mindbender

Responsible to a greater or lesser degree for the Grateful Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Unibomber and continuing for at least the next two decades albeit (reportedly) at a diminished scale, Project MKUltra was launched by the US Central Intelligence Agency through its Office of Scientific Intelligence in coordination with the army’s biological warfare laboratories on this day in 1953. Though some experiments and motivations are documented and verified, huge tranches of files documenting the programme by the CIA director in 1973 (in the midst of Watergate) making independent corroboration difficult to impossible as embarrassing and incriminating for the government to have sanctioned tests without informed-consent on unwitting subjects. Born out of paranoia experienced after acclaimed as a world power to loose monopolies on nuclear armaments and cultural hegemony, many put credence in this efforts at brainwashing, memory manipulation and behaviour control through hypnosis, hallucinogenic drugs, trained assassins, addiction and remote-controlled implants, though others including spymaster and programme director Sidney Gottlieb dismissed and disavowed the project’s methodologies as ineffective and only useful to redirect public scrutiny away from the agency’s actual goals of advancing, enhancing interrogation techniques through classic means of intimation and torture and conversely creating field operators better able to resist such ways of extracting information.