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Thursday May 10 01:39 PM EDT Woman Learned How To Kill As A Child

## Woman Learned How To Kill As A Child

While most children were playing on the playground, Cheryl Hersha says that she was learning how to kill as a child.

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NewsChannel5's Brad Harvey reports that Hersha, a registered nurse, tells a story of an abusive military father who forced her and her sister into a CIA child spy program called MK Ultra. A program at the height of the Cold War involved mind control, torture, sex and murder.

"The military training began when I was about eight and that consisted of teaching us weapons, knives, revolvers and shooting," Hersha says.

Harvey reports that there were different names for different personalities. The child prostitute was sexy Sadie. That program turned into the black widow, which was a seductress assassin.

A real life La Femme Nikita, Hersha, who now lives in Arizona with her family, says that she would seduce and then drug top foreign diplomats and then take them to a secret location.

"Sometimes he would be passed out and they would take pictures and that would be enough to blackmail them into compliance," she says.

But she never completed her missions. She never pulled the trigger on her victims. And because she didn't kill her victims, WEWS reports that an assassin was sent to take her out.

"And he got distracted and I got a hold of the knife. And I did defend my life at that point and plunged the knife into his neck," she says.

The memories were locked deep inside her brain for about 10 years, surfacing after she had a child of her own. She once believed that she was crazy. Nevertheless, she contacted Ohio private investigator Dale Griffis. He claims other MK Ultra survivors have contacted him with similar stories.

Griffis says that after many hours of listening, he realized that there was a pattern and overlapping data.

Griffis and Cleveland-author Ted Schwarz teamed up for a book based on Hersha's story. Beyond the interviews, both men admit that the evidence is thin.

"There is nothing on record that identifies this program by a name with "x" number of children and identifies the people involved," Hersha says.

Shwarz claims that most of the documentation on MK Ultra was destroyed in the 1970s, but he says that Hersha's story is evidence enough. "At this point, what is provable is so provable that what is not provable I do accept," says Hersha. "I wouldn't ask anyone to believe me straight up at face value."

Hersha and the authors warn that people are capable of doing many things under the guise of patriotism.

"A lot of things are done in the name of patriotism under circumstances that people think are right that in hindsight are not. In hindsight they are the horrors of the damned," she says.

The CIA has acknowledged that there is a program called MK Ultra, but officials insist that the group does not include children.

The agency says that Hersha's accusations are without any foundation.

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