Stephen Ward once told me all of the kids at the Dr Barnardo’s home he worked at for free as a councillor had been sexually abused at some time. But anything untoward at Dr Barnardo’s stopped when Heywood (Johnny) Jones rose in the ranks and took over. Johnny ran a tight ship, suffered no excuses and was very hands-on, often doing surprise inspections. He even sacked a few people. No wonder his co-workers called him ‘The Sergeant Major’. That was the nicest name he was called, others used different terms. Johnny Jones lived around the corner to me, in the poorest street in what was a fairly well to-do town in south-east London. Everyone knew him, he was a nice man when not suffering one of his ‘black-moods’, but then he would sit in the dark in the front room and avoid people. He had his pride. I knew his son, we were only months apart in age and we used to kick a ball about together and were in the same cub pack, so I often visited. You probably knew him better as David Bowie. I liked Johnny, despite his problems he was one of the good guys, and I was thus, at a suitable age, invited down to Dr Barnardo’s; Johnny driving me there in the tiny Fiat 500 two-seater that came with the job. It was where I saw a man I’d seen before at the Harley Street practices and at Leonard Cheshire’s care-home. It was the aforementioned Stephen Ward who used to help Leonard and Sue Ryder for free too. He used to hypnotise the kids and dig out the problem and try to deal with it. “No point in pushing it deeper, that’s short-term, these things usually surface sometime and can cause even worse problems. Better to try and deal with it now, with a young, unformed, mind.” Of course at the time I thought this was perfectly honourable and charitable, I was only a child myself, but re-reading an old newspaper article, years later, did make me question his motives.
https://wimpolemuse.blogspot.com/search?q=david+bowie
I would say that it is very likely that Bowie was aware of MK Ultra techniques. After all, his career was all about creating characters or you could call them alters. It sounds like his father actually stamped out Pedophilia at Barnado's children charity (https://www.barnardos.org.uk/) in London when he ran it, which is good.
You should read all of the Wimpole Muse blog if you want to understand the 1960's. London was really swinging back then. Not always in a good way.