'Treadstone': The real story behind CIA operation MKUltra’s quest to give subjects superhuman abilities through drugs and hypnosis
‘Treadstone’, the USA Network spinoff from the ‘Bourne’ series brings to light a fascinating historical time -- the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union’s rivalry from that era produced many technological breakthroughs thanks to an unhealthy spirit of one-upmanship between the two nations.
Were all these breakthroughs great though? Now that’s the real question, isn’t it? In the show, as is in the ‘Bourne’ series, Operation Treadstone is a CIA black ops program that generated and managed a cadre of sleeper agents stationed around the world.
It recruited soldiers and turned them into superhuman assassins, using a behavior-modification program. According to the Robert Ludlum books, Treadstone was formed in direct response to the Congressional Act which banned the U.S. from partaking in any assassinations.
Treadstone, of course, is the stuff of fiction. But is there some historical accuracy hidden away between the lines? As it turns out, yes.
On April 13, 1953, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, ordered the agency to develop mind-controlling drugs to be deployed against members of the Soviet bloc. This secretive program was supposedly launched in response to Soviet, Chinese and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War.
And thus, Project MKUltra was born. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the project, which continued for more than a decade, used illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.
According to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977, the intent of the project was to study “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior”. With MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could, among other things, make hypnosis easier, enhance their subjects' ability to withstand torture and coercion, and produce amnesia, shock, and confusion.
According to a report by the NPR, journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, called the operation the “most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."
Kinzer wrote of the operation: "[Sidney] Gottlieb (the chemist who created and run MKUltra) wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."
That sounds exactly how Bentley (Jeremy Irvine) described the effects of the Russian experiments on him in 'Treadstone'! Another facet of this horrific operation, as per NPR, is the use of "Nazi methodology".
Supposedly, MKUltra was was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. The CIA reportedly hired German and Japanese concentration camp doctors and vivisectionists to learn about their research and build upon it.
Of course, many of MKUltra’s records were destroyed in a 1973 purge, and many had been destroyed throughout the program’s course. Yet, about 8,000 pages of records (mostly financial documents) were found in 1977. Also, fun fact: MKUltra was responsible for the spread of the hallucinogenic drug L.S.D. in the U.S.
'Treadstone' airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on the USA Network.