The CIA's "QK Projects"
I have posted several times on the CIA's still mysterious Project QKENCHANT .
The first two letters "QK" are what is known as a digraph. For example, there were numerous CIA projects, and individuals involved in those projects, and their CIA code names began with the digraph "AM" for Cuba. It is not yet known what "QK" refers to other than it does not refer to a part of the world.
There were other "QK" code names. Little is known about any of them. One, possibly of interest to those interested in the JFK assassination was QKACTIVE. According to Lisa Pease, writing in the essential book Assassinations, it was "a project of the Soviet Russia division in the early '60s for running attempted penetrations of the Soviet Union."
According to this document one Perry Harten, an agent for the Brussels World Exibition in 1956, was "considered for assignment in QKACTIVE, but no use materialised." If he had been utilized would he have defected to the Soviet Union?
Another project was QKHILLTOP, which according to a number of sources was a study of "mind control" initiated by the CIA in 1954 after reports of Communist "brainwashing." According to the book American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond:
One project, codenamed QK-Hilltop, was based at Cornell University under the direction of Dr Harold Wolff. At Cornell, Wolff was an earlier pioneer of human ecology, an interdisciplinary field incorporating psychology, medicine and sociology. When the project began, Dr Wolff asked the CIA to provide him with all its information regarding 'threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, "brainwashing", "black psychiatry", hypnosis and combination of these, with or without chemical agents.'It appears that a number of CIA files on QKACTIVE are available for viewing at the National Archives. Also available are records for several other CIA projects that I had never heard of before: QKBOIL, QKDEMON and QKDROOP.
QKDEMON has to be the coolest CIA code name to date.
