I Believe Cathy O'Brien

Her book has stayed with me for months. I'm now finally ready to write about it and to discuss the CIA's MKUltra program et al.

The Trigger:

I first came to know of Cathy O’Brien through David Icke’s, ‘The Trigger’. Published on September 11th, 2019, Trigger is an up-to-date review of the 9/11 conspiracy. This book is a mammoth 900-page output, but it is not difficult to read. Although more detail could have been included on certain aspects of this highly complex, multi-faceted conspiracy, Trigger is one of the most comprehensive accounts of 9/11 to date. Hundreds of shocking facts and hard questions that are well known in conspiracy theory circles are there for newcomers, and even experienced researchers are bound to find new insights and information to help them flesh things out further:

If you are an Icke reader, it won’t surprise you to know that the author also spends substantial time elaborating on his own theories and, to be fair, on those of others. I had no problem with this. Where available facts end theories are necessary. This is especially so in cases like 9/11 where anyone who has spent even a modicum of time investigating the subject-matter with an open mind knows that the official narrative is false. Furthermore, Icke’s theories are always interesting, if one takes the time to read them. Unfortunately, those who do not will typically have their opinions about Icke decided for them by the media, but I digress.

Upon initial reading, the first hundred or so pages of Trigger did not sit well with me. They are largely incongruous with the rest of the book, bearing almost no direct relation to 9/11. This is where Cathy O’brien comes in. Here Icke levels pointblank accusations of not just rampant corruption and treason, but of absolute human evil at several of the world’s most prominent politicians of the time, including some who are very much alive today. Without going into specific detail, these accusations relate to torture and sexual violence, including routine rape, mind control, human slavery, and yes, in some cases, pedophilia. I believe that Icke’s purpose here is to try to bring readers face to face with the evil he believes we are dealing with in order that we might better understand how such people could perpetrate or knowingly participate in something like the 9/11 conspiracy and its subsequent cover up.

My main concern was and remains that Icke’s accusations are so outlandish and so unbelievable, they may well put many readers off this book entirely before they get to the 9/11 related subject-matter. Icke does not even provide concrete evidence for many of his accusations. But then, even if they are accurate, how could he? Most of the people involved are more directly implicated in plenty of other awful things that would surely have put them behind bars if only justice and democracy were functioning properly, but it is a simple fact that they are not and that these individuals and others like them in or with power are experts at covering their trails. On the other hand, Icke also unearths extraordinary things about these same individuals, which are buried in plain sight in the public record and will blow most people’s minds.

In the end, it comes down to this: In his worst accusations, Icke is advocating for Cathy O’Brien, her daughter, and many others who maintain that they are victims of the alleged crimes mentioned above. For more context, many years ago Icke took the time to get to know survivor Cathy O’Brien personally and they have been friends in frequent contact ever since, so there is no question that Icke genuinely believes O’Brien and her story. Of course, me being me, I had to investigate further. I had to read Cathy O’Brien’s work for myself.

TRANCE Formation of America

I do not mind confessing that this book sat untouched on my shelf for a long time. I knew it would be dark, but I had no idea. I started it several months ago and finished it in 2 days. The subject matter is difficult, but like Trigger, the reading level is not.

TRANCE Formation of America: The True Life Story of a CIA Mind Control Slave – 1995 was written by CIA Mind Control survivor Cathy O’Brien and her rescuer, Mark Philips. Philips, who passed away around 5 years ago, was a former spook extensively trained in Mind Control under Top Secret clearance.

The first part of Trance is written by Philips, who briefly shares his life story, his background, his early encounters with O’Brien and the process of rescuing her. Philips then goes on to detail the long and sordid aftermath where he spends years working to deprogram O’Brien and her then still very young daughter, both of whom were broken beyond words. Throughout this time, Philips, O’Brien and her daughter are harassed, threatened, accosted, and often on the run from three-letter agencies to the point of being desperate and destitute for years on end. Philips also provides copies of impressive supporting documentation at the end of his part of the book.

Fortunately, with Philips’ expert help, O’Brien makes a full recovery, as much as that is possible in a case like this. Sadly, her daughter does not. At the time of Trance’s latest publication, I believe O’Brien’s daughter was still institutionalized as an adult, firmly under the thumb of the US government, with O’Brien seemingly powerless to denied access and seemingly powerless to help. However, on a more positive note, O’Brien’s recovery not only gave her back control of her life and her mind, it also seems to have given her back her memories, which are said to have been completely hidden from her and this is what ultimately enabled her to write her book.

