Research Statement

This research explores the current capabilities of the US military to use electromagnetic (EMF) devices to harass, intimidate, and kill individuals and the continuing possibilities of violations of human rights by the testing and deployment of these weapons. To establish historical precedent in the US for such acts, we document long-term human rights and freedom of thought violations by US military/intelligence organizations. Additionally, we explore contemporary evidence of on-going government research in EMF weapons technologies and examine the potentialities of continuing human rights abuses.


In the 1950s and 60s the CIA began work to find means for influencing human cognition, emotion and behavior. Through the use of the psychological understanding of the human being as a social animal and the ability to manipulate a subject’s environment through isolation, drugs and hypnosis, US funded scientists have long searched for better means of controlling human behavior. This research has included the use of wireless directed electromagnetic energy under the heading of “Information Warfare” and “Non Lethal Weapons.”

 

New technological capabilities have been developed in black budget projects1 over the last few decades— including the ability to influence human emotion, disrupt thought, and present excruciating pain through the manipulation of magnetic fields. The US military and intelligence agencies have at their disposal frightful new weapons, weapons that have likely already been covertly used and/or tested on humans, both here and abroad, and which could be directed against the public in the event of mass protests or civil disturbance.

 

1 Black budgets are government funded projects that are classified/secret to Congress and the American people. For an in-depth analysis on the topic, see Weiner, Tim , Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget, Warner: 1990.


Human Rights belong to people collectively. To believe in rights for some and not others is a denial of the humanness of people worldwide. Yet, denial is exactly what Congress and George W. Bush did with the signing of the Military Commission Act of 2006. The new official US policy is that torture and suspension of due process are acceptable for anyone the president deems to be a terrorist or supporter. This act is the overt denial of the inalienable rights of human beings propagated in our Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More so, US actions declared to the world that the US suspends human rights for those it believes are evil.


The precious words,

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” did not declare that only some men (and women) possess unalienable rights.

Our independence was founded on the understanding that all men and women are recognized by this nation as having innate rights derived by their humanity.

Likewise, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created by the United Nations in 1948, signed and ratified by the US Congress, specifies in its preamble that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been a guide for international law for most of six decades, and as such binds the United States to its general principles. Article 10 states that “everyone is entitled to full equality, to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him,” and Article 5 specifically prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Both of these basic human rights have been superceded by the passage the of Military Commissions Act of 2006.


Additionally, the Universal Declaration of Human rights declares that everyone has the right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression and opinion. This means that humans have the inalienable right to be able to freely think their own thoughts and discover their own truths. This paper addresses this most fundamental human right and explores the pending threats to individual freedom of thought posed by new EMF weapons technologies.


Freedom of thought or cognitive liberty is the natural human right of each person to be secure in their ability to perceive the world to the best of their ability. To have true cognitive liberty in a world as complex as ours would mean that first we must have access to truthful and unbiased information about the actions of others and the general state of the world. The Center for Cognitive Liberties defines this as “the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought.” 2 Without accurate representations we cannot make independently informed choices. It is imperative that the human body and mind be considered sacrosanct. To invade a person’s body without their consent is an egregious human rights crime.


The circumstance may soon arrive in which anti-war or human rights protesters suddenly feel a burning sensation akin to touching a hot skillet over their entire body. Simultaneously they may hear terrifying nauseating screaming, which while not produced externally, fills their brains with overwhelming disruption. Not only are both phenomena currently possible, but designs for more powerful EMF technologies receive continuous funding from the US Government.


We are in a time of extremism, permanent war, and the unilateral manifestation of ethnocentrism and power by a cabal of people in the US government. These power elites have been in operation for decades and are set on nothing less than the total US military domination of the world. They defy the foundational values of the American people to achieve their ends. This is not a new phenomenon.


The repression of human rights has been present within the US Government throughout our history. 3 A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US that sets policy and determines national political priorities.


2 See the Center for Cognitive Liberty at http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/ 
3 For a full discussion on the Global Dominance Group currently operating in the US see: http://www.projectcensored.org/downloads/Global_Dominance_Group.pdf 

The American ruling class is complex and inter-competitive, maintaining itself through interacting families of high social standing with similar life styles, corporate affiliations, and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools.4


This American ruling class is self-perpetuating, 5 maintaining its influence through policy-making institutions such as the National Manufacturing Association, National Chamber of Commerce, Business Council, Business Roundtable, Conference Board, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations and other business-centered policy groups.6 C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, documents how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US, comprised of corporate, military and government elites in a centralized power structure motivated by class interests and working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement. Mills described how the power elite were those “who decide whatever is decided” of major consequence.7

 

4 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006 [5th ed.] and Peter Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, 1994, (http://library.sonoma.edu/regional/faculty/phillips/bohemianindex.html)

5 Early studies by Charles Beard in the Economic Interpretations of the Constitution of the United States (1929), established that economic elites formulated the US Constitution to serve their own special interests. Henry Klien (1933) in his book Dynastic America claimed that wealth in America has power never before known in the world and was centered in the top 2% of the population owning some 60% of the country. Ferdinard Lundberg (1937) wrote American’s Sixty Families documenting inter-marring self-perpetuating families where wealth is the “indispensable handmaiden of government. C.Wright Mills determined in 1945 (American Business Elites, Journal of Economic History, Dec. 1945) that nine out of ten business elites from1750 to 1879 came from well to do families.

6 See R. Brady, Business as a System of Power, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and Val Burris, Elite Policy Planning Networks in the United State, American Sociological Association paper 1991.

7 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956)


With the advent of the military-industrial complex after World War II, President Eisenhower observed that an internal military industrial power faction was consolidating their long-term plans for the domination of America and, eventually, the world. Eisenhower was in no position to fight these men, and history records his feelings on the subject with the text of his short farewell address:

“….But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of these, I mention two only…


…This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.


