Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S.

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

(CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through

brainwashing Brainwashing (also known as mind control, menticide, coercive persuasion, thought control, thought reform, and forced re-education) is the concept that the human mind can be altered or controlled by certain psychological techniques. Brainwash ...

and

psychological torture Psychological torture or mental torture is a type of torture that relies primarily on psychological effects, and only secondarily on any physical harm inflicted. Although not all psychological torture involves the use of physical violence, there ...

. It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of

psychoactive drug A psychoactive drug, psychopharmaceutical, psychoactive agent or psychotropic drug is a chemical substance, that changes functions of the nervous system, and results in alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition or behavior. ...

s (especially

LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...

) and other chemicals, electroshocks,National Public Radio (NPR), 9 Sept. 2019
"The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'"
(On-air interview with journalist

Stephen Kinzer Stephen Kinzer (born August 4, 1951) is an American author, journalist, and academic. A former ''New York Times'' correspondent, he has published several books, and writes for several newspapers and news agencies. Reporting career During the 198 ...

)

hypnosis Hypnosis is a human condition involving focused attention (the selective attention/selective inattention hypothesis, SASI), reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion.In 2015, the American Psychologica ...

sensory deprivation Sensory deprivation or perceptual isolation is the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. Simple devices such as blindfolds or hoods and earmuffs can cut off sight and hearing, while more complex devices can al ...

, isolation, and verbal and

sexual abuse Sexual abuse or sex abuse, also referred to as molestation, is abusive sexual behavior by one person upon another. It is often perpetrated using force or by taking advantage of another. Molestation often refers to an instance of sexual assa ...

, in addition to other forms of

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts c ...

. MKUltra was preceded by two drug-related experiments, Project Bluebird and

Project Artichoke Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project that researched interrogation methods. Preceded by Project BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE officially arose on August 20, 1951 and was operated by the ...

. It was organized through the CIA's

Office of Scientific Intelligence Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) also known as Scientific Intelligence Division was a department of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1963, it was incorporated into the Directorate of Science & Technology.http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAE ...

and coordinated with the

United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories The U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) were a suite of research laboratories and pilot plant centers operating at Camp (later Fort) Detrick, Maryland, United States beginning in 1943 under the control of the U.S. Army Chemical Co ...

. The program engaged in illegal activities, including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as unwitting test subjects. Over 7,000 American veterans took part in these experiments non-consensually during the 1950s through 1970s, many of them suing later on. MKUltra's scope was broad, with activities carried out under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions aside from the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated using

front organization A front organization is any entity set up by and controlled by another organization, such as intelligence agencies, organized crime groups, terrorist organizations, secret societies, banned organizations, religious or political groups, advocacy gro ...

s, although some top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement. MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the

Church Committee The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence ...

of the

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

and

Gerald Ford Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. ( ; born Leslie Lynch King Jr.; July 14, 1913December 26, 2006) was an American politician who served as the 38th president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. He was the only president never to have been elected ...

's United States President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States (also known as the Rockefeller Commission). Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA Director

Richard Helms Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 – October 23, 2002) was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Ser ...

's order that all MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the small number of documents that survived Helms's order. In 1977, a

Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request: * Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Australian act * ...

request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings. Some surviving information about MKUltra was declassified in July 2001.

Background

Origin of project

According to

, the CIA project "was a continuation of the work begun in WWII-era

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

facilities and

Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as concen ...

on subduing and controlling human minds". Kinzer writes that MKUltra's use of

mescaline Mescaline or mescalin (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine) is a naturally occurring psychedelic protoalkaloid of the substituted phenethylamine class, known for its hallucinogenic effects comparable to those of LSD and psilocybin. Biological sou ...

on unwitting subjects was a practice that Nazi doctors had begun in the camps at

Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

and Dachau. Kinzer gives evidence of the continuation of a Nazi agenda, citing the CIA's secret recruitment of Nazi torturers and

vivisection Vivisection () is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for experiment ...

ists to continue experimenting on thousands of subjects, and Nazis were brought to

Fort Detrick Fort Detrick () is a United States Army Futures Command installation located in Frederick, Maryland. Historically, Fort Detrick was the center of the U.S. biological weapons program from 1943 to 1969. Since the discontinuation of that program, it ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

, to instruct CIA officers on the lethal uses of

sarin Sarin (NATO designation GB G-series, "B"">Nerve_agent#G-series.html" ;"title="hort for Nerve agent#G-series">G-series, "B" is an extremely toxic synthetic organophosphorus compound. The Soviet Union also contributed greatly to the motivation for this project; according to CIA director

Allen Dulles Allen Welsh Dulles (, ; April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest-serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he ov ...

, fear of "Soviet brain perversion techniques" was palpable. The CIA wanted to verse itself in this type of "mind control" to be able to recognize and use it in case of a conflict with the USSR. Fear of the enemy ran rampant among Americans, especially upon the sharp increase in PTSD in Korean POWs. The damage incurred on these survivors was so severe that mind control was thought to be the culprit.

