[Note: Please be aware that this article contains several descriptions of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. This is, sadly, inevitable due to the topic at hand. So please tread carefully.]

“The extensive wars that Louis XIV had to wage throughout the course of his reign, while exhausting the state’s finances and the people’s resources, nevertheless uncovered the secret to enriching an enormous number of those leeches always lying in wait for the public calamities they provoke rather than quell in order to profit from them all the more.”1

So begins an unfinished manuscript by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, written while he was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785. More commonly known by his noble title, the Marquis de Sade scribbled The 120 Days of Sodom on a makeshift scroll for several weeks before being transferred to a mental asylum. The text was eventually published in 1904, almost a century after Sade’s death. His manuscript still provokes debate regarding its literary merit (or lack thereof). Its first sentence above is one of Sade’s rare hints of some sort of political commentary throughout this repulsive fable of torture, rape and pedophilia.

The story involves four elite Frenchmen plotting to kidnap twenty children, thereafter subjecting them to excruciating abuse over one hundred and twenty days in a Swiss castle. The whole thing seems to be a devilish experiment for the quartet to push their sexual boundaries to grotesque frontiers. Their abuses are planned and perpetrated in a rigid, repetitive and formulaic structure. Each day starts the same way, with group assaults against victim Y, then breakfast, followed by a beating of victim X, then coffee, and so on.

The violence is interspersed with eloquent narratives by elderly prostitutes reminiscing about their affluent clients. They’re hired to verbally inflame the aristocrats’ imaginations during each day of debauchery, joining their crack team of guards, servants and enablers in a well-funded scheme, its finances “allocated for nothing but expenses in the interests of pleasure”.2

That’s basically the entire plot. One would be forgiven for thinking it’s simply the deranged fantasy of a “sex pervert anti-natalist”, as one podcaster put it.3 Professor Laurence Bongie evidently agreed, referring to the novel as “an unending mire of permuted depravities”.4 So why is it a Penguin Classic? And why did the likes of Samuel Beckett call it “one of the capital works of the 18th century”?5

Perhaps one hint can be found in the book’s parallels with real-life atrocities. The Penguin edition’s translators say the narrative’s violence and objectification “brings to mind the systematic depersonalization of prisoners in concentration camps during the Second World War”.6 Philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno likewise compare “the strict regime of the libertine society” inside The 120 Days’ castle with totalitarian societies. Sade’s text is argued to be a macro-version of these societies, their “relentless organization” systematically dehumanizing citizens until they “become mere material” for their rulers.7

Filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini took this comparison further, setting his adaptation of The 120 Days during Hitler and Mussolini’s waning Axis coalition. The film was set in Marzabotto, a town near Bologna where at least 770 civilians were massacred by the Nazis in 1944. Decades later, scholars like Alessia Ricciardi suggested that Pasolini’s adaptation was “a critique of contemporary political conditions” foreshadowing the 2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.8

Above: A French poster for the 1975 film adaptation of Sade’s novel.

Over in Bangkok, English musician Peter Christopherson shot a music video for his band’s song ‘Ostia’ in 2008. The video juxtaposed Sade and Pasolini’s depictions of calculated, procedural violence with the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sling Interrogation Camp. It was a fitting comparison; like the 120 Days’ systematic brutality, the Communist Party of Kampuchea methodically used “electric shocks, beatings and water poured in the nose to extract elaborate written confessions to real and imagined offenses.”9

All this is to say that despite being a pornographic fever dream written by a convicted rapist, The 120 Days of Sodom at least offers some insights into history’s perpetuation of cruelty. It also provides insights into historical instances where extreme abuse has been perpetrated methodically and quasi-scientifically. Which brings me to the focus of today’s article.

Just as Sade’s manuscript has been compared to historical horrors, this piece will compare his text to descriptions of mind control experiments carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War. By using Sade’s novel as a point of comparison, we can perhaps gain a clearer understanding of why some writers regard the text as relevant to modern times. What’s more, we can delve into the intriguing correlations between accounts of mind control which remain unproven, in the hope of one day ascertaining their veracity. But let’s start with the proven examples first.

