Chapter 1 - Shadows Of The Seventies
A MWSAG Tale from the CIA’s Hidden History
In the dim-lit corridors of Langley, Virginia, where the air hummed with the low buzz of typewriters and the faint scent of cigarette smoke clung to the walls like secrets, life in the CIA during the 1970s was a labyrinth of moral ambiguity and unchecked ambition. The Vietnam War was winding down, Watergate loomed like a storm cloud, and the Agency was scrambling to bury its skeletons before Congress came knocking.
But for those of us in the shadows — the operatives, the chemists, the psychologists — the real war was inside the human mind. Project MKUltra, officially shuttered in 1973, didn’t die quietly. It lingered like a ghost, its techniques repurposed in black ops, its “accomplishments” whispered in classified memos. We weren’t just spies; we were architects of the psyche, forging tools from trauma and chemistry to bend wills and erase memories.
Picture it: 1972, a nondescript office in a forgotten wing of headquarters. I was John Dalphe or at least, that’s the name I remember now, though back then, identities shifted like sand. Recruited in 1968 at 16, attending UC Berkeley. I’d been pulled into the program because of my “profile”: a history of childhood abuse that left me with what the shrinks called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), back when they still called it Multiple Personality Disorder. They saw perfect potential in my fractured mind — a canvas for their experiments. Inspired by cases like “The Three Faces of Eve,” where Eve White’s alters (Eve Black and Jane) emerged as defenses against trauma, our handlers aimed to engineer something more deliberate.
MKUltra’s behavior modification research had evolved from crude LSD dosing in the ’50s to sophisticated programming of “alters” — alternate personalities tailored for espionage.
The “accomplishments” were real, if horrifying. By the early ‘70s, we’d refined techniques to create inviolable couriers: subjects programmed with data accessible only via keywords, then wiped clean of any recall. One subproject, documented in declassified files, involved hypnosis and barbiturates to implant false memories or trigger amnesia. In prisons and mental hospitals, we tested on unwitting volunteers — prisoners got reduced sentences, patients thought it was therapy. Electroshock erased inconvenient recollections; polygraphs measured suggestibility under duress. And LSD? It wasn’t just for hallucinations.
Combined with sensory deprivation, it shattered egos, allowing us to rebuild them. We created “Alphas” — dominant executive personalities for control — and “Betas” for subordinate roles, often sexual or compliant, drawn from abuse survivors whose natural dissociative states made them pliable.
Then there were the “Gammas”: assassin alters, buried deep, evoked only by triggers. Like seeing Fidel Castro in person. Think Sirhan Sirhan — some whispered his programming was a field test. We trained them in wetwork, foreign languages, covert ops, with no bleed-over to the host’s consciousness. “Thetas” were task-specific augments, like eidetic memory implants. And “Epsilons”?
Those were the wild cards — psychic matrices, tapped in near-death scenarios, unknown even to the subject. All rooted in Nazi research captured post-WWII, funneled through OSS into CIA hands. George Hunter White, MKUltra’s early head, bragged about the “fun” of sanctioned crimes. Ken Kesey, dosed unwittingly, never returned their key — a metaphor for the doors we pried open in minds.
My own story? It started innocently enough. Recruited as an “asset,” I underwent sessions in a sterile room with Sidney Gottlieb, the “Poisoner in Chief,” overseeing from afar. They used hypnosis to split my psyche further, programming post-hypnotic blocks.
For a 15 years I was their tool: courier runs to Europe, wetwork I don’t fully remember. But the real horror was personal. My “lifelong friends” — fellow agents — and my wife, an operative herself (unknown to her at first) turned the tech against me. I was enslaved by the effectiveness of an handler-installed MKUltra post-hypnotic suggestion, used unlawfully by my ex-handler/friend & taught to my wife & best friend of 50 years to allow them to erase my memory of any time I physically caught my wife fucking them someone else frequent occurrence) or previous to just when she compulsively wanted to fuck somebody, not me.She had bad CSBD & DID, from childhood rapes, just like me, so I can’t hate her too much.
A decade & a half I was essentially enslaved to my wife & her sexual compulsions/companions
with the use of post-hypnotic. programming keyword triggers installed by my handler, while we were in the CIA. (For clarity — He was a Korean War Marine Sergeant/CIA Officer, & I was his asset, turned Agent, working clandestine ops — inside the USA — we all were) & tasked with establishing real world logistical protocols & applications for using Mind Control. techniques developed during MKUtra, as weapons to defend “Democracy”.
Names? Not fictitious — let’s say it was Officers like Scotty, from parallel tales, or my ex Lillian, who embedded triggers to steal memories of our marriage, & now lives with my former best friend of 50 years, Sal. Lillian & I divorced in ‘96, exactly 30 years (to the day) before the blocks lifted in a dream: two voices saying, “30 years” & “He’s far enough removed to be objective.” Memories flooded back — the abuse, the programming, the betrayal.
