BRAINWASHING: FROM THE KOREAN WAR TO CHARLES MANSON
Filed: 09 July 2025
Compiled by: Cola Corp
Single Use Cart Ref: MANSONSTICKER
I started the Cola Corporation with this mission: Kill American Myths. In her article, "A brief, weird history of brainwashing," Annalee Newitz describes the work of Edward Hunter, the guy who literally invented our concept of brainwashing, like this: "His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology." In that sense, Cola has always addressed brainwashing. I focus on what we might call soft brainwashing: the indoctrination of populations with "political mythologies" via media propaganda. I subvert pattern recognition and otherwise play with established forms to create glitches in mental programming. The original concept of brainwashing entailed breaking down a person's sense of self and replacing it with a new one. This original brainwashing involved torture, as we will see.
For the upcoming Acid Drop collection, I wanted my designs to hew more closely with the original sense of brainwashing Even "soft" brainwashing descends from, and still overlaps with, the original concept of brainwashing. Both are brutal forms of warfare against the people.
--Cola
KOREAN WAR
In 1951, Edward Hunter popularizes the term and concept of "brainwashing" with a Miami News article explaining that Chinese citizens only tolerate Communism because they are victims of state-implemented mind control. Also in 1951, the United States enters the Korean War. This is not a coincidence. One year later, Hunter doubles down with a new book, Brain Washing in Red China.
Meanwhile at Langley, CIA director Allen Dulles becomes convinced that (1) brainwashing is real, and (2) the US is losing the mind-control race to the Reds.¹
In 1953, two captured U.S. Marine pilots admit to dropping bioweapons, specifically plague-infested insects, on their enemies. The official U.S. response was that the men must have been brainwashed while in captivity.² (Even if the men were lying, Occam's Razor would suggest that their captors coerced the confession using standard, barbaric torture methods. But the government went straight for the mind-control theory, which shows how deeply embedded the idea of brainwashing was in the U.S. government.)
When the war ends in July 1953, 20 U.S. POWs decide to remain in China, rather than return home. As one POW described it, "My reasoning was, they really have embraced this socialism so let me see what it is like."³
The U.S. response? "Brainwashed!"
MKULTRA BEGINS
Inspired by Nazi experiments at Dachau⁴—and absolutely certain that the USSR, China, and North Korea have perfected mind-control techniques—the CIA begins the illegal MKULTRA program in 1953. The CIA hopes to discover ways to break down an individual's personality and sense of identity and "reprogram" the individual to suit the agency's ends. Researchers discuss implanting false memories, directing individuals to commit acts that they cannot remember doing, etc. MKULTRA uses medical torture and more straightforward coercion on thousands of subjects, with much of the research predicated on the forced administration of drugs. In 1954 San Francisco, the subprogram Midnight Climax employs sex workers to bring their clients to a CIA safe house, where the clients are surreptitiously dosed with LSD and observed by CIA personnel through a one-way mirror. The CIA chose this subject population knowing that they would be unlikely to discuss their experiences.
MKULTRA EVERYWHERE
In 1951 Tokyo, CIA agents drugged two suspected spies with a cocktail of depressants and stimulants. Under intense interrogation, the men admitted to the CIA's suspicions. The CIA took the men to Tokyo Bay, murdered them, and dumped their bodies into the water. The same CIA crew then went to Seoul and repeated the experiment on North Korean POWs, with the same result: mass execution.⁵
This approach characterizes the recklessness and sociopathy of the MKULTRA program, which included experiments on mental-health patients, prisoners, students, average-Joe citizens, and CIA and military personnel. All of these subjects were either forced into the experiments or the CIA hid its role, as with tests at universities. At Stanford, a young student (and eventual author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) named Ken Kesey took LSD as part of an experiment financed by the CIA. The experience turned Kesey into an LSD evangelist who toured the United States in a Technicolor school bus that Kesey named Furthur, with a crew called the Merry Pranksters. Tom Wolfe would later immortalize Kesey's exploits in the Gonzo journalism classic The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
MKULTRA "research" was not limited to drug administration. The CIA used electroshock, sensory deprivation, and good old physical beatings in its quest to erase and reprogram the human mind.
