MKULTRA and CIA Circumcision Research

By Harvey Muraka

In the 1960's and 1970's, the CIA undertook various research projects that were organized under the umbrella of Project MK ULTRA. The goal of these experiments was to formalize methods of accessing and directing the minds of individuals and groups subjected to various treatments, based on new and existing occult knowledge of “mind control,” interrogation, torture, and newly-developed psychotropic compounds. In 1973, the project was officially closed, most files destroyed—more likely, hidden—and the CIA had a come-to-Jesus moment in front of Congress and the American people, although some suspect that the experiments merely moved off the books and into private or international hands, a la Jonestown and the Finders Cult. One area of the CIA's research that is rarely talked about, or even known, is male circumcision or genital mutilation.

We can start with the paper Psychological Effects of Circumcision, published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in December 1965. The paper was written by the (likely pseudonymous) researcher “Gocke Cansever.” Say it out loud a couple times. Maybe flip the order of names when you do. Huh. Weird.

Cansever describes a study of the psychology of boys circumcised between the ages of 4 and 7 both before and after the surgery, based on various methods of psychological examination, and reports the following trends among the subjects.

• lower IQ as measured 7 days after the operation

• infantile regression of drawings and expressed wishes

• greater measured levels of aggression

• new fears and anxieties

• weaker control over primitive impulses to the point of maladaption

• greater aggression towards their mothers

• withdrawal from human relationships and difficulty responding to demands of external world

• perceptions of having been castrated

It turns out that in 1961, the CIA had payed “Cansever” to study the effects of circumcision, and he found that it made boys dumber, more infantile, more fearful, and more aggressive, with less control over their base instincts and a healthy dose of aggression towards the most significant female figure in their lives, their mothers. If the findings of this study hold true for boys circumcised younger, it might suggest that the United States contains some 100+ million men who have been psychologically altered, from as early as infancy, to be stupider, to have lower impulse control, to tend towards aggression and violence, and to possess an instinctual distrust of women. Throw in the diminishing effects of circumcision on penile sensitivity and the consequent difficulties of sex and tendency towards paraphilias, and a picture begins to emerge of an organic golem that can be manipulated more easily by carrots and is less able to establish a normal, healthy relationship with a woman—splitting the family apart or preventing its formation has always been a goal of oppressive regimes, including the one that currently rules over the US.

Unfortunately for many of us, there exists, at this point, ample evidence that events in infancy can and do have measurable effects on the hindbrain, the part of our brain that drives instinctual, “gut” reactions and behavior. This is especially true when it comes to traumatic events that trigger stress hormones such as partial amputation of the penis, routinely performed at birth in this country. Although humans are cognizant of their lives, making behaviorism a dead area of psychology, it is still understood that instinctual behavior plays a role in decision-making, which is why propaganda and advertising are so widespread. How attached will men be to their women if they are surgically predisposed more to masturbate to pornography than to enjoy normal, PIV sex? Is it really a stretch to claim that enjoyment of sex is determined, in part, by the existing or removed enervation of the sex organ involved, and that this might have an effect on the interpersonal relationships of men and women across the country?

It is also worth noting that, according to Leonard Glick in Marked in Your Flesh, circumcision of gentiles is twice used in the Old Testament as a means of disfiguring humiliation and domination by Israelites, and it may still be interpreted as such by a certain religiously-minded tribe. I am not a mind-reader, and intelligent minds can differ on the motivations of various groups that encourage circumcision in the United States, but the historical context of mass, non-consensual circumcision of gentiles may be a clue as to what is going on here.

“The Receipts”

The image of the newspaper clipping comes directly from the CIA disclosure website. Here is a brief article from a different journalist investigating the existence of the study. According to the second article, the CIA confirmed that they did the study, but said the study was lost. From these 2 articles, I synthesize that the study in question occurred in 1961, was performed on 15 boys from 5 to 7 years old, was a part of MK ULTRA, and described castration anxieties as a result.

Let us turn to Search for the Manchurian Candidate, one of the foundational texts on Project MKULTRA.

In SftMC, I find a reference to a grant from the Human Ecology Fund, the same age bracket, and the quote describing the contents of the Cansever paper. Curiously, every key phrase in John Marks's quote is present in the paper, but the quote itself is not, suggesting a possible transcription error on the part of Marks or direct access to the source material leaked by a source to Marks. It would be interesting to reach out to him and see if he has the source material in question, but I am confident enough in my findings that I am not going to expose myself to scrutiny by attempting to contact Marks directly.

In comparison, the Cansever paper is a good match, although not perfect. Published 4 years later (1965), it professes to have been funded by a grant from the Human Ecology Fund. The study had 12, not 15 participants, and they were aged 4 to 7, not 5 to 7. The study was performed at Robert College in Istanbul, rather than at Istanbul University—I struggled but ultimately gave up on determining if Robert College is a former or current subsidiary of Istanbul University. This could have been a transcription error from Marks, a peculiar artifact of the institutional history of Istanbul University, or a deliberate lie on the part of “Cansever” to obscure the trail for future researchers. The subject matter, described research, and conclusions are a clear match, although I humbly admit that a verbatim quote match with Marks would be more compelling.

Finally, I suspect that “Cansever” is concealing or obscuring things. For starters, if you change the order of the name and say it out loud, it sounds an awful lot like “Can sever [amputate] cock.” Curiously, since initially researching this, I have found other cases of researchers with the last name “Cansever,” implying that it might not be an entirely fabricated name. Nonetheless, the name looks like a joke, and I did not find anyone else named “Gocke.” Furthermore, the researcher mentions a female administrative assistant for the interviews and data collection. Typically in academic publishing, as many authors as can justify it will pile their names onto the list of authors, such that competition for first-authorship has become the name of the game in grad school, yet there is only one author listed on this study, supporting my thesis that the paper's authors have hidden their identities.

I conclude that the paper resulting from the CIA's research into the psychological effects of circumcision has been found, and that, given this and other research on the effects of the practice, circumcision delenda est.