In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.


We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

 

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.” 8

We now understand that Eisenhower was referring to the conjunction of redirected tax monies to research secret new technology aimed at nothing less than increasing the controlling power of the military industrial elite to a global scale.


One particular faction of ambitious men, the former cold warriors and emerging neo-conservatives, were close followers of philosopher Leo Strauss. This elite group included not just generals and industrialists but philosophers, scientists, academics, and politicians have now become the most powerful public-private war organization ever known.


Strauss espoused an elitist philosophy that fawned over the characteristics of those who inherited wealth and lived lives of leisure to pursue whatever their interests may be. His ideas have been transformed into a cogent ideology in which the media, religion, and government are used to subdue the masses while the real “nobles” follow their own will without regard to the laws designed to control lesser men. Strauss was likewise fond of secrecy, as a necessity for control, because if the lesser men found out what was being done to them they would no doubt be upset.


“The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.” In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients.9
Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, and others at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought receive wide credit for promoting the neo-conservative agenda through their students, Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, and Bloom’s student Richard Perle.


Canadian cultural review magazine Adbusters, defines neo-conservatism as,

“The belief that Democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression …such nationalism requires an external threat and if one cannot be found it must be manufactured.”10

8 Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040
9 Leo Strauss, “On Tyranny”, Edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, University Of Chicago Press, 2000.
10 Guy Caron, “Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House,” Canadian Dimension, May 1, 2005.

The neo-conservative philosophy emerged as a reaction to the 1960s era of social revolutions. Numerous officials and associates in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies were strongly influenced by the neo-conservative philosophy including: John Ashcroft, Charles Fairbanks, Richard Cheney, Kenneth Adelman, Elliot Abrams, William Kristol and Douglas Feith.11

 

Within the Ford administration there was a split between Cold War traditionalists seeking to minimize confrontations through diplomacy and detente and neo-conservatives advocating stronger confrontations with the Soviet’s “Evil Empire.” The latter group became more entrenched when George H.W. Bush became CIA Director. Bush allowed the formation of “Team B” headed by Richard Pipes along with Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Paul Nitze and others, who formed the second Committee on the Present Danger to raise awareness of the Soviet threat and the continuing need for a strong aggressive defense policy. Their efforts led to strong anti-Soviet positioning during the Reagan administration. 12


The Committees on the Present Danger (CPD) extend from the 1950s Russian threat to the present.


The current CPD proudly boasts on their website;

“In times of great challenge to the security of the United States, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents have traditionally joined to make an assertive defense of American interests.

 

Twice before in American history, The Committee on the Present Danger has risen to this challenge. It emerged in 1950 as a bipartisan education and advocacy organization dedicated to building a national consensus for a strong defense against Soviet expansionism. In 1976, the Committee on the Present Danger reemerged, with leadership from the labor movement, bipartisan representatives of the foreign policy community and academia, all of whom were concerned about strategic drift in US security policy. With victory in the Cold War, the mission of the Committee on the Present Danger was considered complete and consequently was deactivated.

 

Today, the current CPD promotes radical Islamists as the primary threat to the American people and millions of others who prize liberty. They claim that the threat is global. They also claim that they operate from cells in a number of countries. Rogue regimes seek power by making common cause with terrorist groups. The prospect that this deadly collusion may include weapons of mass murder was the justification for the invasion of Iraq.”13

11 Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, “The Strategist and the Philosopher: Leo Strauss and Albert Wlhlestetter,” Le Monde, April 16, 2003, English translation: Counterpunch 6/2/03.
12 Anne Hessing Cahn, Team B; The Trillion-dollar Experiment, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1993, Volume 49, No. 03
13 The Committee on the Present Danger mission statement can be accessed at http://www.fightingterror.org/whoweare/index.cfm 

Journalist John Pilger recalls his interview with neo-conservative Richard Perle during the Reagan administration:

“I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about ‘total war,’ I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America’s ‘war on terror’, “No stages, This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”14

There is ample evidence available to show that some individuals within government and industry have little problem with violating the public trust and using their positions to kill, maim, torture and destroy. It is of the utmost importance to our traditional American values of human rights and cognitive liberty that we recognize this threat from within. We must move to identify those who show these proclivities and ensure that their activities have adequate oversight.


Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment involving obedience to authority proved that individuals are fairly easily cowed into submitting to anyone who has a claim of authority, and that on average 61 percent of people will administer pain to another person if instructed to do so.15 Both test groups in these experiments rationalized their behavior by appealing to “the greater good.” Because it was for the “advancement of science” they were able to be convinced they should ignore personal judgment and obey the instructions given to them by the experimenters.16


Martin Orne, who was one of those paid by the CIA to conduct experiments on obedience, showed in 1962 that people would go to tremendous lengths to please a person in authority. Orne conducted research that involved presenting subjects with a stack of 2,000 pages of random numbers and instructing them to add each two adjacent numbers until he returned. Over 90 percent of the test subjects continued in this meaningless task for up to five hours.17


Today the combination of political climate and technological capability presents a condition in which widespread manipulation of, not only the flow of information through the media, but also the manipulation of the emotional states and cognitive ability in large populations could be achieved. If policy elites are unaccountable to the public for their actions, and the public has been emotionally manipulated to support them, we can assume that they will certainly abuse their positions in the pursuit of their agendas.


