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America’s Secret Weapons

Mind Control and Biowarfare in the Cold War and Beyond

Jerry Leonard

11/13/04

"Because of its power and global interests U.S. leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would ... have given every U.S. president of the past 50 years Nuremberg treatment."

--Edward Herman

The United States ended World War II by using the most horrific weapon in the history of warfare—the atomic bomb—on the Japanese civilian population. This doomsday weapon had been developed in total secrecy as part of a massive research program employing a small army of world-class scientists. After the war, the United States scrambled through the rubble and chaos to determine what progress its enemies had made in their secret weapons development programs. It turned out that the Germans’ atom bomb effort was primitive compared to the Manhattan Project. However, the Germans and the Japanese had made progress in other areas – and we were obsessed over finding out just how much.

Two of the “weapons’’ we sought information on had nothing to do with the traditional field of battle, but their ramifications would be enormous. Using volumes of information gained from German and Japanese experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners, POWs and entire civilian populations, the U.S. continued its enemies’ research programs in mind control[1] and biological warfare.[2] It even employed some of the war criminals that managed these programs as consultants at Fort Detrick[3],[4] for experiments using U.S. citizens and soldiers as guinea pigs.

The Manhattan Project infrastructure itself was employed in this regard.[5] Under this umbrella, the U.S. hoped to duplicate its success in creating devastating weapons by perfecting the mind-control technology developed by the Germans[6] and the biological warfare technology developed and tested by the Japanese.

The postwar effort to develop novel weapons was substantially different, however, from that which produced a super-bomb capable of leveling an entire city. Instead of using physics and chemistry to harness the fundamental forces of nature, these new weapons would exploit the fields of psychology and biology to manipulate the fundamental processes required for mental[7] and physical health in humans. By unlocking the keys to the brain and the body, the United States would be able to induce diseases at will for psychological or biological warfare. These weapons ultimately had the potential to be more devastating than the atom bomb since they could not only control both mental and physical health on an unprecedented scale but, more importantly, could be tested and used in complete secrecy.

To refine the weapons developed by its enemies in WWII, the Central Intelligence Agency launched an immense program of clandestine research and international experimentation on human subjects. By covertly leveraging the U.S. medical infrastructure, the CIA was able to orchestrate this experimentation under the pretense of legitimate research by doctors who often didn't realize the sinister ends to which their research would be used.[8]

The initial mind-control research was conducted toward nominally noble ends—even if the means to achieve them were abominable. Like their counterparts in other fields, the nation’s elite psychologists and psychiatrists attempted to create human diseases on-demand so that cures could be tested under laboratory conditions. For example, research geared toward selectively inducing hypnotic amnesia and drug-induced schizophrenic states would provide doctors with a way of testing theories on the causes of neurosis and mental illness. Medical research with biological agents had similarly stated goals. Human experiments with “anticancer viruses” such as West Nile Virus and with “cancer transplants” in subjects with impaired immune systems would allow scientists to test their theories of how the immune system controlled the growth of diseases. Such information would assist in manipulating the human immune system toward the development of cancer vaccines.

But of course these experiments toward inducing laboratory models of mental and physical diseases were not conducted purely for medical purposes. Much of this research was conducted for psychological and biological warfare applications, and even then under the pretext of developing defensive measures against enemy use of such technology. For example, learning how to destroy memory and manipulate personality through stress, drugs and hypnosis might allow researchers to counteract these processes and “inoculate” their men against enemy use of such techniques in hostile interrogations. (Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” was the victim of exactly this type of research as a student at Harvard.) Likewise, knowledge of how immunity could be destroyed by chemicals and viruses to cause disease would provide clues critical to counteract these processes in the development of vaccines. Such vaccines would allow the government to inoculate its own troops against bioweapons used by national security threats.[9]

Toward even more sinister ends, this research also provided an offensive capability. Supposedly defensive mind-control research[10] would give the CIA the ability to create agents and operatives who would carry out their assignments in the midst of danger without risk of their becoming security threats.[11] Through mental conditioning and the creation of synthetic, multiple personalities, interrogation-proof double agents could be produced who would not only safely transfer information as human couriers (to a friendly hypnotist) but obediently commit acts such as assassinations that were contrary to their personal morality and safety. Agents with enhanced or selectively depleted memories could even be sent into the field to accomplish tasks they would have no conscious recollection of completing.[12]

