"Brainwashing", drugging... The CIA used hundreds of children to conduct experiments that shocked the world

In the pain, there is no compensation, and there is no waiting to apologize.

| Author: Zheng Aotian Yu Bing

| Editor: Yu Bing

| Editor: Su Rui Lingyun

"We are made of memories, and memories are made of forgetting."

If people one day find out that their memories can be tampered with by others, do they still believe that "you" is "you"?

This is not the setting of a science fiction horror novel, but an experiment that the CIA tried to complete 70 years ago.

On December 27, 2021, a documentary called "Finding Yourself" aired in Denmark, systematically exposing the "mind control" experiments that the CIA had been conducting on 311 Danish children code-named "MK Ultra" under the pretext of "medical experiments" since the 1950s.

People were shocked to find that the "mind control" that appeared in science fiction movies was used by Americans in real life...

Kids in electric chairs

"They [the experimenters] rudely attached wires to our legs, arms, and chests, and then put headphones on us, and my ears were filled with some kind of sharp and noisy noise, which was very uncomfortable."

More than 50 years later, Pol Winnick, 74, still remembers what happened.

Winnick grew up in an orphanage in Copenhagen. In 1960, several strangers came to the orphanage and asked Vinnick, then 11, if he would like to go to the city's hospital to "do something fun." ”

"Life in the orphanage is too boring, not to mention that the people also promised to give us 16 crowns (equivalent to 160 crowns now, about 122 yuan) as payment." A few of my friends and I immediately agreed. Winnick said regretfully. We had no idea what would happen later. ”

In the days that followed, Winnick and his companions were forcibly tied to electric chairs, listening only to noise, screams, and uncomfortable word interference. The "doctor" on the side ignored the children in pain and just recorded the children's reactions.

After the experiment, Winnick returned to the orphanage. His life was completely changed, and he began to have frequent amnesia and was extremely sensitive to sound. At night, he was often startled by subtle sounds, symptoms that did not subside until Winnick entered middle age.

Winnick had long suspected that his childhood experience had hurt him, and had repeatedly asked the hospital to explain the experiments, but no one paid any attention to him.

In 2018, at the age of nearly 70, Winnick decided to find out the truth about the experiment. In the years that followed, he and his team found 311 Danes who had participated in the "experiment," many of whom were orphans.

Meanwhile, as Denmark's secret Documents from the Cold War were declassified, those "experiments" finally came to light.

It turned out that the experiment that Winnick and others participated in was the "MK Ultra" (brain control experiment) program in the United States. Americans want to understand the formation and development of schizophrenia through these human experiments. The program, which has received funding from a number of U.S. medical institutions, received about 300,000 to 400,000 crowns of funding in its first year alone, which is equivalent to 4.6 million crowns (about 3.2 million yuan) today. In addition, a foundation operated behind the CIA has also provided significant funding for the "MK Ultra" program.

According to the danish experimental records, in addition to the "noise stimulation experiment" described by Winnick, each child will also be asked to force answer a "psychological questionnaire" with violent and bloody tendencies. The questionnaire was originally used to check whether there were nazi-leaning soldiers within the U.S. military.

Eventually, based on the materials of these survey visits, Winnick launched the documentary "Finding Myself" in 2021 to personally tell this heinous history. But because a large amount of experimental data has long been destroyed by the hospital, Winnick is unable to determine how many Danish children have fallen victim to the "MK Ultra" program.

In fact, the exposed human experiments in children are just the tip of the iceberg of the "MK Ultra" program. To strip away the experiment, we have to start with the mysterious death of a scholar.

At 2 a.m. on November 28, 1953, Manhattan Island in New York was lit up like daylight. On the 10th floor of new York's most luxurious Pennsylvania Hotel, a middle-aged man wearing only his underwear jumped from his balcony and fell to his death.

The man, Frank Olson, was a young and promising biologist at the age of 43. The police have always questioned when handling the case, why did Olsen, who was at the peak of his career and happy family, suddenly seek death? After a long investigation, the police could not find a clue, and they could only tell the family of the deceased that Olsen may have suffered a "nervous breakdown" before his death.

By 1975, a committee investigating the actions of the CIA, led by then-Vice President John Rockefeller, found that Olson had been injected with psychotropic drugs by CIA personnel before his death. When Olson's family learned of this, they had to file a lawsuit against the CIA, and in order to calm things down, President Ford received Olson's family and paid a huge amount of compensation, but only if they did not mention the "MK Ultra" program.

In this way, olsen's cause of death was buried. It was not until 2019, when the British "Guardian" first published an in-depth report on "Olsen's death", that people learned the secret behind his death.