In the second part of Trance, O’Brien tells her life story. We learn how she was born into a broken family where incest had already transcended generations and was perpetrated on her from such a young age that it is the oldest and first memory in her life. This family abuse continues throughout O’Brien’s early childhood until her deadbeat father falls on financial hard times. Her father also happens to be connected to state politicians with prospects and it is through these monstrous men that O’Brien is sold by her father to the US government. From there, the fortunes of O’Brien’s father change dramatically! Much to my dismay, this all happens in Michigan, the same state where I was born and raised. We also learn from O’Brien’s account that such “recruitment” practices where government alphabet agencies would actively seek out children from broken homes for their “experiments” and for lifelong forced servitude were commonplace.

O’Brien takes us through her childhood induction into this truly dark world and on into her adolescence spent in state custody, in one form or another, where she is systematically tortured and brainwashed over the course of many years into becoming a CIA Mind Control slave. We then see how O’Brien as a young adult with multiple personalities, created and controlled not by her, but by her captors, is put into full circulation both as a sex slave and as a courier and drug mule for the CIA. Later, O’Brien is forcibly impregnated and the resulting child, her daughter, enters into the same system of torture, Mind Control and slavery - from birth.

O’Brien provides extensive details about how she and her daughter were regularly tortured, how Mind Control works, specifically who abused them and how, as well as the ways they were supposedly ‘put to work’ for the US government. The main crimes alleged to have been perpetrated against O’Brien and her daughter were summarized earlier in this essay. I will not go into the sordid details, not least because they are so thoroughly explained in O’Brien’s book. Nor will I name the senior politicians and government officials implicated. Few would believe it if I did.

In fact, I will be honest and confess that I still have a hard time believing everything in Trance, not just because it is so evil and extends to some of the very highest offices in the land, but also because much of it really is, well, unbelievable. On the other-hand, this was not a book I could simply write-off, although many may be inclined to do so. My reasons were the following:

Firstly, there is the existence and involvement of O’Brien’s co-author, Mark Philips. There is also O’Brien’s daughter. If everything hinged on O’Brien alone, the foundation of Trance would admittedly have been inherently weaker. But with two people underwriting the same story, a third still effectively in custody without rights, and with one of them coming from the ‘inside’ of the government with no history of mental illness? That is hard to dismiss out of hand. There are also many clear leads and lines of inquiry, not to mention binary facts that can be easily proven or disproven if authority ever decides to stop ignoring the case. Again, Philips provides compelling documentation supporting his and O’Brien’s version of events. Authority on the other hand is completely silent on the whole matter.

Secondly, O’Brien comes across as credible in her own right and I don’t just mean in Trance. Since her recovery and the initial publication of Trance, O’Brien has been an outspoken advocate for Mind Control survivors right up to the present day. Anyone can find her speaking and doing interviews online. O’Brien clearly still carries a lot of baggage, but she is well-spoken, a free spirit, and she rings as genuine to me. She also poses many powerful questions for readers and for the government at the end of Trance. These relate to the story she has just told us and to her daughter’s continued captivity; and frankly, it is very hard to imagine that there are any answers to these questions that are going to leave the government standing in a good light.

Thirdly, and this goes to motive: If one were trying to get rich off of a scam, this would absolutely not be the way to do it. It is not hard to deduce that there is infinitely more hazard and hardship on this path than money. On the other hand, if the essence of such a story is true, as I believe it is, the victim of such crimes, assuming they survived, could well be entirely motivated to share her story in the pursuit of justice at virtually any cost.

Fourth, the fact that neither O’Brien or Philips were ever prosecuted for Trance says a lot to me, given that the book would constitute the most egregious slander imaginable against many powerful people if its accusations are false.

Fifth, if, like me, you tend to have a sceptical mind, you are probably wondering why more victims of these government programs have not come forward. Here, the first answer is that several have. There are numerous well-documented accounts (including other books) of similar experiences which corroborate Obrien’s story to varying degree. The second answer is that the propaganda-mainstream media will not touch any of it in any meaningful way. The third answer is that many victims of the MKUltra programs often did not / do not survive and most never escape, let alone recover.

