Generally a pretty quick way to shut down a discussion about powerful people doing bad things is to dismiss the whole thing as a “conspiracy theory.” It’s well known, after all, how hard it is to keep secrets. The United States’ most esteemed founder said it best when he said: “Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” At the same time, the most vocal conspiracy theorists don’t do the term any favors. Everyone knows a crazy person who says the Earth is flat, or maybe just that man never went to the moon, or for the really adventurous, that space doesn’t even exist. They will steadfastly hold these beliefs no matter how apparent and accessible the proof to the contrary is. You can prove for yourself that the Earth is round with a stick and a tank of gas, so why should we take these people seriously?

Of course, we shouldn’t! However, that there exists a very vocal fringe of people espousing demonstrably false conspiracies is not a reason to dismiss any theory that involves a group of people conspiring to hide the truth or do harm. Believe it or not, people can in fact keep secrets, and they often do. The Federal Government has a whole swath of laws aimed at targeting citizens who conspire to commit crimes. Imagine if John Gotti strolled into court and said, “Your Honor, this is clearly a dumb conspiracy theory!” Case closed! There’s no such thing as a conspiracy after alll!

What I am about to say may sound crazy, but I hope you will keep an open mind and check your own sources. The talking points that conspiracy theorists are all wedded to their theories regardless of evidence, motivated by financial or political interests, or are driven by prideful pseudo-intellectualism were first drafted by none other than the CIA! In response to the wave of public skepticism regarding the Warren Commission’s findings about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the CIA put out a memo directing agencies “to employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics.” Their words, not mine! In that same document they lay out all of those talking points I mentioned above, including the one spoken by Sherlock Holmes himself in the image above.

Did some rogue faction in the US Government kill President Kennedy because he was opposed to the central banking institutions and intelligence apparatuses? I don’t know and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I can prove that. I definitely don’t think it’s a ridiculous notion, though. He made powerful enemies in areas of the government that have proven themselves willing to kill, torture, and lie. Let’s talk about a two very well-documented conspiracies, one of of which you’ve definitely heard of, and of which you may not have. For the sake of this post, I’m not going to bring up anything that hasn’t already been confirmed by the US Government and proved beyond reasonable doubt.

D-Day and Operation Overlord

Let’s start with something very tame: the D-Day invasion. I bring up this example not to tell you something cooky about World War II involving lizard people or anything. I bring it up to prove to you that governments and even international coalitions are absolutely capable of keeping secrets on massive scales.

On June 6th, 1944, a coalition of 13 countries launched an operation on the coast of France of more than 150,000 soldiers and just under 200,000 naval personnel. This coalition of nations planned the operation for months in advance, deploying sophisticated misinformation campaigns against their enemy. Famously, they laundered a fake attack plan through the ostensibly neutral but axis-sympathetic nation of Spain. They successfully kept this a secret from their enemy! True, they only needed to keep the secret for a few months, but the shear scale of the operation should have made that impossible. They accomplished this through the standard tactic of compartmentalization of information. Though almost 350,000 people were involved in this conspiracy, almost none of them were “read-in.”

This is the first lesson in real conspiracies. Not everyone involved is necessarily “keeping the secret,” even if they are integral to the operation. Beyond those soldiers directly involved the invasion, there were millions of people involved in manufacturing munitions, clothing, running supply lines, and doing myriad supporting tasks who had no idea there was even a specific operation they were supporting. They didn’t need to know to be useful. Sometimes the “victims” of a conspiracy are also sometimes among the perpetrators. I use scare-quotes when I say “victims” because, at least in this case, those people unaware of the conspiracy no doubt benefited. D-Day was definitely a good thing–don’t mistake my meaning–but it was still definitely a conspiracy. Operation Overlord changed the tide of the war, and it could not have happened without superb secret-keeping abilities at the highest levels.

Governments need to be able to keep secrets; this is an important skill for the exercise of very legitimate and often times necessary operations. A government that cannot keep secrets is doomed to fail. That being said, we should not be surprised when those same abilities are used for illegitimate, sometimes nefarious means. Let’s turn our attention to perhaps the most sinister example of this that I am aware of: MK Ultra.

