Mind control, militarized psychics, domestic wiretapping, and digital surveillance. These projects come from the Central Intelligence Agency down in Langley, Virginia. These projects have existed since as far back as WWII and continue to the modern day. The stranger fact? These are only the projects that were declassified or leaked to the public. There could be countless other strange projects from the CIA that we don’t know of. With that, let’s explore the ones available to the public, thanks to the Internet Archive and Wikipedia.
-=[PROJECT MKULTRA]=-
MKULTRA was a program run by the CIA involving human experimentation that ran from 1953 and stopped in 1973. The project focused on developing procedures and identifying drugs such as “psychoactive” like LSD that would be utilized in interrogations to weaken people and coerce them to confess in tandem with brainwashing and psychological torture. A lesser-known fact about the project is that American historian Stephen Kinzer deemed it as a “continuation of earlier Nazi experiments” from the 1940s where Nazi scientists at Auschwitz and Dachau were using similar methods on prisoners of war to develop a truth serum that was described by one of Kurt Plötner’s assistants to “eliminate the will of the person examined.”
-=[STARGATE PROJECT(1977)]=-
The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Military unit created in 1977 by the Defense Intelligence Agency and SRI International. It went by multiple code names like “Gondola Wish”, “Stargate”, “Grill Flame”, “Center Lane”, “Project CF”, “Sun Streak”, and “Scanate” until 1991 when they decided on “Stargate Project”. According to documents by the CIA, the unit aimed to investigate psychic phenomena to apply in military and domestic intelligence scenarios, specifically remote viewing, which is the ability to psychically see events, areas, or information from a long distance. The project would be terminated and declassified in 1995 due to a report from the CIA concluding that it wasn’t useful in any intelligence operation. Today, Stargate is short for “The Stargate Project”, a company from OpenAI investing $500 billion over 4 years to build AI infrastructure for the United States.
-=[PROJECT MOCKINGBIRD]=-
Not to be confused with Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program meant to influence the press, John F. Kennedy initiated Project Mockingbird to identify the source of government leaks by eavesdropping on Journalists through wiretapping. According to a declassified document from June 2007, Project Mockingbird lasted between 12 March 1963 and 15 June 1963 and only targeted two Washington newsmen at the New York Times who published articles containing classified information about the CIA and other agencies. The classified information that was divulged was reportedly “information from a National Intelligence Estimate, including a comparison of the United States and Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenals and the Soviets’ efforts to protect their intercontinental ballistic missile sites.”
-=[VAULT 7]=-
Vault 7 isn’t a project from the CIA, but rather a series of documents about various leaked operations and projects from the CIA from WikiLeaks. Vault 7 was a whole can of worms that was released in 24 parts containing files from 2013 to 2016 which were primarily about the CIA’s ability to compromise cars, smart TVs, most web browsers like Chrome or Firefox, most phone operating systems like iOS or Android, and most computer operating systems like Microsoft Windows or Linux. The CIA would use these tactics for electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. Later in July 2022 according to the Al Jazeera News Network, “Joshua Schulte, a former CIA software engineer, was convicted of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks.” The Guardian then confirmed that he would later be sentenced to “40 years on espionage counts plus a separate 80 months for child pornography counts.”
With all this information about what the CIA has done and can do in mind, you may be troubled by this information and feel like simply having read this just put a big target on your back for a CIA sniper to take. But fear not, as most of this information has been declassified, and if the CIA didn’t want people to know about Project Mockingbird or MK-Ultra, that would be just too bad thanks to the Freedom of Information Act in 1967. Always remember that knowledge is power!