14 John Pilger, “The World Will Know The Truth,” New Statesman (London) (December 16 2002).
15 Stanley Milgram “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View”, New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
16 “Obedience as a determinant of behavior is of particular relevance to our time,” Behavioral Study of Obedience, Stanley Milgram, Yale University, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 4, p. 371
17 See Martin Orne-Orne, Martin T., “On The Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment: With Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications,”Am. Psychol. 17 (1962): 776-783, Orne, M.T. The potential uses of hypnosis in interrogation. In A.D. Biderman (Ed.), The Manipulation of Human Behavior (pp. 169215). New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1961

Previous human rights and cognitive liberty violations are evidenced in CIA and FBI records pertaining to the infamous MK-ULTRA project and the grim record of harassment and subversion uncovered in the COINTELPRO program in force through the 1950s and into the 1970s. We also examined some of the cases of illegal experimentation on the public dating back to the 1930s. We consider, in depth, the forms of electromagnetic weapons entering the battlefield today that trace their origins back through the secret projects of the Defense Department in the 1950s and 1960s.


Psychological Warfare, Information War, and mind control may seem to be exotic topics, but the impact of these technologies and techniques is profound. Our minds are being impacted through a longstanding series of programs aimed at manipulating public opinion through intelligence agencies, think tanks, corporate media and a host of non-governmental organizations designed to engender fear, division and uncertainty in the public.18

 

Media manipulation involving the artificial framing of our collective reality is often a hit or miss proposition, but psychological operations have been carried out in the past, and are being carried out even today, through the practices of “Information Warfare,” directed at enemies abroad and at the American people.19


According to Mary C. FitzGerald of the Hudson Institute, New-concept weapons, such as laser, electromagnetic, plasma, climatic, genetic and biotechnological are the central principle driving the modernization of national defense. The potential for these weapons to be used for both good and bad deserves a great deal of attention, but there is little to be found in the media or discussed by our administration.20


The US is a system of many institutions including those whose sole function is to provide government oversight. When problems arise that threaten the stability of the country or the safety of the people, the US government is designed to have checks and balances that allow the people to challenge misconduct either directly or through congressional representatives. Increasingly, oversight is disintegrating. According to a 2006 report in the Boston Globe, the intelligence committee does not read most intelligence reports in their entirety.21


The media is complicit in omitting information necessary to make democratic decisions.22 A global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. A research team at Sonoma State University recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US.

 

18 For an analysis on the interlocking of the corporate media, think tanks and government organizations, see Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Lew Brown “ The Global Dominance Group and the US Corporate Media” in Censored 2007, Seven Stories Press.

19 See: Snow, Nancy, Information War American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9/11, 2004 Seven Stories Press and Chomsky, Noam Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2002 Seven Stories Press
20 In researching this article, there are no instances of remarks by senior White House, Pentagon, or Congressional officials that specifically address the human effects of non-lethal EMF weapons. A search in Lexis Nexis from 20012006 returned no results in American mainstream media.
21 Classified Intelligence Bills Often Are Unread: Secret Process Can Discourage House Debate, Susan Milligan, Boston Globe August 6, 2006.
22 The Global Dominance Group and the US Corporate media, by Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Lew Brown, published in Censored 2007, Seven Stories Press, 2006, Chapter 10,

 

The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations in the US have DOD contractors on their boards of directors including:

  • William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

  • Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

  • John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

  • Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

  • Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin

Given an interlocked media network, big media in the US effectively represent corporate America’s interests. The media elite, a key component of policy elites in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources.


It is not suggested that everyone in the government believes in global domination, nor that it is the intent of every government official to ‘cover up’ misconduct.23 Scientists involved in potentially harmful technology are not ‘mad scientists.’ In fact, there are many reports in the public sphere addressing government and military misconduct that are put forth by people within these very institutions. The problem is when the government threatens whistleblowers, intimidates officials with job loss, infiltrates activist organizations, and increases surveillance24.

 

23 Remarks on Classification, The Hon. Lee Hamilton, Information Security Oversight Office, October 18, 2005. “At a time when the US intelligence community is under intense scrutiny in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we only increase public skepticism about our government by denying the public information.”
24 See: Valerie Plame, the Richard Leiby, Spy Who Got Shoved Out Into the Cold, Washington Post, October 29, 2005; Page C01; Amended 2006 surveillance bill by Bush; The FBI and the Engineering of Consent, Noam Chomsky, From Public Eye Magazine, Volume One, Number Two; and Demian Bulwa, Oakland: Police spies chosen to lead war protest, San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, July 28, 2006.

 

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PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR
Modern Psychological Operations (Psy-Ops) were significantly advanced in the Second World War 25 and were brought to bear on the American public during the 1950s with the formation of a widespread network of social scientists, journalists, politicians, military specialists and intelligence operatives.

 

Psy-Ops were used to promote a variety of programs in cooperation with the Industrial Military Complex.

 

Their key piece of information warfare was the Communist Red Menace.26

 


25 See William E. Daugherty and Morris Janowitz, A Psychological Warfare Casebook, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958. In particular, see Daugherty’s article on “US Psychological Warfare Organizations in World War II,” pp. 126-136.
26 For a current view of these kinds of operations and how they are outsourced see James Bamford’s article in the Rolling Stone, The Man Who Sold the War Meet John Rendon, Bush’s General In The Propaganda War, November 17, 2005. For more information on CIA control of the media refer to Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media—How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up”, Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63  - the title of the original operation was “Mockingbird” influence was global in scope, counting among his close friends Henry Luce, publisher of Newsweek.
 


One of the opening salvos in this war of deception was fired by George Kennan, the American ambassador to Moscow, describing the Soviet threat in a “long cable” sent to Washington in 1946.


Kennan spent decades studying the Russian political scene. He became convinced that there would be little chance of cooperation with the Soviets and recommended a number of actions, most notably the institution of “political war” through the newly formed CIA - a decision he later regretted, even arguing for the elimination of the CIA in 1997.27

 

In the late 1950s, a right-wing cadre of men within the new CIA was busy building secret armies, planning assassinations, and generally devising plans for world domination that still play out today.


