Back in the 1950’s, as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was heating up, the CIA became convinced that the Communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, in April 1953, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.
But, did it really start there? No, we need to go back to Marx, Lenin, the Bolsheviks, Communism, Hitler and the NAZIs.
In 1848, in the opening line of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’’ Marx’s Manifesto was written to serve as the platform of the Communist League.
The fear of Communism overtaking Europe, the United States and the world - shaped the next 100 years and was the real reason behind the pursuit of “mind control.”
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov "Lenin" led the overthrow of Russia in 1917 - the Bolshevik revolution - and became the first leader of the first Communist country in the world - what became known as the Soviet Union - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) - the first modern totalitarian state.
Lenin was a student of Marxism - but believed socialism should replace capitalism worldwide - it should be done through violence and result in a Global and permanent dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks were a far-left faction of the Russia’s Marxist Social Democratic Labor Party. They would be analogous to the Progressive SQUAD of the Democrat party today comprised of AOC, Omar & Tlaib. The Bolsheviks believed that the success of their Communist revolution in Russia was predicated upon a simultaneous Communist revolution in Germany.
Unbeknownst to many, the Bolshevik government of Russia was in secret negotiations with the Weimar Government of Germany regarding trade and the rearmament of Russia. The two pariahs of Europe – Germany and Russia – had thus come together - just like Russia & China are doing today.
The conventional wisdom back then in Washington DC, London and Paris was that Bolshevism had to be contained and that Germany could not be allowed to fall apart. From 1920-26 the world thought the only real danger was ‘Bolshevism’.
The Bolshevik-Communist movement had always propagated the view that the Communist revolution would be global – “workers of all countries unite’’ was the rally cry. The Bolshevik leadership was committed to the idea that the revolution in Russia would not be and could not be an isolated historical phenomenon. It would be the first step to revolutions that would sweep aside capitalism and all its manifestations – empire and colonies – in every part of the world.
So, Lenin basically led the first attempt at a NEW WORLD ORDER.
Through violent means, Lenin established a system of Marxist socialism called Communism in the former Russian Empire, which attempted to impose collective control over the means of production, redistribute wealth, abolish the aristocracy, and create a more equitable society for the masses.
The Soviet Union had its origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Radical leftist revolutionaries overthrew Russia’s czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of Romanov rule. The Bolsheviks established a Socialist state in the territory that was once the Russian Empire.
A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, a large group of monarchists and capitalists. In a period known as the Red Terror, Bolshevik secret police, known as Cheka, carried out a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime and against Russia’s upper classes.
Lenin consequently became the head of the government of Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union (Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars) until he died in 1924.
The Russian physiologist and Nobel Laureate Ivan Pavlov could be called the father of coercive persuasion science or mind control. You’ve all heard of Pavlov’s dogs. Well, in the early 1900’s, Pavlov showed that he could make dogs salivate by simply ringing a bell. He believed that men could deliberately be made to think and behave any way he wanted.
Lenin was enchanted by the potential for Pavlov’s approach to be used to influence the Russian people - and control the workers of the world. The Soviet government provided financial support for Pavlov’s research institute with hundreds of staff. Pavlov found that stress, sleep deprivation, isolation and repetition all led to mind control.
Lenin understood the importance of Pavlov’s work and issued a decree in 1921 saying “Pavlov is of enormous significance to the working class of the whole world.”
Lenin was admired, not only by Bolsheviks in the former USSR but also among the leaders of Communist parties around the world, such as Mao Tse Tung of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba. Lenin’s idea was that the Russian revolution led by the Bolsheviks would be paralleled in western Europe and around the world.
The scientific management of labor was the prelude to the attempts to manage and control thoughts. Just as the New Man’s actions could be perfected, so could his thoughts — or so a number of Soviet scientists believed. The assumption was that thoughts can be monitored and controlled just as physical actions.
A 1922 treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and modern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The newly established Communist Party, led by Marxist Vladimir Lenin, took control of the government.
Lenin died in 1924, and Georgian-born Joseph Stalin rose to power.
Stalin ruled by terror and left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign, which lasted until his death in 1953, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated.
