Politics A book on two sisters forced into the...

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WillWriteForFood

Cadet
Okay, this kind of creeps me out. I was flipping through this at Barnes and Noble the other night and had to post it here to see what you all thought. It had pictures that the two sisters drew when they were put through this depicting the horrible things they went through during "training." I don't know. I always figured these things to be of a fictional content. A la "Project Christmas".

Secret Weapons : Two Sisters' Terrifying True Story of Sex, Spies and Sabotage
Cheryl Hersha, Lynn Hersha, Ted Schwartz, Dale Griffis

Hardcover, February 2001
Our Price: $25.95
Barnes & Noble Member Price: $24.65

Used Copies Available

People who bought this book also bought:
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences John Marks, Thomas Powers (Introduction)
Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda Thomas Powers
The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB James Risen, Milton Bearden
The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea John Pina Craven
Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the World's Most Powerful Spy Agency Ronald Kessler

Product Details:

ISBN: 0882821962
Format: Hardcover, 434pp
Pub. Date: February 2001 Publisher: New Horizon Press
Barnes & Noble Sales Rank: 168,047

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ABOUT THE BOOK
From The Critics
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ABOUT THE BOOK
From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
Now in their late 30s, the Hersha sisters claim to have experienced chilling childhoods, recounted here by two Ohio-based investigators Schwarz (The Hillside Strangler) and former police captain and "ritual abuse expert" Griffis who say they have studied declassified CIA files and interviewed military personnel in an effort to bolster the Hersha memories. Before the age of seven, the sisters say, they were inducted into a covert, government-authorized, mind-control program designed to spawn spies and assassins. During weekends and summers, they were subjected to traumatizing experiments. Cheryl tells of her days as a caged "lab rat," released to navigate electrified mazes. The two became "psychological captives," programmed to respond to code words. Following practice in weaponry, martial arts and flight training, altered identities were purportedly introduced. At 15, Lynn "was made part of a unit that experienced murder," and she assumed the identity of team leader "Lt. Rick Shaw." As the seductive "Samantha Gooding," Cheryl would paralyze her victims, and she later became the cocky chopper pilot "Sgt. Thomas O'Neil." Naturally, these two "men," long separated, were destined to meet: "Cheryl Hersha! It's me, Lynn, your sister. You've got to let me go. You can't shoot me." Credibility collapses, as improbabilities are piled on inconsistencies, and the truth is buried beneath simplistic, pulp-adventure prose. In closing, the authors claim that "Their story is true," following with an admission that they found no government documents about the program or the sisters. An elaborate disclaimer about the "presumed thoughts and imagined words of the participants" will lead many readers to ponder just how much real events have been fictionalized. (Mar.) Forecast: Since Walter Bowart's Operation Mind Control (1978) and Donald Bain's The Control of Candy Jones (1976), many books about CIA mind control have stacked up. This account of The Manchurian Candidate meets La Femme Nikita will soon work its way toward the bottom of the stack. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Internet Book Watch
In the last half of the twentieth century the American government carried out secret, heinous experiments designed to create and perfect soldiers and spies. Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were two sisters who, as children, were caught up in some of these top secret programs of torture and mind control that went under such covert titles as Monarch, Artichoke, MKULTRA, and Paperclip. In Secret Weapons: Two Sisters' Terrifying True Story Of Sex, Spies And Sabotage, the sisters effective collaborate with Dale Griffis and Ted Schwarz to reveal and analyze these "black box" operations through previously classified CIA files, the sister's own personal experiences, as well as extensive and informative interviews with experts to document one of the most chilling and incredible aspects of American history — and one that never made it into any American history books.

Customer Reviews
Number of Reviews: 1 Average Rating: ****
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A reviewer, A reviewer, April 5, 2001, ****
A Book for all Americans to Read
It would be easy to dismiss this book as craziness or fiction if it were not for the thorough investigation into this type of activity through declassified CIA documents, and other witnesses and survivors. These kinds of horrible activities should not be dismissed from our minds because they are uncomfortable. We need anger and dicomfort to create change. Remember, there used to be a day in this country when no parent perpetrated acts of violence on their children. This book is not enjoyable but rivetting and necessary.
 
Now THAT is REALLY odd............

Project Chirstmas? Now the name is a coincidence but when Project Christmas is the same thing in Alias and this claimed true story that is just freaky. Very freaky. Either that book is fiction or JJ read the book and used the same project in his show. I'm not sure on what to decide. I doubt they'd let JJ do that anyway if that was true but which is correct? Fiction or fact? Fiction or fact?
 
wooooh freaky man. at least it's not called "Project Christmas" that'd be too much of a coincidence... or JJ is really good at getting info.
 
