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Mission Mind Control

Oct 12, 20231 hr
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Episode description

Dive into the world of government intrigue and the mind-bending experiments of the mid-20th century with "Mission Mind Control." Authored by Walter H. Bowart in 1978, this groundbreaking book delves into the eerie rumors and alleged cover-ups surrounding the CIA and other government agencies' mind control experiments. From hypnosis and drug-induced tactics to mind-altering methods, Bowart uncovers the dark secrets behind these covert operations. Join us as we unravel the mysteries of a shadowy past, revealing the enigmatic world of mind control experiments and their far-reaching implications.

Transcript

This is the story of a 30 year search by U.S. intelligence agencies to perfect mind control. Some of those engaged in that search have agreed to talk about it for the first time, one said. I think every last one of us felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing. We knew we were crossing the line. The search would be endless, from brothels, an agent says.

We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom, to the mystical rites of a magical mushroom ceremony performed by an Indian shaman to a Spanish bull. Ray the bull has had electrodes implanted in the brain and is controlled by a scientist. There would be victims. One intelligence agency tried to peel this man's mind back to reveal its deepest secrets lived. Through it, I lived through it. This man worked on some of these programs. He would write of his work.

It was fun, fun, fun. This is the story of the search for mind control. A BC News close up Mission Mind Control with a BC News correspondent, Paul Altmeyer. Mark It's been ages. Can I buy? Allow me two Michelob lights. Michelob makes a light beer. A good taste of Michelob Light. Don't just compare it to other light beers. Compare it to your regular beer. It's that good. You always did go first class. Your ticket to San Francisco. Thank you, Francisco.

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We are not professing to tell you the complete story of these activities. We are professing to tell you the complete story that we know. But these records that we've uncovered don't tell the story. They tell pieces of it. This is a story that has been told in bits and pieces. This is an attempt to pull most of it together. We know we don't have the full story. We do, however, have some striking new revelations and

insights. The story begins here, just off the nation's front yard, the Mall. The buildings behind me were the headquarters for the World War 2 Office of Strategic Services. It was here that the first halting steps toward mind control began. The shaper and molder of OSS was General Wild Bill Donovan, he said of his group's work. We may have made mistakes, but we were not afraid to try things that were never done before.

In this Anything goes atmosphere, Donovan appointed this man, Stanley Lovell, a Boston industrialist, to break new ground in many scientific and technical fields. Donovan Cole level his doctor Moriarty after the fiendish professor in Sherlock Holmes. Lovell liked the name and posed for this Saturday Evening Post photo.

He later wrote of his OSS job that it was quote, to stimulate the peck's bad boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him throw all of your normal law abiding concepts out of the window, here's a chance to raise merry hell. It was in this atmosphere that the search for mind control began. This bizarre man would be an active participant in that search over the next two decades.

His name is George White, an 0 s s captain who had formerly been with the Bureau of Narcotics. In his Diaries, seen here publicly for the first time, White left a legacy of the darker side of American intelligence work. He received his early OSS training at the British run school at Oshawa, Canada, the same school where Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was trained.

White referred to the school in his Diaries as the Oshawa School of Mayhem and Murder, Mike Burke, former OSS colleague of Whites and now president of Madison Square Garden Center. Compelling fellow A mysterious fellow, almost mystical fellow. He was fascinating because you didn't. You knew something about him and not not enough about him to

really get a fix on him. He also knew a great deal about the swifter elements of society, the gamier side of life and and he was very impressive in his technical knowledge of of the underworld, so to speak. He said one of one of our men gets beat up. He says you have to act real fast. And teach these guys a lesson. Charles Saragusa, a former narcotics officer and friend of White's. He's all come around, he says, and break in kneecaps. And with that, one guy laughed.

And George, well, was that little little Billy with him and this one guy sort of naked George White trained on and wiped him across the neck with it. Then he picked up a pool steak and start beating everybody up. He made his point. And he made his point. George White was not a man of understatement or subtleties. His boss at OSS Stanley Level referred to him as deadly and

dedicated. In this note from White's Diaries, it says call level regarding TDTD was a rather transparent cover for Truth Drug. George White worked with the Truth Drug Committee here at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in the nation's capital. They experimented with mescaline, scapalamine and marijuana on unwitting victims. The committee soon learned there was no easy panacea, no truth drug at this stage. But White and later colleagues would not stop trying.

