MKUltra

• 1. Introduction

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  MKUltra was the CIA's secret program of human experimentation, and in 1973 its own agency tried to erase it. Director Richard Helms ordered every file destroyed, just as the Watergate scandal sent Washington into a panic. The order worked almost completely. Yet roughly 20,000 pages survived, because they had been filed by mistake in a records center that did not normally hold such papers. Those stray pages are a large part of why the story can be told at all.

  Over two decades, MKUltra searched for drugs and techniques that could change how a human being thinks and behaves. Who ordered it, and what did its scientists hope to build? Who sat on the receiving end, and what did the experiments do to them? When the secret finally broke, what could Congress, the courts and the presidents of the time actually do about it?

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• 2. Cold War Origins

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  On the 13th of April 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles gave the order that started MKUltra, and the chemist Sidney Gottlieb took charge. The name was a cryptonym. The letters MK stood for the Office of Technical Service, while Ultra was simply a word picked from a dictionary. The stated goal was to find mind-controlling drugs to use against the Soviet bloc. The trigger was a belief that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean interrogators had used mind control on American prisoners during the Korean War.

  The English journalist Rupert Cornwell described the CIA of that time as gripped by paranoia. The United States had lost its nuclear monopoly, and fear of communism was at its height. Counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was convinced that a mole had reached the agency's highest levels. Millions of dollars went into studies of how to control the mind and pry information from people who resisted. Planners also wanted to use the same tools on captives, and they devised several schemes to drug Fidel Castro.

  The idea of a truth drug was older than the CIA's version. In 1943 the Office of Strategic Services began work on a drug meant to produce what it called uninhibited truthfulness. In 1947 the Navy launched Project CHATTER, which carried out the first tests of LSD on human subjects. In 1950 the CIA, under General Walter Bedell Smith, started its own interrogation projects, beginning with Project Bluebird. It was renamed Project Artichoke on the 20th of August 1951. Under Brigadier General Paul F. Gaynor, Artichoke asked whether a person could be made to attempt an assassination against their will. Morphine, mescaline and LSD were given to CIA agents who did not know it, in an effort to produce amnesia.

  The historian Stephen Kinzer saw an even darker ancestor. During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists at Auschwitz and Dachau tested barbiturates, morphine derivatives and mescaline on prisoners, seeking a truth serum. One laboratory assistant to the Dachau scientist Kurt Plötner said the aim was to "eliminate the will of the person examined." Kinzer argued that MKUltra continued this work, and he pointed to its use of mescaline on unwitting people. Under Operation Paperclip, the United States hired many Nazi scientists after the war, and Kurt Blome became involved in MKUltra.

  Some historians say a goal of the program was to build a subject like the one in the novel The Manchurian Candidate. The historian Alfred W. McCoy offers a different reading. He claims the CIA wanted attention fixed on such ridiculous projects so that the public would not notice the real aim, which was better interrogation. One scheme, Subproject 54, was the Navy's secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which would have used sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory. It was never carried out. Other subprojects were. Together with related programs, they added up to more than 150 funded research efforts, spread across more than 80 institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. Many were reached through front organizations, though some officials at the institutions knew who was behind the money. Estimates put the spending at $10 million or more, roughly $87.5 million in today's money.

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• 3. The LSD Gamble

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  In 1938, Albert Hofmann isolated LSD at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. A decade and a half later, MKUltra's early directors learned of it and saw a possible tool for mind control. In the early 1950s, Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to buy the entire existing supply for $240,000. In 1953 the agency also considered buying 10 kilograms, enough for 100 million doses, partly to keep other countries from controlling the supply. Documents later obtained by the author John D. Marks showed that the CIA did buy some quantities from Sandoz.

  Once the program started, the CIA tested LSD on mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes. One agency officer described them as "people who could not fight back." A mental patient in Kentucky was dosed for 174 days. At the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center, also in Kentucky, seven drug-addicted African-American participants received LSD for 77 consecutive days. Participation was sometimes consensual, and those volunteers seem to have been chosen for the harshest experiments. Heroin addicts were bribed with more heroin. Soldiers who took the drugs were threatened with court-martial if they talked. Experiments done without informed consent violated the Nuremberg Code, which the United States had pledged to follow after World War II.

