![]() ![]() (Credit: Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)īulger claimed he had been injected with LSD. ![]() Gangster James "Whitey" Bulger's 1959 mugshot. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. Three days after his speech decrying Soviet tactics, Dulles approved the beginning of MK-Ultra, a top-secret CIA program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials.” “American values” made for good rhetoric, but Dulles had far grander plans for the agency’s Cold War agenda. How did a secret government mind control program inadvertently fuel the use of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s? MK-Ultra Why else would so many countries be embracing such an obviously backward ideology? American freedom of the mind versus Soviet “mind control” became a dividing line as stark as the Iron Curtain. ![]() The idea of brainwashing also provided many Americans with a compelling, almost comforting, explanation for communism’s swift rise–that Soviets used the tools of brainwashing not just on enemy combatants, but on their own people. The paranoia began to drift into American culture, with books like The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Lunch playing on themes of unhinged scientists and vast political conspiracies. Western Psychiatry” offered sensational accounts of new mind-control techniques and technologies that no man could fully resist. Newspaper headlines like “New Evils Seen in Brainwashing” and “Brainwashing vs. ![]() (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)įear of brainwashing and a new breed of “brain warfare” terrified and fascinated the American public throughout the 1950s, spurred both by the words of the CIA and the stories of “brainwashed” G.I.’s returning from China, Korea, and the Soviet Union. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values.Īllen W.Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency at an executive session of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”ĭulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective, but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees. WATCH: Full episodes of America's Book of Secrets online now.ĭulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran. Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all. Some GI’s were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists–a charge the U.S. ![]()
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