The goal remained the same as this 1952 CIA memo says. The aim is controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self preservation. But it was a discovery here in Basel, Switzerland, at Sandoz Laboratories by doctor Albert Hoffman that led the intelligence agencies of America to believe that they had found the panacea. The discovery was lysergic acid

diethalamine LSD. The film that you see is considered by many experts to be the closest illustration of the effects of a hallucinogenic. It was one of the first times that anybody had run into a powerful drug that was different than anything else that they knew anything about. John Gittinger, recently retired chief psychologist for the CIA. This is the first time Getting her has been interviewed publicly. We could disable the whole city by putting a very small amount on a water supply.

After all of these years of us, those of us who involved and then looking for this secret drug, this was the only thing that began to look for the first time, like it might be something like that. The CIA's interest in LSD was intense. The worry was that the Russians would get hold of it were the Soviets into LSDI. Going to have to say, I'm sure they were, but if you asked me to prove it, I I've never seen any direct proof of it.

But at one point, intelligence information received from Switzerland said that Sandoz Laboratories was about to put 100 million doses of LSD on the open market and it caused enough concern within the agency that the United States was prepared to buy the entire supply. However, a slight mistake had been made. The mistake is made public for the first time. I just found out by the new CIA document that there were no such large quantities of LSD on the

market. John Marks has filed numerous Freedom of Information suits against the CIA and has on earth much new material. He is the author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a history of intelligence agency work with mind control. He is a consultant for this report. What happened is that there was a military attache in Switzerland, an American officer, who got milligrams and kilograms mixed up.

In other words, he made a mistake of thinking one one thousandth of a gram was the same as 1000 grams, which is a mistake of a million times. So when the CIA got the intelligence that there were 100 million doses on the market, in fact, there were 100 doses. The man who would oversee the CI A's research into drugs and most of the agency's behavior programs is this man, Doctor Sidney Gottlieb, A chemist.

Dr. Gottlieb declined a BC News request for an interview in their never ending search for the miracle weapons. CIA operative searched here in the remote mountain areas of southern Mexico for what up to then had been considered a myth. Magic mushrooms. They use this man, a part time chemist with the CIA to do this man, a vice president of a bank and an amateur mycologist or mushroom expert, to try to get to the magic mushrooms and turn them into a drug.

But it would be the amateur, our Gordon Wasson and his colleagues, who would win the race and develop the drug psilocybin from the magic mushrooms. We went into the Mazitek area, far from the highways, remote from Mexico City. There we found that rotten bagasses. It's called Bagasso, covered with mushrooms. These mushrooms I didn't know, did, never, had never seen. They were the sacred mushrooms.

Lawson would also discover and record the ancient mystical rites of the mushrooms from a local shaman or magical priestess, Maria Sabina. And we were seeing incredible sights. They would go slowly or they would go fast. As I ordained, all your senses are rendered acute. Did we say that you see visions, You see hallucinations, but that that doesn't begin to tell the story. The hallucinations are only part of it. You hear sounds, You smell things. The the the night was thrilling.

Word of Lawson's discovery reached the CIA quickly. Doctor James Moore, a University of Delaware chemist, secretly served the CIA preparing deadly chemicals on short notice. Moore was instructed to get close to us and and accompany him on another trip to Mexico to get the magic mushrooms. Internal documents show the CIA felt a drug derived from the mushrooms could remain an agency secret. What in the world were they looking for with the magic mushrooms? I think the best answer to that

is that they were looking for. Fundamental information on compounds that were would be capable of causing changes in in behavior, changes in mental attitude. Did you ever consider what would have happened if any of these substances were given to, say, unwitting people? Oh, I don't remember having considered that specifically. I What if you? I trust perhaps you've thought about it? Well, I haven't worried about it. I you what your question again.

What would I have thought had I known that the, the any of these substances would have been given to unwitting persons? You mean a a hostile agent and then of another government? No, I mean that. Was probably, I mean, testing it out on an American citizen. I I guess I must seem very very coldblooded about this, but I don't recall ever having been very much. Preoccupied with that with that issue, but many drugs were tested in this way.

A decision was made at the highest levels of the CIA to do testing on unwitting Americans. As one CIA document says, such testing would be operationally realistic. A former CIA official who worked on these programs describes for the first time how the decision was made. He did not wish to be filmed or recorded, thus his remarks are read by someone else. I think every last one of us felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing. We knew we were crossing the line.

