'peataphysique
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However, this climate of media avoidance has recently begun changing. Another strong endorsement of Baker’s book came from Stephen Kinzer, who just a year earlier had published Poisoner in Chief, primarily focused upon the notorious MK-ULTRA mind-control projects of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA researcher described in the title. Kinzer’s book attracted glowing accolades from Pulitzer Prize winners Seymour Hersh and Kai Bird, both writers with great experience on intelligence matters, and received quite favorable reviews in the elite mainstream media.
At first glance, mind-control and biological warfare might seem entirely dissimilar topics, but they actually share considerable areas of overlap. Both required the creation and use of dangerous biological or biochemical agents, which for maximal effectiveness must then be tested upon unwilling human subjects, often in dangerous or lethal ways. Since in this regard they obviously operate outside the boundaries of normal legality, especially in peacetime, their use must be kept entirely secret, naturally matching them with the proclivities of an intelligence agency such as the CIA. Throughout his book Kinzer emphasized the considerable overlapping personnel and resources between these two domains. Indeed, as the CIA’s “chief poisoner,” Gottlieb developed a wide range of deadly biological compounds which he deployed in a number of mostly unsuccessful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders such as Prime Ministers Zhou Enlai of China and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, as well as Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
But Gottlieb’s great personal quest was to create an effective system of mind-control, the use of chemical compounds or physical techniques to gain mental control over an unwilling subject, which he persuaded CIA leaders represented the Holy Grail of their espionage efforts.
There is an additional and rather ironic connection between the Ft. Detrick biowarfare programs and the unsuccessful CIA efforts at mind-control. As discussed above, there seems to be overwhelming evidence that the severe military setbacks of the early Korean War had prompted America to surreptitiously employ biological warfare, though the military impact was hardly enormous. Then in 1952, a much larger aerial effort dropped insects, rodents, and other obvious potential disease carriers on Communist-held territory, including parts of China. Baker believes that these later attacks were mostly elements of psychological warfare, with no effort made to infect the potential carriers with diseases, but obviously both the enemy governments and the pilots involved would have assumed that actual biological attacks were once again taking place. So when some of the American pilots were shot down and captured, they confessed to these apparent germ-warfare attacks, signing statements and admitting the facts to foreign visitors, thereby serving as the centerpiece of a major Communist propaganda campaign.
Since such actions would have been considered war-crimes, their widespread recognition might have produced a huge public relations disaster for America, and they were heatedly denied in the strongest possible terms as ridiculous Communist propaganda, with these determined public efforts to suppress the facts largely succeeding within the Western bloc.
Upon their return, these captured flyers were threatened with court-martials, causing them to repudiate their statements as having been made under duress. But the records show that any such coercion was almost entirely psychological, with virtually no claims of harsh physical treatment or torture.
This naturally raised the problem of explaining away the detailed and seemingly credible public statements of those captured American officers and why they had confessed to supposedly non-existent war crimes. The response was the creation of a widespread myth that the Chinese Communists had pioneered “brainwashing” as a powerful technique of mind-control. This suggested that our Cold War adversaries had made a major breakthrough in a potentially important military technology, and prompted CIA efforts to match their techniques and close the “brainwashing-gap.”
These ideas also soon entered the popular culture, with the classic example being The Manchurian Candidate, a 1959 bestseller that became an even more influential 1962 film. The fictional work tells the story of a captured American soldier transformed by Chinese brainwashing into a programmed assassin used to remove any human obstacles to a Communist seizure of our political system, and for decades afterward brainwashing remained a staple of fictional suspense plots. Yet Kinzer notes that right around the time the film appeared, the CIA finally abandoned the project as a failure despite the heavy resources expended, hardly surprising since the underlying premise had been entirely fallacious.
One major element of these failed CIA efforts had been the widespread utilization of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, often tested upon unwitting civilian subjects, and the use of these drugs eventually leaked out into our wider society, with serious negative consequences. So to some extent, our official refusal to acknowledge that we had illegally waged biological warfare in the early 1950s may have indirectly helped promote the creation of the drug culture that so greatly transformed our society by the late 1960s.
Although Gottlieb’s mind-control efforts had gone into high gear in the aftermath of the Korean War, they had actually begun during the early stages of that conflict, as Kinzer quotes in this grisly excerpt...
American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
I came of age during the late Cold War Era, and while the possibility of nuclear war was regarded as horrifying, it was hardly unthinkable, being the subject of countless films and stories and with the rival U.S. and Soviet arsenals regularly compared in newspapers and magazines. However...
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