Origin of cryptonym

The project's

CIA cryptonym CIA cryptonyms are code names or code words used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to projects, operations, persons, agencies, etc. Format of cryptonyms CIA cryptonyms sometimes contain a two character prefix called a digrap ...

is a combination of the digraph ''MK'', indicating the sponsorship of the

Technical Services Staff __NOTOC__ The Office of Technical Service (OTS; formerly known as the ''Technical Services Division'' and ''Technical Services Staff'') is a component of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,Central Intelligence Agency press releaseCIA's Office of ...

(TSS), and the word

Ultra adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. '' ...

which formerly designated the most secret classification of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

intelligence. Other related cryptonyms include Project MKNAOMI and Project MKDELTA. MKDELTA was established to oversee the use of MKUltra materials abroad. According to the Church Committee, "such materials were used on a number of occasions".

Aims and leadership

The project was headed by

Sidney Gottlieb Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. Early years and ...

but began on the order of CIA director

on April 13, 1953. Its aim was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the

Soviet bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...

in response to alleged

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

, and

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...

n use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war during the

Korean War , date = {{Ubl, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (''de facto'')({{Age in years, months, weeks and days, month1=6, day1=25, year1=1950, month2=7, day2=27, year2=1953), 25 June 1950 – present (''de jure'')({{Age in years, months, weeks a ...

. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives, and was interested in manipulating foreign leaders with such techniques,Church Committee
p. 391
"A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKUltra materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions." devising several schemes to drug

Fidel Castro Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (; ; 13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016) was a Cuban revolutionary and politician who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 200 ...

. It often conducted experiments without the subjects' knowledge or consent. In some cases, academic researchers were funded through grants from CIA front organizations but were unaware that the CIA was using their work for these purposes. The project attempted to produce a perfect

truth drug Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, ...

for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

, and to explore other possibilities of mind control. Subproject 54 was the Navy's top-secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory; the program was never carried out. Most MKUltra records were destroyed in 1973 by order of CIA director

, so it has been difficult for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 funded research subprojects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. (identical sentence) "Because most of the MK-ULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 ... MK-ULTRA and the related CIA programs." The project began during a period of what English journalist

Rupert Cornwell Rupert Howard Cornwell (22 February 1946 – 31 March 2017) was a British journalist connected with ''The Independent'' newspaper for thirty years. Early life and education Born to Ronnie Cornwell and Jeanie Gronow (née Neal) in 1946 Marylebon ...

described as "paranoia" at the CIA, when the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly and fear of communism was at its height. CIA counter-intelligence chief

James Jesus Angleton James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 – May 11, 1987) was chief of CIA Counterintelligence, counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974. His official position within the organization was Associate Deputy Di ...

believed that a

mole Mole (or Molé) may refer to: Animals * Mole (animal) or "true mole", mammals in the family Talpidae, found in Eurasia and North America * Golden moles, southern African mammals in the family Chrysochloridae, similar to but unrelated to Talpida ...

had penetrated the organization at the highest levels. The agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining ways to influence and control the mind and to enhance its ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation. Some historians assert that one goal of MKUltra and related CIA projects was to create a ''Manchurian Candidate''-style subject. American historian

Alfred W. McCoy Alfred "Al" William McCoy (born June 8, 1945) is an American historian and educator. He is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Scale of project

One 1955 MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort. It refers to the study of an assortment of mind-altering substances described as follows: # Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public. # Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception. # Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol. # Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol. # Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so they may be used for malingering, etc. # Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness. # Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing". # Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use. # Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use. # Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc. # Substances which will produce "pure" euphoria with no subsequent let-down. # Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced. # A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning. # Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts. # Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects. # A knockout pill which can be surreptitiously administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis. # A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity.

Applications

The 1976

report found that, in the MKDELTA program, "Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting or disabling purposes."

Other related projects

In 1964, MKSEARCH was the name given to the continuation of the MKULTRA program. The MKSEARCH program was divided into two projects dubbed

MKOFTEN Project MKOFTEN was a covert U.S. Department of Defense program developed in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sometime in the late 1960s. A partner or descendant program of MKSEARCH, the goal of MKOFTEN was to "test the beha ...

and

MKCHICKWIT Project MKCHICKWIT, or CHICKWIT was a covert program of the US Department of Defense operated in conjunction with the CIA. A partner program to MKSEARCH, the goal of MKCHICKWIT was to "identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia and to obtain ...

. Funding for MKSEARCH commenced in 1965, and ended in 1971. The project was a joint project between the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and the CIA's

Office of Research and Development An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific dut ...

to find new offensive-use agents, with a focus on

incapacitating agent The term incapacitating agent is defined by the United States Department of Defense as: :"An agent that produces temporary physiological or mental effects, or both, which will render individuals incapable of concerted effort in the performance o ...

s. Its purpose was to develop, test, and evaluate capabilities in the covert use of biological, chemical, and radioactive material systems and techniques of producing predictable human behavioral and/or physiological changes in support of highly sensitive operational requirements. By March 1971 over 26,000 potential agents had been acquired for future screening. The CIA was interested in

bird migration Bird migration is the regular seasonal movement, often north and south along a flyway, between breeding and wintering grounds. Many species of bird migrate. Migration carries high costs in predation and mortality, including from hunting by ...

patterns for

chemical A chemical substance is a form of matter having constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. Some references add that chemical substance cannot be separated into its constituent elements by physical separation methods, i.e., wi ...

and

biological warfare Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill, harm or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. Bio ...

