Operation Artichoke

By any means necessary. (The Bus 1.42)

Welcome aboard The Bus!

The Stop

Artichokes/National Geographic

Preceded by Operation Bluebird,¹ Operation Artichoke was a Central Intelligence Agency project which focused on researching interrogation methods. Begun in August 1951 when Bluebird was deemed ‘not wide-ranging or comprehensive enough,’ Artichoke was designed to centralise, expand and intensify lessons learned from the former project with the goal of determining whether a ‘person could be involuntarily made to perform an act of attempted assassination.’² To ascertain whether this was possible or not, the project additionally studied the efficacy of ‘hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal) and the use of other chemicals including LSD, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.’ The project lasted for two years until it was replaced by the wider-ranging MK-ULTRA.³

In the 1950s fear of Communism, the supposed infiltration of Communists into the American government and the belief that these ‘same Communists had found ways of controlling people’s minds,’ fuelled not only public hysteria but also the work of the national security establishment. Much of this anxiety resulted from the work of Edward Hunter, an ‘imaginative propagandist’ who coined the term ‘brain-washing.’⁴ Though ‘few scientists’ believed this to be seriously possible, Hunter’s claims gripped popular imagination and ‘fit the tenor of the times:’ the USSR had successfully detonated nuclear weapons, Americans were ‘being told their country code be attacked at any moment,’ and the new threat of ‘brainwashing’ was ‘even more horrific because it was so unfathomable.’ 

It appears the CIA ‘fell under the spell of its own propaganda’ and as a result not only justified ‘extreme drug experiments,’ but convinced themselves ‘America’s national security demanded them.’ Project Artichoke was essentially ‘medical torture’ - unwilling patients were dosed with potent drugs, subjected to extremes of temperature and sound, strapped to electroshock machines and exposed to countless other forms of abuse.⁵ Starting with marijuana and then moving to cocaine - both of which were found to be ‘unreliable for use in special interrogation,’ the CIA experimenters moved to heroin⁶ and then mescaline before turning its attention to LSD. 

The investigation of LSD as a potentially mind-controlling drug was championed by the director of Project Artichoke, Sidney Gottlieb. Obsessed with the drug’s potential, Gottlieb pushed the experiments further than they had gone before. He was fully supported by Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA and his work was validated even further when Eisenhower was elected President and subsequently appointed Dulles’s old brother - John Foster Dulles⁷- as Secretary of State. This meant that, as far as the CIA was concerned, the State Department could be ‘relied upon to support whatever Gottlieb did … including giving ‘black sites’ all the diplomatic cover they needed.’

After eighteen months of experiments, Gottlieb determined he was ‘no closer to understanding how hallucinogenic drugs could be used to control minds.’ Though convinced LSD was the substance that held the answer, he realised he needed to take advantage of the CIA’s ‘broadening ambition’ on mind control projects in order to be certain. His solution was a ‘new project that would subsume Artichoke and give him authority over all CIA research into mind control.’ Running this project would allow him to test every ‘imaginable drug and technique, plus some not yet imagined’ on not only ‘expendables at secret prisons abroad, but also to … witting and unwitting Americans.’ By this time, Project Artichoke had become one of the ‘most violently abusive projects’ ever sponsored by the US government - and with Dulles’s agreement, it was systematically intensified in the form of MK-ULTRA.

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to a fascinating article from Humanities: ‘All History is Revisionist History,’ examining the difference between the past - ‘something that happed at some point before now’ - and history - the ‘narratives and analyses that historians offer about early times.’ The debate about the nature of history began around 430 BCE - and is still going on today. Give it a read - it provides an interesting window onto contemporary thinking about how we explain about the past and the present.

All History is Revisionist History

The Book

Today’s book suggestion is Stephen King’s Firestarter (1980). The story of a father and daughter who are on a deadly game of chase as a result of secret government drug trials, I felt it fit today’s Stop well. One of the first books by King I read as a teenager, it’s filled with great scenes - one in particular which sticks with me to this day. It’s a fun read - and if you’re a fan of Netflix’s Stranger Things - it’s easy to see its influence on that show’s creators.

