Mind control (also known as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, mind abuse, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated.” The term has been applied to any tactic, psychological or otherwise, which can be seen as subverting an individual’s sense of control over their own thinking, behavior, emotions or decision making.

Theories of brainwashing and of mind control were originally developed to explain how totalitarian regimes appeared to succeed in systematically indoctrinating prisoners of war through propaganda and torture techniques. These theories were later expanded and modified, by psychologists including Margaret Singer, to explain a wider range of phenomena, especially conversions to new religious movements (NRMs). A third-generation theory proposed by Ben Zablocki focused on the utilization of mind control to retain members of NRMs and cults to convert them to a new religion. The suggestion that NRMs use mind control techniques has resulted in scientific and legal controversy. Neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Sociological Association have found any scientific merit in such theories.

Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects.

Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901–8 September 1967) was a twentieth-century Scottish-American psychiatrist. Cameron was involved in Project MKULTRA, United States Central Intelligence Agency’s research on torture and mind control.

Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York, and was involved in experiments in Canada for Project MKULTRA, a United States based CIA-directed mind control program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. He is unrelated to another CIA psychiatrist Alan Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s.

Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron’s research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing “a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture…Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron’s experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb’s earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method.”

Mind control in popular culture: * The communal brainwashing of an entire model community via subliminal messages is a central theme in the 2009 novel Candor by Pam Bachorz. * In the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the protagonist undergoes a scientific re-education process called the “Ludovico technique” in an attempt to remove his violent tendencies. * In his 1999 science fictin novel A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge introduces the themes of “mindrot” and controlled “Focus” later eplored in his 2006 novel. * In the novel Night of the Hawk by Dale Brown, the Soviets capture and brainwash U.S. Air Force Lieutenant David Luger, transforming him into the Russian scientist Ivan Ozerov. * In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949 before the popularization of the term “brainwashing”), the fictional totalitarian government of Oceania uses brainwashing-style techniques to erase nonconformist thought and rebellious personalities. * Vernor Vinge speculates on the application of technology to achieve brainwashing in his 2006 science fiction novel, Rainbows End (ISBN 0-312-85684-9), portraying separately the dangers of JITT (Just-in-time training) and the specter of YGBM (You gotta believe me).

Brainwashing became a common trope of films, television and games in the late twentieth century. It was a convenient means of introducing changes in the behavior of characters and a device for raising tension and audience uncertainty in the climate of Cold War and outbreaks of terrorism. * The film Brazil, depicts a fascist government similar to that in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The government controls a totalitarian society subconsciously by manipulation, intending to remain in control of the population. * Derren Brown: Mind Control (1999-2000), a television show on Channel 4

Russ Baker - Jun 2, 2011

Readers have shown considerable interest in the trailer we ran recently for the video about unknown radiation experiments on African American children.

Continuing our exploration of secret government experiments on American citizens, we now re-publish an article I wrote in 1999 about the CIA and LSD experiments. That article was originally commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, which opted in the end not to publish it. Instead, it appeared in the magazine of the esteemed British newspaper The Observer, the German newsmagazine Spiegel, and in top newspapers in Australia, Netherlands, and other countries. It did not run in the United States.

Here is the full article.

This episode is an interview with Hank Albarelli titled “MK ULTRA – The CIA, LSD, and Mind Control” and is being released on Monday, February 14, 2011. My interview with Hank was recorded on February 09, 2011.

Today we’ll be discussing the CIA’s cold war drug experiments on US civilians without their knowledge, we’ll also be discussing brain washing, mind control, banking, and the origins of the CIA. With me is Hank Albarelli, author and the world’s leading expert on the CIA’s secret MK-ULTRA project. He’s here, after nearly a year of promising you this interview, to discuss his book A Terrible Mistake.

ANNIE YOUDERIAN - November 17, 2010

(CN) - A federal magistrate judge in San Francisco ordered the CIA to produce specific records and testimony about the human experiments the government allegedly conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975.

Three veterans groups and six individual veterans sued the CIA and other government agencies, claiming they used about 7,800 soldiers as human guinea pigs to research biological, chemical and psychological weapons.