The CIA’s Cold War mind control programs are often grouped colloquially under the term ‘MK-ULTRA’, itself a codename for only one such program. Their existence emerged in the 1970s, with Congressional committees and news reports outlining illegal CIA domestic activities during the 1950s and ‘60s. These included medical experiments on U.S. citizens by use of sleep deprivation, isolation, starvation, electroconvulsive therapy and a deluge of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD.10

A well-known MK-ULTRA figure is the late Dr. Ewen Cameron. Funded by the CIA while working across the Canadian border, Cameron tried to dismantle patients’ personalities before rebuilding them using several of the above methods. One woman admitted to McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute for depression was injected with LSD fourteen times without her knowledge. She was also forced to endure “psychic driving” sessions, listening to tape-recorded speech at sixteen-hour intervals. Beforehand, Cameron had broken her down into a vegetable state using sensory isolation, electroshock and drugs.11

Above: Dr. Ewen Cameron (1901-1967)

It was a repetitive, highly procedural torture applied to scores of patients. Mirroring The 120 Days of Sodom’s journaled horrors, Cameron also conducted a procedure where patients were overheated in an electric cage.12 In Sade’s novel, one prostitute’s tale concerns a nobleman from the illustrious Mésange family, who enjoyed children being dangled in front of him “over a large charcoal brazier” which slowly roasted them alive.13

Indeed, several of the novel’s stories echo Cameron’s procedures. Sade occasionally describes sex workers being tortured with mechanical contraptions, such as a woman who is “lodged in a pneumatic machine” where she is “deprived of air, then given air, then ‘tis is taken away again”.14 Eighteenth century precursors to Cameron’s excruciating methods, perhaps, albeit non-electrified.

Above: An electroshock therapy apparatus from Ewen Cameron’s era.

Cameron was no aberration in the intelligence community’s pursuit of behaviour modification. Declassified CIA documents describe similar experiments in American institutions like Louisiana’s Tulane University and Michigan’s Ionia State Hospital. At least one of the Michigan “subjects”, an alleged child molester, was ignorant of these procedures’ true nature. He volunteered to undergo a “beneficial” experiment, without much elaboration, and was subsequently dosed with enormous quantities of LSD and questioned under hypnosis.15

The CIA chose several convicted pedophiles at Ionia for these activities. The agency’s scientists reasoned they might try to conceal their horrific crimes like how “a captured agent might try to conceal his contacts” while interrogated.16 Similarly, in Sade’s 120 Days, the four aristocrats select attendants to aid their sexual forays based on sheer villainy. The female helpers in particular are only chosen if they are, for example, “as wicked as the devil and forever ready to commit any horror and every extravagance one could possibly demand”.17 One agency-funded Tulane psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Heath, was fond of similar excesses. He received CIA money in 1955 to administer “LSD, Mescaline, and other drugs to mental patients who theretofore had electrodes implanted in their brains”.18

In an era where homosexuality was often branded a malady, Heath tried to turn gay men into heterosexuals. He arranged sexual dalliances for a gay man with a female prostitute in a laboratory, monitoring his brainwaves with implanted electrodes. Intermittently, the patient’s cranium was “stimulated” with electric transmitters either by himself or by Heath’s team from an observation area.19 Likewise, one “operation” described in Sade’s novel involves a mechanical “apparatus” which “had been built expressly” for a wealthy patron to observe his naked playthings.20 While the Tulane subject was witting in his treatment, prostitution was also employed in MK-ULTRA with unwitting subjects.

For example, in 1950s San Francisco, sex workers were paid by the CIA to surreptitiously dose clients’ drinks with LSD. Meanwhile, agency operatives recorded the johns’ reactions behind two-way mirrors.21 Again, there are shades of The 120 Days here; the aging storyteller in the novel’s first act recounts spying on sexual liaisons from behind “a hole in the partition” in a Parisian bordello.22 The novel’s aristocrats study and discuss the behaviour she witnessed in a rather scientific fashion, dissecting her clients’ “curious manias” with intellectual rigor. “That’s an odd and pleasant mania,” one debauchee comments, “the major part of it can be extracted for use in other connections”.23

Children are singled out as victims in Sade’s novel, and MK-ULTRA experimentation did indeed occur on children, but it’s unclear to what extent. The vast majority of the programmes’ files were destroyed under CIA Director Richard Helms in 1973,24 the same year the agency implies their mind control operations ceased.25 Activities like Cameron’s were revealed primarily due to patients’ testimony and journaled accounts. A small smattering of files were revealed to the public in 1977 because of a filing error within the CIA.26

This was followed by a Freedom of Information Request years later by psychologist and author Dr. Colin Ross. One CIA document responsive to Ross’ request was an approved 1961 proposal to induce dissociative states in “psychotics, children and mediums”, among other groups.27 The methods were particularly disturbing, ranging from drugs, hypnosis and “psychological tricks” to ensure subjects’ cooperation.28 Ross obtained four other reports summarizing separate experiments on children, but these were relatively benign and centred on activities like behavioural observation and “social processes in teenage gangs”.29

Above: A document showing MK-ULTRA Subproject 136’s approval. This
subproject aimed to induce dissociative states in children & other people.