Every decent kid knows he shouldn't steal, but he does it sometimes. We knew damn well we didn't want anyone else to know what we were doing. The decision was made to do testing on unwitting victims. It was decided they should be on the fringes of society because they were most vulnerable. It was the borderline

underworld. Prostitutes, drug addicts and other small timers would be powerless to seek any kind of revenge in case they found out and as their predecessors had a decade earlier, the CIA turned to George White for help. White was now a high-ranking narcotics official and by this time the stories about George White were legendary. So the way this says you might help you, Monsieur.

And George White was busy talking with me, paid no attention to waiters, So the way to tap them on his shoulders is so you might help you, Monsieur. George White turned around, whipped his gun out, and stuck it in the guy's face like this. In this crowded restaurant. George White did not mind bending the law, and he knew the street well. He was the ideal choice for what the CIA had in mind. We were Ivy League white middle class. We were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty

expert. He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs. White set up socalled safe houses for the CIA in New York, here in Greenwich Village and later in San Francisco in this hotel and in an apartment, a top Telegraph hill with a commanding view of San Francisco Bay. While the existence of these safe houses was disclosed last year, details of what took place

within them has not been told. A former CIA official who worked in the safe houses reveals that they were used not only for drug testing, but to study sexual behavior and how it could be used to manipulate people. We did quite a study of prostitutes in their behavior. How do you take a woman who is willing to use her body to get money out of a guy, to get him to talk about things which are much more important, like state secrets? We learned a lot about human

nature in the bedroom. We started to pick up knowledge that could be used in operations. There would be victims in all of this, but as the agency knew, they couldn't fight back. Some entries from George White's Diaries. Clarice gets horrors. Janet Sky high. As one agency memo says, we have no answer to the moral question. The safe houses were not the

only testing rounds. Millions of dollars would be spent on LSD research at universities throughout the country, and word would begin to spread on campus about this socalled mindblowing drug. Suddenly, there was the counterculture of the 60s. I give the CIAA total credit for sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement counterculture events of the 1960s. Doctor Timothy Leary. The 1960s Johnny Appleseed of

LSD. The CIA funded and supported and encouraged hundreds of young psychiatrists to experiment with this drug. The fallout from that was that the young psychologists began taking it themselves, discovering that it was an intelligence enhancing, consciousness raising experience. I know that some of the studies in which the CIA had supported used as subjects people who later became.

Strong proselytizes of LSD. So we know in that sense, yes, I think it did sustain the the perpetuation of the of the use of the drug and it's rather ironic, isn't it? The counter case that I would make in relationship to that is that remember that the people who were doing the research were people who would be doing the research regardless.

Of who was a sponsor, I don't. I don't think anybody working and then that time in the remotest ever thought that it would blow up into the kind of thing that it did. History will judge the role of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in unwittingly contributing to the counterculture of the 60s through their intense interest in LSD and other hallucinogenics. But for the moment at least, the argument can be made that the CIA helped usher in the Age of Aquarius.

A BC news close up will continue in a moment. Being careful about my body doesn't just mean major things like regular breast exams. I'm even careful about pain relievers. Plain aspirin sometimes upset my stomach, so I use Bufferin. It adds protection. I'm careful about what goes into my body. Bufferin gives me an added relief action. I want Tylenol doesn't. Only one leading tablet has

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that grease clog. I'm switching to Drano and they clogs go better use Drano. Saturday live on a BC The Forest Hills spends Invitational from the legendary West Side Tennis Club, then live third round coverage of the most prestigious ladies coffee bet. Palace Stacy goes for her third straight US Women's Open title and Red hot Nancy Lopez shoots for her elusive first Open victory.

And on a B C's Wide World of Sports rodeo excitement from the Wild West, plus high speeds, high thrills, hydroplane, Action Championship, tennis, golf and a B C's Wide World of Sports Saturday Wednesday on 8 is enough. We got the buggy fever. The Bradford girls go disco crazy. Hey, Hiya Hun. What do you say we get and the summer's off to a red hot start and Charlie's Angels play the horses? I want to be a Jackie but end up in a dead heat with death.

