Dr. Ewan Cameron, a university researcher, had been doing experiments that attempted to restructure personalities. He did so through a repatterning process that made use of the psychedelics that were so abundant in science of that time. His main goal with this procedure was to cure schizophrenia by eliminating multiple personalities. The CIA saw a different opportunity in this.
The CIA, ever seeking more covert methods to gain advantage over the Russians sought to create the perfect assassin.An ideal assassin would be similar to one written about in a popular 50's fiction novel, and thus called a “Manchurian Candidate.” According to Lux of Erowid, “. . . A 'Manchurian Candidate' is someone who has been brainwashed to carry out covert actions such as assassinations and sabotage against their will, without having the awareness that anything is amiss.” (n.p.). If this assassin was created, the CIA could have people be killed without the killer knowing that they did it, an ideal situation. Such a killer could be theoretically produced using personality restructuring, so the CIA began to secretly fund Cameron's work as part of their MKULTRA project. The MKULTRA project was a project based around the use of drugs to create a form of mind control. Cameron's research constituted a potentially perfect method for developing mind control, and thus being able to make the Manchurian Candidate assassin. Cameron was fairly unsuccessful in his research, as he could neither completely submerge a personality, nor restructure a personality without having the old one resurface. This reflected the overall outcome of the MKULTRA project, which was unable to accomplish any of its major goals.
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