S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today P O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027-1295 USA E-mail:
Home page: https://ritualabuse.us/
Issue 190 – September 2026
The purpose of this newsletter is to help stop secretive organizations and groups from abusing others and to help those who allege they have been abused by such organizations and groups. This newsletter is not a substitute for other ways of recovering from ritual abuse. Readers should use caution while reading this newsletter. If necessary, make sure other support systems are available during and after reading this newsletter.
Important:
The resources mentioned in this newsletter are for educational value only. Reading the books cited may or may not help your recovery process, so use caution when reading any book or contacting any resource mentioned in this newsletter. Some may have a religious or other agenda that may be separate from your own recovery process. Others may have valuable information on secretive organizations but have triggers or be somewhat sympathetic to those organizations. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the views expressed in this newsletter constitute expressions of opinion, and readers are cautioned to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions by consulting a variety of sources, including this newsletter. Resources listed, quoted and individual articles, etc. and their writers do not necessarily support all or any of the views mentioned in this newsletter. Also, the views, facts and opinions mentioned in this newsletter are solely the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the opinions of this newsletter or its editor.
Copyright 2026 – All rights reserved. No reproduction of any material without written permission from the editor and individual authors.
Information in this issue includes:
The 2026 Online Annual SMART Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference Video Presentations online https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2026-conference/2026-conference-video-presentations-and-powerpoints Wendy Hoffman, Joshua Moore, Randy Noblitt, Neil Brick, Iain Bryson
Mind Control Documents & Links – Evidence mk-ultra occurred
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case, Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/
Luna Announces Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust
Hektoen International A Journal of Medical Humanities Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The Nuremburg Code, Section on Permissible Human Experiments (1946) https://hekint.org/2024/01/25/louis-jolyon-west-m-d-a-dangerous-doctor/
Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRAhttps://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/64
January 2015 An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability B.M. Disbennett (Disbennett, B.M. (2015) “An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability System,”Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice: Vol. 3: Iss. 2, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.70658/2693-3225.1058 Available at: https://ir.law.utk.edu/rgsj/vol3/iss2/4 https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=rgsj
Robert D Reed Publishers – Self’s Stony Soil: Trafficked Children: An Autobiographical Novella in Verse by Wendy Hoffman – Self’s Stony Soil is available as a Kindle eBook.
Written in free-style poetry, a novella, Self’s Stony Soil reveals the horrors of sex trafficking. A child is trafficked. Taken by airplanes to other countries, she was packed tight into cages, abused by politicians, the wealthy, royalty, and known people in the world. She has amnesia until late in life. That begins the healing of these deep scars. She begins to find her true self. This is her story.
“Self’s Stony Soil speaks to the lifelong consequences to victims of sex trafficking and their efforts to reclaim their humanity and autonomy. Sex trafficking robs the individual of free will. It is demoralizing and soul-crushing. But Self’s Stony Soil reveals even the fragility of a damaged life can reveal hidden strength and the perseverance to overcome the nightmare of sex trafficking and lead to growth, healing, and peace.” – James Randall Noblitt and Pamela Perskin Noblitt, Editors/Authors of RITUAL ABUSE in the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: Psychological, Forensic, Social, and Political Considerations
“In this book of heart-wrenching poetry, we grasp the reality of the horrors inflicted on children through the memories of a girl born into a family who tortured her and trafficked her to unspeakably sadistic offenders.
Judge approves Bank of America’s $72 million settlement with Epstein accusers – The women accused the bank of ignoring suspicious transactions by Epstein. By Aaron Katersky August 27, 2026
A federal judge approved the $72.5 million settlement between Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and Bank of America, the third financial institution to publicly reach such a settlement. “The settlement class has been properly served,” Judge Jed Rakoff decided Thursday.
The women, suing collectively under the pseudonym Jane Doe, accused Bank of America of ignoring suspicious transactions by Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial. Bank America agreed to settle the lawsuit in March while still insisting it did not facilitate Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes.
Among the transactions the plaintiffs alleged were suspicious were payments to Epstein by Leon Black, who stepped down as chief executive of Apollo Global Management after an independent review commissioned by the company found he paid Epstein $158 million for estate planning.
