I was six and a half years old in December 1980 when John Lennon was assassinated. It was the first adult death I ever really noticed. I remember the news, and the constant replaying of the video for his song “Imagine. ” Even now, whenever I hear that song, I think of his murder.
Years later, I came across an old book by British lawyer and investigative writer Fenton Bresler. He suggested that Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, was not a lone nut at all, but a mind-controlled assassin. It sounds far-fetched, but many such books exist, written by often respectable authors, suggesting there is more to the series of assassinations that began with President John F. Kennedy in 1963, followed by Martin Luther King Jr.
in April 1968, Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968, and finally Lennon in 1980. They point to a secret CIA program that is well known in pop culture circles today, though not in any great depth: MKUltra. Even more incredibly, MKUltra did exist.
I have reproduced some of its documentation. Its purpose was to explore the idea of creating government assassins using mind control induced by hypnosis and drugs. But its origins were not in the United States. They lay in the moral vacuum of the Nazi concentration camps, and in a very immoral agreement made between the liberating US forces and some of the most evil Nazi doctors of World War II.
The conspiracy goes like this: between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the CIA set about attempting to create human robot assassins, what are called Manchurian Candidates. The name comes from a book about US soldiers captured during the Korean War who were brainwashed by the Soviets into becoming assassins, committing their crimes in a trance-like state and having little memory of it afterwards. For the record, the US has denied that MKUltra had anything to do with assassinations. They claim it was involved in developing advanced interrogation techniques.
But incredibly, as with so many post-war US intelligence operations, MKUltra’s origins were in Nazi Germany, in a program to find what the Germans termed a “truth serum” that could be used on suspects to obtain information instead of torturing them, which was messy and unreliable. The father of this program was an SS doctor working at Dachau concentration camp. He was brought to the United States in 1945 at the behest of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the direct forerunner of the CIA. He was one of several thousand Nazi doctors, engineers, scientists, and assorted war criminals who were imported into the US under Operation Paperclip after the war.
The idea that hypnosis could force people to speak openly about suppressed or hidden information had been around for a long time. Drugs were another method that could be used in concert with hypnosis to cause an individual to open up to an interrogator. The SS were very interested in using psychedelic drugs to achieve this aim of making prisoners talk. Dr.
Kurt Plotner was, in 1944, an SS Sturmbannführer, or major, in the SS medical service. He headed just one aspect of Nazi human experimentation research, widely practiced by SS doctors and also Luftwaffe doctors throughout the various concentration camps. However, unlike, for example, Dr. Josef Mengele of Auschwitz infamy, Dr.
Plotner is not well known today. The search for a truth serum began in 1944 at Dachau, following Plotner’s earlier human experiments in the search for a malaria cure that killed thousands of camp inmates. The primary substance used by Plotner and his team was mescaline, a naturally occurring psychedelic hallucinogen. Plotner also used LSD, which had been discovered by accident in Switzerland in 1938 by Dr.
Albert Hofmann. The SS negotiated for LSD directly from Sandoz company in Switzerland, which manufactured it, using some for the truth serum experiments at Dachau. The psychedelics were administered to the test subjects via their food and coffee. After the effects manifested, they were observed, and then the prisoners were interrogated.
The SS doctors noted that the drugs induced schizophrenic-like behavior, fragmenting the victim’s will, and triggered profound alterations of consciousness. The SS interrogators combined the chemical disruption with psychological tactics, convincing the disoriented prisoners that they had no control over their own will, to successfully manipulate them into revealing important secrets. While this was going on in Germany, in the United States, thought had been seriously given by the OSS to killing Hitler by the use of a Manchurian candidate. The idea was put forward by an industrialist from Boston named Stanley Lovell, who was also head of research and development at OSS during the war.
The idea was brutally simple: obtain a high-ranking German prisoner of war and hypnotize him into hating Hitler and the Third Reich. Then arrange his escape back to Germany, and he would be triggered to kill the Führer in a hypnotic state. Lovell checked at the time with two famous New York psychiatrists who said that the weight of evidence suggested a hypnotized person could not be made to do what they did not want to do. The OSS shared this view.
