Few organizations have a reputation quite like that of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s mission is to protect the United States from enemies foreign and domestic, but over the years, questions have been raised over whether the CIA’s actions live up to its noble goals. We recently shared a video looking at some of the darker secrets of the CIA. Today, we’ll be looking at even more stories that show the sinister and downright bizarre things the CIA has gotten up to over the years.
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Operation Gondola Wish
Sometimes, what the CIA got up to was not so much terrifying as it was insane.
By the 1960s, gripped by Cold War paranoia, the CIA had become convinced that the Soviets had figured out how to use “paranormal senses” to gather intelligence. They genuinely believed that the US was vulnerable to these new techniques of “parapsychology” and that action had to be taken to counter them. These ‘techniques’ included psychokinesis, moving objects with the mind, out-of-body experiences, which allowed people to ‘leave’ their bodies and move around, and remote viewing, which allowed people to see or sense things without any apparent physical way to do so.
By 1970, the CIA was funding a research program called SCANATE to investigate “gifted individuals” who possessed these special talents. Surprisingly, these early experiments reported an accuracy rate of over 65% in many instances. There was enough perceived success to form a proper project, codenamed Gondola Wish, by 1977. Gondola Wish was supposed to consolidate this parapsychology research so that it could be properly integrated into counterintelligence. It proposed training people in these techniques to act as special agents in Eastern Europe.
The documents relating to Gondola Wish treat it with complete seriousness. For example, the CIA put great thought into who might be recruited for such work. They were worried that the paranormal nature of the work would offend some people’s religious sensibilities, creating a risk that they would go to the public to expose what they thought was an “immoral” project. It is also apparent from the documents that, for whatever reason, the Soviets were believed to be equally certain of the value of this research. Since Russia does not declassify things in the same manner as the US, we can’t really know how far the Soviets really took these experiments. It’s even possible that the Soviets were leading the CIA on a wild goose chase to rate their time – such things were known to happen in the Cold War – but we can only speculate.
#cia #history #classified #ciasecrets #mkultra #projectnorthwood
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