The experiments, many of which took place at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick in Maryland, allegedly exposed test subjects to chemicals, drugs and electronic implants. Though the soldiers volunteered, they never gave informed consent, because the government didn’t fully disclose the risks, the veterans claimed. They were also required to sign an oath of secrecy, according to the complaint.

The veterans filed three sets of document requests to find out who was tested, what substances they were given, and how it affected them. Between October and April, the government produced about 15,000 pages of heavily redacted records, most of which related to the named plaintiffs only.

The CIA argued that much of the information requested was protected under the Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James Larson acknowledged that some of the requests were too broad and ordered the veterans to be more specific and to reduce the total number of requests.

For example, Larson said the plaintiffs’ definition of “test program” is “overbroad,” as it not only named experimental programs like “Bluebird,” “Artichoke” and “MKUltra,” but also included “any other program of experimentation involving human testing of any substance, including but not limited to ‘MATERIAL TESTING PROGRAM EA 1729.’”

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Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye - 10/14/2010

Editor’s Note: When President George W. Bush authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture on “war on terror” detainees, the patterns of abusive treatment and the gauging of physiological responses always had an experimental feel, as if the interrogators were testing how best to break a person’s resistance.

Now, after a seven-month investigation, Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye report that some technical revisions in US government policies on human experimentation created apparent loopholes that allowed the detainees to be used as human guinea pigs for studies in behaviorial modification.

In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating “war on terror” detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.

Wolfowitz issued a little-known directive on March 25, 2002, about a month after President George W. Bush stripped the detainees of traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Bush labeled them “unlawful enemy combatants” and authorized the CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) to undertake brutal interrogations.

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MARIA DINZEO - August 27, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The Vietnam Veterans of America asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Central Intelligence Agency, for failing to produce documents on the CIA’s testing of hundreds of kinds of drugs - including sarin and phosgene nerve gas and LSD - on thousands of soldiers.

The Vietnam Veterans of America sued the CIA in January 2009, claiming the agency had experimented on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., testing the effects of mind-controlling drugs.

The VVA says soldiers were treated “in the same capacity as laboratory rats or guinea pigs.” The underlying federal complaint claims that at least 7,800 soldiers were subjected to “at least 250, but as many as 400 chemical and biological agents.”

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H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye - 11 August 2010

Excerpt:

In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Bender’s earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were covert contractors with the CIA’s MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects. Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch, James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953. About a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr. Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm, where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the CIA, Pentagon and Britain’s MI6 on drug experiments in England and the United States.

Prompted by a new book release, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research has received a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency, Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), concerning a recent account of American government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France. The DGSE is the French counterpart of the CIA.

Washington, DC (Vocus) February 3, 2010 — Prompted by a new book release, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research has received a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency, Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), concerning a recent account of American government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France. The DGSE is the French counterpart of the CIA.

The incident took place in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, and is described in a recent book about the 1953 death of an American biochemist, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (http://aterriblemistake.com/). The book, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. (http://www.albarelli.net/), was published in late November 2009 by TrineDay (http://trineday.com/), which specializes in books about “suppressed information.”

The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold, or to organic mercury poisoning. But Albarelli reports that the outbreak resulted from a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He notes that the scientists who produced both alternative explanations worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

(more…)

The 900-paged book, ‘A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,’ painstakingly explores Olson’s odd death and reveals it to be a murder.

In a bizarre about-face, the secretive Central Intelligence Agency has requested documents from an investigative journalist, even though the writer had earlier obtained them from the CIA itself under the Freedom of Information Act.

Walterville (Vocus/PRWEB ) December 16, 2009 — In a bizarre about-face, the secretive Central Intelligence Agency has requested documents from an investigative journalist, even though the writer had earlier obtained them from the CIA itself under the Freedom of Information Act.

The strange request was made last week to author H.P. Albarelli Jr., whose recently published book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, details a myriad of CIA drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people and sent hundreds more seeking medical help.

“The caller, an agency official, who identified himself by a name I was quite familiar with from past requests,” explained Albarelli, “asked if I would be so kind as to send by fax two documents my book referenced in its narrative and footnotes. I suppose I should have been bowled over by the request, but I wasn’t. It happened once before.”

“The crazy thing,” added Albarelli, “is that all of the requested documents came from my FOI requests to the agency in the early 1990s.”

