Tea at Trianon: Charlie Manson and MKUltra

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 19, 2026

Charlie Manson and MKUltra

From Chronicles:

Long-dead Charlie Manson is back in the news, thanks to a congressional investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra program. One of those testifying before Congress was Tom O’Neill, who spent 20 years of his life trying to follow an occasionally obvious and sometimes obscure trail of documents describing the CIA’s mind-control experiments, which often involved the use of the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In his book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, O’Neill suggests Manson and his cult of followers were possibly a CIA experiment gone bad. Another testifying to the evil of MKUltra was Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

That O’Neill, Kinzer, and others were able to piece together a history of MKUltra is a testament to their skills as researchers, because in 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms had all MKUltra files destroyed. However, thanks to typical bureaucratic ineptitude, it was later discovered through FOIA requests that thousands of MKUltra documents had been improperly stored elsewhere and were not destroyed. O’Neill and Kinzer made other discoveries in personal records and correspondence of those involved in MKUltra.

MKUltra was formally launched in April 1953 in response to North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet attempts to “brainwash” captured Americans during the Korean War. Sidney Gottlieb, the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, led this CIA project. Gottlieb received an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1940 and a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1943.

By the summer of 1951, Gottlieb was working for the CIA as chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff. He thought that through experimentation with various drugs he could find ways to alter brain chemistry and achieve mind control. He tried using the active agent of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cocaine, heroin, and mescaline, before settling on LSD as the most promising drug to alter the thinking and perceptions of the experiment’s subjects. (Read more.)