For about ten years I have studied people who describe themselves as survivors of MK-Ultra. I do not interrogate or independently corroborate their accounts. I look for patterns. This essay is about one: when the harm began, and who did it.

I encountered these accounts on Twitter and Facebook, where survivors write publicly about their experiences. These are people who chose to speak publicly, and they may not represent all who make such claims. Among the accounts I have traced in detail, more than a dozen, and others I know of more loosely, most place the earliest harm in infancy or early childhood, before the child had language or any framework for understanding it. To my knowledge, the people who gave these accounts do not know one another. The people responsible, in their telling, were those with total control over the child’s life: parents, relatives, and caregivers. This cuts against the common assumption that danger begins near puberty and that parents are safe.

One caveat matters. People who report abuse beginning in infancy rarely connect it to MK-Ultra. The reverse is common: those who do make the connection often point to this timeframe.

The accounts differ in detail, but they share these elements:

• Abuse began early, often with barbaric cruelty, encompassing both physical and sexual harm.
• Relatives were perpetrators or accomplices. Some survivors say they were handed over or sold into wider exploitation.
• Women, including mothers and female caregivers, are frequently described as participants, which challenges the assumption that such abuse is committed only by men.
• Boys are among the victims, which also cuts against assumptions about who is targeted.
• The family itself is described as the abusive structure, sometimes a hierarchical, secretive group the child was born into.
• The abuse was normalized. Some survivors describe coded language used at home to make harm ordinary.

Where the biological family was not the source, survivors describe the same pattern: a caregiving setting, an institution, or a violent individual to whom the child had been entrusted or delivered.

The most consistent outcome survivors describe is severe fragmentation of identity, which they identify as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many speak of themselves and their inner systems as “we.” This is consistent with the clinical understanding that a child who cannot escape or tell anyone may survive by dividing experience into separate parts.

Some survivors and therapists go further. They describe the division as deliberately engineered, with memory of trauma sealed in separate parts, like file cabinets, and the trauma response later triggered by scripts to compel a person to act. 

Some point to a recurring phrase, “I was made to serve my country.” If this was indeed a programming phrase used on them, it points to the possibility that sexual abuse was part of a larger program and not solely tied to the perpetrator’s gratification. 

Such a claim also diverges from the documented record, though that record was deliberately destroyed and is therefore incomplete by design. 

To back up: State programs generate paper, and the Nazi regime’s meticulous documentation is the historical parallel. 

MK-Ultra was no exception: the CIA kept extensive files, and in 1973 Director Richard Helms ordered most of them destroyed. 

Two years later, the Church Committee hearings of 1975 concerned adult subjects, prisoners, and some institutional settings.

Not surprisingly, nothing in the official record documents programs targeting infants within families. 

A fair criticism is that accounts shared on public platforms can influence already-traumatized people to adopt others’ memories as their own.

Then again, these accounts are remarkably consistent for people who do not know one another; who naturally would like to have a normal life and not put themselves through the embarrassment, distress, and danger of making this claim; who are frequently physically ill from long-term effects of abuse; who have specific “alters” or personalities; and who carry programs designed to conceal it all.

It is important to remember that self-described survivors had a series of barriers to disclosure present from childhood. The people who should have offered safety were the source of danger. They had no one to tell. They had no vocabulary to tell it with. And they had no reference point for knowing things could be otherwise.

In the end, per these accounts, MK-Ultra socializes people into a Nazi-like inversion of reality., where love, care, and family function as hate, cruelty, and a world where you are abandoned.

The recurring phrase “I was made to serve my country” fits the same pattern, with duty and harm fused into one.

The pattern echoes Arbeit macht frei, “work sets you free,” the slogan over the gates of Auschwitz and other camps, where a promise of liberation was fixed to a place of destruction. 

In the upside-down world of the MK-Ultraed child, love is offered up as hell, and hell is presented as the gift of love.