(more…)

The 900-paged book, 'A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments,' painstakingly explores Olson's odd death and reveals it to be a murder.

For decades now, the seemingly unrelated mysteries of Dr. Frank Olson’s strange “suicide” in New York City in 1953 and the bizarre hallucinogenic outbreak in a small French village in August 1951 have independently provoked and perplexed serious investigators. As related in countless accounts on the Internet and televised news features and documentaries for the past 35 years, Olson’s death has long been suspected to be a murder, but little was offered in the way of real evidence. Now, Frank Olson’s death can be definitively ruled a murder and the French outbreak explained as a planned military experiment gone terribly wrong. How the outbreak connects to Olson’s death is a convoluted saga of deception and intrigue.

In 1995, I began to seriously investigate the strange death of Dr. Frank Olson, a civilian biochemist at the Army’s top-secret biological warfare center. Little did I suspect that my inquiry would span over 10 years and encounter fierce opposition from varied and surprising forces. My investigation was a harsh lesson in the creed of truth finding; the Olson story has taken on near mythical proportions in some circles and had become seriously tainted with fabrications, misinformation and disinformation. Sorting through the so-called “facts” was extremely difficult. Dealing with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which was also investigating the case and called me to New York to consult with them on my findings, was nothing less than an exercise in squaring off with subterfuge.

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Gordon P. Erspamer - 18 October 2009

Despite the passage of four decades, America and its military have never come to grips with its own ghastly programs of using soldiers as guinea pigs to test chemical or biological weapons such as LSD, sarin, nerve gases, plague, mescaline, anthrax and hundreds of others. At the same time, they also conducted mind-control experiments, as soldiers and others were administered drugs, and septal implants were inserted in the sinus cavities a la “The Manchurian Candidate.” The secret research programs, originally code-named MKULTRA but continued under a long succession of other code names, were conducted mainly by the US Army from 1943 until at least 1975. However, the CIA provided planning, financial support and field testing. Participants in the experiments were recruited by the Army and lured by promises of no KP duty, a four-day workweek, the promise of medals and special recognition. At the same time, they were sworn to secrecy and forced to sign a general consent form without informed consent or even knowing the nature of the toxic substances that were sprayed in their faces, applied to their skin or injected into their veins. And the government continues to try to hide the fact that Nazi members were recruited to help devise these experiments as part of Operation Paperclip, and that many of the biological experiments were modeled after those conducted by the notorious Col. Shiro Ishi in Manchuria and Japan.

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By Bruce Falconer, Mother Jones - May 23, 2009

Their stories are a staple of conspiracy culture: broken men, suffering hallucinations and near-total amnesia, who say they are victims of secret government mind-control experiments. Think Liev Schreiber in The Manchurian Candidate or Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. Journalists are a favorite target for the paranoid delusions of this population. So is Gordon Erspamer—and the San Francisco lawyer’s latest case isn’t helping him to fend off the tinfoil-hat crowd. He has filed suit against the CIA and the US Army on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America and six former American soldiers who claim they are the real thing: survivors of classified government tests conducted at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland between 1950 and 1975. “I get a lot of calls,” he says. “There are a lot of crazy people out there who think that somebody from Mars is controlling their behavior via radio waves.” But when it comes to Edgewood, “I’m finding that more and more of those stories are true!”

That government scientists conducted human experiments at Edgewood is not in question. “The program involved testing of nerve agents, nerve agent antidotes, psychochemicals, and irritants,” according to a 1994 General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) report (PDF). At least 7,800 US servicemen served “as laboratory rats or guinea pigs” at Edgewood, alleges Erspamer’s complaint, filed in January in a federal district court in California. The Department of Veterans Affairs has reported that military scientists tested hundreds of chemical and biological substances on them, including VX, tabun, soman, sarin, cyanide, LSD, PCP, and World War I-era blister agents like phosgene and mustard. The full scope of the tests, however, may never be known. As a CIA official explained to the GAO, referring to the agency’s infamous MKULTRA mind-control experiments, “The names of those involved in the tests are not available because names were not recorded or the records were subsequently destroyed.” Besides, said the official, some of the tests involving LSD and other psychochemical drugs “were administered to an undetermined number of people without their knowledge.”

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