It's not listed in the fiction section on shelves at barnes and noble, I was looking for books on spies and espionage in our country in the US History section and there it was. Makes me sick to my stomach, especially the pictures the little girls drew. One of them was forced to take on a sexual persona, had to watch porn and what not when she was very young.
 
while we've all heard horror stories about the U.S. government, i'd hate to believe that this book was true. i can't believe any sane human being would do that to a child.
 
xdancer said:
while we've all heard horror stories about the U.S. government, i'd hate to believe that this book was true. i can't believe any sane human being would do that to a child.
Click to expand...
I'd hate to believe, too. But the world is amazingly f'd up in many different ways, include the U.S where you would think something like this would never have happened. If it were indeed fiction, I do not believe it would be located in the US History section. I just don't know.... BTW.. I love your quote, "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind." So incredibly true.
 
Oh...I read about that a while back...except it was from an online article...lemme see if i can find it...

hmm...well the link was here....

http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Articles/Mi...20Children.html

but apparently it doesn't work anymore...least it's not at the time I'm trying to post it anyway...maybe it'll work for ya'll? The article however..i saved on my comp cus i thought it was interesitng lol so I'll copy and paste what it said...

By Jon Rappoport

The CIA mind-control apparatus has been well known since 1975, when 10 large boxes of documents were released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Several good books were then written on the subject of the CIA program known as MK-ULTRA. Officially spanning ten years from 1952-62, MK-ULTRA involved the use of LSD on unwitting military and civilian subjects in the United States. LSD and more powerful compounds were given under duress as brainwashing and truth serum drugs. The program’s aim was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject’s mind clean and program him or her as “a robot agent.”

In experimental test situations, people were given acid without their knowledge, then interrogated under bright lights with doctors sitting in the background taking notes. Threats would be made. The test subjects were told that their LSD “downer trips” would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their closely-guarded military secrets. The people being interrogated in this way were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel and, abroad, agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term severe debilitation and several documented deaths resulted. Much, much more could be said about MK-ULTRA.
None of this prepared people for the explosive testimony made on March 15, 1995, in Washington, D.C., before the President’s Committee on Radiation, however. In unpublicized sessions, New Orleans therapist Valerie Wolf introduced two of her patients who had uncovered memories of being part of extensive CIA brainwashing programs as young children (in one case, starting at age seven). Their brainwashing included torture, rape, electroshock, powerful drugs, hypnosis and death threats. According to their testimony, the CIA then induced amnesia to prevent their recalling these terrifying sessions.

Both Wolf and her patients stated that they recovered the memories of this CIA program without regression or hypnosis techniques. In other words, these patients spontaneously discovered this information about themselves and their pasts.
Although the committee was mainly concerned with radiation, they permitted Valerie and her patients to testify because, astonishingly, several doctors who had administered the mind-control experiments had also been identified by other Americans secretly exposed to radiation. Apparently there was a crossover.
Prominent names surfaced in the March 15 testimony: Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran MK-ULTRA and Dr. John Gittinger, Gottlieb’s protege. These men and others were directly accused of participating in grisly mind-control efforts on children.

Predictably, this testimony received no media attention.

I now have it all, including many pages submitted to the committee that will likely never be released as part of their final report. Only a small percentage of the pages were read aloud at the hearing. Included are corroborating statements from other therapists around the country and several of their patients. I have now released all of this testimony as a book, U.S. Government Mind-Control Experiments On Children.

When the sickening shock starts to wear off, deeply disturbing questions flood one’s mind: just what was this CIA program? How extensive was it? What was its purpose?

From what I have been able to discover so far, many American children, as well as children from Mexico and South America, were used over a period of about 40 years, starting around 1948. In fact, the program may still be going on. Doctors and agents who administered it wanted to obtain control over the minds of these children, ostensibly to create superagents who wouldn’t remember even what missions they carried out, because of hypnotically induced amnesia (which could be removed by their controllers and reinstalled at will).1

Children were trained as sex agents, for example, with the job of blackmailing prominent Americans - primarily politicians, businessmen and educators. A great deal of filming was done for this purpose. Eventually, people from the inner core of the CIA program filmed each other, and some of the centres where children were used as sex agents got out of control and turned into CIA-operated sex rings.
Some children were considered expendable and simply murdered.

One person who states that he was in this program as a child said, off the record:
“They tried out their brainwashing techniques on the kids from Mexico and South America. They were considered expendable. But on another echelon of the program, they went after the best and the brightest American kids. Making perfect agents to combat the Soviets wasn’t, I don’t think, their ultimate objective. I can’t remember what that was.”

At this point, I made a suggestion:

“Well, if they were choosing the best and brightest, maybe they figured these kids would one day rise to important positions in the society, and they wanted to gain long-term control over them, so they would be under their thumb, so they could tap them at will - a way of controlling the future society.”
“Maybe,” he said. “The Nazis gained control over the intelligentsia in Germany. That was a very key step in their dominance. That was the first thing they did”.
“This smells very much like a Nazi program in the U.S.,” I said. “I don’t mean all the controllers were German, but the style of it, the insanity.”
He said, “They brought over a lot of Nazi doctors after the war and not just to build rockets - for a lot of projects.”