Then the ghost of Jack the Ripper haunts the backstreets of Vegas tomorrow, starting at 87 Central and Mountain on a BC. Covering a span of history such as we are in this report, one can get sidetracked by the socalled glamour and mystery of espionage work, or by the exotic qualities of some drugs. But what you can't lose sight of is what all of this would mean in terms of individual human beings. There would be deaths. It would be long lasting and

harmful effects. The best known case is that of this man, Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the Army Chemical Corps, who in 1953 was slipped LSD unknowingly at a meeting with CIA officials. Shortly after that, Olson went into severe depression. He ended his life at this New York hotel by diving through a shaded, closed window in his 10th floor room. Frank Olson was the first known fatality in the CIA's LSD program.

Olson left behind a widow, Alice, and three children, but it would be years before they learn the real story of his death. Shortly after his suicide, Alice Olson was visited by doctor Sidney Gutley, the man who had administered the drug, and by Robert Lashbrook, his deputy, who was the last person with Frank Olson the night of his

death. It was probably to check me out and see whether I was handling myself and handling the situation, whether I was hysterical and I'm sure they left the house feeling ever so much better because I had been gracious and hospitable to them, so that I must have played right into their hand and made them feel fine. 23 years later, did you? How did you feel about that meeting? My anger was unbelievable at how I had been duped for this length of time and the anguish which

was unnecessary. Anyone who knew during all of those years never told Alice Olson the real story of her husband's death. She would discover it by accident more than two decades later. In essence, it was a 22 year long cover up. Lyman Kirkpatrick was Inspector General of the CIA at the time of Frank Olson's death. But had not the Olsen case occurred within the secret confines of the CIA, would not this case have been a prosecutable case?

Perhaps many, I would think very definitely prosecutable, and certainly from the point of view of the of Mr. Olsen, why it should probably have been actionable. Frank Olsen suicide slowed down the CI A's testing of LSD and other drugs, but only momentarily. The CIA was not the only government agency interested in the possibilities LSD and other drugs presented for mind control. The Army Chemical Corps first started working with the CIA and then branched off on its own.

It, too, tested drugs on unwitting victims, and a death would result. The case of this man, Harold Blauer, a tennis pro seen here with his daughter Elizabeth, is well known. In 1953, Blauer was a private patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was given 5 injections of a mescaline derivative that was being tested secretly for the Army Chemical Corps. With the 5th injection, Harold Blauer died.

As with the Olson case, a 22 year cover up followed until finally the army admitted the real details of Blauer's death since the initial news stories of Harold Blauer's death close to 5000 documents. Previously classified have been released by the Army and obtained by a BC News.

They provide valuable insight into Army activities at the time of Blower's death and where the Army went from there with their own drug testing program from a previously classified deposition of Doctor James Cattell, who administered the mesculine derivative on the purpose of the drug testing to produce symptoms similar to those that you see in schizophrenia. On how much the patient knew about all this.

We didn't delineate all the possibilities of what might happen, because then you contaminate your experiment. Cattell then relates that he never even knew what drug he had given Harold Blauer. Because of the secrecy of the Army experiments, we didn't know whether it was dog piss. This was secret. This was a secret. We weren't in on it. We asked Blower's daughter Elizabeth for her reaction. How can anybody react to that?

I mean, it is so far from from what you'd expect from a human being, never mind a doctor, never mind a professional specialist who's supposed to care about people's minds. It's it's unbelievable. A suit filed by Elizabeth Barrett against the Army Chemical Corps is now pending in federal court. Other army experiments continued on mental patients around the country. The work done at the Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans involves several drugs, hallucinogenics and electrodes

implanted in the brain. The chief researcher was Doctor Russell Monroe, now head of the Psychiatry department at the University of Maryland. These are various progress reports written by Doctor Monroe and recently obtained by a BC News from one of the progress reports. A report of a woman who had electrodes implanted in the brain and was then given LSD and other drugs. She became agitated, cried, lapsed into a trance like state. Tell us if she were about to have a convulsion.

Experienced waves of darkness and light, had bizarre sensations in her neck and legs. Said somebody was trying to manipulate her body. At this point, Dr. Monroe wrote that the woman was obviously having paranoid ideas. As a as a layperson, perhaps you can enlighten me. What therapeutic effect would the type of experiment that I just described have on a patient? Well, the therapeutic effect would be indirect. Was this patient aware that she was being given LSD?

