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Dr. Christine Blasey Ford faced a torrent of personal attacks and conspiracy theories in September and October 2018, after she publicly accused federal judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her when they were both high school students in Maryland in the early 1980s. In late September 2018, a conspiracy theory emerged holding that Blasey Ford was closely linked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and that her allegations were false and part of a CIA plot to block Kavanaugh's confirmation and disrupt President Trump's agenda. One meme which spread the conspiracy-mongering read as follows: Another meme emerged from a tweet and blog post published by conservative radio host Michael Savage on 27 September 2018: The theory that Blasey Ford, in making her allegations against Kavanaugh, is acting on behalf of the CIA or as part of a CIA plot against him has three basic components: This theory, and its component strands, were written about and promoted on several non-mainstream web sites during September 2018, including What Does It Mean, the BrassBalls blog, ZeroHedge, Before It's News, and in a segment on Alex Jones' InfoWars show (in which Jones claimed Blasey Ford and her family were part of the leftist arm of the CIA, whose function is to create transgender children, among other pronouncements). On 17 September, WhatDoesItMean.com's Sorcha Faal outlined this somewhat complicated web of claims: WhatDoesItMean.com has a long history of fabricating evidence, quotations, and stories, as noted by RationalWiki: The Stanford Connection Stanford University does not operate or manage its own CIA Undergraduate Internship Program, but rather promotes that internship (which is operated by the CIA itself in Washington, D.C.) to its students, along with several other fellowships and professional opportunities, under the auspices of the university's Haas Center for Public Service. Christine Blasey Ford is a research psychologist at Stanford, not a CIA internship program administrator. None of the posts claiming she directs, leads, or is in charge of the internship program provided any evidence to that effect, and none of them explained or acknowledged that the internship is an external one, run by the CIA itself thousands of miles away from Stanford's campus. The Haas Center for Public Service lists four staff members responsible for advising students on internships and fellowship. including the CIA's undergraduate internship, and Blasey Ford is not one of them. This claim of a direct personal link between Blasey Ford and the CIA, via Stanford University, therefore falls down. However, as an institution Stanford does have a history of working with the CIA, especially as part of Project MKUltra, a shadowy CIA-sponsored program in the 1950s and 1960s in which scientists and researchers, especially in the field of psychology, used drugs and other techniques to experiment with behavior modification and mind control. Stanford was just one of dozens of universities, research institutions, and hospitals across the United States that served as venues for such experimentation, which was at times illegal and unethical for using human beings as subjects, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. (Famously, the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was subjected to brutal psychological experimentation, suspected to have been part of an MKUltra sub-project, while he was a promising mathematics student at Harvard in the late 1950s.) In January 1973, CIA Technical Services Director Sidney Gottlieb -- the infamous poisons expert who oversaw the MKUltra program -- destroyed many documents relating to the substance of the experiments upon the order of then CIA Director Richard Helms, the U.S Senate would later hear. However, in 1977 a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a trove of material, mostly invoices and other financial documents, relating to the program. Among that trove were hundreds of pages establishing the fact that Stanford University had been one of the dozens of institutions where MKUltra experimentation took place. The documents are now available on the web site of the university itself and indicate that MKUltra activities occurred at Stanford from around 1953 to 1964, with many of the orders and invoices signed by Gottlieb himself. Ralph Blasey III Here's how the BrassBalls blog explained this strand of the conspiracy theory: This component of the overall theory is riddled with factual errors, fabrications, and logical failures. According to his LinkedIn profile, Ralph Blasey III (Christine's brother, and the son of Ralph Blasey Jr.) did indeed once work as a litigation partner for Baker Hostetler in the firm's Washington, D.C. office. But Baker Hostetler did not create Fusion GPS, as the blog post claims. Rather, in 2017 Fusion GPS told the Washington Post that they had performed some work as a subcontractor for Baker Hostetler, who were representing a Russian holding company in a money laundering case brought by the U.S. Justice Department. (More information about Fusion GPS' place in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections can be viewed here.) However, Fusion GPS told the Post that their work for Baker Hostetler began in 2013, while Ralph Blasey III stopped working for the law firm in 2004, nine years before they engaged Fusion GPS. Baker Hostetler's Washington, D.C. address is 1050 Connecticut Avenue Northwest. None of the three companies listed in the conspiracy theory as CIA fronts run by Ralph Blasey Jr. (Christine's father) has offices at that address. Ralph Blasey Jr. is listed as Vice President for Business Development of one of them, Red Coats, Inc., a Bethesda, Maryland-based cleaning