Has anyone found a credible Seed-CIA connection? I?m talking about documents, whistleblowers, shady people in silhouette spilling the beans. The similarities between other pickle factory programs using trauma-based programming (MKULTRA, Monarch) and the Seed method are obvious, although the latter programs trumped in sheer sadistic ingenuity the worst of the Barker-Sembler factories. Then there?s the DuPont-Bush association. Then a geographical link in Lexington, KY. Ten years of research, and Wes Fager is unable to generate anything but speculation in this department? Where is the connection? It has to exist somewhere.
Answering the question is important. Consider the fact that the Senate hearings on the Seed brought Barker's method to light in the worst way for him and others. Turning kids into Manchurian candidates didn't sit well with certain power brokers, or else the process was just another administrative farce to curtail public pressure. In any case, proving the Seed was a company program with a company agenda would tarnish the Seed/Straight legacy worse than all the lawsuits and terrible publicity it has received so far. Such proof of involvement would also link program survivors with survivors of other mind control programs, which could ultimately strengthen and enlighten people, as well as open up a world of information exchange.
Well, just trot on down to your local library and reference the list of CIA clandestine research programs. . . .
It took decades of concerted effort just to establish the fact that COINTELPRO existed. We still can't prove what they did to whom or whether or not they ever actually shut down the program. Hell, as late as `93, GHW Büsh publicly denied the existence of NSA. I don't think we'll ever find that smoking gun evidence. Not, at least, unless the empire falls. Even then it's hard to say what paper and other evidence will survive or which of the evidence presented is factual, as the victors always get to rewrite the history.
Regardless, I think we have enough info to conclude that the method is fucked up.
Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
In discussing his book, Priess examines how Presidents receive the most sensitive intelligence reporting and analysis in the world through the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). The document began with President John F. Kennedy as short items regarding international developments that he could process through quickly. The document was titled the ‘President’s Intelligence Check List’ or ‘PICL’ and pronounced pickle, which Priess humorously noted was a reason that the CIA was called the ‘pickle factory’ for years following.
David Priess “The President’s Book of Secrets” at the Museum
The Last Assignment: David Atlee Phillips and the Birth of CIA Public Relations
Abstract
In recent years, scholars of international history and intelligence have argued that, since the 1990s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been engaged in public-relations campaigns to promote its image. As evidence of this, they point to the CIA's willingness to provide more briefings to the media, its greater engagement with Hollywood, and the appearance of CIA staff historians at academic conferences. Drawing on recently declassified documents and unpublished correspondence from the private papers of CIA officers, this article will argue that efforts by the CIA in the realm of opinion-forming began much earlier than the existing historiography dictates. In the 1970s, embarrassing revelations about CIA domestic operations prompted a host of loyal veterans, most notably David Atlee Phillips, to speak out in favour of the intelligence community as an indispensible, effective, and honourable arm of government. They did this by speaking at universities and by writing memoirs. It will be suggested that the Agency itself was initially reluctant to support the veterans, mindful of the need for secrecy, meaning that the frustrated veterans were required to operate in a strictly private capacity. By the end of the decade, however, attitudes at Langley had changed and perception management was finally put on a formal institutional footing. In charting the birth of CIA public relations, this article provides a fresh vista on the Agency's broader attitudes and policies towards secrecy and openness during the cold war and into the twenty-first century.