Taking Stock

Psychological Warfare

We’ve developed even more cruel and unusual punishment for would-be “free thinkers,” and dissidents since the era of MK Ultra, the CIA mind control programs. During the Cold War, the CIA attempted to outdo Soviet and Asian brainwashing techniques and close the “mind control gap.”

With the Manchurian Candidate, they tried to secretely manufacture the perfect assassin – a cyborg. Then the agency experimented with a variety of drugs designed to neutralize or disable the enemy, or to use as truth serums. They also used electroshock, sensory deprivation, psychotronics, and radical hypnosis. Brain washing wipes the mind and numbs the emotions; reprogramming plugs in new "software" that contours thoughts and feelings, and can trigger behaviors at the will of the programmer.

Though it was a leading candidate, LSD was determined no good for mind control, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be an influential social control. Once the drug became associated with the counterculture, it was banned (1967), which only made it more attractive. Yet it still worked its magic by deflecting energy and attention into hedonistic druggie lifestyles instead of confrontational political activism.

Through its Psychological Warfare Division, CIA-controlled media used CIA promoted drugs to discredit the peace movement. It used CBS, The New York Times, Associated Press, United Press International, even The National Enquirer, and other major United States media to maintain its control over sensitive subjects. This gave new meaning to the phrase, “the medium is the message” – infowars.

DeWitt Poole became president of the CIA's largest single propaganda effort of the WWII era, the National Committee for a Free Europe. Another prominent board member of Public Opinion Quarterly was CBS executive Frank Stanton. He was also a longtime director of both Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Fund.

This CIA-financed organization was established to conduct political advertising campaigns in the United States and to launder CIA funds destined for Poole's National Committee for a Free Europe. This influence over the POQ editorial board and editorial content of the field's most prestigious academic journal was only a symptom of a deeper and more organic bond. The primary nexus between government and social science is an economic one so pervasive it makes any crisis of relations with the government a crisis for social science as a whole.

Facts about the CIA's PSYWAR propaganda and censorship relationship with certain American media executives came to light in the1975 hearings of the Church Committee: United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by U. S. Senator Frank Church, (D) Idaho (Hansen).

Carl Bernstein reported that in addition to The New York Times, "CBS was unquestionably the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship (with the CIA). Over the years, the CBS network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied out takes of news film to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS news film library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA."

The New York Times reported March 24, 2001, that at the time of Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the CIA had a relationship with the Associated Press and the UPI wire services so that the CIA could actually place propaganda stories directly onto the international wires through those agencies. In other words, the CIA could literally write propaganda stories for willing distribution globally by the wire services.