company. Admiral Security Services (which provides security guard and concierge services) is a division of Red Coats, and Datawatch Systems is owned and operated by the same people but located at a different address (albeit within walking distance in Bethesda.) Ralph Blasey Jr. works for only one of those three companies, none of which shares an address with Baker Hostetler (the law firm which Ralph Blasey III, in any case, left in 2004) or has been shown by any evidence whatsoever to be operated by the CIA. Like many other companies in the Washington, D.C. area, Datawatch Systems, which provides doorway and access security services, does have contracts with several federal government departments and agencies, as does Red Coats, Inc., and Admiral Security Services. However, none of them has a contract with the CIA. This attempt to link Christine Blasey Ford to the CIA through her brother Ralph therefore fails on several fronts. Nick Deak Before we get to the substance of this part of the conspiracy theory, it's worth pointing out the profound logical flaw at the heart of it. The underlying premise here is that, if Christine Blasey Ford's grandfather was an intelligence agent, she herself must therefore be steeped in spycraft and have the same interests, temperament, and profession as her grandfather. Anyone with a different personality or career to that of their grandfather will instinctively recognize this assumption as nonsensical. In any event, the claim here is that Blasey Ford's grandfather was the legendary CIA-linked currency trader Nicholas Nick Deak. Without offering any evidence of a familial relationship, the BrassBalls blog stated that Christine and Ralph III’s grandfather was Nicholas Deak. Former CIA Director William Casey acknowledged Deak’s decades of service to the CIA. Deak has been the subject of speculation and fascination for decades. In 1964, Time magazine called him the James Bond of the world of money, writing: In 1985, Deak was shot dead (along with his receptionist Frances Lauder) at his office in Lower Manhattan by Lois Lang, a homeless woman with a history of mental illness. Because of Deak's life-long connections to the CIA and a recent scandal which had implicated his firm in money laundering on behalf of international crime organizations, theories have been put forth that Lang was not merely motivated by her own delusions, as investigators concluded, but was acting under the direction of nefarious and organized forces, criminal or governmental. In 2012, Arkadi Kuhlmann, who replaced Deak as CEO of his firm, told Salon of his own skepticism about the official account of his predecessor's murder: Whatever the truth about the death of Nicholas Deak, one thing is clear: he was not Christine Blasey Ford's grandfather. Multiple news articles before and after his death stipulated that he had only one child, a son named Robert Leslie, also known as Les. This information obviously rules out the possibility that Deak was Blasey Ford's maternal grandfather, and since we know her father is Ralph Blasey Jr., we can say with certainty that Deak was not her paternal grandfather either. This eliminates the third and final component of the conspiracy theory, as articulated by Michael Savage and others. Interestingly, the WhatDoesItMean.com does not claim that Deak was Blasey Ford's grandfather, but rather connects the two by way of another figure from a bygone era, Dr. Frederick Melges: The claims that Lang had been treated by Dr. Melges, and that Melges was associated with the MKUltra project, was written about in Salon's 2012 account of Deak's death: We were unable to verify the claim that Dr. Melges took Lang into his care in 1975, or what that treatment might have entailed. Frederick Towne Melges (known as Rusty) was a psychiatrist from Battle Creek, Michigan, who received his medical degree from Columbia University before working at the University of Rochester and Duke University in later years. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Melges worked at Stanford University, researching the perception of time. He conducted studies into the effects of cannabis and alcohol on time perception, personal perceptions of the future, persecutory delusion among people with acute mental illness, and several subjects related to human emotion. Some of his research involved administering doses of THC (the hallucinatory component in cannabis) as well as alcohol. We were not able to verify the claim that Melges worked at the Stanford Research Institute, and it is unclear whether he ever took part in any MKUltra-related experimentation. However, even if one accepts for the sake of argument the claims made by WhatDoesItMean.com and Salon, no meaningful link exists between Dr. Melges and Christine Blasey Ford. Melges, who suffered from diabetes, died at the age of 52 in Durham, North Carolina, in July 1988, having worked at Duke University since 1977. Blasey Ford got her undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1988, then received a master's in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University in 1991, a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Southern California in 1996, and a master's in epidemiology from Stanford University in 2009. She and Melges never attended or worked at the same university contemporaneously. The earliest record we could find of Blasey Ford's working at Stanford was in the year 2000, by which time Melges had been dead for 12 years (and had left Stanford more than a decade before that). Even if Melges were associated with the MKUltra program, the fact of Christine Blasey Ford's attendance and employment at Stanford several decades later does not even come close to establishing a link between the two.
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