As a reader, this all posed quite a quandary for me. On the one hand, I found much of what Icke, O’Brien and Philips were telling me to be truly unbelievable. On the other, I was in no position to dismiss it outright either. I then realized that in struggling to thread this difficult needle, the me of 2023 had a tremendous advantage over the me of 2019. I remembered that in trying, through extensive reading, to figure out what the hell has happened to our freaking world these past three years, I have read more than a few books on or related to torture, propaganda, psychological operations, and CIA Mind Control. Here below are most of them. These books and no doubt many others are tremendously helpful in trying understand the context surrounding Trance:

Thanks to such books, we know that our government in the US has a long and sordid history of torturing people. We know that they have done this randomly to innocent individuals abroad as well as to countless citizens within the homeland. We know that they have done it en masse, a la Vietnam, a la Latin America, a la Iraq; and we know that this was not simply stemming from the vagaries of war and geopolitics. It was carefully conceived, long-planned and systematically executed torture with the intent of psychologically manipulating and destroying the minds and lives of the perpetrator’s targets, irrespective of guilt or innocence. We also know that psychological operations and terror, at least, have frequently been projected at entire nations. The above collection of books would make an excellent Exhibit A, in any defense of these assertions.

Thanks to the late great Hannah Arendt, we can know more about what went on in the Nazi concentration camps and what they were really for than what conventional history tells us. Thanks to Tom Bower, we also know how desperate and successful the US government, including its military, the CIA and its OSS predecessor were in clandestinely acquiring and smuggling that Nazi concentration camp knowhow and experience into United States and hiding it deep within the bowels of the Deep State after WWII. This was done under the covert auspices of Project Paperclip.

Thanks to Daniel Estulin, Walter Lipman, and Edward Bernays, the latter two who were part of the early evil in my opinion, we know that supposed democratic governments in the west have been systematically perpetrating propaganda on their unsuspecting populations for well over 100 years, leading to catastrophic consequences, including two World Wars and much more. They seem to be working towards a third as we speak.

Thanks to Laura Dodsworth, we know that this propaganda has been steadily honed into a highly sophisticated science with enormous power such that it is better referred to in the present day as psychological operations. We know that psyops are not only used on We the People all the time by our own governments with the help of their media, we also know that those governments quietly made it ‘legal’ for themselves to do this to us in the years leading up to the Covid-19 operation.

Thanks to Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff and her extraordinary book, ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power’ (2019) (not displayed above), we have a thorough understanding of the crucial role Big Tech plays in all this and the methods it uses against We the People in this and other capacities.

Thanks to Douglas Valentine, we have come to understand that much of the worst of what our governments perpetrate in our name overseas was always planned to be brought home and used against us eventually, and that that time is approaching if not already upon us. We also have Edward Snowden to thank for making enormous sacrifices in trying to warn us of this.

Regarding CIA Mind Control, we know from Naomi Klein, Robert Browart, and Stephen Kinzer that these programs were (are) real. We can read and learn about all the known MKUltra predecessor and subsidiary programs, the latter of which includes Project Monarch, which Cathy O’Brien and her daughter were allegedly subjected to. While Browart and Kinzer’s books were written decades apart, they complement each other nicely. We also know from multiple Congressional hearings, in the 1970’s and in the 1990’s, as well as from other books and even from mainstream journalism, when it was freer and better functioning, that the MKUltra programs and related crimes were real. So, the record on that much, at least, is clear.

In essence, with all this information at my disposal, as opposed to judging Trance in isolation, I realized that I actually had all I needed to formulate a reasonably sound position on whether or not I believed Cathy O’Brien. I simply needed to parse the problem differently to be able to distinguish between what I know, what I believe, what I do not know and what most of us probably never can know as it relates to O’Brien’s harrowing story.

I first needed to shed a bit more of my own cognitive dissonance. I was discounting O’Brien because she was describing things for which I had no conceivable personal context to extrapolate from. Also, she accuses people the likes of whom I never would have imagined, let alone suspected of such crimes. Basically, I was dismissing O’Brien because my prima facie reaction was that the things she was saying were not believable - to me. Simple as that. And that simply was not a good enough reason.

However, like most people, I had been subjected to hundreds of hours of ‘news’ and television coverage in my lifetime of most of the political leaders whose names and crimes O’Brien lists. I might have even voted for one or two of them in the day. While I would have been readily critical of any of these individuals within the permitted “Overton Window” and even a ways beyond it, I still saw them a certain way that I now know full well was completely manufactured in my mind over a period of many years by the government, the media, and even the alleged perpetrators themselves. So, I had to unravel these lingering misconceptions a bit more than I had already done between the spring of 2020 and the time I read Trance almost 3 years later.

I also had my own humanity and naïveté in the way. I think most of us do. It is so easy to believe, or to want to believe (same thing), that just because we “would never do” something, other people would not do it either. This can be especially so if those people are in positions of trust and authority. But this is so misguided and mistaken. All any of us really needs to do is to stop and remind ourselves of that fact (and of relevant history) and this then becomes self-evident.