The Communists believed that consolidating individually owned farms into a series of large state-run collective farms would increase agricultural productivity. The opposite proved to be true. Agricultural productivity dropped. This led to devastating food shortages and millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine and hid the truth about millions dying from mass starvation due to failed Communist collectivism policies.
Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership through his secret police. During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign the Great Purge of 1936-1938, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags.
Stalin also made impossible any alliance between the German Communist Party and the social democrats by dubbing the latter “social fascists.”
Stalin’s division of the left had ominous consequences and actually gave rise to the competing socialist NAZI party - thus paving the way for Hitler’s accession to power and its outcome.
British policymakers were faced with a paradox. On the one hand, there was Soviet Russia, “a country with demonstrably weak offensive military capabilities” and on the other Nazi Germany, “a state armed to the teeth and bellicose in rhetoric”.
British policymakers preferred the Nazis over the Soviet Union because the British ruling classes feared Communism more. One immediate consequence of Hitler’s complete control was the annihilation of the Communist movement and countless Communists in Germany.
The news of the Nazi-Soviet pact signed in August 1939 only intensified the anti-Bolshevism of the appeasers.
“Communism is now the great danger, greater even than Nazi Germany.”
Following the surrender of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, the uncomfortable wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain began to crumble.
The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed Communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of Communism into Western Europe and worldwide. In 1949, the U.S., Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies.
In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War. The Cold War power struggle—waged between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
PROJECT ARTICHOKE
During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists working in the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects.
Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and hallucinogens such as mescaline were employed in experiments conducted on Jews and Russian prisoners of war which aimed to develop a truth serum which would, in the words of one laboratory assistant to Dachau scientist Kurt Plötner, "eliminate the will of the person examined."
American interest in drug-related interrogation experiments began in 1943, when the Office of Strategic Services began developing a "truth drug" that would produce "uninhibited truthfulness" in an interrogated person. In 1947, the United States Navy initiated Project CHATTER, an interrogation program which saw the first testing of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) on human subjects.
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began by Lenin & Pavlov, and in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in the Soviet Union and at Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that they could build on their research.
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.
Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.
In 1950, the Central Intelligence Agency under the direction of general Walter Bedell Smith initiated a series of interrogation projects involving human subjects, beginning with the launch of Project Bluebird, officially renamed Project Artichoke on August 20, 1951.
Directed and overseen by brigadier general Paul F. Gaynor, the objective of Project Artichoke was to determine whether an individual could be made to involuntarily perform an act of attempted assassination.
Morphine, mescaline and LSD were all administered on unknowing CIA agents in an attempt to produce amnesia in the subjects. In addition, Project Artichoke aimed to employ certain viruses such as dengue fever as potential incapacitating agents.
"Not all viruses have to be lethal… the objective includes those that act as short-term and long-term incapacitating agents."
The project also studied the effects of hypnosis, forced addiction to (and subsequent withdrawal from) morphine, and other chemicals, including LSD, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.
Project Artichoke was a mind control program that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that asked,
"Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"
Project Artichoke was the Central Intelligence Agency's secret code name for carrying out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD, hypnosis and total isolation as forms of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects. At first agents used cocaine, marijuana, heroin, peyote and mescaline, but they increasingly saw LSD as the most promising drug.
The subjects who left this project were fogged with amnesia, resulting in faulty and vague memories of the experience. In 1952, LSD was increasingly given to unknowing CIA agents to determine the drug's effects on unsuspecting people. One record states that an agent was kept on LSD for 77 days.
The CIA sought to establish control over what it perceived as the "weaker" and "less intelligent" segments of society, or for potential agents, defectors, refugees, prisoners of war and others. A CIA report states that if hypnosis succeeded, assassins could be created to assassinate "a prominent [redacted] politician or if necessary, [an] American official."
The overseas operations took place in locations throughout Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Philippines to skirt US law. Teams were assembled to manage these overseas operations and they were told to "use aliens as subjects."
ALL of that happened in an effort to investigate and perfect “mind control” as a technique even BEFORE MK Ultra was created in 1953. All of that happened before JFK was assassinated in 1963, before MLK and RFK were assassinated in 1968 and before Nixon was removed through a coup by the CIA after he SHUT DOWN the MK Ultra program in 1973.
