CIA Experiments With Mind Control
on Children Source: Perceptions Magazine Excerpts
The CIA mind-control apparatus has been well known since
1975, when 10 large boxes of documents were released pursuant to
Freedom of Information Act requests.
Several good books were then written on the subject of
the CIA program known as MK-ULTRA. Officially spanning ten years from
1952-62, MK-ULTRA involved the use of LSD on unwitting military and
civilian subjects in the United States. LSD and more powerful
compounds were given under duress as brainwashing and truth serum
drugs. The program's aim was to find drugs which would irresistibly
bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject' s mind clean and program
him or her as "a robot agent."
In experimental test situations, people were given acid
without their knowledge, then interrogated under bright lights with
doctors sitting in the background taking notes. Threats would be
made. The test subjects were told that their LSD "downer trips" would
be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their
closely-guarded military secrets. The people being interrogated in
this way were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel and, abroad,
agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War.
Long-term severe debilitation and several documented deaths resulted.
Much, much more could be said about MK-ULTRA.
None of this prepared people for the explosive testimony
made on March 15, 1995, in Washington, D.C., before the President's
Committee on Radiation, however. In unpublicized sessions, New
Orleans therapist Valerie Wolf introduced two of her patients who had
uncovered memories of being part of extensive CIA brainwashing
programs as young children (in one case, starting at age seven).
Their brainwashing included torture, rape, electroshock, powerful
drugs, hypnosis and death threats. According to their testimony, the
CIA then induced amnesia to prevent their recalling these terrifying
sessions.
Both Wolf and her patients stated that they recovered
the memories of this CIA program without regression or hypnosis
techniques. In other words, these patients spontaneously discovered
this information about themselves and their pasts.
Although the committee was mainly concerned with
radiation, they permitted Valerie and her patients to testify because,
astonishingly, several doctors who had administered the mind-control
experiments had also been identified by other Americans secretly
exposed to radiation. Apparently there was a crossover.
Prominent names surfaced in the March 15 testimony:
Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran
MK-ULTRA and Dr. John Gittinger, Gottlieb's protege. These men and
others were directly accused of participating in grisly mind-control
efforts on children.
Predictably, this testimony received no media attention.
I now have it all, including many pages submitted to the
committee that will likely never be released as part of their final
report. Only a small percentage of the pages were read aloud at the
hearing. Included are corroborating statements
from other therapists around the country and several of their
patients. I have now released all of this testimony as a book,
U.S. Government Mind-Control Experiments On Children.
When the sickening shock starts to wear off, deeply
disturbing questions flood one's mind: just what was this CIA program?
How extensive was it? What was its purpose?
From what I have been able to discover so far, many
American children, as well as children from Mexico and South America,
were used over a period of about 40 years, starting around 1948. In
fact, the program may still be going on. Doctors and agents who
administered it wanted to obtain control over the minds of these
children, ostensibly to create superagents who wouldn't remember even
what missions they carried out, because of hypnotically induced
amnesia (which could be removed by their controllers and reinstalled
at will). (1)
Children were trained as sex agents, for example, with
the job of blackmailing prominent Americans -- primarily politicians,
businessmen and educators. A great deal of filming was done for this
purpose. Eventually, people from the inner core of the CIA program
filmed each other, and some of the centers where children were used as
sex agents got out of control and turned into CIA-operated sex rings.
Some children were considered expendable and simply
murdered.
One person who states that he was in this program as a
child said, off the record:
"They tried out their brainwashing techniques on the
kids from Mexico and South America. They were considered expendable.
But on another echelon of the program, they went after the best and
the brightest American kids. Making perfect agents to combat the
Soviets wasn't, I don't think, their ultimate objective. I can't
remember what that was."
At this point, I made a suggestion:
"Well, if they were choosing the best and brightest,
maybe they figured these kids would one day rise to important
positions in the society, and they wanted to gain long-term control
over them, so they would be under their thumb, so they could tap them
at will -- a way of controlling the future society."
"Maybe," he said. "The Nazis gained control over the
intelligentsia in Germany. That was a very key step in their
dominance. That was the first thing they did".
"This smells very much like a Nazi program in the U.S.,"
I said. "I don't mean all the controllers were German, but the style
of it, the insanity."
He said, "They brought over a lot of Nazi doctors after
the war and not just to build rockets -- for a lot of projects."
Other people who said that they had been used as
children in the program remember that doctors with German accents were
definitely present at the sessions. One therapist, who shared this
information informally with colleagues around the country, states
that, so far, the oldest person she has heard of who was in the
program is now 52; the youngest is now nine.