Operation Gladio was one example, well documented and international in scope, in which right-wing members of the US intelligence community created “stay-behind” armies in many of the nations of Europe. Those armies managed to infiltrate the highest levels of politics (most notably in Italy where the term “Gladio” refers to a double edged sword) and have been held responsible for numerous false-flag terrorist acts through the 1980s and 1990s. Terror and propaganda often go hand-in-hand in the extremist elements within our military and intelligence communities.28


To counter the divisions within the intelligence community, a greater voice was given to organizations formal and informal. In the 1950s, one such group, the first Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), promulgated a series of “gap crises.” The Bomber Gap, the Missile Gap, the Space Gap, and the Brainwashing and Psychotronic Gap were used to justify increased military technology spending.

 

Congress was led to believe that the Soviets were a much greater threat than they actually were, and that a terrifying new weapon was being developed that threatened America. They were thus convinced to vote for virtually any black budget proposal that came their way. The CPD ran a series of broadcasts to the public through the Mutual Broadcasting Network that spread fear in the minds of the public.


Under the first civilian CIA Director, Allen Welsh Dulles, the Company began to push forward with its agenda of manufacturing consent from the American people for a new state of perpetual war industrialization. Dulles was a well-connected individual, a successful spy for the OSS in Switzerland during the war, related to three secretaries of state, and the chief advisor to Dewey when he ran for President in 1948.

 

Dulles had access to the highest echelons of policy making and his influence was global in scope, counting among his close friends Henry Luce, publisher of Newsweek.

 


27 George F. Kennan. “Spy and Counterspy.” The New York Times, May 18, 1997. For a sympathetic biography see George F. Kennan and The Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950, Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C, 1993 Princeton University Press. George F. Kennan. “Policy Planning Staff memorandum on the inauguration of organized political warfare“, May 4, 1948. Published in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment. Discusses the need for political warfare: that is, measures short of war, such as propaganda and covert operations.
28 History News Network, USA 13 June 2005, Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO’s Secret Stay-Behind Armies, by Daniele Ganser, The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations 1 June 2005, Kennan published his analysis anonymously in Foreign Affairs, the official magazine of the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR). [Mr. X (Alias ‘George C. Kennan): “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, in Foreign Affairs, July 1947.]
(http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/Terrorism_Western_Europe.pdf)
 


Relying heavily upon established circles of contacts within the nation’s media elites, Dulles recruited key members of the media to work directly for the CIA under Operation Mockingbird. Mockingbird was a psychological information campaign against the American people.


In a campaign that would lead to acceptance of blanket secrecy for “national security”, “the Red Scare” became the excuse for spending vast sums of money on weapon systems and an increase in covert operations both in foreign countries and within the United States.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, movies, news articles, books, radio and television programs were carefully laced with anticommunist messages and images designed to produce an acceptance of the policies being promoted by the defense elite’s propaganda machine.29

“Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service.

 

Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, The Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.” 30

One of the engineers of this deception was a former head of the stay-behind network, Edward W. Barrett, director of the Interdepartmental Psychological Strategy Board (IPSB) and, not coincidentally an editor at Newsweek.

 

Barrett was seen as being very effective in his efforts to manipulate public opinion. At the same time, CPD was a “non-political group of citizens of the western coast” and launched a media campaign in favor of the urgent reinforcement of the national defense. Among the organizers of the Committee were Frank Altschul (Director of the Council for Foreign Relations), William Donovan (former head of the OSS during WWII) and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.31


All of this activity was more than enough to stoke the fears of the public and encourage policy makers to accept the Cold War view of the world.

 

This allowed Truman to convince Congress to approve a tripled military budget that provided funding for secret research and development and turn a blind eye (in the name of National Security) to “black operations” programs authorized under the new Cold War rubric of “containment” and aimed at undermining otherwise peaceful nations and fomenting war, torture and assassination in countries as diverse as Iran, Guatemala and Indochina.32

 

 

29 Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and The Cult of Intelligence, Dell Books,1975 (as a matter of general interest this is reportedly the first book the Government went to court to have censored. There are 168 missing pages as a result of the courts ruling but the spaces were retained in the first edition.)
30 “The CIA and the Media”, Carl Bernstein Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977
31 David F. Krugler, Will It Play in Peoria? The 1950 Campaign of Truth and the Reconstruction of Cold War Propaganda, British Association of American Studies Annual Conference April 1997 University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England

32 William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995; Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=CIA Footnote on Ops)
 


Post-war developments in Europe, especially the British withdrawal from Greece, led Truman to decide it was necessary to have a permanent American presence in the old continent to counteract the Communist influence.33

 

General George C. Marshall, Secretary of State, designed a vast plan that mixed economic assistance and secret actions aimed at establishing democracies and making sure that voters in foreign countries made “the right choice.” National Security Council directive NSC 10/2, essentially written by Kennan, made official the creation of an anti-Communist interference network.34


The US intelligence community had an ace in the hole, Reinhardt Gehlen, a Nazi spymaster with an existing network of agents became the front man in Eastern Europe for American intelligence.


General Reinhardt Gehlen proved to be troublesome for the CIA over the years. Communist counterspies infiltrated his network, his information was often incorrect, and he had downplayed his eagerness to serve the Reich. But Gehlen was only one of thousands of Nazis recruited to assist in the new “Cold War” through Operation Paperclip.35 In fact, the intelligence assets acquired by bringing the Gestapo onto the US public payroll was overshadowed by the acquisition of dozens of brilliant Nazi scientists and researchers.


At this juncture, Truman, through the application of the 1947 National Security Act and the newly formed National Security Council36, authorized a vast number of secret projects involving chemical, biological, nuclear and electromagnetic experiments. Former Nazis were put in charge of many of the most sensitive programs and facilities. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) was entrusted to the former SS officer Wernher von Braun. 37 Kurt Debus, another ex-SS officer, directed Cape Canaveral.

