Of all the various covert operations undertaken by the CIA throughout the years, perhaps none has ever penetrated the American consciousness—both literally and figuratively—quite like Project MKUltra.
What is Project MKUltra?
“During the early period of the Cold War,” writes Terry Gross at NPR, “the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.”
MKUltra began in 1953 and lasted for two decades before it was finally curtailed. It was preceded by and overlapped with various other CIA operations including Project Artichoke, Operation Paperclip, and others. Based in part on Nazi experiments performed at Dachau and Auschwitz, the goal was “to eliminate the will of the person examined.”
The Nazis had used drugs such as mescaline to try to achieve this result, while MKUltra employed a number of other techniques, including administering LSD and other chemicals, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and more. The project was headed by CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb.
“Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people’s minds,” says journalist Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, “and he realized it was a two-part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn’t get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one.”
MKUltra and a Legacy of Secrets and Lies
Project MKUltra was conducted in secret, often without the knowledge or consent of the participants, in places ranging from American military bases to colleges and universities to secret overseas detention centers known as black sites. The secrecy surrounding Project MKUltra didn’t end when the program did, either.
By 1973, the Watergate scandal was having government-wide repercussions, including for the CIA. Richard Helms, formerly the director of the CIA, had been removed by President Nixon for his refusal to help cover up the Watergate scandal and, according to Kinzer, Helms was virtually the only person who “had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing” with Project MKUltra.
“So, as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA,” Kinzer told NPR. “Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records.”
Though some undestroyed documents—around 20,000—were later discovered by a Freedom of Information Act in 1977, this “effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early ‘70s was quite successful,” leaving much of MKUltra’s activities the subject of speculation, rather than fact.
Because it became so difficult to prove just what MKUltra had and hadn’t done, the project became a cornerstone of conspiracy theories and sometimes wild speculation, linking the program to any number of hypothetical and fictional scenarios. But while the real legacy of MKUltra may never be fully known, there are plenty of instances in which truth remains stranger than fiction.
What Did Project MKUltra Do?
Though many of the details of Project MKUltra remain shrouded in secrecy and may never been fully exposed, those 20,000 documents recovered during a Senate investigation in 1977 paint a stark portrait of experiments which “tested drugs (like LSD), sensory deprivation, hypnotism and electroshock on everyone from agency operatives to prostitutes, recovering drug addicts and prisoners – often without their consent.”
The goal of all of these methods, according to journalist Edward Hunter, was to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet – a human robot – without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”
While many people believe that the goal of MKUltra was to create Manchurian Candidate-style sleeper agents—an idea popularized in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, later adapted into the hit John Frankenheimer film in 1962—historian Alfred W. McCoy argues that the goal of these sorts of “ridiculous” programs was actually to distract the public from the real purpose of MKUltra: finding more effective methods of interrogation.
It is impossible to say how widespread these programs truly were, but one lasting legacy of MKUltra was the introduction of LSD into America. “In the early 1950s,” says Kinzer, Gottlieb “arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world’s entire supply of LSD. He brought it to the United States, and began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control,” making Gottlieb “the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.”
Leaving Torture and Death in its Wake
There were even darker sides to MKUltra, as well. Torture techniques later used on prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were pioneered by Project MKUltra, which recruited Nazi scientists and war criminals brought to the States as part of Operation Paperclip. Kinzer calls MKUltra “essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.”
While some of the unwitting subjects of MKUltra include such famous figures as gangster Whitey Bulger and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, not everyone who was subjected to these experiments survived to tell the tale. The most infamous death associated with the project was that of Frank Olson, an Army biochemist who died by defenestration several weeks after having been dosed with LSD as part of the project. Though his death was initially regarded as a suicide, subsequent evidence has since come to light suggesting that Olson may have been murdered.
Nor was he the only one. “We don’t know how many people died,” Kinzer tells NPR, “but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed.”
Featured image via LAist
