MKUltra became MKSearch.
http:// educate-yourself.org/ mc/ spooklandtricks19oct06.shtml
MKULTRA was renamed MKSearch and placed under the control of ORD (Operations Research & Development.) The new agenda became more focused on direct brain stimulation and hypnosis. Neurologist Wilder Penfield showed that patients could recall vividly past memories when areas of their brain were stimulated. What, the Agency wondered, could they achieve if they could use electrical stimulation of the brain to cause a man to hallucinate that his beloved leader was his worst enemy? Could hypnosis create a 'sleeper' who could be 'activated' to carry out a mission five years down the road after being 'triggered' by a word or signal and perform it with no recall of his action? These experiments also met with highly limited success. A Cuban exile was hypnotized and told he would kill Castro when he heard the word "cigar." Before being brought out of the trance, he was told Castro was in the room. The hypnotist then said the word "cigar." The Cuban politely replied, "Sorry, I don't smoke." The Cuban dictator would survive yet another attempt to rub him out.
Perhaps in desperation, in the 1970s the Agency would turn to the occult. Telepaths were asked to try and read minds and even place suggestions into them. Clairvoyants and fortunetellers were consulted for their usability in intelligence-gathering. Palmists and phrenologists were asked for their techniques of personality assessment. Could easily controllable people be found by their palms? One project even looked into the links between eye color and mental illness. Victims of multiple-personality disorder or those claiming to be 'spirit possessed' were studied. In the Vacaville prison, famous for its detention of Prof. Timothy Leary, weird experiments were performed with altered consciousness which made even the king of 'trippers' worry. The Devil was alive and well and working in Langeley.
The Doping of America: The CIA and the Drug Trade
During the same period of its LSD experiments, it was well known that the CIA was involved with the drug merchants of the 'Golden Triangle' who were smuggling in much of the United States' heroin supply. Some opium was also entering the U.S. from Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the CIA at the least turned a "blind eye" toward the drug trade. The CIA has never stopped looking the other way when drug dealers have had the right politics - they also had connections with the Medellin cocaine cartel in the early 80s, who at the time where providing information on the Communist insurgency in the region. While the DEA was busy busting narco-traffickers, the CIA often kept many of them (such as General Manuel Noriega) on its payroll. Many insurgent groups supported by the CIA - including RENAMO, the Contras, and the Afghan mujaheddin - engaged in drug trafficking with the U.S., to pay for U.S.-built arms and materiel. There is some evidence to suggest that the CIA may have even been flying in the drugs for them, on their return flights to the U.S. (!) The fact that many of the 'freelance' mercenaries employed by the agency (a la Soldier of Fortune) often "part-time" to train the private security forces of the traffickers is not a complete coincidence.
But the CIA, while undermining the official policy of the DEA through its own covert policy, never lost sight of the propaganda value of the War on Drugs. That "war" allowed a much more open use of military force in Latin American countries such as Peru and Colombia, where there was virtual 'civil war' between the narco-traffickers and the government. However, the American 'foreign policy establishment' tried to portray a different picture, suggesting that it was the guerillas and rebels in those countries - such as the Shining Path or other Marxist groups - that were doing the trafficking, with the complicity of countries such as Nicaragua and Cuba, who allowed overflights of drug-bearing planes. Rather than going after the big cartels and their processing plants, the CIA has often cooperated with the Peruvian army to go after coca-growing peasant villages, suspected of being hotbeds of 'subversive' activity. It is entirely possible that many revolutionary groups are engaged in the drug trade, but the lion's share comes in from the vast organizations and distribution networks created by the drug cartel heads, many of whom are former important "agribusiness" leaders who got support from the CIA-backed Agency of International Development (AID).