 

At this time scientists began working on “black” projects in earnest, including attempts at finally developing the “lost” theories of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-born American physicist, into military and intelligence applications.38

 


33 Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass Publishers, 2004.
34 See the Federation of American Scientists Intelligence resource program, National Security Council [NSC] Truman Administration [1947-1953] at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/index.html. 
35 Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990, St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
36 The National Security Act of 1947 can be accessed at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/17603.htm 
37 Biography of Werner VonBraun produced by NASA: www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/sputnik/braun.htm  and at the Marshall Space Flight Center located at http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/index.html 
38 Hunt, L. Secret Agenda. The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Simpson, C. “Blowback. The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis, and the Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy”. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988

 

 

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Back to Operation Gladio

 

 


TESLA AND EMF

Military interest into the weaponization of the electromagnetic spectrum has a long history, based on the theoretical work of Nikola Tesla.

 

Radar, in its early inception, was seen not only as a means of tracking the position and speed of enemy targets, but as a potential weapon in its own right. There are very real problems however with overcoming the normal decrease in effect of an electromagnetic field over distance. This effect is a natural function of the laws of physics and applies to both electrical and magnetic fields39.

 

In short, the strength of a field drops off in inverse proportion to the distance of the target from the source. Without a means of concentrating and directing a beam of energy across long distances, any effect that an EMF weapon may have would be limited to its immediate vicinity. From 1900 until his death in 1943, Nikola Tesla worked to develop just such a weapon.


In a letter to the New York Times editor in 1908 Telsa wrote,

“When I spoke of future warfare I meant that it should be conducted by direct application of electrical waves without the use of aerial engines or other implements of destruction... What I said in regard to the greatest achievement of the man of science whose mind is bent upon the mastery of the physical universe, was nothing more than what I stated in one of my unpublished addresses, from which I quote:

 

“According to an adopted theory, every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a calm lake. By being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state. It appears, then, possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear.

 

At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance from the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light; he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man’s grandest deed, which would give him the mastery of physical creation, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny.” 40

Tesla made several claims during the latter years of his life, published by the New York Times in what became an annual event. His theory of the hidden nature of our universe supplants those of many of his contemporaries in that he was able to infer a multidimensional model of the universe that is only now being investigated through the theoretical mathematics of our leading physicists.41


39 There are two laws of note here: the inverse square law, which relates to forces such as gravity, and the inverse cube law, which relates to electromagnetic forces. Both equations describe the relationship between the power of the force and the decrease in that forces effect over distance. In regards to magnetism we refer to the work of Maxwell. One easily accessible online source for his equations is: http://www.rialian.com/rnboyd/maxwell.htm  A good place to start for understanding the man and his work is the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation at: http://www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/html/links.html

40 New York Times, April 21st, 1908 (p.5 column 6) Tesla Letter to the Editor :.
41 “The Cosmic Triangle: Revealing the State of the Universe,” in the May 28, 1999 issue of the journal Science discusses Dark Energy and Margaret Cheney, Tesla: A Man Out of Time, Dell Publishing, 1983.

Tesla also developed means of remotely controlling aircraft as early as 1915, foreshadowing the Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) of today’s battlefields. In 1934 Tesla offers to build a “Death Ray” that would make the power of an opponents air force obsolete. This was one of the earliest recorded statements regarding directed energy weapons.42 Tesla’s offer to build this device for the US government for a bargain price, but with many caveats, was refused by officials who, preferred instead to pump money into the new Army Air Corp, which in turn gave rise to the military aviation complex that we have today.43


Before the war the airline industry was not a major part of the economic life of the nation.44 With huge wartime contracts, however, corporations such as Hughes, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and Northrop quickly grew in power commensurate with the financial bonanza that was unearthed in the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific.45 These companies formed the core of the “military-industrial complex.”

 

Their investors and managers began to consolidate their clout in political circles to keep the nation on a wartime economic footing, a simple and vastly powerful weapon that would make aircraft, bombs, missiles and attendant industries irrelevant would certainly be seen as a direct threat to the growing power of military arsenal. Instead, a “black budget” program was put into motion, which exploited the work of Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein and others. The Manhattan Project, developed by the DOD in 1942, generated a vastly destructive weapon that required a well-established and unbelievably expensive aerospace industry, along with unprecedented levels of secrecy and autonomy from Congress and the public.46

 

42 Front page New York Times, July 11 1934 was entitled, “TESLA, AT 78, BARES NEW ‘DEATH BEAM’” and told of the inventor’s proposal that would “send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles...“
43 To illustrate the control of science for corporate profit, Tesla’s practical applications all shared one thing in common, the were devoid of any profitable application. As a result, Tesla’s development of wireless electricity has never borne fruit, leaving us still in the 21st century surrounded by a landscape of transmission wires, faulty electrical grids, destructive (though profitable) electrical generation systems, wars for oil, and a suffering environment. See Marc J. Seifer, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, Citadel Press, 1998.
44 John B. Rae, Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920-1960, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Roger E. Bilstein, The American Aerospace Industry: From Workshop to Global Enterprise, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
45 Carol L. Cook, The Aerospace Industry: Its History and How it Affects the US Economy, Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 2005.
46 See the National Atomic Museum’s archives concerning the Manhattan Project at
http://www.atomicmuseum.com/tour/manhattanproject.cfm and the Brookings Institute’s archives at
http://www.brook.edu/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCOST/MANHATTN.HTM


The US government also ignored Tesla’s offer to produce a “city killing machine,” which was composed of an electromagnetic shield and a wireless torpedo. Tesla made several proposals during the 1930s, none of which received funding. Among Tesla’s claims, published annually on his birthday in the New York Times, were methods of harnessing the power of the sun to electrify the earth and provide free electrical power to anybody, anywhere.


Tesla did, however, conceive of at least one device that became a major part of our nation’s arsenal - radar.