Work on vaccines had dual uses as well. By developing the technology to selectively deplete the immune system, researchers could develop an understanding of how immune system defects caused disease. This information could then be used to counteract such processes and selectively enhance the immune system in the form of vaccines.[13] But the ability to controllably destroy the immune system was in itself a biological weapon that could be used as part of an offensive capability.[14] And these offensive and defensive tools could be used synergistically. Defensive vaccines could be developed that would allow U.S. forces to be inoculated against offensive bioweapons to be used on enemy forces.[15]

Theory is one thing, implementation quite another. Has the U.S. government, through its agencies, transformed “could” and “would” into “can” and “will”? Did it actually bring research in psychological and biological warfare to the next level? Years of study have convinced me that this has happened and is happening to this very day. Consider:

· The technology developed to control the immune system—selectively depleting immune cells with viruses in animal cancer-transplant experiments—was exploited to induce the epidemic of AIDS and cancer in humans. This latter epidemic is highly beneficial for fulfilling the goals of both the cancer vaccine research and national security establishments, the two fields that worked synergistically to create AIDS viruses grown in human cells just prior to the HIV epidemic. My book AIDS: The “Perfect” Disease explains how such biological warfare agents were not only created under the pretext of cancer research but unleashed under the pretext of an international cancer experiment.[16] In this way, the United States echoed the wartime international biological warfare exercises conducted by the Japanese researchers it recruited following WWII using immunosuppressive viruses it perfected through decades of cancer experiments in animals.[17]

· Nazi mind-control techniques were covertly perfected by U.S. intelligence agencies after decades of research on hundreds of victims,[18] ultimately yielding the ability to control the human mind to create “programmed” provocateurs, double agents and “involuntary assassins.” According to declassified government documents published by the New York Times, such agents would carry out actions “even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” The most egregious crime from these creations was the programming of the assassin used to murder President John F. Kennedy. My book The Perfect Assassin shows how Lee Harvey Oswald’s seemingly contradictory actions are eerily consistent with his being unwittingly manipulated through mind control by the CIA through the now legendary Cold War programs MKULTRA and COINTELPRO. The benefits of Oswald’s actions to the CIA and the foreshadowing of his activities in CIA memos and statements of military hypnotists are revealed in my harmonizing study of the JFK murder.

· Mind-control experimentation is also an enabling technology to maintain a population of human guinea pigs for biological experimentation. The use of AIDS within this framework of experimentation is an extraordinary vehicle to continue the long-running eugenics program to create a master race overseen by American corporations in Nazi Germany. I believe much of U.S. policy is designed to quietly perpetuate this brutally destructive and elitist program. My book Hitler Is Winning describes the tragic legacy and current dangers of this ongoing effort quietly sponsored by history’s deadliest and unpunished war criminals—including America’s elite universities, corporate foundations and political and financial luminaries.

While discussion of mind control and biological warfare by our own government is disconcerting to many, and incredible to some, it is only through public awareness of these subjects that I believe national security planners can be held accountable and thus be prevented from their continued use. For those interested in exploring these subjects further, please read my works explaining the development and use of these weapons available at www.winstonsmith.net.

Forewarned is forearmed.

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[1] Ironically, one of the American biowarfare experts sent into Germany on a fact-finding mission would later die under suspicious circumstances as a result of being an unwitting participant in a CIA mind-control drug experiment similar to those conducted by the Nazis he was tasked with interviewing. Frank Olson, a U.S. government anthrax expert, had been sent to Germany in 1951 with two other men as part of a CIA program to evaluate progress made in Nazi mind-control research. In this case it was the research overseen by “Nazi anthrax expert and SS Major General Dr. Walter P. Schreiber” during the war. As H.P. Albarelli Jr. reported, the U.S.team “traveled to Germany to interview Schreiber” and learn “all that it could about a Nazi SS project that employed ‘psychochemical drugs’ during concentration camp interrogation experiments.” H.P. Albarelli Jr., “Feds’ involvement in anthrax experiments: Records show conflicting reports about bacterium’s use as weapon;” WorldNetDaily.com, 9/21/01, (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25406).