(CBW) research; subproject 139 designated "Bird Disease Studies" at

Penn State #Redirect Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campu ...

. MKOFTEN was to deal with testing and toxicological transmissivity and behavioral effects of drugs in animals and, ultimately, humans.1977 Senate MKULTRA Hearing: Appendix C – Documents Referring to subprojects MKCHICKWIT was concerned with acquiring information on new drug developments in Europe and Asia, and with acquiring samples.

Experiments on Americans

CIA documents suggest that they investigated "chemical, biological, and radiological" methods of mind control as part of MKUltra. They spent an estimated $10 million or more, roughly $87.5 million adjusted for inflation.

LSD

Early CIA efforts focused on

LSD-25 Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, v ...

, which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs. The CIA wanted to know if they could make Soviet spies defect against their will and whether the Soviets could do the same to the CIA's own operatives. Documents obtained from the CIA by John D. Marks under

Freedom of Information Freedom of information is freedom of a person or people to publish and consume information. Access to information is the ability for an individual to seek, receive and impart information effectively. This sometimes includes "scientific, indigeno ...

in 1976 showed that, in 1953, the CIA considered purchasing 10 kilograms of LSD, enough for 100 million doses. The proposed purchase aimed to stop other countries from controlling the supply. The documents showed that the CIA purchased some quantities of LSD from

Sandoz Laboratories Novartis AG is a Swiss-American multinational pharmaceutical corporation based in Basel, Switzerland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (global research).name="novartis.com">https://www.novartis.com/research-development/research-loca ...

in Switzerland. Once Project MKUltra got underway in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes – "people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. They also administered LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public to study their reactions. The aim was to find drugs that would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program them as "a robot agent."Rappoport, J. (1995). "CIA Experiments With Mind Control on Children". ''Perceptions Magazine'', p. 56. Military personnel who received the mind-altering drugs were also threatened with court-martials if they told anyone about the experiments. LSD and other drugs were often administered without the subject's knowledge or

informed consent Informed consent is a principle in medical ethics and medical law, that a patient must have sufficient information and understanding before making decisions about their medical care. Pertinent information may include risks and benefits of treatme ...

, a violation of the

Nuremberg Code The Nuremberg Code (german: Nürnberger Kodex) is a set of ethical research principles for human experimentation created by the court in '' U.S. v Brandt'', one of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials that were held after the Second World War. Tho ...

the U.S. had agreed to follow after World War II. Many veterans who were subjected to experimentation are now seeking legal and monetary reparations. In

Operation Midnight Climax Operation Midnight Climax was an operation carried out by the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the mind-control research program that began in the 1950s. It was initially established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction ...

, the CIA set up several

brothel A brothel, bordello, ranch, or whorehouse is a place where people engage in sexual activity with prostitutes. However, for legal or cultural reasons, establishments often describe themselves as massage parlors, bars, strip clubs, body rub par ...

s within agency safehouses in San Francisco to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with

one-way mirror A one-way mirror, also called two-way mirror (or one-way glass, half-silvered mirror, and semi-transparent mirror), is a reciprocal mirror that appears reflective on one side and transparent at the other. The perception of one-way transmission i ...

s, and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study. In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. They told subjects they would extend their "trips" if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this.

Heroin Heroin, also known as diacetylmorphine and diamorphine among other names, is a potent opioid mainly used as a recreational drug for its euphoric effects. Medical grade diamorphine is used as a pure hydrochloride salt. Various white and brow ...

addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin. At the invitation of Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of

Richard Alpert Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019), also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and author. His best-selling 1971 book '' Be Here Now'', which has been ...

and

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

Ken Kesey Ken Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. Kesey was born in ...

volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

-financed study under the aegis of MKUltra, at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital where he worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of

psychoactive drugs A psychoactive drug, psychopharmaceutical, psychoactive agent or psychotropic drug is a chemical substance, that changes functions of the nervous system, and results in alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition or behavior. T ...

, particularly

psilocybin Psilocybin ( , ) is a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug compound produced by more than 200 species of fungi. The most potent are members of the genus ''Psilocybe'', such as '' P. azurescens'', '' P. semilanceata'', and '' P.&nbs ...

cocaine Cocaine (from , from , ultimately from Quechuan languages, Quechua: ''kúka'') is a central nervous system (CNS) stimulant mainly recreational drug use, used recreationally for its euphoria, euphoric effects. It is primarily obtained from t ...

AMT Amt is a type of administrative division governing a group of municipalities, today only in Germany, but formerly also common in other countries of Northern Europe. Its size and functions differ by country and the term is roughly equivalent to ...

and DMT on people. The Office of Security used LSD in interrogations, but

, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas: he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed it could be given to high-ranking officials and in this way affect the course of important meetings, speeches, etc. Since he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory and using it in clandestine operations, he initiated a series of experiments where LSD was given to people in "normal" settings without warning. At first, everyone in Technical Services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. As the experimentation progressed, a point arrived where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Adverse reactions often occurred, such as an operative who received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car passing him. The experiments continued even after

Frank Olson Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson (July 17, 1910 – November 28, 1953) was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and an employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) who worked at Camp Detrick (now ...