The nature of the “psychological tricks” used on Subproject 136’s child subjects is anyone’s guess. But one can surmise parallels with The 120 Days of Sodom’s bizarre manias. In one of the women’s stories, a ten year-old prostitute is fooled into thinking she has been caught stealing from a tax collector and will be hanged. The girl’s terror leaves her “hardly able to speak”, arousing the maniacal tax collector as he fantasizes about her violent execution.30 She is then “arrested” by an officer who is actually her client’s valet, himself in on the stunt, and told that the whole thing is a ruse; “It’s all over,” he chuckles to her, “and here is your money.”31

Another psychological hoodwink occurs when a youngster is instructed to meet a nobleman in his mansion. Immediately upon seeing the girl, the gentleman tears off her clothes and “throws them one after another into the fire”, repeating invectives like “By sweet Jesus, I’m going to burn you alive!” Believing in his act, the girl is “petrified”, making her client “half-unconscious” with pleasure. Afterwards, he rings a bell and the child is escorted outside by a butler, presented with “clothes twice as fine as those he incinerated”, and returned to the brothel where she lives.32

Several people have claimed they were experimented upon by the CIA long after the agency says these activities stopped. It’s here that we find the murkier, less well-documented claims of CIA mind control. Unlike the Cameron, Heath and Ionia experiments, these programs’ existence remains a mystery. However, with such a huge vacuum in knowledge, it’s at least worth considering these individuals’ testimony. The key is being aware that future investigation may one day validate or refute their stories. With that in mind, let’s move on.

Speaking before a 1995 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Louisiana native Claudia Mullen related experiences highly reminiscent of Sade’s 18th century manuscript. She recounted being left with “bruises, needle marks and burns” by procedures under Doctors Heath and Cameron when she was a child.33 There are even stronger Sadeian parallels in Mullen’s claim that, as part of her abuse, she was brought to government officials and academics to be raped in covertly-videotaped orgies. She said this was so CIA bigwigs like Richard Helms and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb could reel in “more funding for radiation and mind control projects” by blackmailing her abusers with the recordings.34

Above: Claudia Mullen (first on the left) testifies in 1995 before the
President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

Claudia Mullen’s therapist told the committee that some of her patient’s programming occurred at Tulane University in New Orleans.35 Aside from being Dr. Robert Heath’s haunting ground, author Judyth Baker wrote that Tulane had ties to David Ferrie. Ferrie was an alleged CIA asset who molested local New Orleans teenagers “and sometimes hypnotized them”.36 According to Baker, Ferrie worked alongside Dr. Heath in his electrode experiments.37 Claudia Mullen said she was experimented upon from 1957 to 1974, but it’s unknown whether she crossed paths with Ferrie. It’s also never been verified that Ferrie worked with Dr. Heath, or with any other MK-ULTRA scientists for that matter.

In any case, Mullen said she was constantly taught “how to please men sexually” as part of her programming.38 This brings to mind The 120 Days of Sodom’s subtitle, The School of Libertinage. “Libertinage” is associated with 18th century French “libertine” literature, “characterized by its focus on fleshly desires and pleasures”.39 Via their own suffering and the elderly prostitutes’ narrations, Sade’s captive children are schooled in how particularly depraved libertines are expected to behave sexually.

In Sade’s novel, the children’s conduct is rigorously examined according to their captors’ “statutes”. As an example, “all present shall be naked” every evening, while “everyone will be sprawled on the floor and, after the example of animals, shall change, shall commingle, entwine, couple incestuously”.40 The juveniles also regularly attend “masturbation lessons”,41 and their names are routinely “inscribed on the list of punishments” if they disobey even the slightest rule.42

Above: A 2024 Greek stage adaptation of ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’.