Yes. I mean they they were told that they would be given some medications and they. Specifically, LSD. Well, we told them I don't think that they would have even known what LSD was. Then, at the time they were told that they were going to give, they would be given some medications, which might make them feel worse. Doctor Manuel, what? What do you think the Army Chemical Corps was looking for

in all of this testing? They were looking for an incapacitating agent, an agent that would not harm the person permanently, but would incapacitate them temporarily. That seemed like a a humanistic way to to wage a war, if war is necessary. When James Thornwell was given LSD by Army intelligence in 1961, this time it was no experiment. This time the express purpose was to peel back Thornwell's brain to bear any secret within it. This time the Army had gone

operational. Thornwell, as reported on a BC last January, was an Army private station in Orleans, France. Classified documents were missing from his unit. Thornwell became a suspect. His 2 1/2 month interrogation included administration of sodium penathol, hypnosis, isolation. And deprivation of sleep. Army documents obtained by a BC News refer to this interrogation as conventional.

Despite the severe questioning, Army intelligence was getting nowhere with Thornwell and it was decided to slip in LSD for 16 years. Thornwell never knew what had hit him. Tell me about the acid. I'd rather not. It's a bad trip. It's a bad trip. That was a bad trip. The pain was so excruciating. Felt like somebody was sticking me with a million pins, You know, just everywhere. Just you want. To start for me, I walked around. Oh, I can talk. Live through it. I lived through it.

I lived through. It no charges were ever brought by the Army against Thornwell, he was discharged for psychological disorders. But an Army psychiatric evaluation of Thornwell, obtained by a BC News, one which was done prior to Thornwell having been given LSD, says of them fairly cooperative, oriented, alert and gave no evidence of psychosis or depression. From the Army's point of view, this type of LSD interrogation

was a success. Other documents refer to the exploitability of interrogation subjects, cracking them, keeping them off balance mentally. And providing an economical, speedy and productive aid to interrogation. From James Thornwell's point of view, it was no success. Thornwell still has serious problems. He's run through two marriages, he maintains. He can't hold a job, can't concentrate, has nightmares and feels socially and emotionally isolated.

Last fall, Thornwell filed suit against the government in federal court. In a moment, we will examine the closest experimentation to brainwashing that we have uncovered. Oh, for crying out loud, something wrong? Will you pick up a paper? These days, you learn life isn't as simple as it used to be and neither's food. Is that why you eat grape nut cereal? Yep. You couldn't ask for a simpler cereal. Wheat and barley. Vitamins added, no preservatives. Sure.

Looks simple. It's got a natural nutty taste. What's good for breakfast, guys? How about something nice and simple? Grape Nuts. The simple cereal. Maxwell House is coffee. You can count on Maxwell House. Good to the last drop, but every time. Good coffee. Maxwell House coffee you can count on. Always smells good. Always tastes good. Always good to the last drop. Good news. A BC news close up will continue.

In a moment special baseball the Yankees take on the Angels Friday night on a BC. This is a heavy duty stickup and this is a good place for it. New heavy duty stickups from Airwick for small places with big odors.

This is David Shumacher in the news At this hour district police have charged a young northeast woman with the weekend kidnapping of that day old baby so as to say the woman was a pregnant and afraid she lost her own child in the accident and that's what motivated the kidnapping twas the night before Skylab and we'll have the latest on its fate and ours. Testimony before Congress today on battered wives Some of the

victims are battered wives. A rock'n'roll star put on probation for income tax evasion. The condition is he must put on 1000 hours of concerts for charities and we'll be talking with the local. Major, who won a gold medal at the Pan Am Games. Join us at 11 for the sun Sunshine. For the sun sunshine. Nothing else tastes or feels quite like Mountain Dew, or goes down as smooth like a soft

breeze on a lazy afternoon. By far the most chilling experiments we have uncovered took place at this gothic estate called Ravens Crag, halfway up Mount Royal in Montreal. It houses the Allen Memorial Institute of Psychiatry of McGill University. It was here that the CIA funded a series of experiments, severe experiments. The work was done by the institute's then director, Doctor Ewan Cameron. It is the closest experimentation to brainwashing yet disclosed.

His work, unprecedented in psychiatry, consisted of three areas, which he called sleep therapy, psychic driving and the ultimate. Deep patterning Dr. Maurice Dolgier, current head of the Allen Memorial Institute, in his psychic driving, so-called type of of therapy, he would give the patient intensive electric treatment in order to make the patient to regress deeply, become forgetful and then he would attempt to implant new ideas in the mind of a patient.

