
How a deadly fall revealed CIA secrets - ljf
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets
======
pseingatl
Two other LSD targets of the CIA's program weren't mentioned in this excerpt.
You've probably heard of them:

Ted Kaczynski

Charles Manson

It is possible that neither would have committed their crimes but for their
involvement in the CIA's mind experimentation programs. See, O'Neill, Chaos:
Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019).

~~~
seppin
Source?

~~~
rixed
> See, O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the
> Sixties (2019).

~~~
seppin
That book is about the FBI's involvement, not the CIA

------
neonate
Interesting that it doesn't mention Errol Morris' Wormwood:
[https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/wormwood-errol-morris-
use-...](https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/wormwood-errol-morris-use-cinema-
investigate-mystery-1201969590/)

~~~
spookybones
How is it? I'm debating watching it.

------
tony
They were psychiatrists from the 1950's. It was around the time the first
antipsychotic was introduced and people naively believed psychiatry was this
miracle. There are chemicals that make people impressionable, they're
administered at hospitals and available in liquor stores.

IMO the most interesting (and impactful, powerful) stuff is just plain-old
psychology, like what is read in therapy books. You can apply it in nearly any
situation in so many ways.

It adds on to intuition you'd feel normally, the really complicated social
behaviors we act out on into concepts and frameworks. You can choose how you
interpret and use it.

If you don't believe me, google: Dialectical behavior therapy, attachment
theory, schema therapy with "filetype: pdf" in the query and load em into PDF
reader. Kindle has good books.

Schema Therapy:
[https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf](https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf)

Attachment theory:
[https://www.behaviorology.org/oldsite/pdf/AttachmentTheoryBe...](https://www.behaviorology.org/oldsite/pdf/AttachmentTheoryBeh.pdf)

I'm trying to spread the message far and wide so people can know and get woke.
This is stuff I wish I knew 15 years ago.

------
rixed
Interesting how the article turns a story of mass torture and killings akin to
nazy mad-science into a story about one individual murder.

Makes one wonder why would a state research mind control from drugs, when mind
control from history books and newspapers is already so efficient.

~~~
bilbo0s
Maybe mind control from history books or whatever is not as efficient as
you're thinking it is?

Just speculating that if I was a military commander, yeah, I'd go for
saturating a place with drugs to keep the people there from planting IED's way
before I would trust history books to do so. Just strikes me as way more
reliable.

If history is any indication, using history books to get people to behave
decently doesn't seem terribly reliable at all.

~~~
jacobush
Especially unreliable if you want people to do horrible things. Drugs may help
you more then than books.

~~~
ehecatl
I can think of two very influential books that have caused (are still causing)
untold human misery.

~~~
bilbo0s
But it's far easier to think up drugs that have caused untold human misery,
and do so much more reliably. Every human who takes these drugs will suffer
through the misery. No such thing as "I'm too strong to be affected by this
drug." (heroin, crystal meth.) Or "I can quit whenever I want." (opium,
flakka.) Or, "My neighborhood, or community, or nation won't fall into ruin
because of this drug." (China with opium, black americans with crack.)

And that's just the drugs we know about, just imagine the secret ones we don't
know about.

Take X drug, it will have Y effect on every human. Immediately. That's the
definition of efficiency. Keeping with the original example, that's the sort
of efficiency and effectiveness a military leader would want when waging a
campaign against an enemy. Far more swift, efficient, and effective than using
a history book.

~~~
senorjazz
> Every human who takes these drugs will suffer through the misery.

Blatantly false. Not everyone you uses XYZ drug ends up a hopeless addict. The
vast majority of people use the drug with no long term negative effects
addiction, including methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine et al

> No such thing as "I'm too strong to be affected by this drug." (heroin,
> crystal meth.)

Sure they will effect you

> Or "I can quit whenever I want." (opium, flakka.)

Within addiction, sure. Non-addiction use, false. You can stop whenever you
want. Getting addicted to a substance is not as easy as people think. You need
to be using through the day for multiple days in a row. You can use heroin
every weekend without getting addicted, so long as you stop during the week

> Take X drug, it will have Y effect on every human

To an extent, different people can vary degrees of effects from the same dose
when tolerance is not an issue

~~~
r3xpi
This is a recklessly false statement. Please do research into current
literature before relaying dangerous anecdotes that you believe to be true
about you.

------
farah7
I was honestly quite shocked whilst reading this, CIA operated facilities use
to kill and test chemical weapons on volunteer soldiers? damn.

~~~
DoctorOetker
thats a good point: the fact that testing on a volunteer _soldier_ and on army
and CIA researchers, seems to suggest they wanted to compare effectiveness
with the general population, since random members from the population might
not be psychologically representative for foreign soldiers, secret clearance'd
scientists and spies. So from this perspective testing on people of similar
function / caliber from your own accessible population might seem "logical" if
unethical...

