Within my books relating to the three “major” 1960s assassinations, we establish that Lee Harvey Oswald,[1] James Earl Ray,[2] and Sirhan Sirhan[3] had all been subjected to various sorts of mind control under the CIA/MI operation known as MK-ULTRA and its numerous related sub-sets.

Many other essays, magazine articles and books have documented this point, as well as can be expected given that in the mid-1970s the most detailed CIA records were destroyed on the orders of Richard Helms, then-Director of Central Intelligence. Evidently, he took that action to do his part in covering up some of the worst of Lyndon Johnson’s treacheries, helping to sanitize his records and ensuring his contrived “legacy” would be salvaged.

In the post-Watergate period, he foresaw the dilemma and took that action before the congressional committees – beginning with the ironically-named Rockefeller Committee, the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) – began clamoring for the release of those records.

An excellent new resource that summarizes and encapsulates practically everything known about this horrid chapter in U.S. History is an article published in The Unz Review by Larry Romanoff, “CIA Project MK-ULTRA,”[4] which can be found HERE.  Its comprehensiveness is reflected in its length (22,100 words), however given the subject matter, it qualifies for the term “succinct” regardless.

The following excerpts summarize the general scope of the findings, including the single most salient point:  One-half a million unwitting Americans were put through this grinder, funded by unwitting taxpayers and such well-respected institutions as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations with the assistance of numerous “top level” universities.

MK-ULTRA was an umbrella for a large number of clandestine activities that formed part of the CIA’s psychological warfare research and development, consisting of about 150 projects and sub-projects, many of them very large in their own right, with research and human experimentation occurring at more than 80 institutions that included about 50 of America’s best-known colleges and universities, 15 or 20 major research Foundations including Rockefeller, dozens of major hospitals, a great many prisons and mental institutions, and many chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

At least 200 well-known private scientific researchers were part of this program, as were many thousands of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and other similar. Many of these institutions and individuals received their funding through so-called “grants” from what were clearly CIA front companies. In 1994 a Congressional subcommittee revealed that up to 500,000 unwitting Americans were endangered, damaged or destroyed by secret CIA and military tests between 1940 and 1974.

Given the deliberate destruction of all the records, the full truth of the MK-ULTRA victims will never be known, and certainly not the death toll. As the inspector general of the US Army later stated in a report to a Senate committee: “In universities, hospitals and research institutions, an unknown number of chemical tests and experiments … were carried out with healthy adults, with mentally ill and with prison inmates.” According to one government report, “In 149 separate mind-control experiments on thousands of people, CIA researchers used hypnosis, electroshock treatments, LSD, marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine, mescaline, seconal, atropine and other drugs.” Test subjects were usually people who could not easily object – prisoners, mental patients and members of minority groups – but the agency also performed many experiments on normal, healthy civilians without their knowledge or consent.

There were 149 subprojects listed under the umbrella of MKULTRA. Project MONARCH has not been officially identified by any government documentation as one of the corresponding subprojects, but is used rather, as a descriptive “catch phrase” by survivors, therapists, and possible “insiders”. MONARCH may in fact, have culminated from MKSEARCH subprojects such as operation SPELLBINDER, which was set up to create “sleeper” assassins (i.e. “Manchurian candidates”) who could be activated upon receiving a key word or phrase while in a post-hypnotic trance.

The most appalling aspects of this subject begin with how such a hideous and evil program could be conceived by the then-well respected highest-level men in government leadership positions, funded by unwitting taxpayers and certain well-respected research foundations purportedly on missions to serve the public good, and executed by military and intelligence agencies supposedly erected for the purpose of protecting the liberties and freedoms of citizens – all actions contrary to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.

And above all else, using those devices to carry out multiple assassinations of opposition leaders – then putting into place unwitting “Manchurian” programmed and/or robotic “patsies” upon whom to place the blame, and finally neutralizing their voices by officially-sanctioned murder or setting them up to serve the rest of their lives in prison.

As JFK said, upon being briefed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on their horrific proposal for terrorizing – or murdering – random U.S. citizens in Operation Northwoods:  “And they call us the human race!”

End Notes:

[1] See LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, pp. 332-334 (Ref. James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 40-41

[2] See Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? pp. 97-98, 232-234

[3] See LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus, p. 303

[4] See:  The Unz Review, “CIA Project MK-ULTRA” by Larry Romanoff, July 2, 2020 (https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/cia-project-mk-ultra/#unit-731)