One might wonder, of course, why the CIA, which is so concerned with the subversive effects of foreign influences on our great nation, assists other countries to ply their drug trade here. The answer is chilling, but any inner-city resident can tell you why: crack in in the 'hood keeps the poor killing each other (the incessant 'gang wars' over drug turf) rather than going after their real enemies - "divide and conquer." You can't demand your rights or freedoms when you're enslaved to drugs, or think about your oppression when you're strung out on crack. Many radical black groups, such as the Nation of Islam, call upon black youth to stay drug-free. It's not just for silly moralistic purposes, a la "Just Say No." They realize that drugs are a tool of the shadow government to keep people in the inner-city down and out, and also that the "War on Drugs" gives government an excuse to throw our civil liberties out the window and use police-state tactics to fight the 'drug epidemic' their own CIA brought here.
Ostensibly, the agency began its MKULTRA project with the search for nothing more than the perfect truth serum. Such a drug would set intelligence light years ahead, and deal with the headaches posed by defectors, spies, and double agents. In its quest for The "Truth Drug", the CIA would use in the 1950s just about every chemical that the counterculture would turn to a decade later - Albert Hoffman's LSD, Gordon Wasson's 'Magic Mushroom' psilocybin, and marijuana. It was thought that such drugs could 'destabilize' the personality enough to elicit confessions or even whole changes of belief structures (deprogramming.) Then came the revelations from Korea of American soldiers producing taped confessions renouncing "the wars of imperialist regimes" and their citizenship. A Miami Herald article written by a CIA disinformant attempted to solve the mystery of how red-blooded American boys could turn against their country. And it coined a new word taken from a Korean translation: "brainwashing."
The CIA had always used the same methods of coercion as the KGB: sexual entrapment; blacklisting; 'framing' people for uncommitted crimes; or outright physical torture. But there was no foolproof method for assuring that confessions were true; no polygraph test was 100% certain, and even then the information could be 'planted.' Along with the technological supremacy of the United States came a belief in the omnipotence of science. So the CIA was eager to test the powers of technology in new realms. Spy sattelites and electronic bugs were great information gatherers. But the realm of 'human intelligence' still demanded more innovations. Further, new chemical agents could facilitate covert warfare: the CIA thought that "dusting" a crowd with LSD could pacify them; and they experimented with other drugs that might alter the emotions, including the hallucinogen BZ which created paranoid delusions and rage toward the nearest people. In a paramilitary situation, use of such tactics could be devastating.
For a while, the CIA thought that LSD might be the ultimate Spook Drug. They tested it on unsuspecting army privates; put it in the food of federal prisoners; gave it to people visiting prostitutes in hotel rooms; (while watching from behind a see-through two-way mirror in the next room - Operation Twilight Climax) and even put in drinking water, 'just to see what would happen.' Methods of delivery were often comical: such as the time when they tried to spray a convention of foreign dignitaries with an LSD aerosol, with little success (it dissipated too quickly.) Eventually, they found it too 'unpredictable,' but one maverick agent, Ronald Stark, may have been instrumental in getting LSD onto the street black market, and thence making it a staple for the 'counterculture' of the period. Martin A. Lee and Norman O. Solomon note the curious cultural politics of LSD in their recent book, and point out the curious connection of the CIA to some of the early acid gurus at Millbrook.
The CIA has a rather remarkable 'financial empire.' Despite the fact that it is the only government agency with a totally unmonitored 'black budget' - they can spend as they see fit (within set limits) - it is also the only one that annually turns a profit! That is because it maintains many 'shadow proprietaries,' commercial enterprises that operate "up-front" operations until the point where they are called on to do CIA business. Some of those proprietaries include major airlines, such as Pacific Air and its subsidiary Air America, and trade organizations (such as the International Trade Mart) that are really used for covert operations coordination. These shadow companies are maintained tightly and squeaky-clean (and often turn over a hefty profit) until their covert support becomes necessary. It is well known that the CIA brass reguarly invest much of the Agency's money in stocks and risky investments rather than the generally tame security bonds issued by the government. It isn't just James Bond who believes in gambling… the CIA feels that financial independence is an important key to remaining free of government oversight.