Stansfield Turner

So, and obviously this is where the Simeonese Liberation Army plays a role.

But again, I believe it was just before, two months before Guyana, you have Leo Ryan writing to the director of the CIA, Stansfield Turner, claiming that he had been conducting a personal investigation of the Patricia Hearst case.

And he then asked Stansfield Turner to provide this information regarding CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville.

So this is when, and this is really fascinating, and I think will help bridge perfectly into this Philadelphia serial killer case, which I can hopefully do in some sort of efficient way.

And the, so he basically was he was referred to the CIA, right? Essentially is what happened because there was one other person who allegedly had knowledge of Donald Cinque de Frise at the time who was investigating this.

And basically Clifford Jefferson was that person.

And so on October in 1978, there was a response that came not from Stansfield Turner, but from the deputy director, Frank Carlucci, And it says, thank you for your letter of the 27th of September to Admiral Turner requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville.

It is true that CIA sponsored testing using volunteer inmates was conducted at that facility.

has been said about Project MKUltra, its nature, methods, and its ultimate goals.

To keep things simple, we'll define it through a quote directly from the CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, from his testimony to the US Senate on the 21st of September 1977.

MKUltra was an umbrella project under which a broad spectrum of sensitive activities was financed.

Some of these activities dealt with research into behavioral modification, primarily by means of drugs and hypnosis, involving tests on human volunteers and, in some cases, on unwitting subjects." The project was officially sanctioned by CIA Director Allen Dulles in April of 1953 and was shut down in 1964.

According to Professor Timothy Melley of Miami University, Director Dulles was obsessed with replicating the perceived successes of the Soviets and Chinese in brainwashing and mind control via hypnosis as well as the use of drugs.

But as we covered in our previous episode, brainwashing was not really a thing.

It was a concept invented within the CIA itself and had wormed its way into public consciousness thanks to journalist and former CIA propagandist Ed Hunter.

In 1975-77, the Rockefeller Commission, Church Committee, and Senate hearings, after financial records were found, publicly exposed the programs.

CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified that 80 institutions and 149 subprojects had been involved.

No one was prosecuted.

Official termination dates vary by component.

Again, not the sort of thing given out for twenty-plus years of consistent failures.

Uh, CIA Director Admiral, uh, Stansfield Turner's statement that the agency was no longer involved in behavior modification research is also contradicted by the sheer amount of research accumulated on the subject.

The CIA's Office of Research and Development did not s- uh, stay idle following takeover, uh, uh, following takeover of their duties of MKUltra.

Uh, arth- author John Marks, whose early of-- earlier FOIA request uncovered the seven missing boxes in nineteen seventy-seven, uh, refiled a similar request for the Office of Research and Development and received a response that one hundred thirty boxes of documents were available.

It's Subproject 54 of the MKUltra program.

And for those who haven't heard of Subproject 54, you just might not know it by that name, but when Senator Richard Schweiker questioned CIA Director Stansfield Turner about the project during the 1977 MKUltra hearings, he described something that the congressional investigators had simply nicknamed the perfect concussion.

What the heck is the perfect concussion? Schweiker said that the documents involved these techniques for causing brain concussion and amnesia through weapons or sound waves while providing absolutely no warning and leaving no clear physical marks.

So apparently, the perfect concussion is one that leaves no evidence and perhaps can be caused from afar.

And that deliberate bypass is what triggers the absolute wrath of the federal government.

The new CIA director at the time, Stansfield Turner, pushed incredibly hard for legal retaliation.

And they were backed all the way to the top-

Mm.

Somebody sat at a desk in Washington and wondered in writing whether you could talk a person out of wanting to stay alive.

On April 13th, 1953, Director of Central Intelligence Alan Dulles approved a program to find out The proposal had been written by a man named Richard Helms, number two guy in the covert ops org chart, and it asked for the capability to make covert use of biological and chemical materials.

20 years later, as director of central intelligence, Helms would order it all burned.

The man they put in charge was Sidney Gottlieb, born in the Bronx, Caltech PhD in biochemistry, class of 1943.

He had a stutter and a congenital club foot.

MKUltra Subproject 35 was created, in its own words, for the purpose of establishing a cover organization for highly sensitive projects in the field of covert biological, chemical, and radiological warfare." The approval memo is dated November 15, 1954.

Richard Helms signed it the next day.

Allen Dulles, the director of Central Intelligence, signed it that January.