Now, to a layman, it would appear that Doctor Cameron was trying to take the slate and wipe it clean, The slate being the mind. In other words, brainwashing. Exactly. That's a very good comparison. Brainwashing, Yes. Val Orlico of Winnipeg, Canada, the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, was a patient of Doctor Cameron's. She entered the Allen Memorial Institute because of severe depression.

She describes for the first time publicly the LSD therapy and psychic driving treatment that she was given by Doctor Cameron. And then the drug began to take hold very rapidly because it was an IV injection and things became very furry and very frightening and had a lot of sensations that it's very difficult to recall. Nobody explained it to me, Nobody ever asked me if I was willing to do it or anything.

He had this feeling that he would be able to get through the resistance of illness and and and to reach deep changes very quickly. Did he? I don't think that when you look at that in retrospect, the hopes that he had had been, has have been in any way fulfilled. But Cameron would plunge on. The next step was what he called psychic driving. This involved almost endless tape, recorded messages and more drugs for the patient. Cameron wrote that this was the way to make direct control

changes in personality. I thought this was the coldest and most impersonal treatment that anybody could give to anybody in the world. And I became more and more despondent and more and more angry. I just became so despondent that I thought, I can't, I can't live like this any longer. And I thought I would just go out and throw myself underneath the cars on McGregor. I stood on the curb of that street and and I stood there and I thought, OK, go, OK, go. And then I thought, what if

you're not killed? What if you're just mean? What if you don't die and you live and you can't even talk anymore? And I couldn't do it. The most severe technique Cameron used was deep patterning. He described it as breaking up the existing patterns of behavior by means of intensive electroshock therapy with prolonged periods of sleep. He carried out these experiments and something he called the sleep rooms. People in there were like

babies. They cried and they were very disoriented and we were very afraid of the sleep room. We used to walk very carefully against the side of the corridor that was opposite the sleep room with our backs to the wall when we go by. Cameron used this combined sleep electroshock treatment on patients as long as 30 days. One patient he kept asleep for 65 days.

Cameron retired, and his successor, Doctor Robert Clayhorn, ordered a follow up study on the patients treated with Cameron's deep patterning method. It showed that it was no more beneficial in its result than the use of more conservative methods. But the follow up study showed that 60% of those who have been deep pattern still had amnesia for periods of anywhere from six months to 10 years. That's quite a memory loss, isn't it? That is a memory loss.

Indeed it is. It's more, I think, more than desirable. In retrospect, does Doctor Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh? I would say yes. This forceful type of approach that I was describing to you is definitely it can be said that it's harsh. I wouldn't call it harsh.

I would say it was harder on the staff than it was on the patients because these people had to be fed and they had to be cared for and they had to be given sufficient fluid and food and toileted and so on and so forth. It was a a very difficult thing for the staff to to to follow these patients properly and see that they they did well.

Well I'm glad he was concerned for the staff but damn it all I I wouldn't I I I could have maybe had a different kind of life and that makes me angry and sad and I don't know what how to explain how I feel really. I just. I just. How did you feel when you learned that Doctor Cameron's experimentation was financed by the CIA? Well, I thought, oh, I can't even use the word that I thought because I thought that bastard and he was too smart. He knew.

He knew who he was working for. And excuse me, but I just you know. I just can't. Sometimes I can't believe it, and yet I know it's true. If you had the opportunity to say something to the people at the Central Intelligence Agency who financed the study, what would you say? I I realize the CIA is a very important organization and they have a very important job to do. But God, it surely doesn't have to be done on people who are.

Totally incapable of knowing what's happening or having any defense against it. And I I I can't imagine the mentality of people who would do this. I just can't. As for Doctor Cameron, he died in 1966 while mountain climbing, a colleague wrote of Cameron. For him, the ends justified the means, and when one is dealing with a waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt the stance Dr. Cameron seemed ideally suited for what the CIA had in mind. America is adapting to the shape

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Then authorities say this Texas motorcycle gang murdered a federal judge. People are always scared of something they don't understand and they don't understand us, so they're. Scared Geraldo Rivera investigates Dope, Death and the Bandidos on 2020 Thursday, starting at 98 Central and Mountain on a BC.