As early as 1917 he published his theory and developed the first prototype in 1934. It is from the basis of this technology that future research into weaponizing the electromagnetic spectrum proceeded. At the same time Tesla was working on methods of transmitting and receiving communication signals through interplanetary space and reading the images on a sleeping person’s retina (by extension mind reading). His prediction that future wars would be fought with electromagnetic means foreshadowed the rise of electronic warfare and the non-lethal weapons technology being deployed today. 47


At first glance, it would seem probable that the military had taken over the management of Tesla’s material. In fact, a number of projects related to his life’s work were in development. For instance, the building of beam weapons at Wright Patterson Air Force Base under the code name “Project Nick” 48 headed by Brigadier General L.C. Craigie. This project was however, cancelled due to an apparent lack of understanding of Tesla’s means of transmitting high-energy waves without a loss of power over great distances.

 

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began another project in 1958 codenamed “Seesaw” at Lawrence Livermore Labs49 aimed at combating reported Soviet advances in electromagnetic weapons and defenses, advances that many believe came about after 1952 when the bulk of Tesla’s research and personal effects were turned over to his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who promptly whisked them away to Yugoslavia. Eight years later Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would state that, “A new and fantastic weapon is in the hatching stage,” 50 horrifying many and prompting calls for more effective means of using EMF, espionage and counter-espionage.


On February 9, 1981, the office of the Undersecretary of Defense Research and Engineering department sent a letter to the FBI that requested the papers of Tesla, stating, “We believe that certain of Tesla’s papers may contain basic principles which would be of considerable value to certain ongoing research within the DOD. It would be very helpful to have access to these papers.


The letter was signed by Lt. Col. Allan J. Mclaren, an R.O.T.C. graduate from M.I.T. in 1960, who later went on to become a project director with Lockheed Martin Space Systems from which he retired in 2003.51


This section of his memo to the FBI was not declassified until 1993. In response, the FBI issued the same response as to all of the other inquiries with one exception, this time they identified who it was that examined the stored effects; it was the Office of Scientific Research and Development from 47 New York Times, 1937,

“…will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from the defending nation’s border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks When put into operation, Dr. Tesla said, this latest invention of his would make war impossible. This death-beam, he asserted, would surround each country like an invisible Chinese wall, only a million times more impenetrable. It would make every nation impregnable against attack by airplanes or by large invading armies.”

For an interesting article about Tesla’s “Death Ray” and the relationship to Tunguska see: Tesla's Wireless Power Transmitter and the Tunguska Explosion of 1908


48 Tesla: Master of Lightning, archived at PBS: www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html

49 Tesla: Life and Legacy, Missing Papers, archived at PBS: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
50 Max Frankel, “Khrushchev Says Soviets Will Cut Forces a Third; Sees ‘Fantastic Weapon’, New York Times, January 15,1960.
51 See Tesla’s FBI files at the FBI FOIA site located at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/tesla.htm

MIT, a breeding ground of CIA. technical types the Office of Naval Intelligence and agents from US Naval Research.52 What they may have been looking for had likely already been taken, according to a recent PBS special entitled Tesla: Life and Legacy, Tesla’s nephew reported that Tesla’s most recent journal was missing from the bulk of material stored by the OAP.53 In recent years high profile projects such as the High Altitude Auroral Project (“HAARP”), the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), and many of the devices promoted by proponents of “Non-Lethal Weapons” have Tesla’s intellectual fingerprints all over them.54
 

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MK-ULTRA


In terms of mind-control and the breaking down of prisoners for military interrogations, the events at Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo, and in the CIA network of secret prisons dotting the globe, all have their intellectual origin in the work carried out by a network of scientists under the behest of the intelligence community beginning in the World War II period. Mind-control, per se, refers to a well-funded, broad based series of programs designed to explore the furthest reaches of human cognitive ability. The Nazis, as well as the Japanese, had been experimenting on prisoners throughout the war.


Recovery of the records of these experiments led the US to proceed with investigations into new means of interrogations and the building of resistance to interrogations of US personnel..55


The CIA, in association with various other agencies, undertook a long series of experiments on unsuspecting prisoners, students, military personnel and others recruited into one of the at least 162 subprojects of what became known as MKULTRA.56 Interest was certainly piqued by the case of Cardinal Mindseztny and the reports of brainwashing techniques used on American soldiers in prisoner of war camps in Korea57. But even prior to the Korean War the resiliency of the human mind was being tested by researchers on the black budget. These projects reportedly at times violated every conceivable notion of human rights and dignity.58


Frank Olson, a mid-level CIA operative, worked on the development of aerosol delivery of drugs and poisons at Ft. Detrick, Maryland. His work, which is still classified, was. funded through MKULTRA. Olson took a trip to England where MI6 and the CIA were working together on ways to prevent allied spies and servicemen from yielding to interrogation.

 

52 Tesla: Life and Legacy, Missing Papers, archived at PBS: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html. 
53 Tesla: Master of Lightning PBS documentary Dec. 12th, 2000.
54 Box#8 of Declassified CIA documents pertaining to MKULTRA contains the following fragment: The Application of Tesla’s Technology in Today’s World. Obtain, online, through the National Security Archives at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
55 Harris, S. (1994) Factories Of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, And The American Cover-Up. London: Routledge.Tanaka, Y. 1998. Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, Michalczyk, J. J. 1994. Medicine, ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues (METR) Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed & Ward
56 This site provides a selection of memorandum from within the CIA, in which funding is discussed.
http://cryptome.org/mkultra-0003.htm  Digital MK-Ultra files can be found at: http://www.intellnet.org/mkultra/ general note about MK-ULTRA funding)
57 Stephen Budiansky, Erica E. Goode and Ted Gest, “The Cold War Experiments”, U.S News and World Report January 24, 1994.
58 Patricia Greenfield, CIA’s Behavior Caper, APA Monitor, December 1977, pp. 1, 10-11

 

Olson also traveled to Frankfurt, where the two agencies conducted fatal experiments on prisoners of war and others considered to be “expendable.” Olson had an ethical dilemma with the research and, after voicing his concerns, returned to the United States. On November 28, 1953, Olson was in room 1018ª of the Hotel Statler in New York. At 2 a.m., Olson fell from the 10th floor window of his room to his death on the sidewalk below.