, an army chemist who had never taken LSD, was covertly dosed by his CIA supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story New York City hotel room, supposedly as a result of deep depression induced by the drug.Lee, M. A., Shlain, B. (1985). ''Acid Dreams, the Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond''. Grove Press. According to

, Olson had approached his superiors some time earlier, doubting the morality of the project, and asked to resign from the CIA. Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...

were given LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. MKUltra's researchers later dismissed LSD as too unpredictable in its results. They gave up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe," but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. However, by 1962 the CIA and the army developed a series of super-hallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. This resulted in the withdrawal of support by many academics and private researchers, and LSD research became less of a priority altogether.

Other drugs

Another technique investigated was the

intravenous Intravenous therapy (abbreviated as IV therapy) is a medical technique that administers fluids, medications and nutrients directly into a person's vein. The intravenous route of administration is commonly used for rehydration or to provide nutrie ...

administration of a

barbiturate Barbiturates are a class of depressant drugs that are chemically derived from barbituric acid. They are effective when used medically as anxiolytics, hypnotics, and anticonvulsants, but have physical and psychological addiction potential as we ...

into one arm and an

amphetamine Amphetamine (contracted from alpha- methylphenethylamine) is a strong central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy, and obesity. It is also commonly used ...

into the other. The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. Other experiments involved

heroin Heroin, also known as diacetylmorphine and diamorphine among other names, is a potent opioid mainly used as a recreational drug for its euphoric effects. Medical grade diamorphine is used as a pure hydrochloride salt. Various white and brow ...

morphine Morphine is a strong opiate that is found naturally in opium, a dark brown resin in poppies (''Papaver somniferum''). It is mainly used as a analgesic, pain medication, and is also commonly used recreational drug, recreationally, or to make ...

temazepam Temazepam (sold under the brand names Restoril among others) is a medication of the benzodiazepine class which is generally used to treat severe or debilitating insomnia. It is taken by mouth. Temazepam is rapidly absorbed, and significant hyp ...

(used under code name MKSEARCH),

, scopolamine, alcohol and

sodium pentothal Sodium thiopental, also known as Sodium Pentothal (a trademark of Abbott Laboratories), thiopental, thiopentone, or Trapanal (also a trademark), is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anesthetic. It is the thiobarbiturate analog of ...

Hypnosis

Declassified MKUltra documents indicate they studied

in the early 1950s. Experimental goals included creating "hypnotically induced anxieties", "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter", studying hypnosis and

polygraph A polygraph, often incorrectly referred to as a lie detector test, is a device or procedure that measures and records several physiological indicators such as blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity while a person is asked an ...

examinations, "hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects", and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis". They conducted experiments with drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde and

retrograde amnesia In neurology, retrograde amnesia (RA) is a loss of memory-access to events that occurred or information that was learned in the past. It is caused by an injury or the onset of a disease. It tends to negatively affect episodic, autobiographical, ...

while under the influence of such drugs.

Experiments on Canadians

Donald Ewen Cameron canmedaj01237-0046-a

The CIA exported experiments to Canada when they recruited British psychiatrist

Donald Ewen Cameron Donald Ewen Cameron ( – ) was a Scottish-born psychiatrist. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the . He served as president of ...

, creator of the "

psychic driving Psychic driving was a psychiatric procedure of the 1950s and 1960s in which patients were subjected to a continuously repeated audio message on a looped tape to alter their behaviour. In psychic driving, patients were often exposed to hundreds of th ...

" concept, which the CIA found interesting. Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from

Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York City ...

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...

every week to work at the

Allan Memorial Institute The Allan Memorial Institute (AMI; french: Institut Allan Memorial), also known colloquially as "The Allan", is a former psychiatric hospital and research institute located at 1025 Pine Avenue West in Montreal, Quebec. It is situated on the sl ...

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...

, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (US$579,480 in 2021, adjusted for inflation) to carry out MKUltra experiments there, the

Montreal experiments The Montreal experiments were a series of experiments, initially aimed to treat schizophrenia by changing memories and erasing the patients' thoughts using Donald Ewen Cameron's method of “psychic driving”, as well as drug-induced sleep, intens ...

. These research funds were sent to Cameron by a CIA front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and as shown in internal CIA documents, Cameron did not know the money came from the CIA. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as

electroconvulsive therapy Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment where a generalized seizure (without muscular convulsions) is electrically induced to manage refractory mental disorders.Rudorfer, MV, Henry, ME, Sackeim, HA (2003)"Electroconvulsive th ...

at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing

tape loop In music, tape loops are loops of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Originating in the 1940s with the work of Pierre Schaeffer, they were used among cont ...

s of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were often carried out on patients who entered the institute for common problems such as

anxiety disorder Anxiety disorders are a cluster of mental disorders characterized by significant and uncontrollable feelings of anxiety and fear such that a person's social, occupational, and personal function are significantly impaired. Anxiety may cause physi ...

s and

postpartum depression Postpartum depression (PPD), also called postnatal depression, is a type of mood disorder associated with childbirth, which can affect both sexes. Symptoms may include extreme sadness, low energy, anxiety, crying episodes, irritability, and cha ...

, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions. His treatments resulted in victims'

urinary incontinence Urinary incontinence (UI), also known as involuntary urination, is any uncontrolled leakage of urine. It is a common and distressing problem, which may have a large impact on quality of life. It has been identified as an important issue in geria ...

amnesia Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage or disease,Gazzaniga, M., Ivry, R., & Mangun, G. (2009) Cognitive Neuroscience: The biology of the mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. but it can also be caused temporarily by the use ...

, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents. During this era, Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the

World Psychiatric Association The World Psychiatric Association is an international umbrella organisation of psychiatric societies. Objectives and goals Originally created to produce world psychiatric congresses, it has evolved to hold regional meetings, to promote profess ...

as well as president of both the

American Psychiatric Association The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 37,000 members are involve ...

and the

Canadian Psychiatric Association Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

. Cameron was also a member of the

Nuremberg medical tribunal The Doctors' Trial (officially ''United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.'') was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of high-ranking German officials and industrialists that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone ...

in 1946–1947.

Motivation and assessments

His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist

William Sargant William Walters Sargant (24 April 1907 – 27 August 1988) was a British psychiatrist who is remembered for the evangelical zeal with which he promoted treatments such as psychosurgery, deep sleep treatment, electroconvulsive therapy and insu ...

St Thomas' Hospital St Thomas' Hospital is a large NHS teaching hospital in Central London, England. It is one of the institutions that compose the King's Health Partners, an academic health science centre. Administratively part of the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foun ...

, London, and Belmont Hospital, Sutton, who was also involved in the

Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...

and who experimented on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage. In the 1980s, several of Cameron's former patients sued the CIA for damages, which the Canadian news program '' The Fifth Estate'' documented. Their experiences and lawsuit were adapted in the 1998 television miniseries ''The Sleep Room''.

Naomi Klein Naomi A. Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofeminism, organized labour, left-wing politics and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism ...

argues in her book ''

The Shock Doctrine ''The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism'' is a 2007 book by the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton Friedman) have ri ...

'' that Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources'. In other words, torture."

Alfred W. McCoy Alfred "Al" William McCoy (born June 8, 1945) is an American historian and educator. He is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.Donald O. Hebb Donald Olding Hebb (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as l ...

's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method", referring to first creating a state of

disorientation Orientation is a function of the mind involving awareness of three dimensions: time, Location (geography), place and person. Problems with orientation lead to ''dis''orientation, and can be due to various conditions, from delirium to Substance int ...

in the subject, and then creating a situation of "self-inflicted" discomfort in which the disoriented subject can alleviate pain by capitulating.

Experiments on Danes

Unlike the US and Canada, Denmark had a centralized population register, allowing participants to be tracked over the course of several years. U.S. psychologist Zarnoff Mednick teamed up with Danish professor Fini Schulsinger to study schizophrenia progression in Danish orphans. The project grew out of QKHilltop and was later absorbed into MKUltra. In 1977, Schulsinger completed his doctoral dissertation on the project, but as MKUltra had been officially declared in the U.S. to have been discontinued with records destroyed, Schulsinger's thesis became a state secret. The children were required to undergo frequent and harsh mental health assessments for which there was no informed consent. In December 2021, radio documentarian Per Wennick discovered 36 boxes of MKUltra records stored at a psychiatric center in a Copenhagen suburb, but when he asked for access, the center shredded the records, in violation of Danish law.

Secret detention camps

In areas under American control in the early 1950s in Europe and East Asia, mostly Japan, Germany and the Philippines, the CIA created secret detention centers so that the U.S. could avoid criminal prosecution. The CIA captured people suspected of being enemy agents and other people it deemed "expendable" to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. The prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.

Revelation

In 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by

Watergate The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's continual ...

, CIA Director

ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MKUltra impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms's purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial records building and were discovered following a FOIA request in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977. In December 1974, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' alleged that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by the

, in the form of the

, and by a commission known as the

Rockefeller Commission #REDIRECT United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States {{R from move ...

that looked into the illegal domestic activities of the CIA, the

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...

and intelligence-related agencies of the military. In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential

Rockefeller Commission #REDIRECT United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States {{R from move ...

report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the

Department of Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to: Current departments of defence * Department of Defence (Australia) * Department of National Defence (Canada) * Department of Defence (Ireland) * Department of National Defense (Philipp ...

had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to find out how to influence and control human behavior through the use of

s such as LSD and

and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject,

, had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about MKUltra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973.Prepared Statement of Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence
. ParaScope. However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously and had headed MKUltra, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra. The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator

Frank Church Frank Forrester Church III (July 25, 1924 – April 7, 1984) was an Americans, American politician and lawyer. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he served as a United States Senate, United States senator from Idah ...