From the inside cover of the first edition: 

In 1969 Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson participate in a drug experiment run by a veiled government agency known as The Shop. One year later they marry. Two years after that their little girl, Charlie, sets her teddy bear on fire … by looking at it. Now that Charlie is eight, she doesn’t start fires anymore. Her parents have taught her to control her pyrokinesis, the ability to set anything - toys, clothes, even people - aflame. 

But The Shop knows about and wants this pigtailed ‘ultimate weapon.’ Shop agents set out to hunt down Charlie and her father in a ruthless and terrifying chase that ranges from the streets of New York to the backwoods of Vermont. And once they get her they plan to use Charlie’s capacity for love to force her into developing a power as horrifyingly destructive as it is seductive. What they don’t take into account is that even a child can know the pleasure of the whip hand and the satisfaction of revenge.

Let the reader beware, for Firestarter is Stephen King at his most mesmerising … and menacing.

Remember: You can buy Firestarter at Amazon, but you can also get it from your local new or used bookstore - or check it out from the library. And those options are better for everyone.

The Sounds

Today’s playlist is inspired by today’s stop and book: ‘Firestarter’ (The Prodigy, 1996), ‘MK Ultra’ (Muse, 2009), ‘Comfortably Numb’ (Pink Floyd, 1979), ‘Mutual Slump’ (DJ Shadow, 1996) and ‘Mind Games’ (John Lennon, 1973). Enjoy.

The Thought

Today’s Thought is from the English writer and critic Aldous Huxley. Best known for the dystopian novel Brave New World (193X), he had a ‘lifelong preoccupation with the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th -century life:’⁸

‘It’s a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.’

If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:

And that’s the end of this stop - I hope you enjoyed a brief diversion from your regular journey!

Thanks to everyone who subscribes - I genuinely appreciate your interest and support. If you like The Bus, please SHARE it with a friend or several hundred. 

If you haven’t climbed aboard, please do!

Until the next stop …

1. Bluebird ran from 1950 until the creation of Artichoke, for the purpose of investigating the ‘possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques.’ Bluebird was preceded by MK-NAOMI, which was charged with developing ‘whole arsenal of toxic substances for CIA use,’ including biological agents. One experiment involved spraying - for six days - a putatively harmless bacterium called Serratia marcescens into the coastal mist off of San Francisco, reaching all of the city’s 800,000 residents along with people in Berkeley, Sausalito, Oakland and five other cities.

2. If this sounds like the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, it should. Richard Condon’s novel (1959) revolves around the idea of ‘brain-washing’ someone into an assassin. Ironically, ‘fiction lagged behind reality’ as there was no evidence that any form of brainwashing existed. However, to Americans who had been ‘told that ex-prisoners who praised Communism or confessed to dropping bio-weapons over North Korea and China had been brainwashed,’ The Manchurian Candidate was ‘terrifyingly real,’ and it grabbed the country’s ‘Cold War imagination.’

3. MK-ULTRA ran from 1953-1973. It is the dominant subject of the primary source of today’s topic: Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. New York: Henry Holt, 2019. Other sources referenced include CIA, NSA, CIA/MK ULTRA (US Senate) and Plan to Create Involuntary Assassins (NY Times).

4. Hunter was a ‘militantly anti-Communist journalist’ in the 1920s and 1930s who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during WWII as a ‘propaganda specialist.’ After the war he joined the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination where he worked on Operation Mockingbird, the programme through which the CIA ‘shaped coverage of world news in the American press.’ In the 20 September 1950 issue of the Miami News, Hunter published an article based on fictitious interviews with a ‘graduate of North China People’s Revolutionary University headlined ‘‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party’ in which he claimed the Chinese Communists had discovered ways of ‘controlling their people’s minds.’]

5. The ‘Artichoke’ teams (there were four in early 1952 and more were added later) did not confine themselves to unwilling American subjects, though these were certainly used. They also worked in West Germany, France, Japan and South Korea - dispatched when interrogators faced ‘particularly stubborn prisoners’ or when the scientists wished to test a new drug or technique and needed ‘expendable’ subjects - ones whose bodies could be easily disposed.

6. A $300,000 (remember this was the 1950s) study concluded it only had a ‘slight’ interrogation value.

7. After whom Washington-Dulles Airport is named.

8. For a brief biography, see: Aldous Huxley (Britannica).