More than 25 years have passed since I began research into what was then called "brainwashing," a comically euphemistic term invented in the 1950's by CIA propaganda specialist Edward Hunter. It's been 21 years since my book on the subject Operation Mind Control was published internationally, and five years since it reappeared as the greatly expanded Limited Researcher's Edition, featuring an account of "Lois" that offers a synopsis of the book you hold in your hands. Now it can be told. "Lois" is Susan Ford, whose pseudonym is Brice Taylor. Her book Thanks for the Memories, which, by all reports is greatly anticipated by an audience better educated than the one I encountered in the 1970's, is now published for all the world to read.
I wrote my book Operation Mind Control while living in Arizona, still 'a backward state, dominated by Federal funds and jobs, and the dissociated and extremely provincial beliefs that come with it. In the 70's most of the people I spoke with about what I called, generically, "mind control" thought I was crazy. Those who were not afraid to express their opinions on the subject believed it to be impossible. They strongly believed they could not be made to do something against their will and without their own knowledge. They believed they had indomitable powers of will, like the CIA funded psychologist, Timothy Leary's fellow debater and Watergate burglar, G. Gordon Liddy. They believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they could not be broken, fragmented, and mentally enslaved by any technology, even if it included hypnosis, drugs, electronic brain stimulation or what came to be called biological process control.
My interest in this subject was piqued by a young man, David, I had known all my life. He returned from a four-year tour with the United States Air Force in a confused and deeply tormented state. You could not say that he had a destroyed mind. He suffered from complete amnesia about the past years of service in the USAF, but he was making straight "A's" in premedical courses at a prominent University.
I did not recognize him as he sat, slumped in an overstuffed chair in my living room in 1973. He had undergone a couple of years of treatment with a competent psychiatrist and was finally asked by her, "Do you want to know what this is and how it was created, or do you just want to be able to function?" He decided the functioning was good enough, and his treatment accelerated, taking a wide turn away from the historical events he remembered, which included being a "human tape recorder" and witnessing the most secret negotiations with North Vietnam and with "Royals" of the Arabic persuasion who beheaded a prisoner he had just witnessed being interrogated. The image of this decapitation still haunts him in his dreams.
In 1973 the Rockefeller Commission's Report revealed that CIA Director Richard Helms had supposedly destroyed 153 separate files on a long running, top secret project called MKULTRA, as his last act in office. In years to come many of those files were discovered as "misplaced" files. They revealed a long history of criminal activities by individuals who hid behind the National Security Act and ran amok, arrogantly treating citizens of their own country as just so many lab rats.
