TOWARDS RETCON: THE MANIPULATION OF MEMORY
Inducing amnesia might seem like science fiction. Torchwood uses Retcon, the Men in Black a neuralyzer. But the CIA and US military intelligence have a longstanding interest in modifying behaviour generally and memory particularly. Finding a way to ensure that someone who knows too much forgets was, John Marks notes in his seminal book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, “a prime objective of the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs”.
The CIA, worried about the USSR’s supposed progress in unconventional warfare, argued that to defend against Russian mind control they needed to understand the offensive potential. But, Marks points out, “the line between offense and defence – if it ever existed – soon became so blurred as to be meaningless”.
The mind control experiments began with Project CHATTER, which the US Navy started in 1947. CHATTER aimed to emulate, according to declassified documents, the “‘amazing results’ achieved by the Soviets in using ‘truth drugs’”. In 1950, the CIA began Project BLUEBIRD, one aim of which was to develop ways to enhance memory. Think how useful it would be for a spy to accurately recall details during a secret mission.
In 1950, the CIA started working with external scientists to find a drug that destroyed memory. Inducing amnesia supported other aspects of the mind control programme. If you want to programme Manchurian Candidates, it’s better that they don’t recall they’re programmed. And if a Russian agent being interrogated recalled an effective approach, it wouldn’t remain secret for long.
The CIA’s interest continued with MKULTRA. In April 1955, a CIA memo outlined the 17 aims of MKULTRA, which included “materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use”.2
For example, MKULTRA recognised that brain concussion “is always followed by amnesia for the actual moment of the accident”. The memo suggested various ways to deliver an amnesiainducing blow including a “pancake type blackjack”, “concealed or camouflaged springloaded impacting devices that trigger upon contact with the head” and an airgun that fired a “small shot-filled sack”. The CIA even considered “an explosive pad detonated in contact with the head or body” and sound waves tuned to the resonance of the skull. MKULTRA also studied hypnosis, without much “operationally useful” success, as a means to erase the recent past.
Pharmacology is subtler than a bang on the head. For instance, drugs that block a cell’s ability to make protein do not alter an animal’s ability to learn a new task, which depends on short-term memory. However, blocking protein production disrupts longterm memory. A single dose of anaesthetic propofol also seems to impair consolidation.3
On the other hand, glucocorticoids (a type of steroid), adrenaline, amphetamine and some drugs that act on the same biological pathways enhance consolidation. This makes sense biologically. You release adrenaline when you’re stressed. Remembering a stressful event helps protect you when similar circumstances arise. But glucocorticoids impair recall of information already ‘downloaded’ to long-term memory.
For PTSD patients and many other people, the past is a foreign country that they have no wish to revisit. Even transitory recollections can be deeply distressing and disruptive. Numerous studies now suggest that certain drugs could finally help people let go of the past. But the memory loss probably won’t be enough to reliably create the total amnesia needed by the spooks. As one outside consultant for ARTICHOKE remarked: “short of cutting a subject’s throat, a true amnesia cannot be guaranteed”.
NOTES
1 J Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, Allen Lane 1979.
2 United States Senate, Project MKULTRA, the CIA’S Program of Research in Behavioral Modification Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources: Ninety-Fifth Congress First Session; August 3, 1977. Available at https://www.intelligence. senate.gov/sites/default/ files/hearings/95mkultra. pdf.
3 A Galarza Vallejo et al, Science Advances, 2019;5:eaav3801.