Black previously said that his relationship with Epstein, which he said involved “professional services” for estate planning, tax and philanthropic advice, had been “a horrible mistake.” He has denied involvement or knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and said any suggestion of his involvement in “Epstein’s reprehensible conduct is categorically untrue.”
The same Jane Doe plaintiffs reached similar settlements with JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, but their claim against Bank of New York Mellon was dismissed. The court in the BNY Mellon case concluded that the plaintiffs’ complaint had failed to adequately allege that the bank had civil liability under the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act or that the bank had obstructed investigations of Epstein…. https://abcnews.com/US/judge-final-approval-bank-americas-72-million-settlement/story?id=136002279
San Francisco Survivors Achieve $395 Million Settlement
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, June 30, 2026 – SNAP lauds the $395 million settlement by the San Francisco Catholic archdiocese to settle more than 500 lawsuits for clerical sexual abuse, an important first step in achieving justice for survivors.
“This is an important step for closure but much more is still needed,” said Dan McNevin, SNAP’s Treasurer and himself a California survivor. “San Francisco must publish an accurate list and assure that all living priests, who are accused of sexual abuse, are kept away from children.”
Attorneys for survivors released a statement Monday saying that a series of reforms addressing child protection and transparency will be implemented as part of the settlement. In addition, San Francisco archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, will be required to write an apology letter to each survivor.
The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy three years ago. The settlement will cover roughly 530 survivors of child sexual abuse.
SNAP tracks and documents the number of dioceses in the United States that declare bankruptcy each year as a way to protect their assets from the cost of settling claims of clergy sexual abuse.
Mind Control Documents & Links – Evidence mk-ultra occurred – This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case, Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/
Luna Announces Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust Published: Jun 23, 2026 WASHINGTON—Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) today announced a hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments.” During the hearing, members will examine the history and timeline of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MKULTRA project and its original classification and how the project meets the CIA’s obligation to protect the United States. Members will also analyze the intelligence community’s unwillingness to declassify information related to MKULTRA and how the lack of transparency has reduced Americans’ trust in government institutions.
“The intelligence community has covered up the nature and classification of the MKULTRA experiments for decades. Americans have been misdirected repeatedly and deserve transparency and accountability from the CIA. The intelligence community’s unwillingness to deliver the truth has fueled dangerous conspiracy theories and eroded public trust in the federal government. This hearing aims to explore the history of the MKULTRA experiments, how they have impacted Americans’ wellbeing, and how the intelligence community can win back trust,” said Task Force Chairwoman Luna.
WITNESSES:
Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Tom O’Neill, Investigative Journalist, Author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Congress Reopens the CIA’s MKULTRA Files as Witnesses Call for Answers
Congress revisited the program as calls for more file declassification and answers into unanswered questions remain decades later. Military Daily News Published Jul 6, 2026
More than four decades after Congress last took a deep look at the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program, lawmakers are once again asking how much the public still doesn’t know.
The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing June 30 titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” The hearing revisited one of the Cold War’s most controversial intelligence programs while examining whether decades of document destruction and government secrecy have prevented a full accounting of what happened.
Witnesses included Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at Brown University and author of Poisoner in Chief; investigative journalist Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties; and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former National Institutes of Health official who appeared as the minority witness.
Much of the hearing focused on whether additional MKULTRA records still exist and whether victims have ever received meaningful accountability.
What Was MKULTRA?
MKULTRA was a CIA research program launched in 1953 to study methods of influencing or controlling human behavior.
At its peak, MKULTRA encompassed 149 known subprojects carried out at more than 80 institutions, including military bases, universities, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies.
The CIA frequently used front organizations to conceal its involvement while researchers experimented with drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, amphetamines and scopolamine. Some experiments combined those drugs with hypnosis, electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and isolation.
The program also included safe houses that operated as brothels, where unsuspecting patrons were secretly dosed with LSD so agents could observe their behavior. Congressional investigations later found that some subjects suffered lasting psychological harm, and at least one death was directly linked to the experiments. Many experiments were conducted without informed consent.