 

The headline reported his death as an accident or suicide. This report was discredited when, in 1975, another official lie was issued to ease his family’s suffering and deflect public scrutiny. This time Olson was called the victim of an LSD experiment.59 Media reports cited in the New York Times focused on the sensational aspects of LSD use and psychic warfare, but did not dwell on the more egregious violations of human rights and dignity inherent in the programs overseen by the CIA.60


The truth was not revealed until 1994 when his son finally had his body exhumed and examined. The autopsy showed that Olson’s left temple had been fractured before he fell. According to the New York Times Magazine CIA tradecraft books from 1953, that have since been released teach that “one of the surest methods of killing somebody without a trace involves impairing their reflexes with alcohol (or drugs) and then stepping up behind them and stunning them with a blow to the temple.


After that you quickly grab their ankles and in a single motion flip them over a bridge, balcony or out of a window more than 70 feet off of the ground.” 61 What Olson saw, and what cost him his life and his family their peace of mind for 30 years, was the beginning of a long term strategy to develop means of making individual both resistant to “brainwashing” and to control the actions of individuals.62 The cover story that was used to justify the beginning of the project was that there was a “brainwashing gap” with the Koreans.63

 

59 Thomas O’Toole, “CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave out LSD Suicide Revealed”, front-page story Washington Post, June 11, 1975.
60 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media: How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up”, Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
61 Michael Ignatieff, “What did the C.I.A. Do to Eric Olson’s Father?” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2001.
62 ibid. and The Frank Olson Project at http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statements/FamilyStatement2002.html. Dr. Eric Olson continues to do what he can to bring to light the truth of his father’s death. At the above website there are memorandum written by Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld in regards to the families lawsuit during the Ford administration in 1975
63 Reported in the New York Times as “Mind Control Studies had Origin in Trial of Mindszenty”, Aug. 2, 1977, p.16.

64 See Athan G. Theoharis, “Researching the Intelligence Agencies: The Problem of Covert Activities”, The Public Historian, 1984 National Council on Public History, University of California Press.


Experimenters used college students, servicemen, mental patients, the poor and, in several instances, children as young as four years old, in attempts to create untraceable assassins, couriers and other operatives. MKULTRA sub-projects involved the services of many notable universities and used a number of false front corporations such as the Foundation for the Study of Human Ecology and think tanks such as RAND, to shield the source of funding from those with ethical “problems.” 64 We would still know nothing of these activities had it not been for the release of 16,000 pages of documents in 1977 through the FOIA request filed by the surviving family of Frank Olson.

Unfortunately CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of any MKULTRA records shortly before the order came in to his office65, leaving an incomplete picture of a concerted effort by various agencies to create new and better means of controlling the thoughts, emotions and thus behavior, of unsuspecting individuals.

 

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ILLEGAL EXPERIMENTATION


MKULTRA was, however, neither the first nor the last project funded by government or industry to experiment on people in the name of some greater good. A quick review of the history of secret experimentation and medical atrocities reveals a pattern of deadly behavior The Tuskegee Experiments in 1932 cruelly condemned scores of black men to death from syphilis.66


The Pellagra Incident, in which millions died over two decades, in spite of the fact that the US Public Health Service knew at the time that these deaths were caused by little more than a niacin deficiency.67


In 1940 scientists exposed four-hundred prisoners in Chicago with malaria (a US experiment Nazis cited at the Nuremberg trials to defend their own experimentation).68


During WWII, Seventh Day Adventist conscientious objectors were enlisted into Operation Whitecoat by the US Army and the Adventist Church. They were told that they were being tested for defensive research purposes while the government was in fact testing offensive chemical and biological weapons.69


After WWII, matters became far worse for those who were caught up in the web of illegal scientific testing. In 1947 Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the US Atomic Energy Commission issued a secret document stating that the agency would begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects. At the same time atomic tests in which the residents of Utah and Nevada were purposely exposed to radioactive fallout. There were also a series of operations during the 1940s and 1950s in which US cities were attacked secretly by the military through the spread of biological agents in order to track their propagation through a real population.70


65 Project MKULTRA, The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, August 3, 1977, US Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources.
66 Jean Heller (Associated Press), “Syphilis Victims in the US Study Went Untreated for 40 Years” New York Times, July 26, 1972: and VN Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care.” American Journal of Public Health 7(1997):1773-1778.
67 Jon M. Harkness, “Prisoners and Pellagra”, Public Health Reports, Sep/Oct96, Vol. 111 Issue 5, p 463.
68 “They Were Cheap and Available: Prisoners as Research Subjects in Twentieth Century America.” British Medical Journal 315:1437.
69 Krista Thompson Smith, “Adventists and Biological Warfare”, Spectrum Magazine, Vol 25, no. 3, March 1996 and David R. Franz, DVM, PhD, Cheryl D. Parrott, Ernest T. Takafuji, MD, MPH, “The US Biological Warfare and Biological Defense Programs” in Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Part 1; The Textbook of Military Medicine, Office of Surgeon General, Borden Institute 1997; p. 425-436.
70 Atomic Energy Commission Secret Memo by Kirkpatrick, E. E. Col. A January 8, 1947, This was a draft memo from Colonel Kirkpatrick, Acting Manager, Field Operations of AEC, to the AEC Berkeley Area Engineer, puts the AEC stamp on termination of human testing, while simultaneously revealing it was going on under the Manhattan Project-at the request of Oppenhiemer:

“Until the Atomic Energy Commission is able to consider sponsoring this type of experimentation, authorization cannot be given for the use of radioactive materials in human subjects under this contract.”

