The Paper's reporter Hu Zhenqing intern Liu Zhuting
In November 1953, in the early winter, one morning, before dawn broke, the sound of glass breaking suddenly came from the sky over Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, New York. A few seconds later, a man slammed heavily into the sidewalk, and the security guard at the door of the Statler Hotel was startled, and he turned and ran into the lobby of the hotel, shouting: "Someone has jumped off the building!" Someone jumped off the building! ”
At first, the police officers who rushed to the scene thought it was just another ordinary suicide by jumping off a building, but the identity of the deceased was unusual: frank Olsen, a military researcher who had worked on the MK-Ultra program, a top secret program of the U.S. government.
The British "Guardian" article pointed out that after about 20 years, the reasons behind Olsen's death gradually surfaced. The CIA admitted that shortly before Olson's death, his colleagues had unwittingly mixed LSD (short for lysergic acid diacetamide, a hallucinogen) into his drink, which was said to have caused Olson's major depressive episodes.
"Paranoid" starts the plan
In the early 1950s, the newly formed CIA spent $240,000 to procure LSD worldwide, and then distributed the hallucinogen to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and university research institutes through various well-established foundations in the United States and abroad to conduct research on the properties of LSD, how the body reacts after use, and whether it can be used for mind control.
The British "Independent" reported that the research on LSD was part of the CIA's secret "MK-Ultra" mind control program at the time, and that Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army base with a dark history of developing biological weapons, was the main front of the plan. Fort Detrick, located in a remote corner of Maryland, was selected by the U.S. Army as the Army's biological warfare laboratory during World War II, but with the successful development of nuclear weapons by the United States, the U.S. military's demand for biological and chemical weapons was no longer urgent, so the importance of Fort Detrick declined after the end of World War II.
However, with the outbreak of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, an incident attracted the attention of the CIA.
In the 1949 Hungarian government's public "trial show" of "treason" against the Catholic priestly cardinal (i.e., the cardinal) and the Archbishop of Eszgen, The Bishop appeared delirious and incoherent, and confessed to the false accusation.
The CIA's interpretation of the situation was that the bishop had been brainwashed. Although the CIA did not have any evidence to show this, the CIA, not to be left behind, launched its own mind control research program, MK-Ultra.
Rubert Cornwell, a former foreign correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, commented on the period during which MK-Ultra was implemented: "It was a period when the CIA was dominated by paranoia. By this time, the wave of anti-communism sparked by McCarthyism had reached its peak in the United States; abroad, countries of the socialist camp such as the Soviet Union were seen as a mortal threat, and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War had quietly descended.
Debourg's new mission
In this way, under the shadow of the Cold War and the domestic skepticism, Fort Detrick, which was originally a biological weapons laboratory, has since been given a new mission - to carry out mind control experiments.
In the spring of 1949, the U.S. Army created the Special Operations Division, a small, top-secret team of chemists tasked with exploring the military uses of toxic bacteria, according to politico, a political news site that reported on the U.S. political news site.
At the same time, the C.I.A.'s Technical Services Staff has set up its own team of chemical experts. Some CIA employees operating overseas often hunt suspected enemy agents in an attempt to seek new methods of torture — especially the use of psychotropic drugs to make interrogators lose their sense of self-identity, thereby inducing them to reveal other countries' state secrets, and even allowing the CIA to manipulate their minds and carry out actions against the original wishes of the interrogators.
Allen Dulles, who was promoted to CIA director in the early 1950s, was the head of the covert operations division. The CIA's mind control program was originally code-named "Bluebird," then "Artichoke," and finally designated "MK-Ultra" in 1953. The "MK" in this obscure code name indicates that the program was run by the CIA's Technical Services Staff, and the word "Ultra" was used to indicate the highest level of secrecy in intelligence categories before and after World War II.
In Dulles's view, these mind control experiments were crucial and even determined the survival of the United States. Shortly after taking office, he publicly stated at an alumni gathering at Princeton University: "The war with the Soviet Union over the idea of humanity has become incomparably sinister, and we in the West are too far behind in terms of 'brain wars.'" ”
In 1951, Dulles recruited the chemist Sidney Gottlieb to lead a team of chemists on the CIA's Technical Services Staff, overseeing the preparation of biochemical agents and conducting drug trials for mind control.
Because Gottlieb wanted to take Fort Detrick's previous expertise in biological weapons development to take the mind control program to a new level, he proposed to Dulles that the CIA and the military negotiate a formal cooperation agreement that would allow the CIA to use the Army's knowledge reserves, skills, and facilities to develop weapons for the intelligence agency.
After the two sides agreed, Gottlieb created a secret CIA base inside Fort Detrick, and several of his CIA chemists worked closely with the Army's Special Operations Division to advance the MK-Ultra program.
Crazy experiments of all kinds
After some preparation, the MK-Ultra program was launched in April 1953, with an experimental focus on LSD, and research into the hallucinogen subsequently spawned a number of MK-Ultra sub-projects aimed at developing a drug that would allow subjects to completely confess their intelligence or destroy their minds, and mold them into puppet agents.
LSD experiments were mainly on the mentally ill, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers — all "irresistible people," in the words of one CIA official. In one set of experiments, seven inmates in Lexington, Kentucky, were injected with an overdosing of LSD for 77 consecutive days. At the same time, some drug users were rewarded after participating in LSD experiments — more heroin , which was the opposite of the original intent of detaining them for drug rehabilitation.