The program remained largely unknown until the mid-1970s, when investigations by the Church Committee and subsequent Senate hearings revealed portions of its existence. Former CIA Director Richard Helms had ordered most MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, leaving investigators with only financial records that had escaped destruction.
‘Medical Torture’
Kinzer testified that MKULTRA represented one of the most extensive secret human experimentation programs ever conducted by the U.S. government.
“MK-ULTRA conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a U.S. government agency,” he testified. “By any standard they qualify as medical torture.”
Kinzer argued that Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who oversaw MKULTRA, deliberately sought out vulnerable populations referred to as “expendables” for experimentation. He testified that agency officials targeted prisoners, psychiatric patients and other people who were unlikely to attract public attention if something went wrong. Kinzer urged lawmakers not to view MKULTRA solely as history…..
Tom O’Neill focused much of his testimony on what he believes Congress still does not know about MKULTRA….
He also discussed years of research that formed the basis of his book Chaos. O’Neill examined psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who conducted CIA-funded research and later became connected to investigations surrounding Charles Manson.
O’Neill stopped short of claiming the CIA controlled Manson or orchestrated the Tate-LaBianca murders. Instead, he argued that inconsistencies in government records and previously undisclosed relationships between West and MKULTRA officials justify additional investigation.
O’Neill believes the historical record remains incomplete because so many documents were destroyed before Congress could examine them. He also highlighted two other figures whose names surfaced repeatedly during his research: Jack Ruby and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ruby, who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, became a focal point because West evaluated Ruby while he was in custody. O’Neill testified that Ruby’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly after his arrest and questioned why West, who had connections to CIA-funded behavioral research, became involved in his case.
O’Neill argued that the circumstances surrounding West’s examination and his later proposal to transfer Ruby to his own care deserve additional scrutiny. O’Neill also discussed the government’s surveillance of King, arguing that intelligence agencies during the Cold War often blurred the line between legitimate national security investigations and intrusive domestic operations. O’Neill cited the government’s extensive monitoring of the civil rights leader as evidence of how broadly intelligence agencies operated during the era and why lawmakers should continue examining classified records from that period….
The existence of MKULTRA itself is not disputed. The CIA has acknowledged the program existed, and Congress investigated it decades ago. What remains disputed, however, is how extensive the experiments became, how many people were affected, and whether all surviving records have ever been made public.
The CIA’s ‘Heart Attack Gun’: A Cold War Weapon for Targeted Assassinations
Of all the secrets revealed by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured imaginations as vividly as the ‘heart attack gun.’
US Military History Updated Jul 7, 2026 ….Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the American public’s imagination as vividly as the agency’s “heart attack gun.”
During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA wouldn’t do to get a leg up on the Soviet Union, from simple operations such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious — and equally illegal — acts such as dosing “unwitting, nonvoluntary human subjects” with LSD and seeing how well they would hold up to interrogation. We know about these secret efforts because Congress investigated the agency — as well as the FBI, National Security Agency and IRS — in 1975 and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were, to put it lightly, alarming.
Led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which became known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First, a whistleblower revealed the Army was spying on American citizens at home. Almost as soon as the dust from that discovery settled, The New York Times published a story reporting that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping files on some 10,000 Americans it suspected of being foreign agents, including at least one member of Congress.
The Church Committee soon uncovered the CIA’s robust assassination program, targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and, famously, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who survived numerous CIA assassination attempts.
But if the agency was going to kill world leaders, it couldn’t look like an assassination, of course. The CIA needed the perfect weapon, and it found one in shellfish. Once extracted, the potent neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a pistol, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. In a 1975 public hearing, Sen. Church showed the CIA’s “heart attack gun” to the world.
The weapon itself resembled a Colt M1911 pistol with a scope, but it didn’t fire .45-caliber bullets. Instead, it fired a frozen pellet of saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consumed toxic algae blooms. The pellet could be silently fired up to 100 meters away and would enter the body through a pinprick entry wound. The poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead….
