Later, White was transferred back to his hometown of San Francisco, where he expanded on his doings in Greenwich Village, starting up a safe house that added the full gamut of sex acts to LSD studies, including Operation Midnight Climax. He leaned toward fascist leathers and stilettos, and provided prostitutes with "get out of jail free" assurances for assisting in the experiments. There were kundalini-driven orgies, whips and chains, acid trips, and gentle Gottieb with White's wife, "humping her brains out," while he recovered from tripping.
Gottlieb was originally employed as a master chemist. But the mild-mannered meditator also had a covert killer side to him. Kinzer describes the Poisoner-in-Chief's hand in the assassination of world leaders. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai escaped one of Gottlieb's plots with a last minute change of plans. Gottlieb was put in charge of killing Cuban leader Fidel Castro with poison, both directly (cigars) and indirectly (causing his beard to fall out so he's 'lose face' with his people). He was involved in the takedown of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, personally concocting a poison that "if it didn't kill Lumumba outright," writes Kinzer, "would leave him so so disfigured that he couldn't possibly be a leader" (again with the 'losing face' theme).
And the craziest characters kept joining his subprojects. At McGill University in Montreal, Dr. James Hebb studied "the isolation technique [that] could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed." In another subproject he brought Ira Feldman, a master of "old-fashioned" interrogation techniques who observed,
If it was a girl, you put her t*ts in a drawer and slammed the drawer [and if] it was a guy, you took his co*k and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.
Progress!
In New York, John Mulholland, a professional magician who'd worked with Houdini, joined MK-Ultra subproject 4, taught sleight of hand and misdirection to the CIA, and even developed a manual for them, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. The crazies and subprojects of MK-ULTRA just kept piling up. Under Subprojects 9 and 26, Gottlieb studied ways that "various depressant drugs" can shake a person's psyche...Subproject 28 was to test "depressants" ..Subproject 47 would "screen and evaluate hallucinogens," Subproject 124 tested whether inhaling carbon dioxide could lead people into a trance-like state, and Subproject 140 tested the psychoactive effects of "thyroid-related hormones."
It wasn't until Dr. Harold Wollf came along in 1954 that CIA methods took a turn toward the 'ways and means' we wring our hands over today. "Wolff shared Dulles's fascination with the idea of mind control," writes Kinzer. Wollf headed up the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. He proposed placing subjects in inescapable situations that eroded their psyches to the point where, desperate to escape,
doctors could "create psychological reactions within them.""to test "special methods of interrogation, including "threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, 'brainwashing,' 'black psychiatry,'hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents.
Hello, Gitmo. Hello, Abu Ghraib.
Gottlieb's reputation for dark arts intrigues was at its height when in 1953 CIA operative, Frank Olson, suffering from acute anxiety and having reportedly confided to a colleague that "he'd made a big mistake" being part of MK-ULTRA, either fell or dove from the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York. MK-ULTRA almost went down with Olson. Was he heave-hoed out the window or did he somehow stumble through closed curtain and plate glass? It was a mystery that investigative journalist Sy Hersh looked into and opined that, based upon uncorroborated information he'd been made privy to, Olson was murdered. A whole 2017 six-part Netflix series -- Wormwood -- was produced and does an excellent job of recreating the vibe of the 50s and the somewhat hallucinogenic event leading to the fall.
In the end, as unfriendly changes and unwanted scrutiny took place at the CIA in the wake of changing times, Gottlieb retired. And he and his wife travelled by freighter to India where they volunteered at a leper's colony. Did he spend much time in retirement recalling his Jewish roots? Thinking, there but for the grace of God (his name suggests 'love of God') might my Hunagrian Jewish parents have gone -- and me with them --into some death camp, where I might have been 'done' by Nazis in ways very similar to the methods I employed? He was essentially a Holocaust Denying Jew. Netanyahu would have called him "a self-loathing Jew," then hired him to mow lawns in new ways on the West Bank, returning at night to his kibbutz.
So, what's the future of mind control? Kinzer doesn't speculate much. But it's clear, without a lot of thinking, that the more we humans become addicted to the honey of the Internet's hive- mindedness, we become more vulnerable. Edward Snowden has already warned about the mere collection of dossiers (Permanent Records) on every person connected. But there is also the risk of 'contagions' brought on by manipulations of algorithms and newsfeeds. Think of the online white blood cell mobbing of Joseph Kony back in 2012 that created a fever to capture the black cancer, only for the fervor to die suddenly, when it was discovered he hadn't been in the country of capture for years, and the army of American children put into play to GET HIM suddenly got bored and went back to mall shopping.
Gottlieb is said to have abandoned his pursuit of the Grail for mind control in the end. But there is no question that the dark Quest to control minds is still active, as there are still Rove-Cheney-Bush type people out there who believe, as Allen Dulles did, that "Any nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psyche...could rule the world."
We are in the middle of a new brain warfare, as Kinzer puts it, without knowing it, because these manipulations and brain hacks are kept from us. As Kinzer suggests,
The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside "it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men.
We are the "black sites" of future interrogations, by machine-like men, who, if they have their way, will not be out make AI androids of the future more human, but humans more machine-like. It might be as simple as a gizmo implanted in the brain to take the free will away and leave us open to the programming of remote sinister forces.
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