In a previous piece I explored the first two Jason Bourne movies (The Bourne Identity & The Bourne Supremacy) for clues as to the nature of parapolitical and deep state activities in our time. This movie will review the final two Matt Damon Bourne films (The Bourne Ultimatum and Jason Bourne). Please read that piece first if you haven't already.
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Bourne Ultimatum begins directly in the wake of the ending of The Bourne Supremacy. Jason Bourne has escaped from Russia, CIA Deputy Director Ward Abbott is dead by his own hand, and Bourne has obtained a confession by Abbott of his dirty dealings wth Russian oil tycoon Yuri Gretkov.
A few weeks later, a British journalist at the Guardian (Simon Ross) has a source from within the CIA exposing stories of CIA covert black operations—including about Bourne. The source is the CIA station chief in Madrid (Neil Daniels), who was part of Treadstone.
The movie never really explores Daniels’ reason for sharing secrets. We know with the history of Operation Mockingbird and other intelligence operations that journalists are often provided limited hangouts. The FBI and CIA even went so far as to embed reporters and particularly editors at major newspapers like The Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s unclear if Daniels is having a moment of conscience and is becoming a whistleblower or is in fact using Ross to expose some secrets but in a twisted way (perhaps pinning events on Bourne?).
Synchromystically or otherwise, it is intriguing that Daniels is station chief in Madrid. Madrid was one of the core centers of the post-WWII fascist international, described in previous pieces. Many fascists fled to Spain under the protection of Francisco Franco. Madrid is the site of the Madrid Circular, a document written by the postwar fascist syndicate that lays out a vision for how to regain power including the creation of a common European currency and free-trading zone: i.e The European Union!
In a phone conversation Ross says the codeword Blackbriar—mentioned by Ward Abbott at the end of the first film to Congress as the replacement program to Treadstone. Ross’ phone is being tapped by a CIA worldwide surveillance grid. In real life, Edward Snowden’s release of inside information concerning massive warrantless wiretapping came, in part, through the Guardian.
Noah Vosen, in charge of the CIA’s Blackbriar program, calls for an extraordinary rendition of Ross—a British national, i.e. a US ally. Rendition involves snatching up a target (usually deemed to be a terrorist of some sort) and removed from their host country without a legal process of extradition. In some cases renditioned individuals were brought to US black sites around the world (e.g. Poland) and in other cases to countries friendly to the US war on terror where there is a known policy of torture (e.g. Egypt, Saudi Arabia).
In the film Ross is also a veteran national security journalist which brings in the recent actions to suppress or force journalists to give up their sources. During the wiretapping revelations, it was found out US intelligence was tapping German chancellor and ally Angela Merkel’s phone. Rendition became a favorite tool of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the post 9/11 War on Terror. A more accurate version of that plot would have involved coordination with MI5 and MI6 on rendition, as happened in real life.
Vosen eventually explains that Blackbriar is the umbrella program for all the CIA’s black operations. The War on Terror gave us “extra-judicial” prison sites like Guantanamo Bay, torture facilities like Abu Ghraib (which as Ezekiel73 pointed out in his piece has its roots in the Vietnam War), mass warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, “enhanced interrogation” (i.e. torture contravening the Geneva Accords), as well as the use of black ops for targeted lethal action.
Eventually the film reveals that “it all started with Bourne," i.e. the eventual Blackbriar program arises out of the original “enhanced” (read: torture) training tactics for Bourne. Now it may seem strange on the surface to connect the dots between a super solider mind control assassin program and warrant-less wiretapping but the link is there.
To go back to a point Ezekiel73 made in his recent piece on The Network, during The Vietnam War the US Military conducted human psychological experiments (growing out of MKUltra), while at the same time were conducing a counterinsurgency campaign. US military leaders studied French counterinsurgency theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, who advocated significant use of torture and psychological terror campaigns as part of a broader counterinsurgency operation. Those same French counterinsurgency theorists advocated domestically a policy known as the “strategy of tension”, which consisted of infiltrating anti-government political groups (mostly left wing) and agitating them to lead to greater violence. The strategy of tension advocates were rooted in fascist movements (quelle surprise!). They hoped that left-wing terror on the streets would lead to a call publicly for a military dictatorship.