The heart attack gun wasn’t a uniquely American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union’s secretive intelligence and internal security force, had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the KGB’s hired guns, was known to have murdered two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activists, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces, causing death within minutes. Their causes of death both looked like heart attacks. The CIA learned their true causes of death when Stashinsky eventually defected to the West in 1961.
The CIA’s heart attack gun wasn’t just shocking because it was a clandestine weapon of targeted assassination. President Richard Nixon had imposed a ban on biological weapons in 1969 and ordered the CIA to destroy its stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed he never received such an order. Others said the poisons were warehoused by CIA men who believed in the program. Enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people eventually found its way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was formally halted in 1970, according to The New York Times.)
Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:
Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the American public’s imagination as vividly as the agency’s “heart attack gun.”
During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA wouldn’t do to get a leg up on the Soviet Union, from simple operations such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious — and equally illegal — acts such as dosing “unwitting, nonvoluntary human subjects” with LSD and seeing how well they would hold up to interrogation. We know about these secret efforts because Congress investigated the agency — as well as the FBI, National Security Agency and IRS — in 1975 and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were, to put it lightly, alarming.
Led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which became known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First, a whistleblower revealed the Army was spying on American citizens at home. Almost as soon as the dust from that discovery settled, The New York Times published a story reporting that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping files on some 10,000 Americans it suspected of being foreign agents, including at least one member of Congress.
The Church Committee soon uncovered the CIA’s robust assassination program, targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and, famously, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who survived numerous CIA assassination attempts.
But if the agency was going to kill world leaders, it couldn’t look like an assassination, of course. The CIA needed the perfect weapon, and it found one in shellfish. Once extracted, the potent neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a pistol, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. In a 1975 public hearing, Sen. Church showed the CIA’s “heart attack gun” to the world.
The weapon itself resembled a Colt M1911 pistol with a scope, but it didn’t fire .45-caliber bullets. Instead, it fired a frozen pellet of saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consumed toxic algae blooms. The pellet could be silently fired up to 100 meters away and would enter the body through a pinprick entry wound. The poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead.
Weaponized saxitoxin was the discovery of Mary Embree, who joined the CIA right after leaving high school in the 1960s. She began her career as a secretary, working to create small electronics and deliver passports and other documents to field agents. She was later moved to a project known as MKNaomi, with a mission that included stockpiling “severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of the Technical Services Division” — the agency’s source for the specialized devices used in their spy operations. Her job was to find a poison that was undetectable, and saxitoxin was the silver bullet the CIA was looking for.
Though Embree discovered the right poison, the CIA still needed a delivery method that would allow an operative to literally get away with murder. Dr. Nathan Gordon, a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, discovered that mixing the toxin with water and freezing it would allow a poison dart the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long to be fired from a modified M1911.
Once in the body, the victim experiences paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can present as a tingling sensation, followed by shortness of breath, abdominal pain, choking and lack of coordination. The victim is paralyzed before dying of respiratory failure in a process that can take seconds. The only evidence of foul play would be a small red puncture wound, one not easily found by a coroner not looking for it. The cause of death would appear to be a heart attack, even to a medical examiner.
The heart attack gun wasn’t a uniquely American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union’s secretive intelligence and internal security force, had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the KGB’s hired guns, was known to have murdered two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activists, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces, causing death within minutes. Their causes of death both looked like heart attacks. The CIA learned their true causes of death when Stashinsky eventually defected to the West in 1961.
The CIA’s heart attack gun wasn’t just shocking because it was a clandestine weapon of targeted assassination. President Richard Nixon had imposed a ban on biological weapons in 1969 and ordered the CIA to destroy its stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed he never received such an order. Others said the poisons were warehoused by CIA men who believed in the program. Enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people eventually found its way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was formally halted in 1970, according to The New York Times.)
None other than then-CIA Director William Colby himself brought the famed heart attack gun to the infamous congressional hearing in 1975, describing it in clinical language as a “nondiscernible microbionoculator.” Although he detailed how it could be used, he never revealed if or when it was ever used.
