CIA Funded Experiments On Danish Orphans For Decades
26 Jan 2022
An extraordinary Danish Radio report exposed how scores of children in Denmark, many of them orphans, were subject to CIA-funded experiments for at least two decades. The purpose of these activities remains unknown, as authorities continue to actively suppress the truth of what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. The startling exposé is based on the work of documentarian Per Wennick, who was one of 311 participants in the mysterious trials. The children never learned the objective of the tortuous assessments to which they were exposed, even after they ended.
The Search For More Records On Human Experiments
Diligent digging in local archives unearthed a number of papers revealing that the project in which Wennick became embroiled was the brainchild of Zarnoff A. Mednick, a U.S. psychologist interested in what distinguishes schizophrenic patients from neurotypical people and patients with other disorders. Denmark was an attractive testing ground. Unlike the U.S., it boasted a central population register, meaning participants could be tracked over the course of many years.
Mednick collaborated with Danish professor Fini Schulsinger, constructing a study of 207 children with schizophrenic mothers, and a control group of 104 children without schizophrenic mothers, including Wennick. He sought to ascertain how many would develop schizophrenia and how it might manifest. Over a third of the participants were orphans.
In 1977, Schulsinger published a doctoral dissertation on the project. Denmark’s Ministry of Justice intervened to ensure, contrary to standard practice, he was not required to undertake a ‘viva,’ which is a public defence of his thesis. That kept the survey’s background a secret. Having piqued his curiosity, Wennick went off in search of more records related to the experiments.
Eventually, he identified 36 boxes of material stored in the basement of a psychiatric center in a Copenhagen suburb. He asked Josef Parnas, a psychiatrist he interviewed for his documentary series, to assist him. But when the center learned of his request, it began shredding the documents, on the alleged basis it was unable to store research papers after a project’s conclusion. This may have been a violation of Danish law..
There are further reasons to doubt the psychiatric center’s stated rationale. The project was lavishly funded and received around $700,000 when adjusted for inflation.
Roughly a quarter of that money flowed from theHuman Ecology Fund, a CIA front and outgrowth of QKHILLTOP, one of a cluster of mind control programs launched by the agency in the 1950s to study alleged communist brainwashing techniques and develop interrogation strategies. It was eventually absorbed into the notorious MKULTRA.
This may explain why, along with invasive and cruel psychological exams, the Danish children were also subject to extensive physiological and mental assessments. In one of the Fund’s experiments, participants had to agree or disagree with around 600 different statements, a test originally designed to screen soldiers for fascist sympathies around World War II.
Scant information is available publicly on QKHILLTOP’s dimensions even today, although an academic paper published in June 2007 shed significant light on the Human Ecology Fund’s cloak-and-dagger activities.
Originally named theSociety for the Investigation of Human Ecology, it was founded in 1954 by Harold G. Wolff. A renowned neurologist and leading authority on stress, migraines, and bio-physiological mechanisms of human pain, he was personally recruited for the project by CIA chief Allen Dulles, who fostered business in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Thereafter, the Society provided sizable financing to social scientists and medical researchers, primarily in furtherance of the CIA’s behavior modification and persuasion goals. They also identified “specific cultural information” about Cold War enemy populations, such as China or Russia….
Langley got around this problem by simply keeping most participating scientists in the dark as to the agency’s role in commissioning the research program. They hoodwinked scientists and hid the malign purposes behind their labor.
It is, therefore, disturbing that the Fund’s 1961–1963 progress report lists several studies related to childhood, which it supported, such as “conceptual development in children and young adults.”
Did the Danish experiments inform CIA torture techniques, which were employed in recent years?
https://shadowproof.com/2022/01/26/cia-funded-experiments-on-danish-orphans-for-decades/