This strategy of tension was also deployed by the FBi and CIA domestically in the United States during the same time period. Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill makes a compelling case that Charles Manson was a CIA asset of some sort and that the Manson Family murders were part of a psychological terror campaign orchestrated to smear the hippie movement.
Much the same argument is made concerning the Symbionese Liberation Army by author Brad Schreiber in his book, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA. DeFreeze was the purported leader of the SLA which theoretically was an anti-government left-wing US domestic terrorist outfit. DeFreeze however came out of California penal system—the same prison system as Charles Manson—which hosted multiple MKUltra experiments.
Patty Hearst is remembered as a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm syndrome, however, is, at least in this case, a fancy theoretical term covering up for the effects of MKUltra mind control experiments on Hearst. The same kinds of conditioning and programming effects seen in Bourne.
Which brings us to the second major aspect of The Bourne Ultimatum which takes a much darker dive (literally and figuratively) into Bourne’s trauma-induced mind control training.
We see multiple shots of Bourne being waterboarded, being asked if he will fully commit himself to the training. Bourne answers no—each time followed by another round of torture. Here the entire history of MKUltra and its earlier predecessors Artichoke and Bluebird come into play, as does it successor in The Phoenix Program (during Vietnam War). I’ll make reference again at this juncture to Ezekiel73’s indispensable pieces on the weaponization of social scientific research in MK-Ultra, as well as Pt2 on the Network.
MKUltra used all manner of experimental methods to seek to induce mind control. The processes were all ultimately rooted in a specific understanding of the ancient practice of alchemy, which I’ve covered in multiple pieces on the site. In one strain of alchemy, everything first had to be boiled down—called negredo—only then to reconfigured into a new form.
As it pertains to a human being, the point then was to “boil down” a human psyche to a state of pure brokenness, fragmented into constituent parts, which could then be reassembled at the behest of some controlling agent. The mind and spirit had to be crushed and fully broken down (“negredo”) in order to build them back up.
For more on this horrifically brutal and disturbing history see Colin Ross' two books: Military Mind Control and The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists.
In the film, we learn that Bourne’s real name is actually David Webb. As Bourne (or Webb’s) memory is returning he recalls a psychiatrist in charge of the program: Dr. Albert Hirsch (creepily and perfectly portrayed by Hal Finney). Hirsch is based on real life MKUltra psychiatrists like Drs. Ewan Cameron, Sidney Gotlieb, and Jolyon West.
West, for example, did his Ph.D research on inducing a psychotic break in another person. West was called in as psychiatric consult to Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald. Towards the end of his life Ruby wanted to “clarify” his testimony in relationship to his murder of Oswald. West was brought into “examine” Ruby. After that “examination”, West emerged announcing that Ruby had had a psychotic break and would not be fit to testify before the congressional hearing on JFK’s assassination.
In the film, Hirsch repeatedly asks Bourne/Webb if he will “commit to the program” After multiple nos—followed by more torture—Webb eventually says yes. It’s as this point that the camera pans to a hooded prisoner tied to a chair in the corner of the room. Webb gets up, grabs the gun that has been sitting in front of him the entire time, and shoots the man (killing him). Hirsch then says, “You are no longer David Webb. You are now Jason Bourne.”
Hirsch has now completed his process of breaking down the normal processes of empathy in Webb. The unnamed prisoner literally dies in the encounter while David Webb figuratively is also killed in the encounter. The negredo is complete. He is no longer David Webb and the emergence of Jason Bourne (“Re-bourne”) comes through the use of ritual murder. Hirsch broke Webb down so he could alchemically create Bourne as a conscience-less, cold-blooded psychopathic killer.
As Dave McGowan showed in his book Programmed to Kill, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam became the basis for the serial killer phenomenon in the United States of the 1970s, including very possibly the ritualistic Son of Sam killings.
