Paranoia in the face of chilling history

A STRIKE ON N. KOREA COULD EASILY SPIN OUT OF CONTROL — ISHAAN THAROOR

Maybe Donald Trump is paranoid for thinking there’s been a conspiracy against him within the FBI.

And maybe Joseph Heller was right that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’ t mean they aren’t after you.” Especially where the government is concerned.

There are two shows currently streaming on Netflix Canada that make this point.

The programs occupy different genres, focus on different eras, and use different pacing for the telling of their different stories. Manhunt: Unabomber is a sensitive fictionalized dramatization of the FBI’s hunt for domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski in the 1990s. Wormwood is an eerie Errol Morris docudrama that investigates the untimely 1953 death of CIA biological warfare scientist Frank Olson.

We all know how Manhunt ends. We don’t get full answers to the Wormwood mystery and probably never will.

But both s eries draw attention to a chilling piece of history: the damaging, aggressive and — ultimately — unthinkable mind- control experiments that the CIA undertook during the Cold War era.

In Manhunt, the revelation comes toward the end of the series when an episode is devoted mostly to flashbacks of Kaczynski’s formative years.

Having skipped t wo grades, a 16- year- old Kaczynski arrives at Harvard as a precocious undergraduate. Already troubled, he volunteers as a subject for an experiment being run by psychology professor Henry Murray, whom he idolizes and trusts.

For t he f i rst phase of the experiment, Kaczynski bonds with the professor, sharing his most i ntimate feelings and ideas. But t he s essions e ventually turn into episodes of gruell i ng psychological abuse in which Kaczynski is ridiculed and humiliated, his every thought and belief hurled back at him as evidence of his inadequacy as a thinker and a person.

These belittling sessions last for two years.

The study is sponsored by the CIA’s mind- control project, codenamed MKUltra.

It’s true, as I mentioned, that Manhunt is a fictionalized account of the Unabomber story. Sad then that this whole wild mindexperiment narrative isn’t one of the things the writers made up.

Almost all of it is verifiably accurate, including the abhorrent ego- destroying nature of the lengthy experiment, and the CIA’s human research on ways to manipulate subjects into confessions. The detail that can’t be confirmed for sure — that Murray’s testing of Kaczynski was MKUltra research — is nonetheless entirely plausible given what we know about Murray (who was an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, during the Second World War) and the CIA’s research interests and funding at the time of the Harvard testing.

There’s certainly no question now that, as Wormwood shows, one aspect of MKUltra was to dose people with LSD ( among other s ubstances), s ometimes without their knowledge or consent. Scientist Frank Olson was one of several CIA employees to end up on the receiving end of one of these secret “tests.” He reacted badly, became paranoid, and plunged to his death from a 13 th- storey hotel room soon after.

An indication of just how bad things were: the government has long since admitted to slipping Olson LSD without his knowledge, but Wormwood makes a frightening case that the CIA assassinated Olson to contain his inside knowledge about the government’s secret biological warfare program.

Here’s the scariest part. The Kaczynski and Olson stories are not outliers ( at least, not the reckless illegal human experimentation part). As former State Department Officer John Marks’ book Search for the Manchurian Candidate confirms, short of the alleged assassination, what happened to Kaczynski and Olson was perfectly typical of the research the CIA was doing and sponsoring as part of MKUltra and similar projects.

Marks recounts horrific CIA- sponsored r esearch involving unconscionable electro- shock and brainwashing ( much of this took place in Montreal, the victims women), lengthy sensory deprivation and sedation, the spiking of food and drink with Seconal and Dexedrine and marijuana, slipping unwitting prostitutes and drug addicts LSD in safehouses hooked up with surveillance equipment, and injecting black inmates with psilocybin.

Marks concludes his book by warning, “Tampering with the mind is much too dangerous to be left to the spies.”

Goodness yes. But when the offending tampering sounds so outlandish, how to draw the public’s attention to the problem without sounding like a completely paranoid lunatic? And what about when the victim really is a completely paranoid lunatic … but also a victim?

I have no idea if there’s a shady “deep- state” plot afoot against President Trump.

All I know is that when crazy conspiracy theories about government overreach emerge, I tend to roll my eyes. But with all I’ ve heard, seen, and read lately about real secret government cruelty, I’m going to try to listen a little before l aughing the next time I hear a whopper about covert machinations.

HOW TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THE PROBLEM WITHOUT SOUNDING LIKE A PARANOID LUNATIC?