In addition to the above-mentioned "irresistible people", even some CIA employees, soldiers, doctors, government personnel and even ordinary people have become "guinea pigs". The History.com American History Channel said that the reason why these people were also "brutally killed" was because Gottlieb believed that there was a deviation between the experimental test effect and the actual application effect, and he wanted to test the use of LSD in daily life situations.
It was because of Gottlieb's crazy thoughts that the CIA began to give subjects LSD without prior notice, which often caused subjects to suffer from adverse reactions when they were unprepared, such as a CIA agent who unknowingly drank a cup of coffee mixed with hallucinogens, and after the onset of the drug, he became insane, and every car driving through the streets of Washington, D.C., became a "monster" in his eyes.
Outside of LSD, another experiment in the MK-Ultra program is even crazier. The experimenters first injected barbiturates (a class of sedatives acting on the central nervous system) intravenously into one arm of the subject, and then injected amphetamines (amphetamines, a synthetic stimulant) into the other arm. Barbiturates work first, the subject will be drowsy, but just when he or she is about to close his eyes, amphetamines begin to work again, under the combined influence of the two drugs, the subject will become incoherent, and sometimes the researcher can also use this to ask the subject for the desired information.
While experimenting in the United States, the CIA is also aggressively promoting the MK-Ultra program outside the U.S. mainland. NNCR published an article pointing out that U.S. allies such as Japan, West Germany and the Philippines have secret CIA internment camps, and many of the prisoners held in them have become experimental targets for the program — in the eyes of the CIA, these people are "sacrificable" objects. In experiments against prisoners, in addition to using hallucinogens on them, the experimenters often inflicted other tortures on them, such as electric shocks and sensory deprivation.
In Canada, which borders the United States, the CIA hired British psychiatrist Donald Cameron to conduct experiments on the MK-Ultra program in Montreal. The American "Aeon" magazine pointed out that Cameron himself has an almost fanatical passion for technology, and he believes that the traditional psychological correction method is slow and ineffective, so he turned to a radical therapy called "mental drive". The therapy consists of two steps: first, "erasing" painful memories and pathological behaviors in the patient's mind through an electroconvulsive therapy that far exceeds normal power, and then looping a tape with a single message to the patient in an attempt to reshape the patient's psychology. When patients are in pain from endless repetitions, Cameron constrains them in all sorts of rude and strange ways.
However, contrary to his wishes, Cameron did not cure the subjects through "mental drive", and their condition did not improve, but often had severe amnesia symptoms and even recognized their families. The results were devastating.
In this regard, the American historian Alfred W. McCoy believes that "Cameron's experiment laid the scientific foundation for the two-stage psychological torture method adopted by the CIA in the future", which refers to the application of a state of insanity on the subject first, and then creating a "self-inflicted" discomfort, in which the overwhelmed subjects often choose to give in order to alleviate their pain.
Irreparable pain
Despite the endless and frantic experimentation of the MK-Ultra program in many places, the program has never achieved significant results, and the mental control that the CIA craves has been delayed. Gottlieb, who led the experiment, did his best to find a way to destroy the human spirit in order to implant new ideas into the human brain. However, after countless failures, Gottlieb had to admit that "it is difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way". The CIA's frantic experiment with mind control ultimately failed.
Because of this, the MK-Ultra program was budget-cut by the federal government in the mid-to-late '60s and eventually formally halted in 1973.
In late 1974, after the MK-Ultra program came to an end, the New York Times exposed the program's black material, which alleged that the CIA conducted human experiments on U.S. citizens in the 1960s without the subjects knowing it.
A New York Times report sparked national opinion, prompting Congress to establish the Church Committee in 1975 and appoint it to work with the Rockefeller Commission to investigate alleged abuses within the CIA, FBI, and the military within the MK-Ultra program.
With more and more material disclosed by the Church Committee, the MK-Ultra program has aroused widespread concern in the United States. However, official documents on the plan had long since been ordered to be destroyed in 1973 by then-C.I.A. Richard Helms, and the commission of inquiry had to look for clues to the heinous plan through testification from subjects and a handful of civilian records.
The Church Commission's investigation revealed that the CIA's mind control experiment clearly violated the Nuremberg Code (a set of international principles enacted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II to regulate human experimentation) that the United States promised to abide by after World War II, and countless innocent people suffered as a result. Among them, U.S. military researcher Frank Olson is the most widely known victim of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
The History.com website reported that in the early 1950s, olson was mentally tortured and suffered from depression after witnessing the drugs he participated in being used in various inhumane human trials, so he was depressed all day long, and finally had the idea of leaving.
In November 1953, Olsen received an invitation from Gottlieb to vacation to Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. What he could not have imagined was that during this vacation trip, he and several other colleagues had also become human subjects in Gottlieb, who secretly put LSD in their drinks.
More than a week later, Olson, returning from a vacation, fell to his death in New York. The Guardian said that although the federal government determined that Olson's death was a suicide or an accident, his family always believed that there was another reason: CIA personnel feared that Olson's departure would leak secrets about the MK-Ultra program in Fort Detrick, so they threw him out of the hotel window.
Olsen was the one who developed psychotropic drugs, but eventually died of psychotropic drugs. The victims of the MK-Ultra program were by no means alone, and the CIA's mind control experiments caused pain to countless people. Politico notes that these experiments have destroyed the minds of many people and led to uncountable deaths, and that many of the drugs, tablets and aerosols used on victims were developed by the laboratory in Fort Detrick, "The MK-Ultra program is the most terrible experiment the U.S. government has ever conducted on humans."
"Although the human spirit can be destroyed, we can never fill the void left by the destruction of the spirit." Gottlieb admitted after the plan failed.
Editor-in-Charge: Li Yiqing
Proofreader: Shi Gong