From a “practical” point of view, as well, the use of the ritual murder compromises the agent from the beginning, making them totally beholden to their handlers. Bourne’s loss of memory, his momentary pangs of conscience (e.g. not killing Wombosi’s children) all point to the imperfect nature of such technocratic control over the human mind. But the trauma-induced mind control tactics employed on Bourne leave their horrifying marks on his being which continue to reveal themselves, layer by layer, throughout the films.
The Bourne Ultimatum ends with Bourne stealing secret files on Blackbriar and giving them to Pamela Landy, a CIA agent, who turns whistleblower. The film ends with the assumption that the program has been shut down due to the public revelation of this ultra-secret program. That leads into the fourth and final Bourne film (with Matt Damon), called simply Jason Bourne.
Jason Bourne
A number of years pass between the ending of the third film and the beginning of the fourth. Jason Bourne has gone off the grid and is boxing for cash in Macedonia. Nicky Parsons, former CIA Operation Treadstone logistical technician, who went on the run after helping Bourne in the third movie, is now working with a man named Christian Desault. Desault is a movie version of Julian Assange. Desault leaks sensitive information over the internet a la Wikileaks.
At the time of writing, Assange is facing extradition from the UK—where he has been held in prison since 2019—to the United States. He was charged in US courts with violating the 1917 Espionage Act.
As Ezekiel73 detailed in his first piece on the Network, the administration of US President Woodrow Wilson marks a major turning point in bringing the American side into the Anglo-American establishment. Wilson’s political advisor/Svengali, Col. House, was a major agent of the interests of the Round Table Group—a group convened in Britain to extend British global dominance into the 20th century.
The Round Table group ran influence campaigns to seek to turn the tide of US public opinion towards entering into the war on the Allied side. US public opinion was largely opposed to entry into World War I. Wilson was able use the false flag of the sinking of the Lusitania as a cover for entry into the war. The war allowed Wilson to pass The Espionage Act to quell any domestic dissent. Wilson also introduced the Federal Reserve as the US Central Bank, which brings us back to the Bank of International Settlements from the prior piece in this series.
Wilson of course also led the US delegation to the Treaty of Versailles and the treaty’s massive war reparations payments laid on Germany, setting the stage for the German hyperinflation crisis and the subsequent Rape of Germany period detailed in the prior piece. That same Espionage Act is now the one being used as a threat against Assange for exposing some of the contemporary dirty dealings of the Network.
Nicky Parsons hacks into the CIA, discovering evidence of the CIA having tracked and recruited David Webb (Jason Bourne) into the program. She also learns that Webb’s father Richard, was involved in Operation Treadstone. Parsons locates Webb/Bourne in isolation. Parsons is being tracked and her encounter with Bourne brings him out of hiding and sets in motion the rest of the film.
Richard Webb, father to David Webb (later Jason Bourne), was the architect of the Treadstone program. It was Richard Webb who theorized that the US needed highly trained special forces, outside the normal chain of command, who could be called upon during a global war against stateless terrorist type organizations. Perhaps the closest real life parallel to Richard Webb and his ideas for Treadstone (and later Blackbriar) is Col. Charles Alvin Beckwith. Beckwith created Delta Force, a special forces outfit of the US Army. Beckwith also recommended the creation of JSOC: Joint Special Operations Command following Operation Eagle Claw: i.e. the failed rescue attempt of the US hostages in Iran in 1980. JSOC was meant to coordinate operations between various special forces units: e.g. Delta Force and Navy Seals.
JSOC’s original assignment was capturing Manuel Noriega in US invasion of Panama. JSOC, which was originally considered a somewhat fringe element of the US military, became, especially under President Barack Obama, the go to division for special operations in the war on terror. JSOC personnel were involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. JSOC operatives were also involved in the infamous Black Hawk Down event in Somalia—they had been sent to capture Somalian warlord Mohammed Aideed (1993). JSOC was involved in the assassination of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as Zarqawi’s successor Abu Masri, with the group morphing into the infamous Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The influence of JSOC continues to grow. Stanley McChrystal, who was head of JSOC during the Iraq War, lead the operation that killed Zarqawi. He was later promoted to overall commander of the Afghanistan War.
