Imagine a world where all privacy has been eliminated, where none of your own personal thoughts can be protected, and where Big Brother can modify your thinking electronically without you even realizing it. A nightmarish future like that would be much worse than the surveillance society described in George Orwell’s book 1984. In an ultra high-tech electronic police state, there would be no place to run and no place to hide.
More than half a century ago, the CIA started working on covert mind control technology. One of the earliest of the CIA’s secret behavioral control programs was known as Project Artichoke. According to The New York Times on Aug. 2, 1977, the scope of this project was summarized in a CIA memorandum dated Jan. 25, 1952 wherein CIA officials wanted “the evaluation and development of any method by which we can get information from a person against their [sic] will and without his knowledge.”
The memo also asked if they could “get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”
On April 13, 1953 Project Artichoke grew into a super-secret project called MK-ULTRA that was overseen by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who Counterpunch called a “pusher, assassin, pimp and U.S. official poisoner.” In his well-known book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,* author John Marks wrote, “The agency’s brainwashing experts gravitated to people more in the mold of the brilliant—and sometimes mad—scientist, obsessed by the wonders of the brain.” Gottlieb’s boss at the CIA was the notorious Christian Zionist James Angleton.