[2] Americans also scrambled to get data from Japanese biological warfare experts such as Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of Japan’s biowarfare establishment. (This establishment, known as Unit 731, killed tens of thousands of civilians in field tests with biowarfare agents it developed in tests on prisoners of war.) Lt. Col. Arvo T. Thompson interviewed Ishii after his capture by American forces: “In Japan, Thompson interviewed Ishii, who had been captured by the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. …A top-secret U.S. Army Far East Command report on Thompson’s findings reads: ‘The value to the U.S. of Japanese biological weapons data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war-crimes prosecution.’ A 1956 FBI memorandum reveals that by the mid-1950s the U.S. knew everything about Ishii’s human experiments but agreed not to prosecute in exchange for Japan’s scientific data on germ warfare.” Like Frank Olson, Thompson later committed suicide: “In May 1951, scientists at Fort Detrick were shocked to learn that Thompson had ‘committed suicide’ while on another special assignment in Tokyo. The circumstances surrounding Thompson’s death have never been publicly revealed. Two years later, Olson would also ‘commit suicide’ under circumstances so unusual that eventually he became an icon of American mysteries.” H.P. Albarelli Jr., “Feds’ involvement in anthrax experiments: Records show conflicting reports about bacterium’s use as weapon;” WorldNetDaily.com, 9/21/01, (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25406).

[3] War criminals from both enemy camps would be hired as consultants and brought to lecture at Fort Detrick, Maryland—the U.S. center for biological warfare development. According to Fort Detrick researchers, the chief Japanese biological warfare researcher (Ishii), along with other Japanese researchers, “was secreted into the United States to lecture at Camp Detrick…. on Unit 731's human experiments.” http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25406

[4] “Remarkably, despite his being wanted for war crimes and strong suspicions that he was acting as a double agent for the Russians, [Nazi SS Major Walter P. Schreiber] was hired to work with the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps. On Oct. 7, 1951, the New York Times reported that Schreiber was in Texas working for the U.S. Air Force. After his employment contract with the Army and Air Force expired, the CIA blocked plans to send Schreiber back to Germany and in May 1952 helped arrange his relocation to Buenos Aires where he was employed as an expert on ‘disease and epidemics’ by the Argentine government. Some former Fort Detrick researchers who declined to be identified maintained that Schreiber, on at least two occasions, lectured at the Frederick, Md., facility. Others maintain that Schreiber was relocated to Argentina so he could help facilitate the flow to the United States of other fugitive Nazi scientists hiding there.” H.P. Albarelli Jr., “The secret history of anthrax: Declassified documents show widespread experimentation in ‘40s,” WorldNetDaily.com, 9/06/01, (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25220); H.P. Albarelli Jr., “Feds’ involvement in anthrax experiments: Records show conflicting reports about bacterium’s use as weapon;” WorldNetDaily.com, 9/21/01, (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25406).

[5] John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp. 6-8.

[6] Marks reports that the Nazis first conducted mind-control experiments with mescaline “to eliminate the will of the person examined.” While the Nazis experimented on “Jews, gypsies, Russians and other groups on whose lives the Nazis place little or no value,” American scientists using exactly the same techniques (for example, slipping the drug into a person’s drink) with even more powerful chemicals would test these substances on the American public at-large. Like the Nazis, the Americans would also use drugs in combination with hypnosis for mind-control experiments. Marks, p. 4, 5.

[7] Quoting CIA sources, the New York Times summarized the “25-year, $25-million effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to learn how to control the human mind.” The CIA “sought to crack the mental defenses of enemy agents—to be able to program them and its own operatives to carry out any mission even against their will and ‘against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.’” Nicholas M. Horrock, “Private Institutions Used in CIA Effort to Control Behavior,” New York Times, August 2, 1977.

[8] This research was secretly financed and orchestrated through a network of CIA-controlled foundations.