The Church Committee’s findings eventually led President Gerald Ford to sign an executive order forbidding employees of the United States government to “engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” In the end, the CIA would just have to figure out how to eliminate its foreign adversaries without directly contributing to their deaths —as it did in Afghanistan, Argentina, Poland, Chad, Nicaragua and elsewhere…. https://www.military.com/history/cias-heart-attack-gun-cold-war-weapon-targeted-assassinations.html
Hektoen International A Journal of Medical Humanities
Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
– The Nuremburg Code, Section on Permissible Human Experiments (1946)
Louis J. West, M.D. (1924–1999), was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a poor immigrant family. He enlisted in the US Army during World War Two, was sent to medical school at the University of Minnesota, and graduated in 1949. After a psychiatry residency, he served in the US Air Force until 1956. His studies of “brainwashing” and psychological torture helped exonerate American airmen who, after capture in Korea, confessed to or cooperated with Korean accusations against the US of war crimes, particularly those of bacteriological warfare. West’s testimony saved the Americans from courts-martial….
Some of West’s research on mind control was done as part of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Project MKUltra, from 1953–1973. Illegal human experimentation was done to develop procedures and drugs to weaken people and force confessions through psychological torture and brainwashing. These experiments were carried out at over eighty institutions, including military bases, schools, universities, hospitals, and prisons. Special brothels were established where customers were secretly dosed with psychoactive substances. The drugs tested included LSD, amphetamines, mescaline, psilocybin, and scopolamine. The drugs were combined, in institutional settings, with electroconvulsive (“shock”) treatments, hypnosis, isolation, and sensory deprivation. Several people died or were permanently damaged…. https://hekint.org/2024/01/25/louis-jolyon-west-m-d-a-dangerous-doctor/
Documents Reveal Just How Crazy The CIA’s MKULTRA Mind-Control Program Really Was Eireann Van Natta Intelligence State Reporter December 26, 2024
A new collection of over 1,200 documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) infamous mind control program, MKULTRA, was published by the National Security Archive and ProQuest on Monday.
The collection was announced 50 years after Seymour Hersh’s New York Times investigation illuminated the program’s abuses, according to the Archive. It was also published 70 years after the U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly & Company, became the CIA’s primary source of the psychoactive drug LSD, the Archive added.
The MKULTRA project was conducted in the 1950s, and most of the original records were destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms and head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division Sidney Gottlieb, according to the Archive. Gottlieb would eventually serve as director of the agency’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA
About this Collection
This collection explores the Central Intelligence Agency’s foray into behavioral and mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Most commonly known as Project MKULTRA, which refers to the research carried out by the CIA and affiliated institutions between 1953-1963, this codename came to be used as an umbrella term for an array of scientific, psychological, and military endeavors that began well before the official start of MKULTRA in 1953 and that continued in the years after the project officially ended. In this collection, researchers will find many documents relating to MKULTRA as well as its predecessors, Project BLUEBIRD and Project ARTICHOKE, and its various sister projects and successors, including MKNAOMI, MKDELTA and MKSEARCH. This collection also contains records relating to investigations into the CIA’s mind control program, both by the Agency itself and Congress, during the mid to late 1970s. The set has been carefully curated to highlight the clearest, most substantive documents available on MKULTRA and to focus on those records that provide insight into the scope and purpose of the Agency’s mind control program.
Most of the documents were donated to the National Security Archive by John Marks, the author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a book widely considered to be the most authoritative recounting of the CIA’s involvement in behavior and mind control experiments. They consist primarily of CIA records Marks obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Another source for the collection are documents that the CIA released to the family of Frank Olson, an Army biochemist who died in 1953 after he was secretly administered LSD by a CIA employee and then fell from a 10th-story window. Congressional hearings and testimony and the CIA’s reading room were also researched to supplement the collection….
The collection includes records that managed to survive the agency’s “purge” of secretive documents, according to the Archive. The CIA conducted mind control research under Operations MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the Archive noted. The collection — CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA — is mainly composed of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents previously compiled by former State Department official John Marks.
“The MKULTRA program was shut down more than 40 years ago, and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov,” a CIA spokesperson told the Daily Caller. The Caller also reached out to the Archive but has not heard back as of publication. “Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind,” the organization stated in its report….