Other people who said that they had been used as children in the program remember that doctors with German accents were definitely present at the sessions. One therapist, who shared this information informally with colleagues around the country, states that, so far, the oldest person she has heard of who was in the program is now 52; the youngest is now nine.

Since a number of people who were brainwashed, tortured and drugged in these experiments try to resolve their experiences in therapy, psychiatrists and other professional therapists are hearing these stories. They are told, for example, that CIA controllers sometimes dressed up in Satanic costumes to further traumatize the children, also providing a cover that wouldn’t be believed if the children ever talked.

It is worth noting that there is a movement to discredit these “recovered” memories, and the most prominent group, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), has several board members with CIA or military-intelligence connections - including the notorious Dr. Louis “Jolly” West of UCLA, who tried to establish a center for “the study of violence” at the university in the 1970s. This center’s specialty would have been psychosurgery, a horrendous melting of brain connections, supposedly to curb people’s “violent tendencies.”

FMSF maintains that a person always remembers abuse done to him or her, and therefore any new recovery of it in therapy is false and must have been fabricated through misleading suggestions by the therapist. While it is certainly true that such inducement happens in therapy, the blanket statement that all recovered memory is invented is unsubstantiated.

In a written statement to Dr. Wolf that was included in her testimony to the president’s committee, well-known researcher and psychiatrist, Colin Ross said,
“Published articles in my files include descriptions of administration of 150 mcg of LSD to children age 5-10 years on a daily basis for days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years. Neurosurgeons at Tulane, Yale, and Harvard did extensive research on brain electrode implants with intelligence funding, and combined brain implants with large numbers of drugs including hallucinogens.”
Ross based his report on his more than 20 years of investigating CIA mind control.
Chris De Nicola, one of Dr. Wolf’s patients who testified before the president’s committee, named her controller as a Dr. Greene, a name reported by several other mind-control subjects. It may well be that this name was a cover used by various CIA and military-contracted experimenter-torturers. Here is a quote from her testimony:

“[Dr. Greene] used me in radiation experiments both for the purpose of determining the effects of radiation on various parts of my body and to terrorize me as an additional trauma in the mind-control experiments. [She was eight years old.]

“The rest of the experiments took place in Tucson, Arizona, out in the desert. I was taught how to pick locks, be secretive, use my photographic memory to remember things and a technique to withhold information by repeating numbers to myself. [She is obviously talking about being trained as an agent.]

“Dr. Greene moved on to wanting me to kill dolls that looked like real children. I stabbed a doll with a spear once after being severely tortured, but the next time I refused. He used many techniques but as I got older I resisted more and more.
“He often tied me down in a cage, which was near his office. Between 1972 and 1976 he and his assistants were sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were project, subproject, subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation mind-control experiments which I have submitted in my written documentation. I was caught twice and Dr. Greene tortured me ruthlessly with electric shock, drugs, spinning on a table, putting shots in my stomach, in my back, dislocating my joints and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal...”

Is there a precedent for this kind of sadistic treatment by CIA and military personnel? Indeed there is. Here is a quote from the introduction to my book, U.S. Government Mind-Control Experiments On Children. It contains information from reliable published sources; such as The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks2, Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee3 and The Mind Manipulators, by Alan Scheflin4. In part, these authors derived their information on the CIA and MK-ULTRA from the ten boxes of information released suddenly in 1975 by the agency in response to Freedom of Information Act requests:

“Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as 1955, working for the Army, gave patients LSD while he had electrodes implanted deep inside their brains.
“Canadian researcher, Dr. Ewan Cameron, under long-term CIA contract, attempted to depattern, and reprogram his psychiatric patients’ personalities wholesale. He started with 15 to 65 days of ‘sleep therapy,’ during which a patient was kept under nearly 24 hours a day, through the administration of cocktails of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal, and Phenergam. Throughout this sleep period, the patient would be awakened two or three times a day for electroshock treatments, given at an intensity 20-40 times the ‘normal’ convulsion-producing strength.