It was the Cold War, and especially the trial of Joseph Cardinal Minsenti, who was forced to testify in a Hungarian court that he was a spy, and then later the Korean War with the coerced and mainly fraudulent confessions of American servicemen that would spark intense interest in intelligence circles about brainwashing, the CIA secretly commissioned a study of communist brainwashing methods at the Cornell University Medical Center. A leader of that study was Doctor Lawrence Hinkle.

He explains first the Russian method of controlling and breaking a person. Absolutely isolated from everyone else, with one man whose job it is to get you to write. The extent to which you are a criminal in this setting, you can get people to do most anything, do you see? Because you don't have to lay a hand on them. And by the time you get through and you go up before the judge, the fellow says, Were you a spy?

He says yes, I was a spy. The the the Chinese never really had this kind of a state police system. They were getting me in. And all this fellow does is ask you write, rewrite, rewrite and talk to him about your whole

life. Graduated from pilot training in 1949. While the purpose of the study was to find out about communist brainwashing techniques, CIA documents show that the agency was interested in developing mind control methods of its own to precondition and control Chinese living in this country to be sent back to their homeland as CIA agents. What do you think they were looking for? Well, I think they no, they weren't looking for, they weren't looking for agents or

anything like that. Yet the agency's perception of the work you were doing In CIA documents we have examined, it says that the the project that was being done here, they intended to use everything learned about the new agents to induce them to quote, to perform acts of a complex, purposeful nature. Yeah, but that was the effects of which may be out of keeping with the individuals sort. Of thing was never done. Those people were not that that

was when they first came here. The first people they sent up to see us do you see were were operational type people from the CI with some other other wild ideas, OK, this is their perception of it if if I could. Just get their perception of it either. Now I was dangerous to his being contrary to any previous consciously expressed intentions and interests. Contrary to the good of the individual and subversive to the goals for which he is. Consciously working and all this talk.

But the situation was you see those things were never done because of wise people on both sides we not able to do this and are interested in it. They were, though. Some of the low level people were but the high level people were not. Tell you the truth, but documents clearly show that the CIA was attempting to develop agents over whom they had as much control as possible, agents who would perform tasks contrary to their own good.

Normally conditioned American has been trained to kill and then to have no memory of having killed. His brain is not only being washed as they say it has been dry Clean is a Manchurian candidate controlled by others to do things against his will possible? It was a remarkable film because as far as I'm concerned it made something totally impossible seem absolutely credible. I would say the answer is yes, but there are many

qualifications to that. Doctor Milton Klein, a psychologist, A clinical and experimental hypnotist, and unpaid consultant to the CIA, the. Qualifications would be the subject selected to produce the kind of behavior that you wish, the amount of time, the procedures that are utilized, and the motivations of the people who are designing, executing, and administering the procedures. You're asking whether an

individual. Can be under hypnosis, influenced, coerced, persuaded, shaped to perform an antisocial act, or a destructive act or an act of violence. My answer would be yes, Captain Marco, you'll be good enough to lend Raymond your pistol, please. Yes, ma'am. Thanks, Ben. Sure can. Shoot Bobby Raymond through the forehead. Yes, ma'am. How valuable a tool can hypnosis be in the intelligence field?

None whatsoever. That has absolutely no use because nobody's ever been able to do that, That I know of do it in an operationally feasible way. I'm not in any way saying that hypnosis doesn't take place. I'm not saying there's nothing to it.

I would say that most government agencies concerned with intelligence operations have been looking to hypnosis as a tool for a variety of purposes, one of which is to carry out and to execute certain intelligence operations on a basis where they would not have to rely completely on some of their own emotional reactions. Actually, they're until murder. It could, if you consider that an act of killing someone under

circumstances of war is murder. I think one has to define what that means under circumstances of peace. Under circumstances of peace, it would be murder. Another former CIA agent says that Fidel Castro at one time was considered as a possible target for a Manchurian candidate. Castro was naturally our discussion point. Could you get somebody gung ho enough that they would go in and get him? But if you have 100% control of a guy, you have 100% dependency.