, concluded that "prior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects." The committee noted that the "experiments sponsored by these researchers ... call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments." Following the recommendations of the Church Committee, President

in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, among other things, prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent orders by Presidents

Carter Carter(s), or Carter's, Tha Carter, or The Carter(s), may refer to: Geography United States * Carter, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Carter, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Carter, Montana, a census-designated place * Carter ...

and

Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan ( ; February 6, 1911June 5, 2004) was an American politician, actor, and union leader who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He also served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 ...

expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation. In 1977, during a hearing held by the

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (sometimes referred to as the Intelligence Committee or SSCI) is dedicated to overseeing the United States Intelligence Community—the agencies and bureaus of the federal government of ...

, to look further into MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages, that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been incorrectly stored at a records center not usually used for such documents. These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, but much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report. On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator

Ted Kennedy Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic ...

said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of
LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...
to "unwitting subjects in social situations.

At least one death, the result of the alleged

defenestration Defenestration (from Modern Latin ) is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark that started the Thirty Years' War. Th ...

, was attributed to Olson's being subjected, without his knowledge, to such experimentation nine days before his death. The CIA itself subsequently acknowledged that these tests had little scientific rationale. The officers conducting the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers. In Canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a CBC news show, '' The Fifth Estate''. It was learned that not only had the CIA funded Cameron's efforts, but also that the Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments. This revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the CIA as their U.S. counterparts had, and the Canadian government eventually settled out of court for $100,000 to each of the 127 victims. Cameron died on September 8, 1967, after suffering a heart attack while he and his son were mountain climbing. None of Cameron's personal records of his involvement with MKUltra survived because his family destroyed them after his death.

1994 U.S. General Accounting Office report

The U.S.

General Accounting Office The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a legislative branch government agency that provides auditing, evaluative, and investigative services for the United States Congress. It is the supreme audit institution of the federal gover ...

issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances. The quote from the study: Quote fro
"Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans Health? Lessons Spanning Half A Century", part F. Hallucinogens
103rd Congress, second Session-S. Prt. 103-97; Staff Report prepared for the committee on veterans' affairs December 8, 1994 John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia, Chairman. Online copy provided by gulfweb.org, which describes itself as "Serving the Gulf War Veteran Community Worldwide Since 1994". (The same document is available fro
many other (unofficial) sites
which may or may not be independent.)

Working with the CIA, the Department of Defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named BZ. (Note 37) Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MKULTRA program, established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects

Deaths

Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known. Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of

. Olson, a

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

biochemist and

biological weapon A biological agent (also called bio-agent, biological threat agent, biological warfare agent, biological weapon, or bioweapon) is a bacterium, virus, protozoan, parasite, fungus, or toxin that can be used purposefully as a weapon in bioterroris ...

s researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November 1953, as part of a CIA experiment, and died by suicide by jumping out of a 13th-story window a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson fell to his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that had occurred during a severe psychotic episode. The CIA's own internal investigation concluded that the head of MKUltra, CIA chemist

, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson's prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to take into account Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies, which might have been exacerbated by the LSD. The Olson family disputes the official version of events. They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, about many of which he had direct personal knowledge. A few days before his death, Frank Olson quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick) because of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological weapons research. Among Olson's concerns were the development of assassination materials used by the CIA, the CIA's use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists under

Operation Paperclip Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World Wa ...

, LSD mind-control research, and the use of psychoactive drugs during "terminal" interrogations under a program code-named

Project ARTICHOKE Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project that researched interrogation methods. Preceded by Project BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE officially arose on August 20, 1951 and was operated by the ...

. Later forensic evidence conflicted with the official version of events; when Olson's body was exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window.Marks 1979: chapter 5. The medical examiner termed Olson's death a "homicide". In 1975, Olson's family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and formal apologies from President

and CIA Director

William Colby William Egan Colby (January 4, 1920 – May 6, 1996) was an American intelligence officer who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from September 1973 to January 1976. During World War II Colby served with the Office of Strateg ...

, though their apologies were limited to informed consent issues concerning Olson's ingestion of LSD. On 28 November 2012, the Olson family filed suit against the U.S. federal government for the wrongful death of Frank Olson. The case was dismissed in July 2013, due in part to the 1976 settlement between the family and government. In the decision dismissing the suit, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote, "While the court must limit its analysis to the four corners of the complaint, the skeptical reader may wish to know that the public record supports many of the allegations n the family's suit farfetched as they may sound." A 2010 book by H. P. Albarelli Jr. alleged that the

1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning The 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning, also known in French as Le Pain Maudit, was a mass poisoning on 15 August 1951, in the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in Southern France. More than 250 people were involved, including 50 people interned ...

was part of MKDELTA, that Olson was involved in that event, and that he was eventually murdered by the CIA. However, academic sources attribute the incident to ergot poisoning through a local bakery.

Legal issues involving informed consent

The revelations about the CIA and the army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting experiments without informed consent. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Frank Olson's family received $750,000 by a special act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director

met with Olson's family to apologize publicly. Previously, the CIA and the army had actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families. One subject of army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The government argued that Stanley was barred from suing under the

Feres doctrine ''Feres v. United States'', 340 U.S. 135 (1950), combined three pending federal cases for a hearing in certiorari in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the United States is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for in ...

