From the River to the Sea

Korean prisoners of war in the 1950s were subjected to early MK-ULTRA experiments while in American custody, according to recently declassified CIA documents which confirm these experiments for the first time. The only reporting that previously referenced Koreans being used as guinea pigs for these experiments was journalist John Marks’s landmark 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Using CIA documents, Marks traced the now-infamous MK-ULTRA project to its start, when it was known as Project Bluebird. In the book, Marks describes how, in October 1950, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were chosen as the first test subjects to receive “advanced” interrogation techniques, with the overt goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

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The first reference to “Project Bluebird” in the NSA’s collection is an office memorandum from April 5, 1950. Addressed to CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the document lays out the project’s goals, required training, and budget, all while emphasizing that knowledge of Project Bluebird “should be restricted to the absolute minimum number of persons.” The memo includes detailed plans for interrogation teams trained to utilize the polygraph, various drugs, and hypnotism “for personality control purposes.” These teams were to be made up of three people: a doctor (ideally a psychiatrist), a hypnotist, and a polygraph technician. The memo clarifies that while the doctor and technician would need to undergo approximately five months of training, the Inspection and Security Staff’s own department hypnotist could be made available immediately. In a later memo from February 2, 1951, there are inquiries into acquiring six “hypospray” devices: experimental instruments designed to covertly inject sedatives through the skin via “jet injection.” There’s a request to investigate modification of a “tear gas pencil” and other “devices of unestablished action,” such as the “German ‘Scheintot’ [sic] (appearance of death) pistol.”

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[W]hile the actual offshore locations are redacted, a write-up of a CIA meeting held one year later specifically notes a “project in Japan and Korea in which the Army had used a polygraph operator along with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists on Korean POWs.” Although the initial proposal for Project Bluebird mostly emphasized the potential for “personality control,” it’s clear that CIA officials were also interested in broader, more ambitious outcomes. One document summarizing a “special meeting” between U.S., British, and Canadian intelligence services notes the CIA’s desire to research “the psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs” and “determining means for combatting communism,” “‘selling’ democracy,” and preventing the “penetration of communism into trade unions.” Another meeting held on May 9, 1950, called for “the Surgeon General of the Army to place on the search list of the Nuremberg Trials papers request for information on drugs, narcoanalysis, and special interrogation techniques.”

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Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S. The central animating myth behind MK-ULTRA and Project Bluebird is the narrative of the American soldier who returned home after months of imprisonment by enemy forces, only to be revealed as a hypnotized double agent. Throughout the Korean War, American moviegoers were screened films starring and narrated by future president Ronald Reagan. These films showed American troops being psychologically tortured by Chinese and North Korean soldiers until dangerous, anti-democratic ideals were implanted in their minds without their knowledge.

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