Two years before Claudia Mullen’s testimony, Paul Bonacci recounted similar CIA “schooling”. In a 1993 deposition for his lawsuit, Bonacci claimed he was abused in a mind control program from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. A local of the Omaha, Nebraska area, the teenage Bonacci was allegedly brought to Offutt Air Force Base in the south of the city to be drugged and brainwashed by psychiatrists and military officers.43 The headquarters of STRATCOM, America’s key nuclear deterrence system, Offutt Air Force Base is where at least four people believe they were experimented upon during the ‘70s and ‘80s.44

Bonacci claimed the specific CIA project he was abused in was called “Monarch”. He said its personnel included a Lieutenant Colonel previously investigated for child molestation,45 a Chief Master Sergeant, and an Omaha businessman later ordered to pay $1,000,000 in damages to Bonacci in a default judgment.46 By his own admission, this same businessman handled “top-secret information” for the Air Force during the Vietnam War, having been stationed in Thailand as an “information specialist”.47 He was jailed for embezzlement in the 1990s,48 and his personal photographer said he was in cahoots with the Lieutenant Colonel.49

Bonacci said a prime goal of “Monarch” was to induce youths with multiple personalities. This echoes MK-ULTRA subproject 136, intended to create mental personae which could be “induced and controlled” with “drugs and hypnosis”.50 Foreshadowing Claudia Mullen’s testimony, Bonacci said his programmers “have a lot of schools where they train girls to be prostitutes, and boys like [himself]”.51 He also said he was intermittently ordered to have sex with Congressmen so his handlers could blackmail them.

Above: Paul Bonacci being sworn in for his 1993 deposition.

Bonacci claimed he was ushered into the project by “an airman from Offutt Air Force Base” assigned to “recruit kids from the local neighborhood”.52 In court, he said he was forced to help kidnap a schoolboy across state borders in West Des Moines, Iowa.53 In The 120 Days of Sodom, similar procedures are carried out in Parisian neighborhoods and across the provinces to obtain children; “Sixteen intelligent procuresses, each accompanied by two lieutenants, were sent into the sixteen major provinces of France, while a seventeenth was occupied with the same work in Paris only.”54 Mirroring the espionage aspects of Bonacci’s allegations, “spies were posted to survey these women’s proceedings” and to inform the four masterminds “with exhaustive and prompt reports of what they were doing.”55

Similar claims to Bonacci’s and Mullen’s were published in a 1995 memoir by Cathy O’Brien. She wrote that she was taken to a “Charm School” in Youngstown, Ohio during the 1980s, where children were hypnotized and trained in prostitution as part of “the Monarch Project”.56 At the Charm School, she was allegedly tortured in an underground “wine cellar dungeon” adjacent to cells holding “dogs, cats, snakes” and ceremonial alters, “including one specially designed for bestiality”.57 Likewise, in The 120 Days of Sodom’s “school of libertinage”, children are thrown into dungeons “surrounded by cats, rats and mice” for the libertines’ pleasure.58 Several narrations also describe prostitutes being forced to have sex with horses and bulls, deemed an “entertaining spectacle” by their clients.59

Above: Cathy O’Brien giving a speech about her recollections of mind control.

Theatrics and fantasy permeate The 120 Days of Sodom, as they did in the Monarch allegations centuries later. In Sade’s novel, the quartet’s statutes dictate that several aides will dress up as “nuns, fairies, sorceresses and, upon occasion, widows” during storytelling sessions.60 Similarly, Bonacci described being taken with other children to Colorado tunnels where they were forced into mock alien abductions on supposed spaceships. These “were not real spaceships, nor were they real aliens”, Bonacci told lawyers. “We were simply induced with drugs so that we would not render reality…If we ever related this information, then it would come out and appear as if we were crazy.”61

In December 1993, journalist Anton Chaitkin reported that other Monarch victims described “tormenters dressed as space aliens”, “Mickey Mouse” or donning “Wizard of Oz costumes”.62 Similar Sadeian theatrics are described by Idaho native J.R. Sweet. He recalls his “CIA handler” being dressed as the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Similar to Bonacci’s testimony, Sweet relates a 1993 incident where his handler triggered him into a “a dissociative state” to adopt a “sexual personality”.63 He was then allegedly forced into sex acts with people wearing NASA garments atop a surgical table, and later with another child dressed as Alice from Carroll’s Victorian fairytale.

Above: J.R. Sweet in 1997, aged nineteen.