It also occurred to me through other reading and investigations that I now have a pretty sound grasp of other unrelated yet still heinous crimes of corruption, war crimes, and even treasonous acts some of O’Brien’s accused have gotten up to in their lives at our expense. That being the case, why on earth would I think that these individuals have any moral compass, any built-in stopping mechanism for their psychopathic madness, or any perception of limits on their power in domains where they believe they can act with impunity? Once again, upon reflection, my answer to myself is clear: I do not.

The extraordinary detail with which O’Brien describes the Monarch program and the torture methods used all maps perfectly to the foundations exposed in the above referenced works from Klein, Browart, and Kinzer. However, in terms of the specific methodologies of Mind Control, how it actually works, and how effective it can really be, O’Brien goes much further and what she describes makes sense based on all I have read before.

All of the above referenced works are thorough in regard to the harms and destruction inflicted on the unwitting government hostages involved. As indicated, these are things for which there is no longer any serious question about in the public record. Even the CIA’s Wikipedia acknowledges them, because it cannot hide them. Yet, at least with Klein and Kinzer’s works, there is something dissatisfying about where things end up in terms of certain aspects of their conclusions concerning MKUltra.

While both books provide extraordinary revelations, I now think that Klein and Kinzer each ran into CIA roadblocks which prevented these authors and the public at large from getting the full truth. In other words, while much about the MKUltra programs was released, much (more) was covered up (and is yet to be revealed). This too is a matter of public record.

More likely, I think it was ultimately another case of Power satiating the angry masses with just enough red meat to satisfy its thirst for answers and perceived justice in the face of shocking revelations about the existence of the MKUltra programs, but nothing like the complete picture of the programs and their related crimes. The above works of Douglas Valentine go a long way towards supporting that view.

Klein tells the story of how CIA asset (Donald) Ewen Cameron, who at different times in his career was first head of the American Psychology Association and later the same for the Canadian Psychology Association, used his position at McGill University to perpetrate a horrendous, long-lasting CIA op. Essentially, Cameron used makeshift hospital facilities at McGill that only he and his staff had access to, to lure unsuspecting patients, including those with only mild problems coming for outpatient appointments, into captivity and inhumane experimentation.

Once subdued, these patients were subjected to long periods of isolation, sensory deprivation, experimental drugging, and torture, among other heinous crimes for months, if not years on end. Cameron’s mission and his genuine (fanatical) belief was that if he could wipe clean his prisoners’ minds by completely destroying those minds, he could then mould brand new ones to his liking in their place, which he could then control. Klein and the public record both indicate that Cameron succeeded amply in destroying lots of innocent minds and lives, while also suggesting that he failed in achieving anything else. But did he really fail? I am not so sure and Valentine’s book, The Phoenix Program suggests not.

Unlike CIA moonlighter Cameron, Sydney Gottlieb was a CIA agent through and through for most of his life and at least in the later years he is presumed to have been in charge of the CIA’s entire MKUltra Program. His personal speciality was LSD and other experimental psychotropic drugs.

While the respective details vary, the broad strokes and modus operandi of these two monsters (Cameron and Gottlieb) were much the same. Gottlieb and his team also abducted countless innocents, destroying both their minds and their lives, and murder was also not a problem when it was ‘necessary’. Gottlieb and his superiors are also directly implicated in creating and orchestrating the LSD culture of the American sixties to target and subdue a rising youth that was becoming increasingly disgruntled with the Vietnam War, not to mention four major political assassinations et al.

As with Cameron, according to the public record, which is really all Kinzer had to go by, we are supposed to believe that all of Gottlieb’s experiments, which went on for years and years and had untold millions thrown at them, ended in failure, that no exploitable subject-matter was mastered, and that the MKUltra program and all its iterations were simply quietly ended. This stinks to high hell, although I am in no way suggesting anything untoward on the part of the above referenced authors.

Just a quick side bar to do Klein’s masterpiece proper justice: In Shock Doctrine, Klein convincingly argues that the Cameron’s methods were later extrapolated from and systematically used to terrorize entire nations in Latin America and beyond. But this is related to psyops, psychological terror, and torture, whereas I am making a distinction between those things and full-blown Mind Control, which is purported (by the CIA) to have been a failure.

In Operation Mind Control: The CIA’s Plot Against America, Browart is much more circumspect about the CIA’s Mind Control programs ending in failure. In fact, he argues the opposite and even attempts to connect the dots to several of the afore mentioned political assassinations, among other things.

