In his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, University of Wisconsin historian Alfred W. McCoy suggests that the Yale obedience experiments were funded by the CIA as part of MKUltra’s studies on the control of human behavior.153 During that time, the CIA funneled money through various federal agencies to fund 185 independent researchers to perform sinister behavioral manipulation studies at universities across North America.154 Milgram first proposed his obedience research in a 1960 solicitation to the Group Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), a key conduit for the CIA's MKULTRA mind control experiments. The dean who hired Milgram later as a professor at City University of New York was a former deputy director of ONR. Milgram’s Yale mentor was Irving L. Janis, who wrote the seminal Air Force study of Soviet mind-control and hypnosis for the Rand Corporation. Milgram’s other connections to the CIA’s Psychological Warfare program are too numerous to mention here.
In an equally important revelation, the CIA mind-control experiments identified social isolation as the primary protocol for controlling societal and individual behavior: “In 1960, one of the agency’s most active contractors, Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell, confirmed the significance of [social isolation] . . . for the CIA mind-control effort . . . in light of the neurological literature, the most promising of all known techniques.”155
The CIA’s research found that “the effect of isolation on the brain function [on an individual] is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep.”156
Social isolation affects organic brain development, and the human body, length of life, cardiovascular health, and so on. Social isolation doubles the risk of death in Blacks while increasing the risk of early death in Caucasians by 60–84 percent, while other studies show that it is safer to smoke fifteen cigarettes a day—or be an alcoholic—than to be socially isolated:
Meta-analysis coauthored by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, [found that] lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or having alcohol use disorder. [Holt-Lunstad] also found that social isolation is twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity. . . . “There is robust evidence that social isolation significantly increases risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators.”157
NIH’s collaboration with the CIA in these odious torture, obedience, and brainwashing experiments heaps additional ignominy on the agency. During the 1950s, NIH scientist Dr. Maitland Baldwin conducted social isolation experiments on monkeys and humans at NIH headquarters and CIA safehouses. MKUltra’s experiments used “expendables”—people whose deaths or disappearances would go unnoticed— including “a rather gruesome experiment” in which Baldwin had subjected a soldier to forty hours of isolation, causing him to go insane and to kick apart the box in which Maitland imprisoned him. Maitland, who told his “Operation Artichoke” case officer that isolating subjects for over forty hours could cause “irreparable damage” and perhaps be “terminal,” nevertheless agreed to go forward if the agency could provide cover and subjects.158
The various scenario-planning simulations provided a unique forum to convene key decision makers, and to introduce, and then to sanction, with authoritative voices, previously unspeakable conduct that violated democratic and ethical norms. That conduct included the forced isolation and quarantine of entire populations, including the healthy; censoring free speech; violating privacy with track and trace surveillance systems; trampling property rights and religious freedoms; and obliterating traditional economies via nationwide business lockdowns, enforced masking, coercive medical interventions, and other assaults on human rights, civil rights, constitutions, and democracies. With each new simulation, the staccato repetition of the message by “trusted experts”—doctors in lab coats and authoritative collectives like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sen. Sam Nunn, WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland, and Sen. Tom Daschle—reinforced the lesson that censorship, isolation, the militarization of medicine, totalitarian controls, and coercive vaccine mandates are the only appropriate response to pandemics. Scenario planning, in other words, is a potent brainwashing technique for creating and fortifying anti-democratic orthodoxies among key political leaders, the press, and the technocracy, and preparing the nation to tolerate a coup d’état against its Constitution without resistance.
Lockstep Simulation 2010
In 2009, President Obama declared biosecurity as the spear tip of US foreign policy, dispersing memos to all government agencies instructing them to integrate biosecurity into their mission. By 2010, US spy agencies were demonstrating a growing interest in vaccines as a foreign policy instrument. Just as the Cold War, and later on, the “War on Terror,” had rationalized US military presence across the world as a bulwark against brushfire nationalist rebellions purportedly orchestrated by a communist monolith, vaccination programs could justify interventions in developing countries with high disease burdens as a tool for social and political control. In 2010, the WHO pronounced biosecurity as the centerpiece of its approach for managing global risks.159
That same month, as Bill Gates delivered his Decade of Vaccines speech at the UN, biosecurity—the war on microbes—was already eclipsing the “War on Islamic Terrorism” as the preferred driver of the security state cartel. A few days later, Peter Schwartz authored a scenario report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.”160 A section called “Lockstep” reinforced the burgeoning orthodoxy that rigid global tyranny was the antidote to infectious disease:
In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain—originating from wild geese—was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months. . . .