Sweet remembers other darkly performative flourishes, such as being “tested” for the Monarch program by a ventriloquist. Sweet describes this fellow writing down the boy’s name “for the records” before swinging open a box. Inside, “on silken linen was a human hand cut off at the wrist”, causing the petrified eight-year-old to silently regress into a dissociative state. His examiner “had a questioning but pleased look about him” because, Sweet says, he was one of the few who dissociated.64 Similarly, in The 120 Days of Sodom, at least one child dissociates from the abuse by the book’s end. Captives becoming numbed to violence are rewarded with “a green ribbon”, signifying they will be taken home from Switzerland alive.65

Bonacci, Sweet and O’Brien all recall being abused in Satanic rituals. O’Brien remembers the aforementioned Lieutenant Colonel using “occultism” as a “trauma base” to program her mind.66 Likewise, The 120 Days of Sodom takes on overtly Satanic overtones in its later passages, culminating in what Sade calls “The Passion of Hell”. This is an elaborate narration by the final storyteller, who recalls several children being tortured by fifteen men, each one “wearing the mask and emblem of a demon”.67

Similar to the Youngstown “Charm School” described by O’Brien, Sade’s ceremony takes place in “a house on the outskirts of Paris” owned by “a very powerful lord” prepared specifically “for no purpose other than the gratification of this passion”.68 O’Brien said the Charm School was likewise operated by someone from a distinguished Pittsburgh banking family.69 In preparation for The 120 Days’ Hell Passion, children are procured and stored in a nuns’ convent, over which the aforementioned lord “has absolute control”, before fifteen are selected for the Dantean “operation”.70 The youths are initially “branded each upon the shoulder”,71 and Bonacci described some Monarch subjects being branded upon their legs.72

As with the convent used in preparation for this hellish mania, Bonacci’s lawyer and Cathy O’Brien said that several Monarch victims were funnelled from a Catholic orphanage in Omaha. O’Brien was allegedly told by her CIA handler that this institution had been “infiltrated at the top” for this purpose.73 In 1978, California radio host Mae Brussell said this specific orphanage had previously been “identified with intelligence operations”.74 However, I’m not aware of Brussell providing any proof of this.

Had O’Brien and Bonacci been misled into repeating Brussell’s claim decades later? Or is there a kernel of truth here? After a counsellor at the same orphanage was arrested for child molestation in 1996, court records revealed he had boasted about his involvement in “various subversive activities, including spying and the CIA”.75 He had counselled the brother of Frederick Paine, a resident later jailed for murder.76 Years before this was revealed, Bonacci’s lawyer asserted that Frederick Paine was one of the youths brought to Offutt Air Force Base for brainwashing sessions.77 At the very least, it was an odd coincidence.

Above: An underground conference room in Offutt Air Force Base during the 1980s.

Five years after Claudia Mullen’s testimony, her therapist’s license was revoked by the Louisiana State Board of Social Work Examiners. They wrote that the clinician had become “over-involved” with another patient allegedly in the throes of mind control. According to them, “while her intent to help [the patient] seems to be genuine, the Board finds that [the therapist] lost her way in this case, largely because she was driven to justify and confirm her belief system about mind control”.78

Among other things, the Board ruled that the psychotherapist behaved in a “grossly negligent” manner and “exploited” her relationship with the troubled woman “for personal gain”.79 A Santa Clara law professor who supported Claudia Mullen’s testimony went quiet about the story.80 The therapist herself died of cancer at the age of fifty-four, less than two years after her license was revoked.81

While working through repressed memories of what he believes were traumatic experiments, J.R. Sweet filed Freedom of Information requests to the CIA for records about himself. The CIA stated no records of any “publicly acknowledged” affiliation between him and the agency were located.82 Cathy O’Brien remains a controversial figure, though one of her particularly gruesome accounts of abuse was verified by doctors in 2001.83

As for Paul Bonacci, he’s now living a quiet and peaceful life with his wife and children. In the Summer of 2024, I interviewed Bonacci for an upcoming documentary with a working title of The Omaha Tapes. This project will tell the story of a joint Yorkshire Television and Discovery Channel production from the 1990s. The Yorkshire crew travelled to Omaha to interview Bonacci and others about their accounts of abuse, before their production was abruptly cancelled by the Discovery Channel.84 Bonacci was very gracious with his time, and I greatly appreciate his participation.

On a final (and tragic) note, a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade, named Xavier de Sade, was subjected to medical experiments in a Nazi labor camp during World War II.85 Thankfully, he survived, and years later he gave the Surrealist writer Gilbert Lely access to a trove of his great-great-great-grandfather’s works. Author Joel Warner observed that “as Sade emerged from the artistic and literary fringes, scholars and intellectuals found him ripe for analysis.”86

Therefore, I hope this article has provided a decent analysis not only of Sade’s dark relevance, but also of the enduring mysteries surrounding the CIA’s mind control experiments.

Above: The original manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’.
It is currently owned by the French government.