Since a number of people who were brainwashed, tortured
and drugged in these experiments try to resolve their experiences in
therapy, psychiatrists and other professional therapists are hearing
these stories. They are told, for example, that CIA controllers
sometimes dressed up in Satanic costumes to further traumatize the
children, also providing a cover that wouldn't be believed if the
children ever talked.
It is worth noting that there is a movement to discredit
these "recovered" memories, and the most prominent group, the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), has several board members with CIA
or military-intelligence connections -- including the notorious Dr.
Louis "Jolly" West of UCLA, who tried to establish a center for "the
study of violence" at the university in the 1970s. This center's
specialty would have been
psychosurgery, a horrendous melting of brain connections,
supposedly to curb people's "violent tendencies."
FMSF maintains that a person always remembers abuse done
to him or her, and therefore any new recovery of it in therapy is
false and must have been fabricated through misleading suggestions by
the therapist. While it is certainly true that such inducement
happens in therapy, the blanket statement that all recovered memory is
invented is unsubstantiated.
In a written statement to Dr. Wolf that was included in
her testimony to the president's committee, well-known researcher and
psychiatrist, Colin Ross said,
"Published articles in my files include descriptions of
administration of 150 mcg of LSD to children age 5-10 years on a daily
basis for days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years.
Neurosurgeons at Tulane, Yale, and Harvard did extensive research on
brain electrode implants with intelligence funding, and combined brain
implants with Large numbers of drugs including hallucinogens."
Ross based his report on his more than 20 years of
investigating CIA mind control.
Chris De Nicola, one of Dr. Wolf's patients who
testified before the president's committee, named her controller as a
Dr. Greene, a name reported by several other mind-control subjects. It
may well be that this name was a cover used by various CIA and
military-contracted experimenter-torturers. Here is a quote from her
testimony:
"[Dr. Greene] used me in radiation experiments both for
the purpose of determining the effects of radiation on various parts
of my body and to terrorize me as an additional trauma in the
mind-control experiments. [She was eight years old.]
"The rest of the experiments took place in Tucson,
Arizona, out in the desert. I was taught how to pick locks, be
secretive, use my photographic memory to remember things and a
technique to withhold information by repeating numbers to myself.
[She is obviously talking about being trained as an agent.]
"Dr. Greene moved on to wanting me to kill dolls that
looked like real children. I stabbed a doll with a spear once after
being severely tortured, but the next time I refused. He used many
techniques but as I got older I resisted more and more.
He often tied me down in a cage, which was near his
office. Between 1972 and 1976 he and his assistants were sometimes
careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I
snuck -into his office and found files with reports and memos
addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were
project, subproject, subject and experiment names with some code
numbers for radiation mind-control experiments which I have submitted
in my written documentation. I was caught twice and Dr. Greene
tortured me ruthlessly with electric shock, drugs, spinning on a
table, putting shots in my stomach, in my back, dislocating my joints
and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal..."
Is there a precedent for this kind of sadistic treatment
by CIA and military personnel? Indeed there is. Here is a quote from
the introduction to my book, U.S. Government Mind-Control Experiments
On Children. It contains information from reliable published sources;
such as The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks (2),
Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee (3) and The Mind Manipulators, by Alan
Scheflin (4). In part, these authors derived their information on the
CIA and MK-ULTRA from the ten boxes of information released suddenly
in 1975 by the agency in response to Freedom of Information Act
requests:
"Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as
1955, working for the Army, gave patients-LSD while he had electrodes
implanted deep inside their brains.
"Canadian researcher, Dr. Ewan Cameron, under long-term
CIA contract, attempted to depattern, and reprogram his psychiatric
patients' personalities wholesale. He started with 15 to 65 days of
'sleep therapy,' during which a patient was kept under nearly 24 hours
a day, through the administration of cocktails of Thorazine, Nembutal,
Seconal, Veronal, and Phenergam. Throughout this sleep period, the
patient would be awakened two or three times a day for electroshock
treatments, given at an intensity 20-40 times the 'normal'
convulsion-producing strength.
"In the mid-1950's, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would
become Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then
a laborer in the field for the CIA, gave a 'pseudoneurotic
schizophrenic' patient mescaline. The patient had a not-unfamiliar
heaven-and-hell journey on the compound. But Hoch followed this up
with a transorbital leucotomy...Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a
local anesthetic, and then proceeded to remove pieces of cerebral
cortex, asking at various moments whether the patient's perceptions
were changing."