JSOC also has US citizens on its kill list. See Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars for more on JSOC. The failure of a strategic over reliance on small teams of super trained elite soldiers conducting targeted assassinations and manhunts is very apparent both in the Bourne movies and its real life counterpart.
Back to the film…
Richard Webb became distraught learning that the CIA was targeting his son as a potential recruit for the Treadstone program that Webb had conceived. Richard Webb threatened the CIA with leaking the program and as a result was assassinated. The assassination (car bomb) is made to look like the work of a terrorist cell, leading David Webb to volunteer for the program—a program that will tragically focus on targeted assassinations (including even of CIA personnel and American citizens), assassinations made to look like the handiwork of others.
The inter-generational trauma dynamic in the film reveals yet another thread covered multiple times on the site: social traumatology. Social traumatology is the application of trauma studies to inter-generational family lineage, sub-cultures, and wider societies. I’ve look through a social traumatological lens at Donald Trump, the US Civil War and its ongoing cultural war effects, as well as the Mens’ Rights and #metoo movements.
One of the core insights of social traumatology work, particularly through the study of family constellations, is that the unfinished work of the ancestors gets played out by the successive generations (“the sins of the father”). David Webb’s father, initiated an ultra-secret program, of ultra-elite, super solider assassins which eventually ensnared his own son in its “web.” The CIA lies to David Webb about his father’s assassination and then wipes his memory in order to train him (Webb/Bourne) in killing in the very same methods that murdered his father.
The interplay between social traumatology and mind control points back yet again to MK Ultra (and its offshoots). As I’ve covered in previous pieces, one of the strangest aspects of the highly strange topic of UFOs is the consistent replication of the phenomenon through multiple generations, especially among military families. This line of inquiry is made even more complex by faked human “alien abduction”, particularly by military and/or intelligence personnel. It raises the possibility that much of what one might consider the alien abduction phenomenon of the 1960-1970s, was yet another tentacle of the MKUltra Octopus. The CIA admitted publicly (on its Twitter feed!) that it had faked alien abductions. These are known as MILABs (Military Abductions). While David Webb was not being targeted for a fake alien abduction experiment, it is very creepy that he was being surveilled and groomed for entrance in to a trauma-based mind control program. While David Webb was already in the US army at this point, there are the even darker accusations of grooming of underage minors by intelligence agencies: aka Project Monarch as a possible subset of MKUltra (think Stranger Things). One potential victim of childhood programming is the godfather of abduction lore Whitley Strieber: a possibility Strieber has publicly speculated on himself.
In broad terms, MKUltra sought to exploit vulnerable populations: e.g. psychiatric patients, inmates, young students at universities, and in this example a grieving son.
Silicon Valley and Military-Technological Industrial Complex
The other major thread of the last Bourne film is that the Director of the CIA Robert Dewey (played by Tommy Lee Jones) seeks return on his investment in a media platform named Deep Dream. The Deep Dream founder Aaron Kalloor (played by Riz Ahmed) publicly calls his platform the most transparent and claims that the site is free from surveillance. Meanwhile he has taken seed money from the CIA for his project. Deep Dream is a clear take off on Facebook (now Meta). I’ve previously explored parapolitical revelation of the method concerning the Meta-verse in the film Free Guy.
Dewey wants to create a backdoor into Deep Dream so he can spy on all its users. This project is code named Iron Hand, third in the line of succession to Operations Treadstone and Blackbriar.
In our world, The CIA has its own venture capital wing known as In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel was the first backer of Peter Thiel’s Palantir—which is involved in Minority Report-esque pre-crime artificial intelligence. Palantir is named after the seeing stones of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings books. As I’ve covered previously elites like Thiel are the kind of individuals who read Tolkien and think that Sauron was on the right track with that whole “one ring to rule them all in and in the darkness bind them.” The Palantiri are a series of conduits for an “all-seeing eye”, that is total surveillance. It’s right there in the name—they ain’t hiding it folks.