In 1944, Olson, who had retired from the U.S. Army, entered the infamous Fort Detrick to work on atmospheric biology. It is the largest biological weapons research and development center of the US military. In 1950, he was involved in operations code-named "Ocean Droplets" to test the effects of germ warfare on cities.

At that time, the U.S. military released pathogen mist near the coast of San Francisco for many consecutive days, resulting in a significant increase in pneumonia cases in the city, and many people suffered from very rare serious urinary tract infections.

After Operation Ocean Droplet, Olsen quickly became a biological warfare expert at Fort Detrick. But in front of his family, he never revealed the contents of his work, saying only that he was a scientist working for the U.S. government.

In early 1953, Olson was recruited by the CIA to join the MK Ultra program. The person in charge of the experiment was the American chemist Gottlieb, known as the CIA's "chief poisoner".

Soon after working with Gottlieb, Olson discovered that he was engaged in an extremely dangerous experiment. Gottlieb argues that simply injecting a sufficient dose of a powerful psychotropic drug into the human body can destroy that person's mind and memory and cause it to collapse.

The CIA was convinced of Gottlieb's views and believed that the experiment would be of great use if successful, not only to control human thought, train spies and defend against reconnaissance by other countries, but also as a means of torture to obtain intelligence.

In the CIA's "MK Ultra" lab, Olson watches innocent people become experimental objects every day, with mountains of monkey carcasses piling up in the corners. In the "black jail" of West Germany, he saw American agents skillfully using drugs and torture devices, destroying the prisoner's will little by little.

These inhuman experiments finally broke through Olsen's psychological defenses, and he was on the verge of collapse and wrote his resignation.

What Olson didn't know was that he was also a CIA surveillance target. They quickly made the decision that Olsen "knew too much" and was no longer qualified to return to a normal life.

One night, Gottlieb organized a Thanksgiving party where CIA agents poured new hallucinogens into Olson's drink. After 5 days, the drug attacked, olsen began to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and did not remember his wife and children.

Upon learning of Olson's condition, the distraught Gottlieb asked agents to send him to the lab for further research. Eventually, Olson, under the effects of hallucinogens, jumped off a building and died, dying at the hands of his own people.

To keep the MK Ultra program running smoothly, the CIA has conducted many creepy and evil experiments.

American journalist Steven Kinzer has long studied the "MK Ultra" program and is the author of the book "Chief Poisoner: Gottlieb and the CIA Seek Mind Control."

During World War II, the German Nazis experimented with the hallucinogen Maxkalin at Dachau, one of its three central concentration camps, and after the war, the CIA hired Nazi doctors to go to Fort Detrick to teach CIA officials about sarin gas to understand how long it would take for sarin gas to kill. Kinzer also said that the CIA also recruited Unit 731 war criminals who had committed heinous crimes in China to do research at Fort Detrick, "'MK Ultra' is essentially a continuation of the work of Japanese and Nazi concentration camps." ”

To avoid criminal prosecution for the failure of the experiment, the CIA has also set up secret detention centers overseas, where it conducts more extreme experiments.

Most of these bases are located in Germany, Japan, the Philippines and other countries, and local CIA officials can directly send enemy agents or suspects to secret detention centers and torture them with various experiments, trying to make them completely mentally broken, even to a lethal level.

The Washington Post reported that in 1954 the CIA sent a small detachment overseas to conduct experiments on individuals who could "represent communist countries."

However, the multimillion-dollar MK Ultra program was not as successful, and arguably rather a failure, as the CIA envisioned. Some of the subjects had amnesia, some had become vegetative, and even if someone confessed, the veracity of their testimony could not be verified.

After the Olsen incident, the "MK Ultra" program was almost exposed, and the CIA immediately destroyed relevant documents and experimental records. In follow-up investigations, some CIA staff claimed that they had "no memory" of the program and had not been punished in any way.

Evidence can be destroyed, but the damage the CIA has done to these people is never recoverable. The victims can only live in the pain of the past, without compensation, and cannot wait to apologize.

On January 18, a reporter asked Zhao Lijian at a regular press conference of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: "The Danish documentary "Finding Yourself" has aroused the attention of all parties. The children were never told the specific purpose of the experiment. What is China's comment on this? ”

Zhao Lijian said: "As former US Secretary of State Pompeo said, US CIA officials take 'lying, cheating, and stealing' as their 'creed', and are keen to concoct 'black evidence' to slander other countries, set up 'black jails' to violate human rights, and provide 'black money' to incite coups." The US government often talks about the so-called "human rights" and "democracy", but always says one thing and does one thing. What the U.S. government should do is apologize, compensate, and hold accountable the victims of these secret human experiments. ”