CIA Mind-Control Experiments

The covert convergence between CIA and cognitive scientists — psychiatrists and psychologists — who provided the patina of legitimate science to CIA’s outrageous — even depraved — psychological torture experiments. CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” experiments were at first interwoven with chemical and biological weapons tests and radiation experiments; they were conducted on (mostly) involuntary soldiers and…

The phrase “psychological warfare” is reported to have first entered English in 1941 as a translated mutation of the Nazi term Weltanschauungskrieg, (meaning world view warfare). It was first embraced by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a prominent Wall Street lawyer whom President Franklin Roosevelt appointed as Director of the new U.S. intelligence agency, the Office…

Cameron was an internationally prominent psychiatrist who was invited as a consultant to the Nuremberg Tribunal. Allen Dulles asked him to evaluate Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, and assess his mental capacity to stand trial. Cameron and two other prominent psychiatrists — Drs. Nolan Lewis, Director of NYS Psychiatric Institute and Paul Schroeder, University of…

The secret US Naval Technical Mission Report described the “interrogation” techniques and mescaline experiments at Dachau; they were conducted by Dr. Kurt Ploetner, one of the most prominent Nazi researchers in this area. The report was based on a cache of secret documents captured in Himmler’s cave depository — those documents have since disappeared. The…

The committee was headed by Winfred Overholser, MD, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. Overholser, a Harvard graduate was Chairman of psychiatry at George Washington University, who presided over St. Elizabeths for 25 years. He was elected President of the American Psychiatric Association in 1948. St. Elizabeths was probably…

The OSS (later CIA) first tested extreme interrogation — torture — techniques in Camp King where the chief physician was General Dr. Walter Schreiber, former medical chief of the Wehrmacht, followed by Dr. Kurt Blome, the former Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich. * Paperclip Rogues Intelligence officials in the military and CIA were…

The CIA was established by President Harry Truman in 1947 as an information gathering agency to apprise the President with accurate up-to-the-minute information in particular about trends and developments in all danger spots in the world. President Truman had not anticipated that the CIA would function as an elitist espionage agency whose leadership was dominated…

The Naval report about the Dachau mescaline experiments was the catalyst for Project CHATTER which focused on identifying and testing drugs for interrogations and recruitment of intelligence agents. It was headed by Lieutenant Dr. Charles Savage, a graduate of Yale and the Pritzker Medical School at the University of Chicago. Dr. Savage conducted the experiments…

Charles Loucks, Chief of U.S. Chemical Warfare in Europe learned about the hallucinogen LSD from Hitler’s former chemist, Richard Kuhn, who described its astounding incapacitating effect. Paperclip RoguesLoucks recognized LSD as a chemical agent with enormous military potential. The US Army definition of “psychological warfare” marked Top Secret in 1948: Psychological warfare employs all moral…

Dr. Rinkel, a research psychiatrist obtained LSD from its sole Swiss manufacturer, Sandoz Chemicals; his partner, Dr. Robert Hyde took the first acid trip in the West. They then organized an LSD Study at Boston Psychopathic Institute where they tested the drug on 100 patients.” Soon an elite group of five private researchers and six…

In 1949, the Rand Corporation issued a report, “Are Communist Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confession in Public Trials?” The report relied on old Soviet hypnosis experiments conducted in 1923 (which were translated into English in 1932). The Soviets had reported success in implanting memories of crimes hypnotically. The Rand report helped set the…

BLUEBIRD was the first structured comprehensive, integrated CIA mind control project involving both domestic and overseas covert activities designed to study enemy techniques and test them on selected individuals, including “potential intelligence agents, defectors, refugees, Prisoners of War and “others.” Under this early program, experimental psychoactive drugs and hypnosis were used; the objective was to…