Operation Mind Shield 1951
How the Turkish military experimented on technologies to counter North Korean Brainwashing
Readers of this substack will already be familiar with the Menderes government and the importance it gave to closer relationships with the United States. In October 1950, desperate to join the NATO, Turkey has sent 5000 troops to Korea. But Turkey’s contribution to the war effort does not end there. A little known and now forgotten project known as Operation Mind Shield.
Operation Mind Shield was a direct response to public fears of secret Chinese brainwashing techinques as alleged by journalist Edward Hunter in his wildly succesful book Brainwashing in Red China. In the book Hunter coins the term “brainwashing” for the first time and argues that the reason for the previously unseen numbers of desertion among US troops was due to highly advanced methods of brainwashing employed by the Chinese. Although no such desertion rates were recorded among other participant armies, the US senate imediately entered a brainwashing arms race against the Chinese and allocated significant resources to counter enemy brainwashing operations. This project became of great interest to the Turkish antrhopologist Afife İnanç, one of the leading researchers into the effects of language on biocognitive antrhopology at the time. Her later contributions to deciphering the ancient Phyrgian language and the subsequent revelation of the Mad King’s prophecy can be read in great detail from the 2006 Global Anthropological Society report.
With İnanç’s efforts, a facility was soon established in Kırıkalle where experiments were conducted on members of the local population who were deemed to be “genetically undesirable” by İnanç’s standarts, mostly involving members of Turkey’s ethnic and religious minority groups. The secret facility was destroyed when gulible faith in brainwashing was replaced by healthy scepticisim following the end of the war. The only picture remaining of that could give a clue as to the whereabouts of the facility is the walled suburban enclave built for the US scientists and military personel believed to be taken in 1952.
Photographs of the experiments have surfaced in a massive global data leek in 1999 and have been circulating ever since. The images that have become public show what appears to be synthetically inflated brains with living tissue being experimented on by scientists and strange helmets being placed onto the heads of test subjects presumably to measure their susceptibility to brainwashing. Perhaps the best known picture among these, is that of a Turkish platoon in Korea wearing experimental protecive helmets to shield from harmful brainwaves.
