   In other words, mind control was at the very core of Marxism.  One would be hard pressed to come up with a better pejorative against the governing principles of Lenin and Stalin.

As a result of Hunter’s work, Americans soon concluded that Marxism struck at the heart of democracy – the avowed enemy to freedom of the individual by eliminating the exercise of freewill.  It was telling that Pavlov’s treatise was penned while a conscripted guest of Lenin for six months in the Kremlin.  In the article, Hunter also related the famous tale of America prisoners traveling through Manchuria for a special brain cleansing side-trip.  Some historians now believe this portion of his investigation to have been an embellishment owing to the fact Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, paid Hunter to conduct his research and publish his revealing piece to frighten our citizenry.  Regardless, for at least two more decades, the CIA spent ample dollars striving to shape public opinion regarding the ‘clear and present danger’ of Marxism, an ideology we rightly deemed sought to overthrow our sacrosanct way of life.[iii]

At the same time, helping to reinforce the widespread dread if not paranoia, popular author Aldous Huxley opined that Hunter’s expose had vast implications for the western world.  For Huxley it seemed as if Brave New World was already underway.  Hunter’s study had provided concrete proof that political prisoners could be turned against their own country.  It just took enough fear and torture to do the trick.

But the use of nation-wide, media-based mind control was arguably even more destructive than one-on-one brain washing.  Without a doubt, per dollar spent it was the most cost effective means to produce maximum fear in the mind of the public.  Allen Dulles lectured on ‘brain warfare’ at Princeton in 1953 and figuratively scared the pants off otherwise well-clad people – that is, Princetonians and other ivy leaguers.  At one level of society, average Americans worried about the atomic bomb.  However, at the level of the upper crust, the movers and shakers were more concerned about the ‘battle for the mind’ and taking steps to ensure that this weltanschauungkrieg (worldview war or psychological warfare) would be won by the West, no matter what the costs and the consequences to the freedom of the common man and woman in America.

During early schooling, American kids learn how liberty begins with individual choice and the freedom to think for oneself.  However, by the 1950s our leaders were already straying from this well-worn republican axiom. The rich leaders of our great nation determined the world had become too dangerous to let regular Americans remain free to think for what they would about crucial subjects.  Moreover, American governance became motivated not just out of fear but also out of monetary benefit, to build our own brand of fascism – a form resilient to the horrors of the Soviet expansion and robust enough to conquer the financial world.   The U.S. Government and our largest corporations commenced working cooperatively to achieve a shared goal of world domination.

In his farewell speech, Eisenhower had warned Americans about the growing military-industrial complex and how it threatened our democracy.  The most obvious peril was expressed in his fear that scientists and technologists would combine in a dangerous coterie to wage endless war for profit without much regard for human life – even the lives of our own children.  Vietnam plainly validated his fears.  But the reshaping of the American code of conduct and assuming our place in the world were being compromised in other more sinister ways.  Behind the scenes toxic steps were being taken to safeguard national security and transform our national purpose – even though the nation’s self-perception of our morally upright agenda stood fast.  Seeing America through rose-colored glasses was comparatively easy to justify since the Soviets and the Red Chinese were by definition ‘godless communists’.  In stark contrast, America was called to a much higher set of principles established by our god-fearing Founding Fathers at our nation’s inception.  Even today, this conviction (now called American exceptionalism), constitutes a moral reason if not imperative to spread democracy throughout the world (often voiced with the words, “America is the world’s last and best hope for freedom!”)  Moreover, this oft-broadcasted shared conviction in American mores sanctions interventionist actions, both military and clandestine, at all points around the globe.[iv]

Sixty years ago the decision was made that to achieve such upright objectives – initially to defeat the communists – our government must sometimes dispense with sacred ideals of individual liberty in our land.  It was our own version of “the end justifies the means.” Since well-intentioned ‘do-gooding’ and conducting ‘business as usual’ couldn’t stand up to the merciless methods of the Soviets, the rule of law should be applied selectively, only when it served the interests of a larger goal of national security.[v]

The key means to enact this transformation was redirecting modern mass media (leveraging various forms of pecuniary incentives) to indoctrinate this progressive bit of realism into U.S. citizens.  The media would cease being primarily a watchdog on politicians and public policy that infringed on individual liberty.  Instead, it would become the essential means to establish what citizens should demand of their officials, what laws should be enacted, and what social programs should be implemented.  Ask most any Republican today and they would likely agree:  The mainline media continues to so function today.