~~~
farah7
Something tells me keeping statistical integrity wasn't a major factor in
testing on these soldiers. i think soldiers just tend to be better test
subjects for these purposes as they are more obedient, willing to sacrifice
their lives for a bigger cause, take instruction without asking too many
questions, keep secrets and no doubt they have more mental fortitude and a
higher pain threshold to withstand multiple rounds of various chemical
attacks.

~~~
DoctorOetker
that only explains experimentation on the now dead soldier in Britain, not on
the army and CIA scientists, researchers, agents described though.

if both occured I seek the shortest explanation that explains the most
observations

------
DoofusOfDeath
One quibble about the title: How would we know if these are the CIA's
_darkest_ secrets?

~~~
dang
Ok, we've removed the dark superlative above.

------
voldacar
Really makes you wonder what stuff they're doing now that will be declassified
in a few decades

~~~
arminiusreturns
MKUltra was the US program that expounded on the research done by the Germans,
Japanese, and Soviets (sometimes only programs we thought they were working on
and started counter-programs which then spurred the creation of counter-
counter-programs...)

My take is that by about the late 80's, early 90's, they had finished most of
the research and transitioned into implementation at mass scale, both
domestically and internationally. Extrapolate from that what you may.

~~~
acqq
"It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA
Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed
line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the
American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981."

"In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition,
supression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish
to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored,
the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests
of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be
better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine
these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now
threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential
to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic
institutions. -- Aldous Huxley, "Propaganda in a Democratic Society" Brave New
World Revisited"

[https://www.globalresearch.ca/1975-video-cia-admits-to-
congr...](https://www.globalresearch.ca/1975-video-cia-admits-to-congress-the-
agency-uses-mainstream-media-to-distribute-disinformation/5424860)

~~~
RyanAF7
Global Warming is bullshit.

------
DSingularity
Look who we find in the vanguard, defending the darkest secrets of government;
Dick Cheney.

~~~
smileypete
If you google 'Cheney Rumsfeld MKULTRA' there's plenty enough reading to fill
a rainy Sunday afternoon...

------
rdtsc
> “Some of our people were out of control in those days,” Colby said. “They
> went too far. There were problems of supervision and administration.”

That was in 1975 talking about the events in the 1950s. There is this idea
that, well CIA might have gone a bit too far, but it was a long time ago.
Hiring Nazi scientists, feeding people drugs, murdering, overthrowing
governments, conducting torture sessions. That was in those old dark and
confused times. Today they just sit at their desks and type reports like nice
little bored bureaucrats.

What if they are just as evil and brutal today and we just don't know about
it. I have a hard time believing that as an organization, they sort found
their moral one day and decided they need to start behaving.

> “Well, he’s gone,” the caller had said. Abramson replied: “Well, that’s too
> bad.”

Abramson is a doctor treating Olson. Surely, after being told his patient is
gone, he would be horrified and demand to know all about the tragedy. But the
conversation indicates they were both expecting it to happen. Well who is Dr
Harold Abramson, were there any other suspicious deaths associated with his
patients. What the heck was Abramson doing that made Olson reconsider seeing
his family again and instead opted to head back to New York to this doctor
instead. How many Dr. Abramsons are there around today I wonder...

~~~
bilbo0s
> _Today they just sit at their desks and type reports like nice little bored
> bureaucrats.

What if they are just as evil and brutal today and we just don't know about
it._

Just throwing this out here, but what if it's both. They, like every other
nation in the world, are evil and brutal, and the vast majority of them are
just sitting at desks somewhere doing fairly mundane jobs. That's just the
nature of a modern intelligence agency I bet.

~~~
fl0wenol
The trend has been to push the crazy research stuff into the private sector or
universities and fund it through intermediaries / grants.

Not just the IC but in general.

------
privateSFacct
Wow - that's a grim read. And this is what we know the CIA is up to plus I
think some of the "war on terror" dark site work?

------
DoctorOetker
>Because Olson’s survivors had signed away their right to legal relief when
they accepted their $750,000 compensation payment in 1975, they could not sue
the CIA.

can someone clarify how this works? how does signing away a right work? isn't
it just a contract?

am I correct that people in such a situation could in theory still seek legal
relief, but that in doing so they "merely" violate this "contract"?

~~~
stordoff
It's referred to earlier as a settlement. It's a form of pre-trial relief when
both sides agree that this settles the matter and brings litigation to an end.
It's not a contract per se, and to seek legal relief again, you would have to
find new grounds - you have effectively used your legal relief. It's the usual
end for lawsuits.

~~~
DoctorOetker
is the discovery of deception not a new ground in itself? "jump or fell". "the
_suicide_ of your father upset you, go seek therapy", ... don't qualify as new
grounds?

does the law explicitly regulate settlement, new grounds, etc or is it
emergent behaviour or "standard operating behaviour" of which everyone assumes
that is what the law says as opposed to what the law actually says?