MK Ultra

You may have already heard about this dark chapter of American history, but anecdotally I can say most people I know in America know nothing or very little about it. Let’s start with the basics, available on the Wikipedia page that bears its name. This is the publicly available, official narrative:

Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects’ mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects’ consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.

Many of the details of this project were lost to the annals of history because then CIA director Richard Helms ordered all documents of the project destroyed in 1973. What we know from the scant documents that survived the purge and eye-witness testimony offered to the US Senate’s Church Committee paints a very grim picture. There was a Netflix series based on one of the more famous cases, where an Army biochemist was unwittingly dosed with LSD and fell (or jumped) to his death.

For those of you that have heard of MK Ultra, you might be aware of the numerous instances of the CIA unwittingly dosing US service members with LSD and other drugs. What you might not be aware of is the associated sub-project under MK Ultra, Midnight Climax, where they set up one-way mirrors in brothels to observe random American civilian johns that they had dosed with LSD and other drugs. The objectives of this project were to explore the use of drugs and subliminal messaging to induce American citizens to commit crimes. They literally committed crimes in order to brainwash Americans into committing crimes. They have admitted this into the public record.

Along a similar vein, another (in)famous example of these experiments is none other than Ted Kaczynski, also known as the unabomber. During his time at Harvard University, as a minor (he was a mathematical genius) he was subjected to a different kind of mind-control experiment that focused on psychological abuse rather than drugs. This was also part of the MK Ultra project. While we can’t say that the CIA’s objective was to create a domestic terrorist, we do know from details of Operation Midnight Climax that encouraging criminal behavior was definitely one objective of the program.

There are other stories from the program that are harder to verify, due to Helms’ purge of documentation. These include dosing an entire village in France with LSD, experiments in erasing or implanting false memories in Canadian mental patients in Montreal, and successes with behavioral modification using subliminal messaging in film media. US servicemen who were either directly victimized by the program, or made aware of victimization were threatened into silence, and when that didn’t work, discredited. This is second lesson of conspiracies; just because someone reveals the secret, doesn’t mean the conspiracy is “exposed” in the public sense.

Although the US Senate did eventually bring these atrocities to light, as previously mentioned, the vast majority of the documents were destroyed before the committee ever convened. No doubt the most shocking activities of the program will never be exposed. Even though the committee was able to prove that the CIA had willfully conducted illegal activities at home and abroad with awareness at the highest levels, no one was ever arrested for any of these crimes. That brings us to the third lesson of conspiracies: when the perpetrators are powerful enough, even if they are exposed, they can still get away with it.

This program was decades long, involved hundreds of perpetrators in several countries, and thousands of victims. It was kept secret until the 1970s, and even when it was finally “exposed,” most of the details had long been buried never to resurface. By the way, just as some food for thought, the start of this program that involved use of chemicals to modify behavior roughly coincides with the genesis of the national effort to fluoridize municipal water supplies for public health benefits. Though it was long ago, remember it was brazenly illegal yet no one was criminally punished! Why then should you expect today’s government to be more virtuous than it was in the past? What’s the mechanism that purified these organizations?

What’s the point?

MK Ultra sounds really fantastical, like something out of a science fiction novel. I encourage you to do some more of your own research and really dive into some of the crazier aspects of the program. I’ve only included here the most well-documented, easy to verify elements. Knowing the objectives of the program, and the fact that so much of the evidence was destroyed, I think it’s reasonable to keep an open mind to some of the other claims individuals connected to the program have made. I’m not saying you should believe everything you hear or read, but I’m saying you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss someone because they sound crazy, especially when the CIA is going around intentionally making people crazy.

And I hope you won’t be so quick to dismiss your cooky uncle when he tells you about a conspiracy theory. Many victims of MK ultra, or the less fantastical but equally deranged Tuskegee Study were derided and had their lives ruined when they spoke out about it. So did many of their supporters. Even when they were eventually vindicated, by then the damage had been done. There are many reasons to dismiss an argument, but “you sound crazy when you say that,” or “they couldn’t possibly pull of a conspiracy like that” are not valid reasons. Least of all should you entertain the argument of “they’d never do that,” because where wealth and power are concerned, people will do anything.