On first reading, this reader at least felt that Browart was taking a lot of license by inferring too much, possibly because the revelations of the existence of these programs had just come to light and he perhaps got a bit swept away by it all. I am no longer convinced that this is the case. In fact, Browart relays some absolutely mind-boggling accounts that he received first-hand through extensive interviews with Mind Control survivors. This includes a recently discharged veteran of the US Military at the time who was seemingly leading a perfectly normal, fully functional life as a private citizen, but mysteriously could not remember anything about the military career he had just finished. I have also continued to read other works of Browart’s since, and it is clear that he stayed true to his convictions for the remainder of his life. He did much to dispel my initial skepticism with his subsequent writings.

All this brings us back to Cathy O’Brien. Once again, the torture and other Project Monarch methods, which O’Brien describes in Trance match perfectly to the foundations of what we know about the MKUltra programs, as described by Klein, Browart, Kinzer and others. These things were also revealed (and then buried) in the previously referenced Congressional hearings for a start.

So, if we know that mass crimes in so-called Mind Control were perpetrated by the US government, which we do; and if we also know that Cathy O’Brien is a direct victim and recovering survivor of those very same kinds of crimes, and I believe I do, then who am I to dismiss O’Brien on the specific details, i.e. her story, which she first sought to expose in Trance in 1995 and has continued to dedicate her life to exposing ever since. Why would I do that? My answer for myself is that I should not. Not least because it is quite possible, and probable even, that O’Brien is not just a recovering survivor, but that she is the best living witness the world has in relation to what the CIA and our government really got up to with MKUltra and this still matters now more than ever.

In this context, O’Brien’s contribution to the record is enormously important, especially since the CIA claims to have destroyed its MKUltra files when Gottlieb left his post in the early seventies, long before any related Congressional hearings occurred. Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason other than the CIA’s own word to believe that these programs were ever discontinued, so I don’t! It seems much more likely that they have continued all along under different names.

In the end, I do still have difficulty believing all the things O’Brien describes in her book. However, I have already addressed how my own cognitive dissonance may be at work here, and I also alluded to other high crimes, which I believe many of these individuals have perpetrated, often including both treason and war crimes. It is also obvious that most, if not all of the implicated individuals allowed these programs to happen and therefore have responsibility for them regardless of anything else.

Therefore, why would I give any of these individuals the presumption of innocence on anything, especially when someone who is clearly a victim and who comes across as credible is pointing the finger at them? I have decided do not and that I am going to stand with the victim at least until such a time as a fully transparent and legitimate hearing is conducted and all known facts about MKUltra are revealed. Because it truly does seem that we have only scratched the surface of the CIA and its Mind Control programs, and it is all too clear that Power is still hiding serious crimes here. For a start, I would like to see the CIA’s JFK files released. They were promised to us by 2017, but that date has come and gone. Why?

I will still reserve judgement regarding the extent to which O’Brien says she was used in espionage, as well as just how far, wide, and high up in the hierarchy she was used as a sex slave. Again, that is because the truth is that I can never really know, and also because much of it reads like a movie script that is so far-fetched, it would never see the light of day. Another truth is that outside of a full government confession, which will never happen, no one who is not read in can ever know for sure the extent to which everything O’Brien asserts actually happened or could have happened. Maybe some of it is only true in her mind, but these details are far less important than the bigger story. The story is not about how we can cling to some already manifestly criminal politician’s presumption of innocence on a particular crime, it is about high crimes that the government perpetrated on victims like O’Brien and on We the People at large and following the truth about the already known crimes wherever it may lead.

I do not believe that the 2019 me would have made it beyond the first 100 pages of Trigger and or that I would have completed Trance or believed what I read if I had. Therefore, I can only speculate on how someone approaching either of these books cold is likely to react to them. While easy reads, both books present very steep curves in terms of what one is willing to potentially accept as a possible reality.

However, I do know that the groundwork I had serendipitously done beforehand helped me immensely in understanding these two books. With respect to Trance, I have shared in detail the supporting readings which made all the difference for me. I hope some of those references and related insights were helpful to you and I would encourage anyone who is also trying to make sense of the last 3 years to read any of those books.

With respect to 9/11, I only discussed David Icke’s Trigger. While a truly important book in my view, it is not the first that I would recommend to one who is only just now starting to revisit and question the official narrative surrounding the 9/11 conspiracy. In my own time and in my own words, I will have much more to say and share about the events of September 11th, 2001. I will, of course, share my more extensive reading list and other source materials on that subject at that time.

For now, other than thanking you for your time, I have only one thing left to say:

I believe Cathy O’Brien.

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Post-script supplemental:

Archive Of MK Ultra Documents