Another document was seemingly written by the Technical Services Staff (TSS) Chemical Division after DCI Allen Dulles and other officials discussed whether using Georgetown University Hospital for certain experiments was worth the cost, according to the Archive. The officials requested that the TSS provide them with a list of advantages, the organization claimed.
The document detailed various “materials and methods” the group was working on, such as “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness.” Additionally, it included substances that would result in “physical disablement.” The document also mentioned the development of materials that create symptoms of diseases “in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering,” or the exploitation of a pretend or exaggerated disease for one’s personal benefit. The records also indicate that TSS was attempting to develop “physical methods of producing shock and confusion” along with substances that “alter personality structure” as well as a “knockout pill” for undercover drugging….
Legal documents were also released, including Gottlieb’s depositions by attorneys for Velma Orlikow. She was a patient of the Allan Memorial Institute, a Canadian facility where Dr. Ewen Cameron experimented on psychiatric patients in the 1950s and 60s. Cameron’s experiments were funded in part by the CIA’s MKULTRA program, according to the CBC.
The Archives noted that while MKULTRA had approval from the “highest levels,” there was little to no oversight of the program. (RELATED: Declassified Documents Claim CIA Secretly Collected Americans’ Private Data)
It was not until 1975 when the Church Committee investigated the intelligence community that various intelligence operations, including MKULTRA, were brought to public light. Eireann Van Natta https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/64
Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Project MKULTRA, Subproject 35,” Top Secret, November 15, 1954, 13 pp.
Description
The CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS) requests authorization for a project at Georgetown University Hospital that would provide cover for research under the Agency’s “biological and chemical warfare program.” Using a philanthropic organization as a “cut-out,” the CIA would partially fund “a new research wing” of the hospital (the Gorman Annex) and would use one sixth of the new annex to conduct “Agency-sponsored research in these sensitive fields.” MKULTRA, the memo observes, provides research and development funding “for highly sensitive projects in certain fields, including covert biological, chemical and radiological warfare” but does not specifically authorize funds to establish cover for these programs.
An attachment describes the rationale for the use of a university hospital as cover for conducting such experiments, noting that “competent individuals in the field of physiological, psychiatric and other biological sciences are very reluctant to enter into signed agreements of any sort which would connect them with this activity since such connection might seriously jeopardize their professional reputations.”
The Agency’s clandestine funding and use of the hospital would be channeled through the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, named for Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University Hospital who had been secretly working with the CIA since 1951. The Fund was used “both as a cut-out for dealing with contractors in the fields of covert chemical and biological warfare, and as a prime contractor for certain areas of biological research.” In addition to Geschickter, at least two other board members of the Fund were aware that it was being used to conceal the CIA’s “sensitive research projects.”
Agency sponsorship was “completely deniable since no connection would exist between the University and the Agency.” Three “bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division of TSS” would be given “excellent professional cover” while “human patients and volunteers for experimental use will be available under excellent clinical conditions” and with hospital supervision.
The document was found among the papers of James Srodes, author of Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999), which are housed at the George C. Marshall Research Library of the Virginia Military Institute.
Source George C. Marshall Research Library, James Srodes Collection, Box 8, Folder: “AWD [Allen Welsh Dulles]: Mind Control 1953-1961”
Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Successful Application of Narco-Hypnotic Interrogation (ARTICHOKE),” Classification unknown, 3 pp. Jul 14, 1952
Description
In a memo to the DCI, the CIA Security Office reports on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” Using the cover of a “psychiatric-medical” evaluation, officials from the Security Office and the CIA Medical Office combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and, in one case, “a subsequent total amnesia produced by post-hypnotic suggestion.” In the second case, CIA handlers used “heavy dosages of sodium pentothal,” a barbiturate, “coupled with the stimulant Desoxyn,” a methamphetamine, “with outstanding success.” The officers involved believed “that the ARTICHOKE operations were entirely successful” and “that the tests demonstrated conclusively the effectiveness of the combined chemical-hypnotic technique in such cases.”
