For those of you who think the CIA is too honorable to have cooperated with a smear campaign to unseat a duly elected president:
Ten Victims of MK Ultra
Here is a paragraph from the beginning of the list:
Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a source of inspiration in the counterculture movement, was first exposed to LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a part of the MKULTRA project while still a graduate student at Stanford University. He came to be involved in the study almost by accident, as a neighbor of Kesey’s—a psychologist—signed up for the project but had to back out at the last minute. An outstanding athlete and a straitlaced individual up to that point, Kesey had never done any sort of drug and had never even tasted alcohol. At the time of the experiments, Kesey was in training for the 1960 Olympics, as he had earned a place on the wrestling team as an alternate.
Despite Allen Ginsberg’s insistence, Kesey did not believe that the project was sponsored by the CIA, and not until decades later did Kesey discover the program’s true intent: “[The testing] wasn’t being done to try to cure insane people, which is what we thought. It was being done to try to make people insane—to weaken people, and to be able to put them under the control of interrogators.”
It makes for fascinating, if grim, reading. Read the whole thing.
As an additional grace note to emphasize the unwisdom of thinking the ends justify the means, let me provide a link to identify the where the science was coming from:
What was Operation Paperclip
[In] Operation Paperclip, roughly 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War. The program … goal was to harness German intellectual resources to help develop America’s arsenal of rockets and other biological and chemical weapons, and to ensure such coveted information did not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. Although he officially sanctioned the operation,
President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.
Again, this review of a history book appears on the CIA’s website.
Operation Paperclip
In 1949, the CIA created the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Its first director, Dr. Willard Machle, traveled to Germany to set up a special program to interrogate Soviet spies. The CIA believed the Russians had developed mind-control programs and wanted to know how US spies would hold up against this capability if caught. He also aimed to explore the feasibility of creating a “Manchurian candidate” through behavioral modification. Thus, Operation Bluebird was born.
Bluebird, later called MKULTRA, was a research activity experimenting in behavioral engineering of humans. The Nuremberg Code prohibits experimentation with humans without their consent. During this program, Dr. Frank Olson, a US Army biological weapons researcher, was given the drug LSD without his knowledge, leading to his death by leaping from a building. DCI Richard Helms ordered much of the documentation destroyed, and the circumstances of his demise remain controversial to this day.
So our intelligence community was employing Nazi scientist war criminals to give LSD and other mind altering drugs to unsuspecting civilians, criminals, and servicemen.
Allow me to add an apt quote by CS Lewis:
The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.
— C.S.Lewis, THE ABOLITION OF MAN
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
September 21, 2019 @ 12:53 am
