1953. The Cold War was hot. The CIA was paranoid. American POWs had come back from Korea praising communism. Confessing to crimes they didn’t commit.
The CIA believed the Soviets had cracked it. Mind control. Brainwashing. A way to rewrite a human being.
America needed it too. Or they’d lose the war before it started.
Allen Dulles gave a speech at Princeton. Called it “brain warfare.” Said the Soviets were doing it. Never mentioned America was about to do it first.
On April 13, 1953, Dulles approved Project MKUltra.
In charge: Sidney Gottlieb. Chemist. PhD from Caltech. Club foot. Stutterer. Drank goat’s milk. Grew Christmas trees on his farm.
Looked like a gentle eccentric. Was the most dangerous man in American intelligence.
They called him the Black Sorcerer. He designed poisoned cigars for Castro. Poisoned handkerchiefs. Exploding seashells. Toothpaste laced with toxins.
MKUltra was his project. His vision. His playground.
The goal was simple. Find a drug that could control minds. Erase memories. Force confessions. Create the perfect spy. The perfect assassin.
They tried everything.
LSD. Mescaline. Heroin. Barbiturates. Scopolamine. Electroshock. Sensory deprivation. Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation for weeks. Verbal abuse. Sexual abuse. Isolation chambers.
149 subprojects. Funneled through fake foundations. Front companies. So universities wouldn’t know they were taking CIA money.
Over 80 institutions. 185 researchers. Harvard. Stanford. Columbia. Johns Hopkins.
None of them told the subjects what was happening. Most subjects didn’t know they were subjects.
Here’s what they did.
They dosed prisoners. Drug addicts in a federal facility in Kentucky got LSD for 77 straight days. Black inmates. Given LSD continuously for over two months.
Just to see what would happen.
They dosed mental patients. Terminal cancer patients. Soldiers. Students who signed up for “paid research.”
They dosed each other. CIA agents at a 1953 work retreat had their drinks spiked. No warning. Just dosed.
One of them was Frank Olson. 43 years old. Army scientist. Biological weapons expert.
The LSD broke him. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. Told his wife: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Nine days after being dosed, Frank Olson went through a 10th-floor hotel window. November 28, 1953.
The CIA said suicide. Said the drugs made him do it.
In 1994, his son had the body exhumed. Forensic pathologist found a hematoma above the left eye. No glass in his hair. Injuries inconsistent with falling through a window.
The medical examiner changed the ruling. Homicide.
Frank Olson didn’t jump. Someone hit him. Then threw him out the window.
Because he knew too much. And was about to talk.
But Olson was just the famous one.
Operation Midnight Climax. Subproject 3.
The CIA rented apartments in San Francisco and New York. Set them up as safehouses. Hired prostitutes. Paid them $100 a night.
The prostitutes brought men back to the apartments. Dosed their drinks with LSD. Random targets. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Anyone they could get.
Behind a two-way mirror sat CIA agents. Drinking martinis. Watching. Taking notes.
The operation ran ten years. Hundreds of victims. All dosed without consent. All watched like animals.
The man in charge was George Hunter White. Federal narcotics agent. Installed a portable toilet behind the mirror so he never had to leave.
He wrote a letter to Gottlieb years later:
“I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
That’s what this was. Fun. For the people running it.
Meanwhile, in Montreal.
Dr. Ewen Cameron ran the Allan Memorial Institute. Former president of the World Psychiatric Association.
The CIA funded him. Funneled money through a front foundation.
Cameron called his experiments “psychic driving.” He put patients in drug-induced comas. Up to 86 days at a time.
While they slept, he played tape loops. Phrases repeated tens of thousands of times. Designed to break their minds.
Then “depatterning.” Massive doses of electroshock. 30 to 40 times the normal amount. Combined with LSD. PCP. Barbiturates.
The goal: erase the personality completely. Rebuild it from scratch.
It didn’t work. He destroyed them instead.
Patients came out unable to read. Unable to remember their children. Unable to control basic bodily functions. Adults reduced to infant states.
These were people who’d gone to him for anxiety. Mild depression. Normal disorders.
They left broken. Many never recovered.
Cameron died in 1967. Never prosecuted. Obituary praised his contributions to psychiatry.
The program kept going. Year after year. Victim after victim.
Some survivors figured out what had happened. Most didn’t. Most went to their graves thinking they’d gone crazy on their own.
Not knowing a government chemist had broken their minds for an experiment that never worked.
Because it didn’t work.
After 20 years and millions of dollars, the CIA never created a Manchurian Candidate. Never found a truth serum. Never figured out mind control.
All they did was torture people for nothing.
In 1973, Richard Helms knew the scandal was coming. Watergate had broken. Congress was starting to look.
Helms was CIA Director. He ordered Gottlieb to destroy every MKUltra file.
They shredded everything. Every experiment. Every subject. Every name. Gone.
They thought they’d gotten away with it.
Then in 1977, a CIA clerk found 20,000 pages. Misfiled under financial records. Missed the shredder.
Those pages became the Church Committee hearings. America learned about MKUltra for the first time.
Over 30 universities involved. Covert drug tests on unwitting citizens. At every social level. High and low.
Sidney Gottlieb was called to testify. Claimed he didn’t remember. Couldn’t recall specifics.
No one went to prison. Not Gottlieb. Not Helms. Not Dulles. Not Cameron. Not White.
Gottlieb retired to Virginia. Grew organic vegetables. Volunteered at a hospice. Practiced folk dancing.
Died in 1999. Age 80. In his own bed. Peacefully.
The victims didn’t get that.
Thousands of Americans and Canadians used as test subjects. Without consent. Without knowledge. Without follow-up care.
Many were poor. Many were incarcerated. Many were mentally ill. Many were minorities.
Chosen because no one would believe them. No one would defend them. No one would miss them.
Some killed themselves. Some spent years in mental hospitals. Some never recovered.
We will never know how many. The files are gone. Gottlieb burned them.
Here’s what makes this unforgivable.
This wasn’t a foreign enemy. Wasn’t a rogue agent. This was official US policy. Approved at the highest levels. Funded with taxpayer money.
American citizens. Drugged. Raped. Tortured. Driven mad. By their own government. For nothing.
And the men who did it faced no consequences. No prison. No disgrace. Died rich. Died respected.
The victims died screaming. In bedrooms and mental wards and hotel windows. Their names never said out loud.
MKUltra wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was real. It happened. Proven in Senate hearings. The CIA admitted it. The President apologized.
And almost no one was punished.
The United States government ran a torture program against its own people for 20 years.
Destroyed the evidence.
Got away with it.
There is actually more to MK Ultra than this. The Netflix Series “Stranger Things” is more of a documentary about SOME of the results of MK Ultra. One “success” of the torture is that “sometimes” latent psychic abilities are found in the process. When such occurs, it is weaponized.