CHARLES MANSON
Manson arrives in San Francisco in 1967, just in time for the Summer of Love. Around the same time, Jolly West sets up shop near the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. West is a psychiatrist and researcher who once tortured an elephant to death by injecting it with 300,000 milligrams of LSD and waiting for the poor pachyderm to collapse, at which point West administered more drugs, until the elephant finally died after suffering for 1 hour and 40 minutes. In San Francisco, West uses rooms at the free clinic to test LSD on young hippies seeking medical care. At the same time, Charles Manson frequents the clinic with his harem of devotees, who often need treatment for STDs and family planning. During this time, Jolly West continues his ongoing personal correspondence with Sidney Gottlieb, the man in charge of MKULTRA.⁶
So. During 1967, Charles Manson frequents a clinic where a CIA-adjacent researcher conducts mind-control experiments with LSD, with one of the stated goals being the de- and reprogramming of the human mind.
THE DEATH OF THE SIXTIES
The Tate-LaBianca murders in August 1969 mark the end of the Sixties. Yes, the decade will literally be over in four months, but more than that, the Sixties are now metaphorically dead. Flower Power has wilted and died. Peace and love has been snuffed out by chaos and hate. The figure of the guru, promising to illuminate a path towards spiritual bliss, has transmogrified into the evil genius of Charles Manson. At the CIA, agents referred to Sidney Gottlieb as the Black Sorcerer, a nickname equally befitting Manson, whose devotees follow his commands to murder without hesitation.
Manson used sleep deprivation, abandonment, sex, social isolation, and copious amounts of LSD to indoctrinate new followers into the Family. It certainly seems that he achieved the brainwashing standard that the CIA sought for two decades. David Smith, head of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, visited Family member Susan Atkins 10 years after the killings. Smith quotes Atkins as saying this about Manson: "I can't get him out of my head! He's still in my brain!"
This anecdote comes from Tom O'Neill's excellent book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. In the book, O'Neill recounts an interaction he had with Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who had published a book on MKULTRA. "I laid out a circumstantial case linking West to Manson," O'Neill remembers. "Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong?
"'No,'" (Scheflin) said, 'an MKULTRA experiment gone right.'"⁷
LEGACY
In 1963, Sid Gottlieb gave up on MKULTRA. In Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer writes, "For ten years Gottlieb had directed systematic, intense, and far-reaching research into mind control. Finally, he and his comrades were forced to face their cosmic failure. Their research had shown them that mind control is a myth—that seizing another person's mind and reprogramming it is impossible."⁸
Imagine then, Gottlieb keeping track of each sensational development from California as Manson appears to accomplish what the most entitled, empowered, and arrogant intelligence agency in the world could not: mastery over the minds of others.
MKULTRA was one standard by which federal US intelligence can measure Manson a success. There are others. The FBI and CIA attempted to disrupt civil rights, women's rights, and leftist political movements throughout the Sixties with massive programs like COINTELPRO and CHAOS. The government had been warning about the dangers of counterculture and its effect on your children. Right on cue, here comes Charlie Manson. The diminutive Pied Piper embodies the counterculture: he dresses like a hippie, sings folk music, ingests copious drugs, and has all the other trappings of Flower Power. Except that with Manson, those trappings are a trap—one that, in a stunning coincidence, accomplishes multiple objectives of the United States government simultaneously and emphatically: apparent mind control and the discrediting of a generational cultural movement.
CODA
I don't have an opinion whether Manson was formally or directly involved with CIA mind-control studies. There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence, but I prefer to focus on one clear fact: The U.S. government had goals that were shared, and ultimately accomplished, by the most diabolical figure of the 1960s. Sidney Gottlieb, with his extra-legal, administrative obsession with mind control, fell into league with a murderous lunatic who to this day haunts the consciousness of a nation. Surely that shared interest—that affinity—is the deserving point of our focus.
REFERENCES
1. Nofil, Brianna. “The CIA’s Appalling Human Experiments with Mind Control Channel.” History.com.
2. New York Times. 1953. “RED GERM CHARGES CITE 2 U. S. MARINES; Peiping Radio Says Air Officers Disclosed Joint Chiefs Order for Bacteriological War,” February 23, 1953.
3. Nasaw, Chloe Hadjimatheou and Daniel. 2011. “The American POW Who Chose China.” BBC News. October 26, 2011.
4. Kinzer, Stephen. 2019. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, p. 59. St. Martin's Griffin.
5. Ibid, p. 64.
6. O’Neill, Tom. 2019. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties p. 306-307. Little, Brown.
7. Ibid, p. 369.
8. Kinzer, Stephen. 2019. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, P. 198. St. Martin's Griffin.