A more current report from the National Security Archives that clearly lays out the timeline and the assault by researchers on “subjects” can be found at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet12/brief12/tab_f/br12f1d.txt ----“ Personal Statement from Elizabeth Zitrin, Attorney at Law Public Member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Radiation Experiments”. For information on biological warfare experiments a good starting place is : Biological Warfare: A Historical Perspective, by LTC George W. Christopher, USAF, MC; LTC Theodore J. Cieslak, MC, USA, MAJ Julie A. Pavlin, MC, USA, and LTC (P) Edward M. Eitzen Jr., MC, USA.—Operational Medicine Division, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, Maryland, as posted at http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/cbw/bw.htm
 

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THE SCIENTISTS

 


Dr. Ewen Cameron 71


Once the details of MKULTRA came to light, the focus in the media and in the Senate, was on the use of drugs, especially LSD. While the researchers within the project did indeed concentrate on developing a variety of hallucinogenic concoctions, they did so with an end in mind. The goal was to devise means and methods of enabling undercover operatives, soldiers, contractors or anyone who was involved in secret projects, to be able to keep those secrets if they were captured or interrogated. Hypnosis, combined with drugs, sensory deprivation and systematic abuse were seen as a means to that end. The leader in this pharmaceutical and psychological research was Dr. Ewen Cameron.


Cameron was at the time, one of the most esteemed psychiatrists in the world. As president of the American Psychiatric Association, Canadian Psychiatric Association, and one of the founders of the World Psychiatric Association, Dr. Cameron began experimenting on brainwashing techniques as early as the 1930s with schizophrenic patients. At this time lobotomies were not yet in common use, though the procedure would begin to be implemented in 1936 on a wide scale. Electroshock therapy was some years from being accepted as a primary means of changing behavior.72

 

71 This section about Dr. Cameron is based on Orlikow Vs. United States, CIA Settlement of Some Complaints. Ewen Cameron and the Allan Memorial Institute - Subproject 68 funded by CIA from March 18, 1957 to June 30, 1960 Without conceding liability, in 1988 the CIA agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a case brought on behalf of nine plaintiffs who were subjected to federally funded mind control experiments sponsored by the CIA and conducted by prominent psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, M.D. The experiments included heavy does of LSD, electroshock and psychic driving.

72 See “CIA Brainwashing Experiments”, MacLean’s; January 28, 1985, Vol. 98 Issue 6, p46, 1/3p and “A cold-war horror show’s last act”, US News & World Report; October 17, 88, Vol. 105 Issue 15, p13, 1/3p.


Cameron relied on torturous and highly stressful techniques for breaking down the personality of his patients. Schizophrenics would be stripped down naked beneath red lights for eight hours a day, sometimes for up to eight months with repeated messages inundating their senses. In other experiments Cameron would attempt to induce the delirium associated with a high fever by cooking his patients in an electric cage until their body temperature reached 102 degrees.


From January of 1957 until September of 1960 Cameron became one of the promising researchers the CIA turned to in order to develop means and methods of “brainwashing” and programming  human beings to do the will of the agency. Cameron received $64,242.44 73 from the CIA. to develop a combination of techniques that would destroy an individual’s memory of an event and enable the programmer to control their behavior through post-hypnotic commands.

 

Cameron used a variety of drug combinations coupled with prolonged sleep deprivation, isolation, hypnosis, and electro convulsive therapy in order to “wipe” an individual’s memory. His techniques worked, to a certain extent, but ethical considerations led the CIA to cut Cameron’s funding in the US, prompting Cameron to move to Canada to continue his work with funding channeled through the Canadian Government.


He continued his work, officially, from 1961 until 1964 in Montreal where he received an additional $57,750.74 During this time Cameron combined his techniques (in a “therapy” he called de-patterning) with electroconvulsive therapy in which the voltage introduced into one subjects brain, Linda Macdonald, exceeded the APA’s guidelines by 76.5 times.

 

He succeeded in wiping her memory and to this day, she cannot remember anything prior to 1963. In a January 17, 1984 broadcast of the Canadian Broadcasting System, a program called “The Fifth Estate” detailed the experiments of Cameron, prompting a burst of investigative journalism culminating in a class-action suit brought against the CIA by former subjects. In 1988, the case was settled out of court for $750,000, divided between 8 plaintiffs. Linda Macdonald received $100,000 and legal fees from the Canadian government, but Cameron himself, faced no punishment.75

 

 

Dr. Jose Delgado


Whereas Cameron focused on creating traumatized individuals through intense psychological pressure, Dr. Jose Delgado was investigating the direct route to control of “human subjects.”


Delgado physically invaded the brains of subjects with electrodes in order to create emotions and control actions with the push of a button. As he stated himself,

“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.” 76

In his paper “Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and Recording in Completely Free Patients,” Delgado observed that:

“Radio Stimulation on different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effect, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation (an essential precursor for deep hypnosis) colored visions, and other responses.” 77

73 CIA MORI ID 17468: www.wanttoknow.info/mindcontrol 
74 Collins, Anne. In the Sleep Room. The Story of CIA Brainwashing in Canada. Ken Porter Books, 1988
75 Tyner, Arlene. Mind-Control Part 1: Canadian and US Survivors Seek Justice, PROBE Magazine, March-April, 2000
76 Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School. Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.

Delgado, to his credit, did make great strides toward a better understanding the physiology of brain structures and their attendant behavioral and emotional correlates, strides that did not go unnoticed by the intelligence community and the military.


While Delgado worked in an area of specific interest, the direct stimulation of brain structures through implanted electronics, other researchers explored means of creating multiple personalities and programming the alternate personalities that emerged to do a variety of intelligence related work as operatives, still others explored the effects of various drug combinations and other “programming” and interrogation techniques aimed at creating super spies and breaking down enemy agents.

 

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