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TODAY: More on MK ULTRA subprojects that John Marks didn’t want to talk about!
MK ULTRA Subproject 127 was never mentioned by John Marks in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, the book designed to present MK ULTRA material to the American public.
In subproject 127 CIA researchers analyzed fifty years of voting records for individuals in a low-literacy, USA-friendly, developing democracy. They were trying to figure out what would make people vote different ways over time.
I’m concerned about Project 127 because I don’t see any reason why the CIA should be worried about voter behavior in a friendly nation, especially when the goal of such a study is to distill general information about voter behavior over long periods which could be used to manipulate voters in the United States. Is the CIA in the business of manipulating allies’ democratic governments in the long-term? Are they in the business of manipulating American voters?
Subproject 127 was designed “to study the open voting records of [REDACTED] registered voters over a fifty year period.” [MORI #ID 17385, page 9] From the same document:
2. This study is an attempt to do a longitudinal study of the factors that affect the voting of people over a considerable period of time. The results of the study could contribute to [REDACTED]. In addition, the data represents a unique gold mine of information to study some of the fundamental behavioral characteristics of people.
Subproject 127 analyzed voters based on “ecological patterning” (you’ll remember that’s CIA for ‘race‘), “social standing” and affiliation to established parties, which ran from “conservative” to “Communist”. In order to vote in this friendly country, you had to be male, over thirty and own a house.
The study was focused on what it takes to get voters to change who they vote for; one advisor pushed for data on “individual turnover and population succession”. This means looking at how aging, migration and “activation of non-voters” changes the political landscape. They also wanted to look at how hot-button issues and political personalities can shift the scene.
I probably don’t have to tell readers this, but “population succession” issues have been at the heart of American politics for the last fifty years; these issues got going due to 1960s immigration reform.
Subproject 127 shows the CIA ‘gearing-up’ to meddle in another democracy. This meddling might bother me less if I didn’t know that the agency was interested in manipulating politics back home in the USA, as evidenced by their interest in inner city youth and projects like MH CHAOS. I am very suspicious of an unaccountable, clandestine government agency which concerns itself with multi-generational voter behavior.
Some CIA people at the time of the study were nervous about Project 127 too. The MK ULTRA documentation contains a letter from Project 127′s mysterious lead researcher to the CIA directors in charge of funding:
I may note that we have not asked any other foundation to support this project. So far our experience with [REDACTED] foundations has been that they react unfavorably to research in the field of political sociology. [MORI ID# 17385, page 11]
While most of the CIA grant-givers showed “unqualified enthusiasm” about the operational possibilities of the “Voting” project, one correspondent was concerned that getting an American foundation to fund such a study would raise red flags inside the target nation:
My own reaction to the project is that it might possibly be considered a little inappropriate for an American foundation to participate in a study of voting in a friendly nation. If some of the results from the study turned out to be surprising and politically important, it is conceivable to me that a question might be raised concerning the support of the study by funds coming from outside the country.
There was also *something* unsavory about the way Agency researchers got access to the voter data in question: something happened to make this data available, and correspondents made it clear that such an opportunity might not present itself again. The circumstances suggest that the data was obtained unethically.
As always, I don’t expect readers to take my word about Project 127, and have provided photographs of the 20 documents in question here. The results of the study were not included in the MK ULTRA file, so we can’t be sure that the CIA found anything useful– but we know that such uncertainty was important to Colby’s damage control strategy. Neither can we be sure that the study was conducted exactly according to the design laid out here, however page 12 tells us that the CIA did shell out around $7,500.00 for the research in 1960, so we know it went ahead in some form. We also know that money was still being given to the project in 1962 [page 5].
Whatever the researchers found or didn’t find, we can be sure the CIA was very interested in this type of voting data and we should to ask ourselves: “Why?”
Why does the CIA have to know what motivates voters’ choices over 50 years? I think it’s entirely reasonable that spooks ‘war game’ out different political situations overseas that might affect American interests, but we don’t need the Agency to become a repository of ‘tricks’ to change voters’ choices over time. The CIA can’t handle that type of power.