John S. Earman, Inspector General, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum for the Record, “MKULTRA Program,” Secret, November 29, 1963, 2 pp. Nov 29, 1963
Description
This memo records a meeting held in the office of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gen. Marshall Carter to settle the one major point of disagreement among CIA officials over the inspector general’s MKULTRA recommendations: whether to continue with the testing of MKULTRA substances on unwitting U.S. citizens. Others present were Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms, CIA executive director (and former inspector general) Lyman Kirkpatrick, current CIA inspector general John Earman, and Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
Both Gottlieb and Helms “argued for the continuation of unwitting testing,” while Earman, Carter and Kirkpatrick disagreed. Carter was concerned with the “unwitting aspect,” and a discussion ensued “on the possibility of unwitting test on foreign nationals,” which “had been ruled out” due to opposition from “senior chiefs of stations” as “too dangerous” and who said they lacked “controlled facilities.” Earman finds this “odd,” emphasizing the slipshod nature of some of the safehouses used for unwitting tests in the U.S.
Concluding the meeting, the participants agree that if the Directorate for Plans determined “that unwitting testing on American citizens must be continued to operationally prove out these drugs, it may become necessary to place this problem before the Director [of Central Intelligence] for a decision.” The attached cover memo from 1975 indicates that the DCI decided to defer a decision on testing U.S. citizens for one year and requested that until then the Agency “please continue the freeze on unwitting testing.” The authors of the cover memo found “no record … that this freeze was ever lifted.” Source John Marks Collection
January 2015 An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability B.M. Disbennett (Disbennett, B.M. (2015) “An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability System,”Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice: Vol. 3: Iss. 2, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.70658/2693-3225.1058 Available at: https://ir.law.utk.edu/rgsj/vol3/iss2/4
….This paper will explore the top-secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) human medical experiment, MKULTRA, and the possible avenues of relief for service members involved in the project….This article will take a brief look into the history of human medical trials, followed by a history of the CIA program MKULTRA, and other related programs. Next, it will explore case law that bars veterans from constitutional remedies as well as tort remedies against the U.S. government. Finally, the article will discuss challenges for veterans in the VA disability compensation system to determine if MKULTRA victims could successfully seek service-connection. Ultimately, a veteran attempting to recover damages from MKULTRA testing will likely be unable to prevail under a constitutional analysis, but an MKULTRA victim may be able to seek service-connection under the VA. https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=rgsj
The Lunchbox Theory: Lessons Learned from Trauma and Abuse, by Michael Skinner
The Lunchbox Theory is a deeply personal memoir about the lifelong consequences of childhood abuse, including sexual trafficking – and the hard-won possibility of healing. With honesty and compassion, Michael Skinner traces his path from a successful musician, agent, and father to a man forced to confront truths he had buried for years. The story ultimately points toward resilience: reclaiming joy, rebuilding a life, and choosing hope.
For more than two decades, Skinner has advocated for survivors of childhood trauma. Today he brings that experience to his work as an award-winning speaker—and as a musician again, using story and song to help others feel seen and less alone.
Michael Skinner
Michael Skinner is an award-winning advocate, educator, writer, and critically acclaimed singer, songwriter, and guitarist, who addresses trauma, abuse, trafficking and mental health concerns through public speaking, writing, and his music. Since 1993, Michael’s uplifting and heartwarming story and songs of hope and healing have impacted thousands of people throughout the country. His presentations at colleges, universities, high schools, mental health centers and conferences, churches, civic groups, sexual assault and domestic violence support centers and conferences, including a women’s correctional center in Hawaii, are highly acclaimed. His role as a consultant and trainer for the Federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the National Center for Trauma Informed Care, and the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors has been crucial in helping to shape the policy initiatives and directives for the delivery and implementation of trauma-informed care and services. He has worked with organizations nationwide to address the stigma of mental health and end the silence of child abuse and suicide. Michael is the founder and director of The Surviving Spirit; a monthly newsletter and website sharing resources to help those impacted by trauma, abuse, and mental health challenges. https://www.mskinnermusic.com/https://www.casemateipm.com/9781963714098/the-lunchbox-theory/
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