Maybe we've all been brainwashed?

One of the oddest things about the pandemic is that after two years of struggle, loss and uncertainty, there are groups of people who truly believe the whole thing has been a carefully orchestrated hoax by the world’s governments. And that, rather than being a marvel of modern science, the vaccines that are now slowly helping life get back to some form of normality are a trick, a way to control our minds or inject microchips or 5G into our blood.

It’s easy to dismiss these theories as fantastical. After all, it’s not as if our political leaders have proved themselves adept at cooperating with each other recently, we don’t have enough rare earth minerals to make microchips for over seven billion people as well as all of our stuff, and 5G is just a name for part of the radio wave spectrum which is already everywhere.

However, there was a time in the not too distant past when the fear of a government trying to control the minds of its population wouldn’t seem so bizarre. Because, well, it happened.

In the early 1950s the CIA bought the entire world’s supply of LSD for $240,000. And then they started giving it to people – some of whom knew they were taking the psychedelic, and some of whom didn’t.

It was part of the agency’s MKULTRA programme, which was trying to find a mind control drug that could be weaponized against America’s enemies in response to the rumours that the Soviet Union had already successfully developed their own. MKULTRA, which sounds far more ominous than its original codenames BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, supplied LSD to Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead songwriter, and Alan Ginsburg, whose writing ironically fuelled the kind of counterculture rebellion the CIA was desperately trying to avoid.

And, as part of MKULTRA’s choicely named Project Midnight Climax, men all over San Francisco were also unwittingly given the drug by CIA operatives in bars, restaurants, and even at the beach before being escorted to agency-run brothels where they would be tricked into all manner of compromising activities.

But MKULTRA wasn’t all hallucinatory fun and late-night games. The CIA employed Nazi scientists who had experimented on people with mescaline in Dachau as part of the programme. LSD was forcibly given to inmates of US jails and detention centres in Germany, Japan and the Philippines. And one operative in New York reportedly kept seven addicts who had been lured to a CIA safe house in Greenwich Village hooked on LSD for 77 days straight.

The CIA even gave the drug to its own scientists to test if it would make them pliable enough to give away government secrets they’d sworn to keep – with fatal consequences.

On Thursday November 19th, 1953, Frank Olsen, a senior scientist working with the CIA, was unwittingly drugged at a high-level agency retreat in Maryland. He reacted badly to the LSD and two days later threw himself out of a six-storey hotel window in Manhattan.

The story was covered up, but it still trickled into the general paranoia that was consuming America’s general public as much as its leaders in the middle of the Cold war. After all, this was a society in the grips of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, that was terrified of Communists living next door, and which would soon be watching Angela Lansbury in her Oscar-nominated turn as a mind-controlling Soviet sleeper agent in The Manchurian Candidate.

Officially, MKULTRA was not a success. Midnight Climax was shuttered in the mid sixties when the CIA’s inspector general found out what it had been up to and how much agency money it had spent, and the whole programme was shut down in 1973. But that just pushed it all further into the realms of mystery and intrigue. First, MKULTRA became public knowledge soon after in 1975 thanks to the Rockefeller Commission’s investigation into CIA activities on US soil, along with the revelation that most of its files had already been destroyed. Then in the 1990s Olsen’s family had his body exhumed and performed a second autopsy which suggested he’d been killed before he fell out of the hotel window. Most recently, in December 2018 declassified documents showed that MKULTRA had successfully used remotely controlled brain implants to make six dogs run, turn and stop on command.

And public fascination with things like mind control and sleeper agents never went away. From the Charles Bronson Manchurian-Candidate-lite Telefon to The Americans, which was based on the discovery of a real life ring of Russian sleeper agents in the United States in 2010, and Black Widow, it’s fertile ground for entertainment that unnerves us just a little. Olson’s tragic story even received its own six-part Netflix docudrama series.

Of course, the world is a different place today than it was over 60 years ago. A place of data leaks, cyber attacks, a global 24-hour news and social media cycle – none of which have uncovered any concrete evidence that our governments are secretly trying to brainwash us. But, knowing that at least one or two of them have tried to does make the current crop of conspiracy theories sound a little less irrational.

[This article originally appeared on crimetime.co.uk]