Bearing the limitations of this clandestine organization in mind, projects with goals such as “contributing to the general field concerning voting behaviors” really scare me. Who was helping the CIA reach this goal?
All the names in Project 127 have been blacked out except that of MK ULTRA big-wig “Sid G.”, who is ‘Sidney Gottlieb’. Who might the CIA have gone to for ‘the latest’ in voter behavior research 1959/60? A book by Pippa Norris of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior states the following:
Part I: Theories of Social Cleavages and Voting BehaviorThe seminal sociological studies of voting behavior developed during 1960s by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan emphasized that social identities formed the basic building blocks of party support in Western Europe.
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Seymour Martin Lipset
My guess is that the CIA’s man was Seymour Martin Lipset. My evidence follows:
1) Seymour Martin Lipset was an anti-Stalinist leftist, a political persuasion which was very popular with the CIA after WWII. (Interested? Read Francis Stonor Saunders’ Cultural Cold War.)
Lipset was also a fervent supporter of the state of Israel, whose work “explored racism, prejudice and political extremism“, and who was “one of the first intellectuals to be called a neoconservative“. You can get a full list of his accolades from the Hoover Institution.
2) Seymour Martin Lipset enjoyed prestige across American academia, which is pretty typical for somebody who can make it rain Agency money:
He occupied prestigious academic positions at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, George Mason, the Hoover Institution and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
He was the only person to be president of both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. (New York Times, Jan 4th 2007)
3) Seymour Martin Lipset had the right research style to be the CIA’s mystery researcher.
There is only one working reference which hasn’t been blacked out in the MK ULTRA release [p.16]: “The Lazarsfeld-type of panel, based on interviews, is a much better tool..”
Later in his career, Seymour Martin Lipset would go on to become president of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Society in Vienna. Lipset embraced the same methodological ideologies that are extolled in the CIA documentation.
4) Seymour Martin Lipset ran with the CIA crowd.
A) In the 1940s Paul F. Lazarsfeld (the same guy who formulated the paneling method used by Lipset’s CIA ‘Voting’ project and whose Viennese admiration society eventually asked Lipset to be president) worked with Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal on “anti-Semitism in American Labor” for the Jewish Labor Committee.* Herbert Marcuse had been an OSS agent since 1942 and was a CIA agent at least until 1952. Paul Lazarsfeld, Lipset’s icon, ran with a spooky set.
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Paul Lazarsfeld
Leo Lowenthal, Lazarsfeld’s co-worker, wrote a book with Seymour Martin Lipset one year after the CIA’s “Voting” project began, which was titled Culture and Social Character. (See the bibliography below.) Lowenthal was a prominent member of the exiled Frankfurt School intellectuals along with CIA-agent Herbert Marcuse.
During WWII, Leo Lowenthal worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI), the same propagandists who employed Carl Hovland, who inspired MK ULTRA project 102, which focused on mapping the politics of inner-city youth (the ‘riot’ demographic). In fact, Paul Lazarsfeld and Carl Hovland are both considered fathers of communication research in the USA and their professional relationship was cemented through their mutual OWI work.
B) Seymour Martin Lipset got money from the same private political organizations as OSS/CIA-agent Marcuse, namely, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. (See the bibliography below.) According to Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile:
As Neumann recounted to Horkheimer:
“I have just come back from a two hour conference that Graeber and I had with Dr. David Rosenblum, chairman of the public relations committee of the Anti-Defamation League and of the American Jewish Committee. The outcome is briefly this: It is likely that we shall get a grant of $10,000 for the execution of the Anti-Semitism project if this sum is matched by an equal sum supplied by the institute… I am confident that we have a very big chance of getting the $10,000 and though your presence here might not be indispensible I feel, that in this situation, every step should be done to ensure a happy conclusion of our endeavors.”
‘Horkheimer’ relates to the preeminent Frankfurt School member Max Horkheimer, ‘Neumann’ is Franz Neumann, another Frankfurt School-er to join the OSS. Seymour Martin Lipset himself would later become a consultant to the American Jewish Committee.
