There are few things more American than taking a wild rumour and weaponising it. During the Cold War, the CIA did exactly that. Panicked that the Soviets had cracked some mythical “brainwashing” formula, they launched Project MK Ultra, an operation so classified that even the people being tortured weren’t cleared to know about it. Between 1953 and 1973, the agency poured money into mind control experiments that would make Frankenstein’s lab look like a mindfulness retreat. The goal was simple and insane: find ways of breaking people’s will, chemically, psychologically, spiritually, and rebuild it in the image of their handlers.

Sometimes the smartest weapon isn’t a missile. It’s an idea that makes your enemy build your strategy for you. In the late 1970s, West Germany was buzzing with protests. Farmers, students, and anti-war activists were uniting against nuclear power. Their fear was simple enough, another Chernobyl before Chernobyl even happened. Out of those rallies emerged what would become the German Green Party, a movement born from the soil of local activism, not Kremlin conspiracy. Or so the story goes. Because while the Greens were busy chaining themselves to reactor fences, the KGB was watching with quiet fascination. The Soviets had

In the old days, propaganda took effort. You had to find journalists willing to pretend the script was their idea, slip them some funding, and maybe a medal if things went really well. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was exactly that kind of vintage manipulation, dozens of reporters secretly tied to the agency, a few hundred more sympathetic, and suddenly the country saw exactly what it was meant to see. The Church Committee later confirmed the relationships in 1975, exposing how at least fifty journalists had direct CIA links, while Carl Bernstein estimated it was closer to four hundred. Back then,