Brain Warfare
Written & Narrated By Baltimore Writer Charles Rammelkamp
That snake in the grass Allen Dulles,
head of the CIA until Kennedy fired him
after the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
spilled the beans in a speech he gave
to his fellow Princeton alumni, in 1953,
talking about the manipulation of minds,
conditioning patsies to repeat thoughts
implanted by suggestion from outside.
“We might call it,
in its new form, ‘brain warfare,’”
he told the audience in Hot Springs, Virginia,
that April evening, early in the Cold War.
I was sitting in the front row,
not that “Glen Webber” meant anything
to the man who’d oversee
the Iranian coup d’état four months later,
the one that strengthened the Shah’s hand,
the stooge Pahlavi the Ayatollah would overthrow
two and half decades later.
“Its aim is to condition the mind
so it no longer reacts
on a free will or rational basis.”
How smug Dulles was, lamenting,
“We in the West
are handicapped in brain warfare.
We have no human guinea pigs,”
attributing such a sinister program to the Soviets,
claiming the moral high ground,
when his Bluebird and Artichoke projects,
brutal experiments on unwilling subjects,
had been going on for two years.