If something happens and you haven't programmed it in, you've got a problem. So in the end it was decided that a Manchurian candidate was not feasible, but the search for mind control continued. But could the mind be controlled? Perhaps not. But is human behavior predictable? In this area, the CIA did make a significant breakthrough, a personality assessment system designed by the agency's chief psychologist, John Gettinger. It comes close to being able to

predict how humans will behave. It's really a descriptive system, attempt to try to describe personality in a relatively systematic way so that hopefully you can get some kind of an idea to predict what the behavior between different kinds of individuals. Getting your system had many uses in intelligence work. One was to draw personality portraits of world leaders using getting your system, the agency

concluded. The Shah of Iran is a brilliant but dangerous megalomaniac whose basic problems resulted from an overbearing father. And there were other applications. Your assessment staff played a key role in helping other governments pick their police intelligence agencies, including, we've learned, the Korean CIA, Uruguayan National Police. Can you tell us about this? No.

Author John Marks, the former #2CIA man in Uruguay, told me how in 1966, John Giddinger and an assistant traveled down to Uruguay and gave the test in order to select members of the Uruguayan intelligence service. A psychologist who used to work for the CIA, he told me in 1961 he personally traveled to South Korea as part of an American CIA effort. To set up the Korean CIA and to give the the personality test to candidates for the Korean CIA to choose the best man for their

secret police. But one of the basic functions of getting your system was finding the vulnerabilities of an agent, a double agent or a potential agent. And it's applicability to intelligence work. Isn't the PAS system looking for persons soft spot? Well, of course the answer to that is yes. But I had, I hasten to say soft spot. This is what I consider a negative word.

Of the hundreds of behavioral projects undertaken by the CIA, getting years appears to have been one of the more successful and more conventional. Other experiments were not as conventional. Neurophysicist Dr. Jose Delgado was financed by the Office of Naval Research. In this experiment, the bull is sedated. Electrodes are implanted in its brain. Delgado transmits an electronic impulse to the center of the bull's brain. Delgado has remote control of

the animal. Recently released CIA documents refer to the feasibility of remote control of animals and that special investigations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man. Other areas were examined through the 60s and 70s. Brain surgery, psychosurgery, Creation of amnesia, parapsychology, manipulation of genes.

Even though past and present CIA officials have indicated this kind of work ended in 1963 and one of those who took part in these programs in 1977, the Senate subcommittee heard testimony from many of them, but the testimony was not that revealing. According to one of them, they agreed amongst themselves to keep the inquiry within bounds that would satisfy the committee.

Former narcotics officer Charles Siragusa says that he was asked to limit his testimony by the man he reported to at the CIA. He wanted me not to say anything to perjure yourself. That's right. Well, either that I'd have to pressure myself or take the 5th amendment and I'm not about to take the 5th amendment for anybody.

Former CIA chemist Robert Lashbrook testified he had no first hand knowledge of the agency run safe houses when in fact he supervised one of them and according to George White's Diaries, was at a safe house when White conducted what he called an LSD surprise experiment. Doctor Sidney Gottlieb, whom we recently filmed near his California home, oversaw many of the CIA behavioral programs. He retired in 1973 and destroyed the records of this work.

In sort of a valedictory letter, Doctor Gottlieb wrote that he and his colleagues had been able to maintain contact with the leading edge of developments in the field of biological and chemical control of human behavior. Doctor Gottlieb also testified before the Senate subcommittee, but from an ante room where he could not be filled because of what his lawyer termed health and cardiac problems, Doctor Gottlieb declined a BC News request for an interview.

And what of George White, the man who helped the agency and so many of its programs? He would retire here to Stinson Beach, CA. And shortly before his death he wrote to his boss at the CIA, doctor Sidney Gottlieb, and summed up his career by saying it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red blooded American boy lie, kill and sheep steal, deceive, rape and pillage with a sanction and blessing of the all highest? Has mind control been achieved?

From all of the available evidence it appears doubtful the human will has prevailed up to this point. But as we have seen, work is continuing in this field, work that we still don't know very much about. How deeply are the Russians and other dictatorships into all of this? We really can't say, and the CIA is reluctant to give out information about it. But the basic question remains, what place does all of this have within a democracy? One final point should be made.

As one of the persons who worked on these programs told us, we are very capable, conscientious and very dedicated scientist working for our country. Their work speaks for itself. This is Paul Altmeyer for a BC News. Good night. Here's a great idea. Potato peeler? Nope. Hair curler. It's Vanish Bowl Freshener freshness. To snap, snap it under the rim and it freshens two ways. It's always there to freshen.

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