“In the mid-1950’s, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would become Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then a laborer in the field for the CIA, gave a ‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenic’ patient mescaline. The patient had a not-unfamiliar heaven-and-hell journey on the compound. But Hoch followed this up with a transorbital leucotomy... Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a local anesthetic, and then proceeded to remove pieces of cerebral cortex, asking at various moments whether the patient’s perceptions were changing.”
Claudia Mullin, the other of Dr. Wolf’s patients who testified before the President’s Committee on Radiation, said her experiences with CIA mind-control experiences began when she was seven years old:

“In 1958, I was to be tested, they told me, by some important doctors coming from a place called the ‘Society’ [the Human Ecology Society, a CIA front]. I was told to cooperate; answer any of their questions. Then, since the test ‘might hurt,’ I would be given ‘shots, x-rays, and a few jolts of electricity.’ I was instructed not to look at anyone’s face too hard and to ignore names,’ as this was ‘a very secret project’ but to be brave and all those things would help me forget...
“A Dr. John Gittinger tested me and Dr. Cameron gave me the shocks and Dr. Greene the x-rays... By the time I left to go home, just like every time from then on, I would recall nothing of my tests or the different doctors. I would only remember whatever explanations Dr. Robert G. Heath [of Tulane Medical School] gave me for the odd bruises, needle marks, burns on my head and fingers and even the genital soreness. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Already, they had begun to control my mind!

“The next year, I was sent to a place in Maryland called Deep Creek Cabins to learn how to ‘sexually please men.’ Also, I was taught how to coerce them into talking about themselves. It was Richard Helms (Deputy Director of the CIA), Dr. Gottlieb, Captain George White and Morse Allen, who all planned on filming as many high government and agency officials and heads of academic institutions and foundations as possible... I was to become a regular little ‘spy’ for them, after that summer, eventually entrapping many unwitting men, including themselves, all with the use of a hidden camera. I was only nine when this kind of sexual humiliation began.”

Captain George White was a notorious agent for the CIA. He set up a brothel in San Francisco in the 1960s and, using hidden cameras, filmed men having sex with prostitutes. The men’s drinks were “spiked” with LSD. In 1950, Morse Allen, another important CIA man, was appointed head of Project BLUEBIRD, another CIA mind-control program.

Ms. Mullin states that she was adopted when she was two years old. By the time she reached seven she had already been abused extensively by her mother. Her mother apparently turned her over for “testing” to CIA-connected people and Claudia then entered a 27-year period of what can only be called enslavement. Claudia states that she has been monitored, that she is still monitored and watched by agency related people, including a medical doctor. Now living in New Orleans, she has given information to local police authorities about her situation. In her testimony to the president’s committee, Claudia remarked,

“Although the process of recalling these atrocities is certainly not an easy task, nor is it without some danger to myself and my family... I feel the risk is worth taking.”

Claudia’s therapist, Dr. Wolf, has written to the president’s committee,
“To the best of my knowledge, [Claudia] has read nothing about mind-control or CIA covert operations. Since she decided to listen carefully and remember as much as she could about conversations among the researchers, her memories are extraordinarily complete. I have sent written copies of memories to Dr. Alan Scheflin [author of The Mind Manipulators] for validation and he has confirmed that she has knowledge of events and people that are not published anywhere, that some of her memories contain new information and that some are already known and published. Some of her memories have been confirmed by family members. She has also shown me old scrapbooks where she wrote notes to remember what was happening to her and hid the notes under pictures in the scrapbook.”

I spoke with Alan Scheflin in May [1995] of this year. He said he had found one piece of information Claudia had mentioned in her recollections that had no precedent in published material. It involved a connection between two government researchers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on the 130 pages of testimony given before the President’s Committee on Radiation, and it is also just the beginning of a history that will undoubtedly widen in the coming months and years. Dr. Wolf told me that when word got around she was going to testify before the president’s committee, she was contacted by about 40 therapists “in just the 10 days leading up to my trip to Washington.” The therapists had heard similar CIA mind-control stories from their own patients. Many of these professionals are afraid to go on the record about their patients’ stories, as censure from their professional societies is a reality. The political mood these days is not conducive to granting an aura of credibility to revelations of CIA brainwashing.

So what else is new?
Click to expand...
 
Yeah I'm just not surprised by anything our government does anymore. I really am not. Though frankly sometimes to maintain freedom and security for the masses, the rights of a select few must be sacrificed. That's just the dark, disgusting truth of life, sad as it is. And unfortunately though none of us should have the right to make that decision for others, the fact of the matter is, someone has to.
 
If you go the amazon link and read the text on the "first flap" on the inside of the book, it sounds eerily similar to the techniques used on Sydney during her missing two years; specifically the part about erasing the original identity and replacing it with another. Strange, huh? But, obviously, JJ would have researched a lot before writing Alias, and he has probably come across this book during his investigation and research. So, it's very likely that he created Project Christmas, and the brainwashing techniques used on Sydney based on the readings from this book, and most likely many other sources as well. :smiley:
 
and so you wonder...could it happen in today's time? i mean, this was all in the 50s-70s, but everyone's seen the movies: bourne identity, paycheck, the manchurian candidate, all of which are similar in nature with the gov spawning the perfect worker bee in their game. so how possible is it in today's society?
 
It's probably happening right now. Things don't really change. The only reason you know about that is that the intelligence gets declassified after a few decades.
 

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