The Prisoner: Mind Control, Then and Now (Part Two)

AMC TV's "reimagining" of the late Patrick McGoohan's 1960s cult classic "The Prisoner" is generating renewed interest in the role of the individual in society.

(STARpod.org) -- In the 1960s, a British TV show called "The Prisoner" broke new ground in the dust bowl of the American TV landscape. A strange mix of spy sci-fi and allegory, "The Prisoner" painted a bizarre image of the evil abuse of societal control and government manipulation.

Mind-control technology played a major role in the series: In the Village, former spies are prisoners of an electronic surveillance machine run by shadow "control" -- their minds subjected to all manner of invasive experiments, both psychological and physical, without their consent.

To put the role of "The Prisoner" into historical perspective, consider that revelation of CIA's nefarious covert use of drugs and mind-control experiments conducted against unwitting civilians would not be revealed until the middle of the next decade.

MKULTRA, and other related secret government programs conducted by the Intelligence Community, had begun in the early 1950s. Sensing possible revelation of their existence, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of the files a few years before a Congressional investigation revealed a small part of the truth to the American public.

A handful of surviving files document an extensive program of mind-control experimentation worthy of the dark evils of "The Prisoner." Eventually the Intelligence Community mind-control effort was sent spinning into directions resonant with science fiction: hypnosis, altered sates of consciousness, psychotronic weaponry, telepathy, psychic "remote viewing," and even mind-over-matter psychokinesis.

In late 1963, Richard Helms requested the investigation of hypnosis and telepathy for the operational intelligence and counterintelligence cold war with the Soviet Union.

Less than ten years later, his associate from Technical Services, Sidney Gottlieb, was funding research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The goal: determine how psychics, like Uri Geller and Ingo Swann, were able to affect sensitive instrumentation and, if possible, develop an operational "remote viewing" psychic spy.

As the effort unfolded, reports of very strange happenings slowly leaked from the covert activity at SRI. For the most part, according to the historical record found in U.S. government documents, the participants in the psychic spy research at SRI were unaware of their CIA sponsor.

In a very real sense, the research at SRI was a kinder, gentler version of "The Village" in "The Prisoner."

From the point of view of the CIA, the psychics represented persons capable of accessing sensitive information. How they did this, and, most importantly, how CIA might make use of their skills, was at the core of the operation.

An explicit threat quickly emerged from the SRI research when one of the CIA test subjects provided classified information about a sensitive National Security Agency location.

Ken Kress, one of the CIA officers assigned to the project, described how this played out at CIA, in an article written in 1977 for CIA's classified internal publication "Studies in Intelligence."

An SRI psychic, Pat Price, "who had no military or intelligence background, provided a list of project titles associated with current and past activities including one of extreme sensitivity. Also the code name of the site [the NSA installation] was provided. Other information concerning the physical layout of the site was accurate."

This provided the impetus to continue the secret research. Kress writes, "The project proceeded on the premise that the phenomena existed; the objective was to develop and utilize them."

Today, contacts in the Intelligence Community cite a possible return to the unethical practices of mind control research from the early years of American intelligence, this time by private intelligence organizations.

In part three I will explore the relationship of America's psychic mind-control efforts to the Age of the Internet and the War on Terror.

For more information on America's mind-bending psychic espionage efforts, including original declassified government documents, please visit STARpod.org.

AMC TV has produced a fabulous web site for their new version of "The Prisoner" which includes video of all seventeen original episodes. Visit AMCTV.com for more information.

For the rest of this story, see SPIES LIES and POLYGRAPH TAPE -- Knowing the Future: The UFO Spy Games Book. To read more about the book, click here.

Copyright (c) 2009 Gary S Bekkum and STARstream Research / STARpod.org -- All rights reserved.