Claudia Mullin, the other of Dr. Wolf's patients who
testified before the President's Committee on Radiation, said her
experiences with CIA mind-control experiences began when she was seven
years old:
"In 1958, 1 was to be tested, they told me, by some
important doctors coming from a place called the 'Society' [the Human
Ecology Society, a CIA front]. I was told to cooperate; answer any of
their questions. Then, since the test 'might hurt,' I would be given
'shots, x-rays, and a few jolts of electricity.' I was instructed not
to look at anyone's face too hard and to ignore names,' as this was 'a
very secret project' but to be brave an all those things would help me
forget...
"A Dr. John Gittinger tested me and Dr. Cameron gave me
the shocks and Dr. Greene the x-rays...By the time I left to go home,
just like every time from then on, I would recall nothing of my tests
or the different doctors. I would only remember whatever explanations
Dr. Robert G. Heath [of Tulane Medical School] gave me for the odd
bruises, needle marks, burns on my head and fingers and even the
genital soreness. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Already,
they had begun to control my mind!
"The next year, I was sent to a place in Maryland called
Deep Creek Cabins to learn how to 'sexually please men.' Also, I was
taught how to coerce them into talking about themselves. It was
Richard Helms (Deputy Director of the CIA), Dr. Gottlieb, Captain
George White and Morse Allen, who all planned on filming as many high
government and agency officials and heads of academic institutions and
foundations as possible...I was to become a regular little 'spy' for
them, after that summer, eventually entrapping many unwitting men,
including themselves, all with the use of a hidden camera. I was only
nine when this kind of sexual humiliation began."
Captain George White was a notorious agent for the CIA.
He set up a brothel in San Francisco in the 1960s and, using hidden
cameras, filmed men having sex with prostitutes. The men's drinks
were "spiked" with LSD. In 1950, Morse Allen, another important CIA,
man, was appointed head of Project BLUEBIRD, another CIA mind-control
program.
Ms. Mullin states that she was adopted when she was two
years old. By the time she reached seven she had already been abused
extensively by her mother. Her mother apparently turned her over for
"testing" to CIA-connected people and Claudia then entered a 27-year
period of what can only be called enslavement. Claudia states that she
has been monitored, that she is still monitored and watched by agency
related people, including a medical doctor. Now living in New
Orleans, she has given information to local police authorities about
her situation. In her testimony to the president's committee, Claudia
remarked,
"Although the process of recalling these atrocities is
certainly not an easy task, nor is it without some danger to myself
and my family...I feel the risk is worth taking."
Claudia's therapist, Dr. Wolf, has written to the
president's committee,
"To the best of my knowledge, [Claudia] has read nothing
about mind-control or CIA covert operations. Since she decided to
listen carefully and remember as much as she could about conversations
among the researchers, her memories are
extraordinarily complete. I have sent written copies of
memories to Dr. Alan Scheflin [author of The Mind Manipulators]
for validation and he has confirmed that she has knowledge of
events and people that are not published anywhere, that some of
her memories contain new information and that some are already
known and published. Some of her memories have been confirmed
by family members. She has also shown me old scrapbooks where
she wrote notes to remember what was happening to her and hid
the notes under pictures in the scrapbook."
I spoke with Alan Scheflin in May of this year. He said
he had found one piece of information Claudia had mentioned in her
recollections that had no precedent in published material. It
involved a connection between two government researchers.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on the 130 pages of
testimony given before the President's Committee on Radiation, and it
is also just the beginning of a history that will undoubtedly widen in
the coming months and years. Dr. Wolf
told me that when word got around she was going to testify
before the president's committee, she was contacted by about 40
therapists "in just the 10 days leading up to my trip to
Washington." The therapists had heard similar CIA mind-control
stories from their own patients. Many of these professionals
are afraid to go on the record about their patients' stories, as
censure from their professional societies is a reality. The
political mood these days is not conducive to granting an aura
of credibility to revelations of CIA brainwashing.
So what else is new?
[Jon Rappoport is a distinguished investigative reporter
and the author of AIDS, INC. He can be found inhabiting the late
night airwaves of KPFK radio in Los Angeles and lecturing at the
Hardware Humanitarian House in Santa Monica, California.]
Notes:
1) See "From the Inside Out," Perceptions, March/April
1995, p.58
2) Paddington Press, New York, 1978
3) W.W. Norton, New York, 1979
4) Grove Press, New York, 1985
by Jon Rappoport
September/October 1995
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