As difficult as it may be for Americans to believe, this is precisely what happened beginning in earnest with the Cold War.  Media provides ‘norms’ in behavior and mores for belief.  Television, movies, books, standard media like newspapers and magazines (and today new media creations on the Internet) all combine to provide an influential force guiding what we should wear, how we should behave, what we should believe, how we should conduct our business lives, and how we should parent our children.  More than less, mass media makes us what we are.   At best, those that don’t comply are strange and uncool; at worst, they are increasingly dangerous and a threat to society.  One of the most essential aspects of modernity is the plan for humanity to dance to the music composed by mass media.

History will testify that it was the CIA Project labeled MOCKINGBIRD that had the most widespread and lasting impact on America.  The purpose of MOCKINGBIRD mirrored Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine which saturated minds across Germany with anti-Semitism and Hitler’s revengeful casus belli.  To be fair, the roots of Project MOCKINGBIRD can be traced back before Hitler to an American intellectual, Walter Lippmann and his 1922 book, Public Opinion.  His message was simple:  the elites must tell the rest of us what to believe.  Journalism isn’t a means of true education – but it is the way public opinion is formed in the modern world.  Thus, fast forwarding to today, Joe the Plummer doesn’t really know what he should think.  The television networks and national newspapers must tell him.  The consent of the governed operates much more smoothly when manufactured by the media.

Presaging B.F. Skinner, Lippmann instructed that with the advances of psychology and knowing how media works, the “practice of democracy has turned a corner.” The “omni-competent citizen” is little more than a proletariat myth and should be discarded.  As a by-product of Lippmann’s philosophy of information dissemination, most journalism ceased being ‘investigative’ – it became vapid entertainment.  Famous war correspondent and journalist Edward R. Murrow lamented the same devolution of media – proclaiming it a means to peddle the public cancer causing cigarettes while simultaneously misinforming citizens on what was really happing in the world – tales told by the most literate directed at passing dribble off as news and without compunction for failing to deliver the cold, hard facts as demoralizing as they may be.  To make the point more plainly, allow me to modify the pronoun from second person singular to third person plural in the famous line Jack Nicholson shouted at Tom Cruise in the movie, A Few Good Men, “We can’t handle the truth!”  Moreover, based upon the fact satirist John Stewart is today’s “most trusted source of news” rather than an contemporary television news anchor to Walter Cronkite (once the “most trusted man in America”), Nicholson’s cynicism may be on target.

According to author Alex Constantine, Allen Dulles was behind MOCKINGBIRD just as he was MKULTRA.  For Dulles and other America elites, mind control was too important to apply on individuals only, one by one – it should be indiscriminately lavished upon the masses.  Constantine states that by 1967, MOCKINBIRD would put 600 ‘stringers’ into the press, influence 25 newspapers and wire services, and have over 1,000 books written for propaganda purposes.  By 1978, the ‘Company’ was spending over $265 million annually with direct ownership of 50 U.S. newspapers.  In effect, the CIA operating under Dulles adopted a policy of, “If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.”

Not only has the agenda been set for the people by media czars; the assumption about why the elite should do this for the less educated population is held to be scientifically sound.  “Mind control – going beyond freedom and dignity (as scientist B.F. Skinner’s infamous book title implies) – builds upon the notion that human freedom is an illusion.  We are not free to choose.  We are like Pavlov’s dogs, trained through reflex conditioning.  In fact, Pavlov is now but a more accepted scientific and sophisticated rationalization for treating humankind as less than the crown of God’s creation.  100 years ago, the elite codified their sense of superiority by developing the pseudoscience of eugenics.  It led to the sterilization almost 50,000 Americans before World War II – and through passive euthanasia, the deaths in mental hospitals and prisons likely numbering in the thousands.

Mind control also assumes that certain humans are more valuable than others; that the less capable should be herded together and treated with chemicals to dumb them down, calm them down, and keep them in line.  Those with suspicious minds lodge a controversial complaint that today’s vast usage of anti-depressants in America amounts to a collective drug-fix perpetuated by ‘Big Pharma’ (aka pharmaceutical companies).  This psychotropic approach to social engineering keeps our citizens subtlety anesthetized in the name of maintaining domestic tranquility.  Some authors and commentators dare to go further, proposing this tactic isn’t just the way pill companies increase their profits; it is much more than that – it constitutes a segment of elite strategy to manage society using the means of government.  In the final analysis, perhaps it’s a bit of both – profit making and social engineering combined with the normal human inclination to alleviate pain.  After all, like pleasure pain relief is highly habit forming.

