MK-ULTRA

MK-ULTRA was an illegal mind-control research program that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operated between 1953 and 1964. The CIA conducted experiments using high doses of LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation on subjects who often had no idea that they were part of a covert test. The ultimate goal was to find a way to erase the memory and then control the mind as a tool in fighting the Cold War. In his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, author and journalist Stephen Kinzer called the program “essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps,” in part because Nazi doctors and others who had worked in those environments were recruited to continue their research as part of the program. Fearing discovery, the CIA destroyed most records of the experiments in 1973, but details of the program later emerged through congressional and journalistic investigations.

Program’s beginnings

The roots of MK-ULTRA go back to U.S. Pres. Harry Truman’s administration, when the CIA launched Project Bluebird, its original mind-control program. Allen Dulles, who became the head of the CIA’s covert operations in 1951, latched onto Bluebird. He sent an early memo to Frank Wisner, a senior officer who was helping to oversee the program, saying that he wanted to explore “augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc.” Under Dulles’s leadership, the CIA began opening its own secret prisons in West Germany and Japan, where it experimented on prisoners with no oversight. Advising this early research was Gen. Walter Schreiber, the former surgeon general of the Nazi army, who had approved experiments at the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Dulles became convinced that the Soviet Union had already developed mind-control tactics. There were rumors that the U.S.S.R. could program people to make false confessions and possibly train them to kill on command. Dulles saw the Bluebird research as increasingly urgent, and in August 1951 he ordered that the program be expanded and intensified. He renamed it Artichoke.

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Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist who had recently joined the CIA as its top drug expert, was tasked with overseeing the research. Gottlieb and his colleagues set about finding a drug that would act as a “truth serum” in investigations and would make it possible to reprogram people and then wipe their memories clear.

Experimenting with LSD

Gottlieb learned that cocaine, heroin, and mescaline had failed in prior government experiments, so he turned to LSD. In 1953 he arranged for the CIA to spend $240,000 to buy the world’s entire supply of the drug. The agency later arranged for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company to replicate the formula, so it had an endless supply. Gottlieb distributed LSD to hospitals, clinics, and other institutions, asking them to give it to patients and see how they reacted. He did this through fake foundations, so many institutions carrying out these experiments never knew they were doing the work of the CIA. Some of the those who participated in the experiments amounted to a who’s who of the ’50s and ’60s counterculture movements, including author Ken Kesey, poet Allen Ginsberg, and members of the Grateful Dead. It was also used heavily on prisoners, mentally ill people, and people experiencing addiction—“people who could not fight back,” as one CIA officer put it.

In April 1953 the mind-control program was expanded and intensified once again and was given the name MK-ULTRA, reflecting what Dulles called its “ultra-sensitive nature.”

In 1957 Whitey Bulger was incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary after being convicted of truck hijacking and armed robbery. Bulger would go on to become known as a leading organized crime boss in Boston, but in the late 1950s he agreed to participate in an experiment that he was told was intended to cure schizophrenia. In exchange for participating he and other incarcerated people would receive time off their sentences. As part of the experiment, the subjects were given LSD almost daily for 15 months. The results, as Bulger described them, were horrific:

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Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me.

The program expanded over the next decade and came to include 149 subprojects. At least 80 institutions, 44 universities and colleges, and 185 researchers were involved in some capacity.

Research methods and results

Despite its size and scope, the program operated in extreme secrecy; fewer than half a dozen agency leaders knew about it at any given time. This meant that Gottlieb’s power was essentially unchecked. He was allowed to bring in prisoners from across the United States and around the world and subject them to torture and other experiments. He was never expected to formally report on his work.

However, the research never produced the results that Gottlieb, Dulles, and others were hoping for. By the early ’60s Gottlieb was beginning to give up on it. He wrote in a 1960 memo that “no effective knockout pill, truth serum, aphrodisiac, or recruitment pill was known to exist.” He had learned that through drugs, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and other abuse, it was possible to destroy a human mind—but not to “open the wiped-away mind to control by an outsider,” Kinzer wrote. The program wound down in 1963 and in 1964 was replaced with a tamer project called MK-SEARCH.

Destroying the evidence

Nine years later most records of the program were destroyed. In late 1972 U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon told Richard Helms, the CIA director, that he would be replaced after the upcoming inauguration. Before Helms left office, he summoned Gottlieb for a meeting. They agreed that the MK-ULTRA files would be purged—to avoid public outrage and likely to ensure that no one would be prosecuted. The chief of the CIA records center balked at Helms’s order to destroy the documents, so Gottlieb drove to the facility in person. Ultimately seven boxes of MK-ULTRA progress reports were shredded.

However, other files dealing with the program were later discovered. The reporter Seymour Hersh revealed the existence of MK-ULTRA in a 1974 New York Times story. Three government investigations followed, but they were hampered by the destruction of the documents. No researchers were ever federally investigated.

The program was the subject of the 2022 movie MK ULTRA, directed by Joseph Sorrentino.