Right in line with said “morals”, Thiel is part of a large Silicon Valley contingent who want to inject themselves with the blood of the young to extend their lifespans (aka actual vampirism). Speaking of vampires, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was also an early investor in Facebook.
Thiel also was the shadow backer of Hulk Hogan’s seemingly quixotic lawsuit against the online media company Gawker. Thiel backed the lawsuit because Gawker had outed him as gay some years earlier. The lawsuit bankrupted Gawker. It became yet another vector of attack in the war on journalism and free press. From the side of government, there’s the prosecutions against whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning (and threats of the same against Edward Snowden), extradition proceedings against Assange, as well as pressure put on journalists to give up their sources. While from the corporate-tech side of things they can simply bankrupt a magazine they do not like or in the case of Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder), simply buy The Washington Post itself and literally write the news that best suits their own agenda.
Lastly, who could have guessed that Thiel’s supposedly self-contradictory and complicated political philosophy becomes rather un-complicated and quite self-consistent, when viewed as a form of fascism? Sauron was pretty faschy after all.
As Whitney Webb details in her excellent piece on Facebook’s connection to the military industrial complex, DARPA had a program named LifeLogs which sought to create a social media platform where users would share all their personal data, relationship connections, preferences, shopping, political persuasions, and the like. It sounds an awful lot like Facebook in other words. Coincidentally or otherwise, LifeLogs was shut down the day that Facebook went live. So whether Facebook was directly funded by the intelligence agencies—a la Jason Bourne—or just so happened to separately be created by another, it ended up playing the exact same function.
As I’ve covered in a previous piece, the practice of gaining users attentions, aka the “attentional economy”, is itself a product of the same mind control techniques having their roots in MKUltra. In that piece I detail the story of Cambridge Analytica—which, unsurprisingly, had connections to Peter Thiel—where Analytica, according its own internal memos, admitted that It was deploying weapons-grade psychological warfare tactics on targeted populations via Facebook.
Additionally, as I’ve also covered elsewhere, there’s the highly strange intersection between the creation of the internet and the CIA’s project to develop psychic spies: aka Third Eye Spies. Those two projects were simultaneously carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). In fact some individuals were involved in both projects. The connection between the two seemingly completely opposed projects, is that both involved an “all seeing eye” if you will. One project looked to create a digital Panopticon (internet/arpanet) and the other was for psychic interior “all-seemingness” through remote viewing-based espionage.
One last point of comparison between the Jason Bourne plot element of the CIA backdoor into the social media giant is the PROMIS software scandal. There’s a whole piece unto itself on that one—in fact Ezekiel73’s next instalment on The Network will do precisely that so I’m not going into major detail on PROMIS right now.
But it’s enough to say here that in the early 1980s Bill Hamilton designed a then state-of-the-art management software tool (PROMIS: Prosecutors Management Information System). Hamilton was hired by the US Justice Department to direct the program to coordinate tracking of individuals with felonies/warrants across states lines (no such federal digital database existed previously). Hamilton’s program was then stolen likely by a faction within the Justice Department and/or the intelligence agencies. The program was then repurposed and sold (without Hamilton’s consent) to foreign governments, other intelligence agencies (e.g. Mossad), as well as banking and corporate interests. A backdoor was installed into the updated version of the PROMIS software which was then used to spy on its users, exactly as described in the film.
These examples only begin to scratch the surface of deep involvement by military intelligence in the creation of Silicon Valley from its very inception. Yasha Levine’s book Surveillance Valley details the history in incredible depth.
For our purposes here, note the consistent theme of the “all-seeing eye” running through Thiel’s Palantir, remote viewing/psychic espionage, and the very foundations of the internet itself. Additionally, this “all seeing eye” surveillance orientation is itself completely rooted in attempts to control the mind through methods like hypnosis, hallucinogens, and other MKUltra torture techniques.
“It all started with Bourne.” Or in the real world “it all started with MKUltra.”
The same mentality underlying the desire to surveil and control an individual’s mind is the same mentality that seeks to create technology that doe the same thing on a global scale.