Looking back to the 1950s, LSD testing by both the CIA and the military made their early victims unfortunate bellwethers of what was to come.  In 1953, Frank Olsen, a U.S. Army biological warfare specialist employed at Fort Detrick in Maryland, became the first known victim of death by LSD.  The hallucinogen was secretly slipped into his drink by the insidious Sidney Gottlieb then head of the other notorious CIA project, MKULTRA, in a part-prank, part off-the-record drug trial.  Over 20 years after the fact, upon reading the government’s 1975 Rockefeller Report on CIA Operations, Olsen’s family sued and won $750,000 in damages from our government.  If it was a joke, the levity was lost on them.

John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, revealed the clandestine attempt by the CIA to develop brainwashed spies in the late 1970s from MKULTRA documents discovered in the White House five years after former CIA Director Richard Helms, when leaving his post, ordered all such records shredded.  Marks broke the story, confirming the details of the various subprojects (143 of them) through first-hand interviews with many of its participants and victims. His assessment was that “the CIA probably played as big a role in the development and study of psychoactive drugs as the National Security Agency’s code-breakers did in the development of computers” (Marks, page viii).  Indeed, as others pointed out, if it hadn’t been for the CIA, the counter-culture might not have happened.  There would have been no Ken Kessey, no One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and no ‘magic bus’ touring the country had the CIA not catalyzed LSD as a cultural phenomenon and made it, rather than Pepsi Cola, the real ‘choice for the new generation.’ [vi]

Likewise, Dr. Colin Ross studied and documented the actions of CIA researchers involving over 80 institutions (universities, hospitals, clinics, etc.) in his complementary and much more recent book The CIA Doctors.  Ross wryly pointed out that what these doctors did when financed by the U.S. government merely repeated many of the actions Nazi scientists had conducted ten years before, actions that eventuated in hanging upon their conviction at Nuremberg.

And then there is also the colorful case of infamous doctor, Jolyon West who carried out a very large-scale murder in the mid-1950s – a bull elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo.  Trying LSD out on the Pachyderm proved more than the animal could handle.  West, acting on behalf of the government, would do more than administer LSD to animal test subjects.  He became a ‘go to guy’ for the CIA in other manners involving psychological research.  Most famously, he would later conduct psychological examinations of infamous killers Jack Ruby, Patty Hearst, and Timothy McVeigh.  The fact that the same doctor did all these interviews is a bit too much to pass off as coincidence.   To most researchers and authors who’ve written on the subject, it is all-but-clear West’s role was to keep CIA black ops under wraps and provide the government’s interpretation on the meaning of these red-letter events, an interpretation that denied any government wrong-doing and especially assured that these events were scattered, unrelated, and random actions with no ability for Americans to connect the dots.

So then, what method did the CIA determine was best for creating their Manchurian Candidates?  According to CIA medical and testing expert, John Gittinger (author of the famous Gittinger Personality Assessment System) the method of choice wasn’t hypnotism, because hypnotism was too unreliable.  It wasn’t pharmacological inducements either.  Their effects weren’t sufficiently long lasting and failed to create anyone adequately ‘gung ho’ (the colloquial term Gittinger used when interviewed by John Marks) to perform such dangerous assassinations.  Marks’ historical account leaves one with the impression that the Manchurian Candidate was a myth, an impossible quest, despite how much our government spent on these projects.[vii]  Indeed, although Marks documented the outrageous search for the Manchurian Candidate, he leaves the reader supposing that the brainwashed assassin was not to be found.

Unbeknownst to Marks who wrote in the 1970s (and the truth wasn’t to be fully known until the 1990s), the secret assassins and how they were programmed were not myths.  The assassins did exist.  But the methodology utilized in their development was far different from what he imagined.  The techniques relied upon diabolical forms of torture based upon a medical health phenomenon known as dissociation – the basis for Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID.  The techniques were so extreme they could be considered lifted right out of Hollywood horror movies – except no one but the perpetrators ever envisioned anything as malevolent as what the CIA practitioners actually did when creating an inestimable number of these DID victims.

The methods for creating alternate personalities drew upon the work of English attachment theorist, Dr. John Bowlby, and as I argued in my book, Power Quest Book Two: The Ascendancy of Antichrist in America, the secretive work of one of the Nazi’s most fiendish scientists, Dr. Josef Mengele.  This remarkable and disturbing subject will be taken up in a future article.

Notes