. In 1987, the

Supreme Court A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...

affirmed this defense in a 5–4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case: ''

United States v. Stanley ''United States v. Stanley'', 483 U.S. 669 (1987), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a serviceman could not file a tort action against the federal government even though the government secretly administered doses ...

''. The majority argued that "a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters." In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of

constitutional rights A constitutional right can be a prerogative or a duty, a power or a restraint of power, recognized and established by a sovereign state or union of states. Constitutional rights may be expressly stipulated in a national constitution, or they may ...

The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects.... defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials ... began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.

Justice

Sandra Day O'Connor Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is an American retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was both the first woman nominated and th ...

, writing a separate dissent, stated:

No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential ... to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.

In another lawsuit, Wayne Ritchie, a former

United States Marshal The United States Marshals Service (USMS) is a federal law enforcement agency in the United States. The USMS is a bureau within the U.S. Department of Justice, operating under the direction of the Attorney General, but serves as the enforcem ...

, after hearing about the project's existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party which resulted in his attempting to commit a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest. While the government admitted it was, at that time, drugging people without their consent, U.S. District Judge

Marilyn Hall Patel Marilyn Hall Patel (born 1938) is a former United States federal judge, United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Patel is Indian-American, hailing from the famous Mumbai Patel famil ...

found Ritchie could not prove he was one of the victims of MKUltra or that LSD caused his robbery attempt and dismissed the case in 2005.

Notable people

Experimenters *

Harold Alexander Abramson Harold Alexander R. Abramson (November 27, 1899 – September 29, 1980) was an American physician ( clinical allergist), remembered as an early advocate of therapeutic LSD. He played a significant role in the CIA's MKULTRA program to investigat ...

Harris Isbell Harris Isbell (June 7, 1910 – December 23, 1994) was an American pharmacologist and the director of research for the NIMH Addiction Research Center at the Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky from 1945 to 1963. He did extensi ...

Martin Theodore Orne Martin Theodore Orne (October 16, 1927, Vienna, Austria – February 11, 2000, Paoli, Pennsylvania, US) was a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Orne is best known for his pioneering research into deman ...

Louis Jolyon West Louis Jolyon West (October 6, 1924 – January 2, 1999) was an American psychiatrist involved in the public sphere. In 1954, at the age of 29 and with no previous tenure-track appointment, he became a full professor and chair of psychiatry at t ...

Documented subjects * American poet

first took LSD in an experiment on

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

's campus where he could listen to records of his choice (he chose a

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

reading, a Tibetan

mandala A mandala ( sa, मण्डल, maṇḍala, circle, ) is a geometric configuration of symbols. In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of practitioners and adepts, as a spiritual guidance tool, for e ...

, and

Richard Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...

). He said the experience resulted in "a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse that." He became an outspoken advocate for psychedelics in the 1960s and, after hearing suspicions that the experiment was CIA-funded, wrote, "Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the CIA's lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control?" *

, author of '' One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'', is said to have volunteered for MKUltra experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park while he was a student at nearby Stanford University. Kesey's experiences while under the influence of LSD inspired him to promote the drug outside the context of the MKUltra experiments, which influenced the early development of

hippie A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around ...

culture. * Robert Hunter was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, translator, and poet, best known for his association with

Jerry Garcia Jerome John Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician best known for being the principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, which he co-founded and which came to prominence ...

and the

Grateful Dead The Grateful Dead was an American rock music, rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, Folk music, folk, country music, country, jazz, bluegrass music, bluegrass, ...

. Along with Ken Kesey, Hunter was said to be an early volunteer MKUltra test subject at Stanford University. Stanford test subjects were paid to take

, and

, then report on their experiences. These experiences were creatively formative for Hunter: Alleged subjects * Boston mobster

James "Whitey" Bulger James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. (; September 3, 1929 – October 30, 2018) was an American organized crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Bos ...

alleged he had been subjected to weekly injections of LSD and subsequent testing while in prison in Atlanta in 1957. *

Ted Kaczynski Theodore John Kaczynski ( ; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (), is an American domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide ...

, an American domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, was said to be a subject of a voluntary psychological study alleged by some sources to have been a part of MKUltra. As a sophomore at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment", led by Harvard psychologist

Henry Murray Henry Alexander Murray (May 13, 1893 – June 23, 1988) was an American psychologist at Harvard University, where from 1959 to 1962 he conducted a series of psychologically damaging and purposefully abusive experiments on minors and under ...

. In total, Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study. * Lawrence Teeter, the attorney for

Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (; ar, سرحان بشارة سرحان ''Sirḥān Bišāra Sirḥān'', born March 19, 1944) is a Palestinian Jordanian man who was convicted for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy, a United States Sena ...

, believed that Sirhan was "operating under MK-ULTRA mind control techniques" when he assassinated

Robert F. Kennedy Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...

. *

Marshall Applewhite Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. (May 17, 1931 – March 26, 1997), also known as Do, among other names, was an American cult leader who founded what became known as the Heaven's Gate cult group and organized their mass suicide in 1997 ...