Edit: perhaps a clearer phrasing in everyday language: is there a difference
between how lawyers, judges, ... have the cookie crumble versus how the law
says cookies should crumble?

~~~
o09rdk
Yes, I'd think that there was a breach of the settlement contract by virtue of
the fact that the family was lied to. They might have done something different
if the facts were known then as they are known now. It's definitely new
information or new grounds.

------
ncmncm
The most terrifying book I have read recently is "Men Who Stare at Goats", by
Jon Ronson. He keeps it light, on the surface. If you read what it is really
telling you, all these programs like MK-ULTRA were not disbanded, and are
still being used against the American public.

The "staring at goats" tale is an example of PSY-OPs tested on the public,
wholly successfully. Ever wonder how we got fired up to invade Iraq when the
UN inspector was perfectly clear that there were no WMDs there, and we knew
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11?

The Pentagon has never been able to begin to account for the trillions of
dollars it gets. Is there any possibility much of it is not piped through
black programs into convenient pockets?

------
DoctorOetker
>He was one of several special operations division scientists who were in
France on 16 August 1951, when an entire French village, Pont-Saint-Esprit,
was mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium that afflicted
more than 200 residents and caused several deaths; the cause was later
determined to have been poisoning by ergot, the fungus from which LSD was
derived.

The article insinuates this group of CIA & army scientists was responsible for
the "ergot" poisoning in the french village, has any new evidence to this
regard come to light besides the theory / book published in 2009?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-
Esprit_mass_po...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-
Esprit_mass_poisoning)

>In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, writer Hank P. Albarelli Jr alleged
that the Special Operations Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
tested the use of LSD on the population of Pont-Saint-Esprit as part of its
MKNAOMI chemical behavior program in a field test dubbed Project SPAN.
According to Albarelli, the ergot contamination explanation had been
challenged and "ruled out".[10][13][14] Historian Stephen Kaplan dismissed
Albarelli's theories and assertions as "hardly possible", and anthropologist
Bernd Rieken [de] wrote that "even in the secular society of the present,
substitutes for the devil and other demons may be found, in this case the CIA,
which some people believe capable of every conceivable evil".[10][15]

Especially the last quote seems very naive After reading the following
paragraph from the posted article!

>“In CIA safe-houses in Germany,” according to one study, “Olson witnessed
horrific brutal interrogations on a regular basis. Detainees who were deemed
‘expendable’ – SUSPECTED spies or moles, security leaks, etc – were literally
interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis and
torture, to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”

capitalization mine: _suspects_ being interrogated to death without any form
of due process or trial?

So we have a story about american (and presumably also west german) agents
interrogating / experimenting suspects to death in safehouses in germany, and
then we have an american-born historian Stephen Kaplan and a german
(psychologist?) dismissing that western powers would ever perform feats
typically associated with east-german Stasi practices. Guantanamo bay also
happened, and was rubberstamped by psychologists / psychiatrists...

some real class acts these CIA & army biological warfare gents!

------
cairo_x
"He was one of several special operations division scientists who were in
France on 16 August 1951, when an entire French village, Pont-Saint-Esprit,
was mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium"

Big if true. The book doesn't come out till October. I wonder if this is the
only circumstantial evidence they have? If they can place him in the actual
village, that would be something.

~~~
Fnoord
I just wanted to point out that entire villages mysteriously being seized by
mass hysteria and violent delirium happened due to at least other factors as
well. Case in point: ergotism [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism)

------
neuro
I recall distinctly this being called a conspiracy theory years ago.

~~~
wardbradt
What stories were regarded as conspiracies? I had thought that a fair amount
of information about MKUltra was uncovered by the end of the 70s. [1]
(Assuming you are not referring to a time before then).

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_Projec...](http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf)

------
appleflaxen

      > In spring 1953, he visited the top-secret 
      Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down in 
      Wiltshire, where government scientists were studying 
      the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On 6 May, 
      a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old soldier, was dosed 
      with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, 
      collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later.
    

Wow.

------
alpple
LSD may have unearthed Olson's conscience, which doesn't mesh well will having
been involved in human torture. I think LSD may be the opposite of mind
control. ( I don't think it's safe though )

------
tempsolution
Yes another great read, for the land of the free and brave.

~~~
seppin
If your country doesn't have an intel agency doing this or similar
congratulations you are too small to matter.

~~~
rolltiide
Not all societies are built around a culture of paranoia, and not all
societies manifest this with an autonomous intelligence agency

this dark current should be excised from society as the declassifications show
they more often undermine our security from domestic and foreign sources

~~~
seppin
Right some countries are Iceland, a rich place floating in the middle of
nowhere with no military intel needs.

And some countries have interests to protect.

That's the difference. It's not morality, it's whether or not you have
anything to lose.