However, Professor George Estabrooks, head of the psychiatry department at Colgate University, disagreed. He said that once you had a person who was a good subject for hypnosis, and about one in five people are, he was sure that you could make him do whatever you wanted him to do, regardless of his pre-hypnotic disposition. Stage hypnotists, after all, cause people to make fools of themselves against their will all the time. Estabrooks suggested that the OSS conduct an experiment to take a perfectly normal person and see if they could be hypnotized into killing someone.
However, this scheme was shut down by OSS director William Donovan, who believed it was deeply immoral. Come the end of the war in Europe, there was an almost unseemly dash to gather up enemy personnel who could be useful to the Allies, regardless of their war crimes. During the joint US-British Alsos mission to Germany, which was tasked with finding German nuclear secrets and scientists, the commanding officer of that unit, US Colonel Boris Pash, had the opportunity to grab Dr. Plotner for the OSS, which he did.
The decision was taken that Plotner be permitted to continue with his truth serum experiments in the US as the OSS tried to develop new interrogation methods, particularly as World War II began in 1945 to evolve into the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Plotner was one of more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, technicians, and others sent, often with their families, to the US to staff a wide variety of US intelligence-backed projects, gaining for the US a technological lead in the early Cold War. Plotner’s war crimes were suppressed, and he was given a new identity: Dr. Schmidt.
His experiments from the concentration camps would be used as the groundwork for Project Bluebird, created by the OSS successor organization, the CIA, in 1951. Bluebird was later renamed Project Artichoke on the 20th of August, 1951. The goal of Artichoke was to see if a person could be involuntarily made to perform an act of attempted assassination. The project would use hallucinogenic drugs and hypnosis, forced addiction, and other methods to assert control over the subject’s mind.
They also developed new interrogation techniques based on Dr. Plotner’s drug experiments, combining hypnosis and drugs such as mescaline and LSD, which they discovered were very successful against suspected Soviet agents. Artichoke was later succeeded in 1953 by Project MKUltra, which worked further to create mind-controlled assassins for the US government. Experimentation continued until 1972, when MKUltra was allegedly shut down.
Nazi scientists other than Dr. Plotner were also involved in MKUltra, including Dr. Kurt Blome, who had carried out human experimentation in the concentration camps, primarily in the field of biological warfare, particularly the weaponizing of diseases like bubonic plague, typhoid, cholera, and anthrax. Some of this was in concert with the Japanese Unit 731 in Manchuria, China, notorious for these kinds of experiments and its human vivisection experiments.
In my book, The Devil’s Doctors, I prove that both the British and US governments had benefited their own biowarfare post-war programs by using data from Japan’s Unit 731. This included data derived from human experiments on British, Australian, and American prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II. Blome was recruited directly by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA for MKUltra.
The CIA used a variety of techniques to manipulate subjects’ mental states and brain functions, including LSD and other psychedelic drugs, hypnosis, electric shocks, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of illegal torture, resulting, of course, in several documented deaths and undoubtedly many others we know nothing about. So, did MKUltra produce any real Manchurian candidate assassins that could be used by the CIA? Most of the MKUltra records were destroyed by the CIA in 1973. However, despite the best efforts of the CIA, things have slipped out.
For example, US Navy psychiatrist Lieutenant Commander Thomas Narut, assigned to the US Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy in July 1975, attended a NATO conference in Oslo, Norway on stress. During a private Q&A afterwards to a small group of individuals, which included Peter Watson of the Sunday Times in London, he said he had been part of MKUltra and that they had indeed created units of what he called hitmen and assassins that were ready in selected countries should the need arise. Narut told Watson that US Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, conditioned them as political assassins, and then placed them in US embassies around the world. When the Sunday Times ran a story on this, the US Navy immediately denied any of it and said that Dr.
Narut had been speaking in theoretical and not practical terms. A further piece of evidence came from Dr. Milton Kline, a New York psychologist and former president of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, who was an unpaid consultant on CIA hypnosis research. He said, on the record in the 1970s, that the idea of creating a real-life Manchurian Candidate was not impossible.
“It cannot be done by everyone,” said Kline. “It cannot be done consistently, but it can be done. ”
Whatever the truth may be, researchers continue to suspect the involvement of MKUltra in some of the high-profile assassinations over the past 60 years, particularly those of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan and John Lennon by Mark Chapman.
Many people believe that lone nuts were not quite as alone as the government tried to make out. While others dismiss MKUltra as a conspiracy that failed to achieve anything. What do you think?