, leader of the Heavens Gate Cult, is reputed to have been an MKUltra subject while in the Army in the 1950s, and is mentioned as such by Dr. West in recorded video. *

Charles Manson Charles Milles Manson (; November 12, 1934November 19, 2017) was an American criminal and musician who led the Manson Family, a cult based in California, in the late 1960s. Some of the members committed a series of nine murders at four loca ...

has been tied to MKULTRA by author Tom O'Neil, beginning with his time in prison, when Manson took part in drug-induced psychological experiments run by the federal government. This continued through his ongoing connection to the CIA's Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco once out of prison in 1967.

Aftermath

After retiring in 1972, Gottlieb dismissed his entire effort for the CIA's MKUltra program as useless. The CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned.

In popular culture

MKUltra plays a part in many

conspiracy theories A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources: * * * * The term has a nega ...

due to its nature and the destruction of most records.

Music

* The seventh track on

Muse In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses ( grc, Μοῦσαι, Moûsai, el, Μούσες, Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the ...

's 2009 album The Resistance is titled MK Ultra.

Television

* The 1998 CBC miniseries ''

The Sleep Room ''The Sleep Room'' is a 1998 Canadian television movie about experiments on Canadian mental patients that were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by Donald Ewen Cameron and funded by the CIA's MKUltra program. It originally aired as a miniseries a ...

'' dramatizes brainwashing experiments funded by MKUltra that were performed on Canadian mental patients in the 1950s and 60s, and their subsequent efforts to sue the CIA. * In season 2, episode 19 of ''

Bones A bone is a rigid organ that constitutes part of the skeleton in most vertebrate animals. Bones protect the various other organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells, store minerals, provide structure and support for the body, an ...

'', " Spaceman in a Crater", Jack Hodgins mentions that

was an unwitting participant and committed suicide, but that an exhumation 45 years later proved he was murdered. *'' Wormwood'' is a 2017 American six-part

docudrama Docudrama (or documentary drama) is a genre of television and film, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. It is described as a hybrid of documentary and drama and "a fact-based representation of real event". Docudramas typic ...

miniseries A miniseries or mini-series is a television series that tells a story in a predetermined, limited number of episodes. "Limited series" is another more recent US term which is sometimes used interchangeably. , the popularity of miniseries format h ...

directed by

Errol Morris Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of its subjects. In 2003, his documentary film '' The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamar ...

and released on

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...

. The series is based on the life of the scientist

and his involvement in Project MKUltra. *''

Stranger Things ''Stranger Things'' is an American science fiction horror drama television series created by the Duffer Brothers, who also serve as showrunners and are executive producers along with Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen. Produced by Monkey Massacre Prod ...

'' contains several fictional characters related to the MKUltra project, such as

Eleven Eleven or 11 may refer to: *11 (number), the natural number following 10 and preceding 12 * one of the years 11 BC, AD 11, 1911, 2011, or any year ending in 11 Literature * ''Eleven'' (novel), a 2006 novel by British author David Llewellyn *'' ...

, Kali, and Henry Creel.

Video games

* '' Call of Duty: Black Ops'' and '' Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War'' feature characters subjected to the MKUltra Program, primarily Alex Mason and Bell.

Notes

References

External links

Entire Four CD-ROM set of CIA / MKUltra Declassified documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), image format
''The Black Vault'' * MKUltra Declassified documents, PDF format
U.S. Supreme Court, ''CIA v. Sims'', 471 U.S. 159 (1985) 471 U.S. 159
''

Findlaw FindLaw is a business of Thomson Reuters that provides online legal information and online marketing services for law firms. FindLaw was created by Stacy Stern, Martin Roscheisen, and Tim Stanley in 1995, and was acquired by Thomson West in 2001. ...

''
U.S. Supreme Court, ''United States v. Stanley'', 483 U.S. 669 (1987) 483 U.S. 669
''

''
Mind Control and MKULTRA
by Richard G. Gall

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20050421233209/http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/church-committee-drugtesting-report.htm XXVII. Testing and Use of Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community]
List of MKULTRA Unclassified Documents including subprojects
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mkultra 1953 establishments in the United States Central Intelligence Agency operations Code names Cover-ups Devices to alter consciousness History of the government of the United States Human subject research in the United States Investigations and hearings of the United States Congress Lysergic acid diethylamide American medical research 20th-century military history of the United States Military psychiatry Mind control Psychedelic drug research American secret government programs Human rights abuses in the United States Medical experimentation on prisoners Academic scandals Torture in the United States Psychoactive drugs and the military Clandestine operations CIA cryptonyms Medical scandals in the United States

Background

Origin of project

Origin of cryptonym

Aims and leadership

Scale of project

Applications

Other related projects

Experiments on Americans

LSD

Other drugs

Hypnosis

Experiments on Canadians

Motivation and assessments

Experiments on Danes

Secret detention camps

Revelation

1994 U.S. General Accounting Office report

Deaths

Legal issues involving informed consent

Notable people

Aftermath

In popular culture

Music

Television

Video games

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links