Answering a Question

Answering a Question

Zachary Thompson

English 1100

11/6/13

Operation: Mk-Ultra

For about the past six decades, the military industrial complex have been blatantly lying to the American people as to what operations are being constructed and carried out without any overseer known to the public.  Declassified projects such as Mk-Ultra and operation Paperclip have done enormous amounts of damage to everyday people, and even our nation as a whole.  The people that carry out these day to day operations need at the very least regulation, or completely dismembered all together.  

At the beginning of World War 2, the United States, and the U.S.S.R ( Soviet Union ) were common allies, because we had one common goal, and that was defeating the Nazi Socialist Party.  After Adolf Hitlers death, and the eradication of the Nazi Socialist Party, all of what was Germany, was now no longer.  However, before Germany was completely torn apart by the United States, and U.S.S.R, the United States conducted a joint operation by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) funded by the military industrial complex, and a paper signed by Harry Truman authorizing this project one month before trialing Nazi war criminals at the Nurenburg trials.  This project was called Project Paperclip.  Project Paperclip was designed to approximately capture 6000 Nazi scientists and bring them back to the United States to work in the military industrial complex and receive compensation for there employment.

Documents regarding Project Paperclip were not released and had not surfaced until the early 70's when all previous operations linking to operation Mk-Ultra were to be destroyed directed by the head CIA director Richard Helms at the time.

After the importation of the 6000 something Nazi scientists, operations such as Mk-Ultra started to take place here in the United States with very few people knowing at the time it was happening.  You might have already asked yourself this question, or even already looked up the information, but what exactly is operation Mk-Ultra?  Well lets start from the beginning, earlier when Nazi Germany first started making their mark around Europe, the Nazi scientists began to start working with something called 'weltenshunkrieg' which is another word for world view warfare in German.  They were very interested in imposing the Nazi world view on the other countries they had occupied, and by doing so they would use propaganda or other psychological means to influence or confuse the thinking,and undermine the moral of the enemy or opponent; this was known as psychological warfare.  When all this information was brought over with Project Paperclip, it was then Americanized and then referred to Operation Mk-Ultra.

Mk-Ultra was an operation of sub operations.  The sub operations were broken down into different ideas of how to manipulate and control the mind using different methods such as electroshock therapy, massive doses of drugs, and depriving people of food, water, sleep deprivation, anything that would be thought to disrupt thinking patterns for periods of time.  

Ewen Cameron at the time had been the United States most profound psychiatrist and one of Mk-Ultra's top scientists.  He used high tech sound techniques and multiple loop recorders to force unwilling people to listen to recorded messages for weeks, and maybe even months at a time to disrupt their thought and thinking patterns and be a potential victim for brainwashing.  Dr. Camerons subjects were random, but soon after he noticed that hospitalized patients in mental wards were more easily obtainable they made the Allan Memorial Institute of Montreal their official institute of choice.  

The Mk-Ultra program was also experimenting with the use of drugs.  These drugs included the following: LSD, Heroin, Morphine, MDMA, Mescaline, Psilocybin, Scopolamine, Marijuana, Alcohol, and Sodium Pentothal.  All these drugs were used at one point during the experiments of Mk-Ultra but LSD (Lysergic Acid) was used the most common.  The Lysergic Acid was to have said to to distort ones sense of reality, thus being able to control or guide someones loyalties a certain way.  They first used the Lysergic Acid on unwilling military personnel, around one-thousand soldiers to be exact, and its not that they weren't unwilling, they just didn't know what they were being given at the time. 

Another method used in the Mk-Ultra program was Hypnosis.  Hypnosis is a psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state.  Many victims have came out and said they were subjected to hypnosis in the Mk-Ultra experiments, but one that really stood out when I read it was Cathy O'Brien's testimony.

Cathleen Ann O'Brien was born December 4th, 1957.  As a young girl she was abused sexually by her father Earl M. O'Brien.  She claimed to have been put into the program by her father, who had ties into the CIA/child sex rings.  While in the program Cathy happen to experience many, many terrible things including developing dissociative identity disorder.  She said while being in the mindset of a different person or identity, she doesn't remember anything that she had done previous.  From over the years Cathy developed well over 9 different personalities, each being completely different from who she really was.  Over time she has been able to get her disorder under control and come to grips with reality.

After all that being said about the military industrial complex to sub operations to Mk-Ultra, I find this information to be quite shocking, and actually a little scary.  If you think about it, the United States is one of the most prosperous nations on the planet, but when you import 6000 something Nazi scientists after World War 2, and your whole reason for doing so is that so "the enemy" cant get their hands on these scientists, then who really is the enemy?  It seems completely illogical to me to say that "we defeated Adolf Hitler, and the Socialist Party" when actually, we just moved their location, and increased their budget and security.  It may offend some of you that I used the word 'we' as if you had direct ties to the Nazis and helped coordinate all these wonderful operations, but you shouldn't because we as a nation didn't know of such things.  Thus making my point that all of these classified and declassified documents and operations should be made more visible to the public, and should not be coming out forty something years after the event took place.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed reading up on this topic, and I hope it sheds some light on some things for some people that don't really know a whole lot about the subject.  To me this has been an eye opener, and really has changed my life.  When I find stuff like this, it reminds me why I love history so much!

Work Cited

 Foster, Stephen. The Project MKULTRA Compendium: The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification. S.l.: S. Foster?, 2009. Print.

 Kawell, Jo Ann. "Coke & the CIA: The Real Thing?" Coke & the CIA: The Real Thing? 267.9 (1998): 25+. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.