Life in the ‘70s CIA? It was camaraderie laced with paranoia. Mornings reviewing subproject results: 149 known, per Church Committee hearings, with 17 on behavioral drugs without human testing, 14 with volunteers, 6 on unwitting subjects another never known. I have another 70 in my hardcopy records, along with the 1st Draft of the ‘Gemstone Files, buried in the Big Sur backcountry, along with 4,000 hits of Tiny Doctor Tim’s Orange Sunshine (the ones with the 50mg of STP — which gave the ‘trip’ a “ coming on like a freight train’ boost.)
If “Experienced” you know that of which I speak.
Afternoons in safe houses, dosing hookers in Operation Midnight Climax to test interrogation resistance Evenings? Wrestling with the ethics, or lack thereof. We preyed on the vulnerable — mentally ill, prisoners, soldiers — echoing Auschwitz experiments by Nazis like Walter Schreiber, whom we hired. Rep.
Dennis Kucinich’s 2001 bill to ban psychotronic weapons was laughed off, but it highlighted the legacy: non-lethal pain via microwaves, sound waves, electromagnetic fields.
The “accomplishments”? Not the mind control panacea we sought — Gottlieb himself admitted failures outweighed successes in ’75 testimony (a marvel of “gaslighting”. Some of this shit worked like crazy, like with me). No publicly possible perfect Manchurian Candidate was admitted then l . . . but Trump is living proof of the KGB’s Mind Kontrol success. But we learned: drugs like LSD could disorient, hypnosis implant suggestions lasting years, trauma forge alters for dual lives. It influenced modern psyops, interrogation manuals (think Gitmo), even disinformation campaigns
Targeted Individuals (TIs) today claim echoes — gangstalking, electronic harassment — dismissed as paranoia (that was the point) but rooted in real tech from subprojects like MKNAOMI (biologicals) and MKSEARCH (successor to Ultra).
By ’73, with Watergate brewing, Director Richard Helms ordered files destroyed (he never got mine, btw) But leaks surfaced: Washington Post articles on Girard, a victim convinced of beamed pain. Church Committee exposed it in ’75, Rockefeller Commission too.
Then there was the incident of an entire French village (Pont-Saint-Esprit) gone maniacal from something:
“The 1951 mass poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, known as “Le Pain Maudit,” affected over 250 people, causing hallucinations and seven deaths. While long rumored to be a CIA LSD experiment, most evidence points to natural ergot poisoning from contaminated bread, not intentional LSD dosing” — WIKI For the record, Col Hunter told me over beers at a SF “Spook Bar”:in the Marina District) it was a test of “BZ” (really nasty stuff) in the water supply. Typical Gottlieb evil operation. One of hundreds on unsuspecting civilians, covered up by then young lawyer. Donald Rumsfeld in the Church hearings.
We scattered — some to black-leaf ops, essence-level stuff beyond mundane CIA. I survived, pieced my selves together. At 75 now, with 159,000 blog views currently from 12 countries, & a 500,000 total views per month reach with my accounts across multiple platforms I will be spilling it all now. It’s time. The Intel establishment denies verifiable successes, but my life avows otherwise. Quantum parallels? Many Worlds theory suggests branches where it worked perfectly — or worse, lol. For those doubting, here’s a compendium of currently working links to declassified docs, histories, and research on MKUltra.
Also, for my source material for this story, please visit my blog, “Letters To My Future Selves” ( jondalfopines.blogspot.com )
Dive in; the rabbit hole’s WAY deep.
- CIA’s official declassified MKUltra documents: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/project-mkultra
- • Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 1977 Hearing Transcript: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-hearings-95mkultra.pdf
- • National Security Archive on Sidney Gottlieb’s Testimony: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2025-10-30/top-secret-testimony-cias-mkultra-chief-50-years-later
- • Wikipedia Overview (with declassified refs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
- • History.com on Experiments: https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments
- • Britannica Summary: https://www.britannica.com/topic/MK-ULTRA
- • University of Iowa Research Guide: https://libguides.law.uiowa.edu/az/the-cia-and-the-behavioral-sciences-mind-control-drug-experiments-and-mkultra
- • Princeton University Archives on MKUltra Ties: https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2025/10/the-cias-quest-for-mind-control-piecing-together-project-mk-ultra-and-its-princeton-connections-part-ii-mk-ultra-at-princeton-university
- • NPR on Gottlieb: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief
- • The Intercept on Related Researchers: https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west
- • Jacobin Magazine on Program History: https://jacobin.com/2020/10/cia-brainwashing-program-mk-ultra-sidney-gottlieb
- • Harvard Kennedy School Paper on Mind Control Past/Future: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/24_Meier_02.pdf
- From the old list, many are defunct, but survivors include: https://www.mindjustice.org (Cheryl Welsh’s site on mind control ethics); https://www.wanttoknow.info/mindcontrol (PEERS network summaries); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA (as above). — (AI edited)
Written by Jondalf Thrasher
Weltanschauungskrieg Essayist. Aspie/w SS. “Manning the barricades” since the Vietnam War. Original Yippie!/SDS/WU. Hippie double agent in MKUltra for 10 years
