ANKARA
In 1954, a prison doctor in the southern US state of Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them "double, triple and quadruple" doses of the psychoactive drug LSD for 77 days straight.
"They may have died without knowing that they were part of the CIA's highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds — a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick," writes author Stephen Kinzer, formerly based in Turkiye, who investigated this ultra-secret project
Exactly 69 years ago, on April 13, 1953, then-CIA Director Allen Dulles launched the psychedelic mind-control program codenamed MKUltra to manipulate the mental states and brain functions of an individual by covert injection of high dosages of psychoactive substances and other chemicals.
Testifying before a joint US Senate committee in 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner admitted that the project intended to study "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior." MKUltra was preceded by two drug-related experiments, Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke.
According to Kinzer, the CIA project "was a continuation of the work begun in WWII-era in Japanese facilities and Nazi concentration camps on subduing and controlling human minds." He has documented that MKUltra's use of mescaline on unwitting subjects was a practice pioneered by Nazi doctors in the Dachau concentration camp.
In a 1985 verdict, the US Supreme Court found that the CIA indirectly funded 162 different secret projects that were "contracted out to various universities, research foundations, and similar institutions." In total, at least 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, but many were unaware they were dealing with the CIA.
Although the program was shut down in 1964, there is ample evidence that intelligence agencies continued the project in their domains.
No longer science fiction
These mind-control methods are no longer limited to science fiction and are now exploited by the intelligence agencies to control the minds of leaders.
In 2006, retired Gen. Boris Ratnikov, a former official of the KGB, the Soviet Union's main security agency, told the government-controlled newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that in the mid-1980s, about 50 research institutes in his country had studied remote mind control techniques with substantial government funding.
Experts say the concept of breaking and rebuilding the mind was first scientifically introduced by German spy agencies around World War II. However, it was later perfected by the CIA and the KGB.
According to Ratnikov's account, Russian President Boris Yeltsin planned to visit Japan in 1992. But Ratnikov's department detected attempts to "program" Yeltsin's mind to make him give the Kuril Islands back to Japan. The move would have prompted China to demand its disputed areas from Russia as well, potentially sparking a war between the countries. Yeltsin canceled the trip for unknown reasons.
Ratnikov also revealed that senior officials in Western Europe and the US had "unwittingly provided information" to his department, "which was able to read their minds, thanks to Soviet-era scientific achievements," reported by Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
He also told the paper that in the early 1990s, he and his colleagues "scanned" the mind of new US Ambassador Robert Strauss to discover that the embassy building contained equipment capable of exerting "psychotronic influence" on Moscow residents, but it had been deactivated.
Controlling mind through remote control
According to a declassified CIA document, one significant mandate given to the project was to determine whether the agency could seize a person by remote control in the span of an hour or two and direct him to crash an aeroplane or wreck a train, among other things.
Other mandates included experimenting with a subject and forcing them to travel long distances to execute specified acts such as subversion and espionage.
Carol Rutz, a former CIA researcher, describes an experiment on two women. "Without their consciousness, they were made to plant a bomb perfectly and were fully amnesic," she said in a paper. They hardly knew what they had done.
Author of the book, A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children and Other Innocent People, she had also co-authored the "Extreme Abuse Survey" in which more than 2,000 persons from 40 countries participated to document ritual abuse and mind control.
In 1974, Stanford Research Institute developed a computer system capable of reading a person's mind by correlating the brain waves or inducing a heart attack from a distance. The latest development in the technology is the cloning of any targeted victim's or group's human electroencephalogram (EEG) or brain waves.
They are then placed on Silent Sound carrier frequencies, where they could silently trigger the occurrence of the same basic emotion in another human being.
History has shown that radical rulers, riding anti-corruptions waves and the promise of transforming a decrepit political system, often get co-opted into conventional politics. The old cycle sets into motion leaving the general public once again to await the arrival of a new messiah and a fresh revolution.
Is this because they are subjected to mind control programs? There are no satisfactory answers to the complex question.
