There’s an evolving trend within and throughout the realm of my upcoming Odyssey online publications. Last week I began exploring the American conspiracies that the truths of our nation are built upon. This week I’d like to continue examining the phenomenon behind our nation’s great conspiracy theories as a means for thinking both critically and creatively about the potential sea of covert operations planted deep within the soils of our America.

The Central Intelligence Agency, better referred to as the CIA, states that their mission as an organization is to, “…collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to assist the President and senior US government policymakers in making decision relating to national security.” However, its history of discrete engagements might prove that the CIA has in fact established a hidden agenda for the nation and citizens it’s supposed to serve and protect. Last week I placed the organization under scrutiny for its alleged involvement in the creation and implantation of HIV/AIDS within homosexual and African American communities as a means of depopulation. This week, I’d like you to take a second to think about your mind, your brain, your psyche. Our minds promote our capability of being. They allocate functioning and nourish the very memories and experiences that allow each of us to grow and contribute to our societies and our immediate environments. Our brains, in simple terms, are our keys to individuality. In the 1950s, however, the CIA’s attempt at mass brain control could have limited these biological freedoms.

The term, “MKULTRA” has become a rather harsh point of reference since its origin in the decade of the 1950s. For twenty years, the CIA consecutively funded and supervised the tampering with the human psyche as the organization conducted tests on human subjects in a strategic effort of rendering mind control. For espionage purposes, the CIA allegedly sought to gain control of minds and individual personalities.

“…MKULTRA has since become a cornerstone of conspiracy theorists flaunting it almost gleefully as proof of the government’s misdeeds against its own private citizens.”

The working theory behind the purpose of MKULTRA dubs American citizens simply as government subjects. The individuals experimented on ranged from volunteers, to inmates and unaware participants. And as the subjects varied, so, too did their reactions to the primary psychedelic drug administered: LSD. In addition to drug administration, various experiments also involved the use of verbal/sexual abuse and torture. But how did the CIA develop an interest in mass brain control potentially through the use of such psychedelic drugs? Politics, of course. Simply put, during the Cold War, the Western bloc and the Communist bloc became weary of one another, remaining defensive about ulterior motives. In 1949, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, the highest ranking Catholic archbishop in Communist Hungary was brought into court and charged with treason. He proceeded to verbally confess to a host of related and unrelated crimes. As a spectator, the CIA assumed the archbishop was under a brainwash spell. As a result, the CIA sought to develop an innovative means for brain control in order to obtain information. This was, in fact, occurring during “the Cold War’s golden era of espionage.”

MKULTRA experimented with a host of biological and chemical agents in order to achieve their overarching goal. However, it has been noted that many of these agents were not administered to test subjects by any certified medical personnel and that many subjects suffered from illness for hours or even days after ingesting the drug. At McGill University, research conducted by Dr. Donald Cameron involved the treatment of minor psychiatric complaints. In turn, severe treatment was administered, including the use of electroshock therapy higher than average voltage procedures, the administration of LSD and other illegal drugs. All of these procedures were condoned under the terms of MKULTRA, however many of these procedures left subjects with lifelong disabilities.

Many of these disabilities were in fact mental constraints. Whitey Bulger, an infamous gangster of his time, was not only a subject, but is a survivor of the MKULTRA mission. Imprisoned and serving time in a federal prison in Atlanta, GA for his involvement in gang activity, Bulger, along with other inmates, were exposed to LSD experimentation in exchange for lighter sentencing. Bulger reflects on his experiences with the psychedelic as being, “…horrible LSD experiences followed by thoughts of suicide and deep depression.” He went as far as comparing Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, the pharmacologist overseeing the program, to Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted a world of inhumane experimentation on Jewish subjects.

The motives of the CIA remain under scrutiny; the very citizens the federal organization is meant to serve have been used as subjects for mind-altering procedures. While the MKULTRA study was dubbed unsuccessful, it still exists within the framework of experimentation on the psyche. Some claim that the human mind is just entirely too intricate to be controlled.