You know, I wish I had a dollar for every time some random stranger approached me on the street and said, "Chris, all the cool kids are talking about Cold War mind control programs, but I don't know the first thing about them. Can you help?"
It goes something like this:
Unethical and nonconsensual human experimentation has a long and ugly history in the US, but especially so during the mid-20th Century. Here are just a few examples:
Pellagra Experiments (Mississippi, 1915-1920s) In trying to isolate pellagra’s cause, Dr. Joseph Goldberger induced the disease in prisoners by feeding them a deliberately deficient diet. Goldberger proved pellagra stemmed from Vitamin B deficiency, but only after subjects suffered skin lesions, diarrhea, and dementia.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Alabama, 1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service tracked syphilis’s natural progression in 600 Black men; 399 with the disease, 201 without. Participants weren’t informed they had syphilis, or that treatment for it would be withheld. Scientists let the disease take its course, ruining lives and causing blindness, insanity, and death.
The Manhattan Project (New Mexico, 1940s) exposed workers, soldiers, and even hospital patients to plutonium and uranium—sometimes via injection—to study radiation effects without consent or full disclosure.
U.S. Army chemical weapons tests (1940s-1950s) Thousands of soldiers, were exposed to mustard gas and Lewisite (a blistering agent) to test protective gear and after-exposure treatment. Soldiers were left with all kinds of injuries, with many later coming down with cancer.
Holmesburg Prison experiments (Philadelphia,1951-1974) With funding from Dow Chemical and Big Pharma, Dr. Albert Kligman exposed prison inmates to dioxins, experimental drugs, and other toxins. One of these was Agent Orange, which left lasting physiological damage.
Willowbrook State School (New York, 1956-1971) Under the direction of Dr. Saul Krugman, researchers infected mentally-retarded children with hepatitis — sometimes via food contaminated with fecal matter — to study immunity and vaccines. You read that right: doctors fed hepatits-infected shit to retarded kids.
That these experiments violated the Nuremberg Code (1947) wasn’t a problem to any of these scientists. It wouldn’t be until the 1974 National Research Act that experimenting on human beings without their consent was outlawed in America.
But you know the old expression - when human experimentation is outlawed, only outlaws will experiment on humans. And there was no shortage of those.
MIND-BENDER
Lauretta Bender (1897-1987) was a neuropsychiatrist who conducted some rather brutal medical experiments on children at Bellevue Hospital in New York City from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s.
How brutal?
Well, Bender administered electroshock treatment and dangerous doses of insulin to children diagnosed with "autistic schizophrenia," and other conditions. ECT was used to induce seizures to purportedly alleviate psychiatric symptoms. At least 100 mostly black children, three years old and up, were subjected to this quackery. Bender also experimented on children with LSD at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens during the 1960s.
Bender’s work was too insane for most of her peers to endorse. Even for the CIA, who tried to suppress any outside reporting on her unbridled sadism and cruelty. However, it was all perfectly legal, since human experimentation without consent was not prohibited in the US until 1974. But at the same time she stands as a cautionary example of science run amok to sane and moral people, Lauretta Bender has been fully rehabilitated by the scientific establishment.
AT FULL CLIP
Operation Paperclip was a program launched after World War II, which imported German scientists, engineers, and technicians - many of whom were card-carrying Nazis - to the US. As soon as they were settled, they were put to work for American companies, especially in the fields of rocketry, pharmaceuticals, and weapons of mass destruction.
Paperclip’s most famous recruit was Wernher von Braun, who would eventually be put in charge of the space program. But many others were veterans of Nazi mind control and human experimentation programs, expertise they put to work for their new paymasters. Early CIA MK programs were already heavily influenced by Nazi interrogation tactics, and the work done in conjunction with old SS hands at Camp King (near Frankfurt) laid the groundwork for all the mind control mischief that followed.
Three particular Paperclip figures are worth noting:
Kurt Blome, an expert in biological warfare, escaped the noose at Nuremberg thanks to U.S. intervention, and was put to work at Camp King. His work on the psychological effects of various chemicals inspired the CIA’s work with various mind-altering substances.
Walter Schreiber worked with US intelligence at Camp King before going to work at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas under the auspices of Paperclip. When the American media began digging into his past, the Feds sent him to live in Argentina.
Hubertus Strughold was brought to the U.S. to work on aerospace projects. His research under the Nazis involved human experimentation in extreme conditions, which inspired MKULTRA experiments sensory deprivation and physiological stress.
SORCERERS
Sidney Gottlieb was born Joseph Schneider on August 3, 1918, in the Bronx. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech, which lent him a unique insight into the compositions of exotic drugs and poisons. Gottlieb was also an eccentric and/or proto-hippie weirdo who was partial to goats and folk dancing, contrary to the Doctor Doom aura that follows him around in some circles.
While you're there, check out the full recording of the latest True Crime Radio Mystery Hour. Here's a taster...