[9] There is a historical precedent for this scenario, which goes back to the very formation of the Republic. George Washington vaccinated his recruits against smallpox to protect them from suspected biological warfare attempts by the British. It is known that the British used such measures against Indian populations. According to an article on the PBS website: “During the French and Indian War in 1763 the British Commander-in-Chief Sir Jeffrey Amherst wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet about the using smallpox against Indians: ‘Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians? We must use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.’” The BBC reported the favorable response to the letter: “The colonel replied: 'I will try to inoculate the [Native American tribe] with some blankets that may fall in their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself.' Smallpox decimated the Native Americans, who had never been exposed to the disease before and had no immunity.”

[10] John Marks described how offensive mind-control research was related to defensive research. According to Marks, the early mind-control researchers “quickly realized that the only way to build an effective defense against mind control was to understand its offensive possibilities. The line between offense and defense—if it ever existed—soon became so blurred as to be meaningless.” John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), p. 25.

[11] As John Marks summarized: “Caught in the muck and frustration of ordinary spywork, operators hoped for a miracle tool. Faced with liars and deceivers, they longed for a truth drug. Surrounded by people who knew too much, they sought a way to create amnesia. They dreamed of finding means to make unwilling people carry out specific tasks, such as stealing documents, provoking a fight, killing someone or otherwise committing an antisocial act. … Plagued by the unsureness, agency officials hoped to take the randomness—indeed, the free will—out of agent handling. … Thus the impetus toward mind-control research came not only from the lure of science and the fantasies of science fiction, it also came from the art of the spy business.” John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp. 52, 53.

[12] Mind-control technology could also be used to extract information from enemy agents or even turn them into unwitting double agents.

[13] This process was designed to induce immunoproficiency through creating immunodeficiency. See Why AIDS Was Invented, by the author.

[14] In addition to helping researchers understand how to increase the lethality of bioweapons, the ability to selectively deplete the immune system would allow the government to turn everyday diseases into biowarfare agents. Through the use of this technology, the U.S. could selectively destroy entire populations considered national security threats.

[15] In the 1960s, the U.S. considered using smallpox as a bioweapon against the Vietnamese since U.S. soldiers were vaccinated against the disease while the Vietnamese were not. “A boomerang effect seemed unlikely, since American troops were routinely vaccinated against the contagious disease. And North Vietnamese troops appeared to be vulnerable. In some ways, the setting was ideal. Though Vietnam had experienced no smallpox outbreaks since 1959, the disease still lurked in neighboring countries, allowing an epidemic to be attributed to natural causes. In the argot of covert operations, the strike would be plausibly deniable, a key requirement.” Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad, Germs, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 60, 61, 74.

[16] This technology allowed planners to selectively deplete not only populations of immune system cells but entire populations in the Third World.

[17] In my book, I summarize the evidence that this biological warfare exercise was conducted under the pretext of administering vaccines, including the smallpox vaccine. Curiously, there is a historical precedent for the use of smallpox vaccination in a biological warfare exercise. According to a BBC article by Colette Flight: “It has been alleged that smallpox was also used as a weapon during the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). During the winter of 1775-76, American forces were attempting to free Quebec from British control. After capturing Montreal, it looked as if they might succeed. But in December 1775, the British fort commander reportedly had civilians immunized against the disease and then deliberately sent out to infect the American troops. A few weeks later a major smallpox epidemic broke out in the American ranks, affecting about half of the 10,000 soldiers. They retreated in chaos after burying their dead in mass graves.”

[18] The Scotland Sunday Times reported the activities of an internationally respected Canadian doctor recruited by the CIA: “Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world’s leading psychiatrists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing personalities of people in his care.” Under Cameron’s “care,” patients were kept on LSD for months at a time so they could be brainwashed. According to the Times, “Patients were woken from drug-induced stupors two or three times a day for multiple electric shocks. In a specially designed ‘sleep room’ …Cameron placed a speaker under the patient’s pillow and relayed negative messages for 16 hours a day.” One of Cameron’s victims was Gail Kastner, who after 50 years, has finally gotten her lawsuit appealed in the Canadian courts. According to the Times, “Kastner was a 19-year-old honors student suffering from mild depression when she first underwent ‘treatment’ in 1953. On returning home she sucked her thumb, demanded to be fed from a bottle, talked in a baby voice and urinated on the floor.” This court case opens the possibility of compensation for hundreds of more victims. “Brainwash victims win cash claims,” Karin Goodwin, The Sunday Times, Scotland October 17, 2004.