Seymour Martin Lipset has all the right friends to be a covert CIA asset. Here’s a taster of some of the scholarship that resulted from Lipset’s *probable* 1960 work with the CIA. I’ve highlighted Lipset’s Anti-Defamation League work, Lipset’s work with Lowenthal and works by Lipset which have a similar flavor to research done by Herbert Marcuse and his team, such as Prophets of Deceit.
LIPSET S. M., RAAB E., Prejudice and Society, New York, Anti-Defamation League, 1959.LIPSET S. M., Political Man : The Social Bases of Politics, New York, Doubleday, 1960.LIPSET S. M., GALENSON W., Labor and Trade Unionism, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1960.LIPSET S. M., SMELSER N., Sociology : The Progress of a Decade, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1961.LIPSET S. M., LOWENTHAL L., Culture and Social Character, New York, Free Press, 1961.LIPSET S. M., (Abridged modem edition of Harriet Martineau), Society in America, Garden City, Doubleday-Anchor, 1962.LIPSET S. M., The First New Nation : The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective, New York, Basic Books, 1963.LIPSET S. M., (Abridged modem edition of M. Ostrogorski), Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, volumes I and II, Garden City, Doubleday-Anchor, 1964.LIPSET S. M., WOLIN S., The Berkeley Student Revolt, Garden City, Doubleday-Anchor, 1965.LIPSET S. M., Estudiantes universitarios y politica en el tercer mundo, Montevideo, Editorial Alfa, 1965.LIPSET S. M., BENDIX R., Class, Status and Power : Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, New York, Free Press, 1966.LIPSET S. M., SMELSER N., Social Structure, Mobility and Development, Chicago, Aldine Publishers, 1966.LIPSET S. M., SOLARI A., Elites in Latin America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967.LIPSET S. M., ROKKAN S., Party Systems and Voter Alignments, New York, Free Press, 1967.LIPSET S. M., Student Politics, New York, Basic Books, 1967.LIPSET S. M., Revolution and Counterrevolution, New York, Basic Books, 1968.LIPSET S. M., HOFSTADTER R., Turner and the Sociology of the Fronder, New York, Basic Books, 1968.LIPSET S. M., HOFSTADTER R., Sociology and History : Methods, New York, Basic Books, 1968.LIPSET S. M., The Left, the Jews and Israel, New York, Anti-Defamation League, 1969.LIPSET S. M., Politics and the Social Sciences, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.LIPSET S. M., ALTBACH P., Students in Revolt, Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1969.LIPSET S. M., RAAB E., The Politics of Unreason : Right-Wing Extremism in America 1790-1970, New York, Harper and Row, 1970.
What I’ve hope I’ve shown today is that John Marks, and ultimately Bill Colby, wanted to steer the American public away from a project that has much more importance than goofy psychic studies or LSD as a truth-serum. I have not answered the question: “Why did Colby want this information released, only to ignore it?”
I can, however, offer a speculative guess as to ‘why’. Both subproject 127, and the ‘riot demographic’ subproject 102 which I wrote about last week, involve academic researchers who travelled in similar spheres– specifically, friends of Carl Hovland, Paul Lazarsfeld– and who shared similar political ideas. (Muzafer Sherif was just as ‘anti-Nazi’ as any of the Frankfurters.)
It may be that Colby and friends included these subprojects as ‘sleepers’ to use against CIA patrons of the aforementioned academics should they ever attack Colby et alia in the future– much like Colby outed MH CHAOS and HT LINGUAL to attack James Angleton. (See Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold.) Since these subprojects haven’t been aired in over thirty years, my guess is that Colby and that group stayed cordial until the CIA director’s untimely death.
Next week… did the CIA really not find anything through MK Ultra research?
*Paul Lazarsfeld was instrumental in resettling the Frankfurt School intellectuals in the United States. Lazarsfeld’s ‘Radio Research Project’ at Princeton University and later Columbia employed Frankfurt academic Theodor Adorno.
Image may be NSFW.
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