  In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up brothels inside agency safehouses in San Francisco. The aim was to attract men who would be too embarrassed to talk about what happened. The men were dosed with LSD, the rooms had one-way mirrors, and the sessions were filmed for later study. Elsewhere, unwitting subjects were questioned under bright lights while doctors took notes. Interrogators told them their trips would be extended if they refused to give up their secrets. Long-term harm and several deaths followed.

  Gottlieb himself had a different use in mind. Because LSD wears off, he reasoned that it could be slipped to high-ranking officials to disturb meetings and speeches. To learn how it behaved outside a laboratory, he began giving it to people in ordinary settings without warning. At first everyone in Technical Services tried it, watching a partner for hours and taking notes. Later, outsiders were dosed with no explanation, and a surprise acid trip became an occupational hazard for CIA operatives. One operative received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, D.C., seeing a monster in every passing car.

  By 1962, the CIA and the Army had developed stronger hallucinogens, among them the highly touted BZ. Researchers had come to see LSD as too unpredictable to control. They dropped the hope that it was the secret that would unlock the universe, though it kept a role in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. As the new drugs took over, many academics and private researchers pulled out of the program.

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• 4. Beyond the Needle

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  One experimental technique used two intravenous lines at once. A barbiturate went into one arm, and the moment the subject began to drift off, an amphetamine flowed into the other. The records list many other substances, including heroin, morphine, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, alcohol and sodium pentothal. Temazepam was used under the code name MKSEARCH. A 1955 MKUltra document sets out a wish list of goals. It names cognitive enhancers, disease mimics, euphoriants "without letdown," and agents that would diminish ambition. How much of this was tested is unclear, since most of the drug files were deliberately destroyed.

  Hypnosis drew attention in the early 1950s. Declassified papers describe goals such as creating "hypnotically induced anxieties" and studying how personality relates to susceptibility to hypnosis. Researchers also wanted to improve recall of complicated written material and arrangements of objects. They combined hypnosis with drugs, and tested memory loss in both directions while subjects were under the influence.

  The Army ran its own LSD testing in three phases. The first involved more than 1,000 soldiers who volunteered for chemical warfare experiments. The second used 96 volunteers, to judge whether the drug had intelligence uses. The third phase included Project Third Chance and Project Derby Hat, which dosed 16 unwitting nonvolunteers and then interrogated them as field tests.

  In the early 1950s, in American-controlled areas of Europe and East Asia, the CIA reportedly set up secret detention centers. They were located mostly in Japan, West Germany and the Philippines, and they let the United States avoid criminal prosecution. Suspected enemy agents and people considered expendable were held there. Prisoners were drugged, given electroshocks, exposed to extreme temperatures and kept in sensory isolation. The earlier Project Bluebird had reportedly been used on North Korean prisoners of war in October 1950. According to documents released by the National Security Archive in 2024-2025, it aimed at "controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation."

  The Church Committee later found that in a related program called MKDELTA, drugs served mainly to aid interrogations. They were also used for harassment, discrediting and disabling. In 1964 a continuation named MKSEARCH was created, with two branches called MKOFTEN and MKCHICKWIT. It was funded from 1965 to 1971 as a joint effort of the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA to find new incapacitating agents. By March 1971, more than 26,000 potential agents had been collected for screening. Meanwhile, a separate thread had opened years earlier, in January 1957, when the CIA created Subproject 68 at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

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• 5. The Montreal Experiments

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  Every week, the Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron traveled from Albany, New York, to Montreal. There he worked at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University. From 1957 to 1964 he was paid $69,000 to carry out MKUltra experiments, roughly $766,936 in 2024 dollars. The money passed through a CIA front, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and internal documents show that Cameron did not know the CIA was the source. The agency was drawn to his concept of "psychic driving." He hoped to cure schizophrenia by erasing a patient's existing memories and reprogramming the mind.

  Psychic driving meant playing recorded messages to patients without pause while they were under powerful drugs such as LSD or barbiturates. A second method, "depatterning," aimed to break down the existing personality. Cameron also tried paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. In his "driving" experiments, patients were kept in drug-induced comas for weeks, in one case up to three months, while tape loops played noise or simple repeated statements.

  Many of his patients had come in with ordinary troubles such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression. Many suffered permanent damage. Victims lost bladder control, lost their memories, forgot how to talk, forgot their parents, or came to believe that their interrogators were their parents.

  Cameron's reputation was enormous. He was the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association and president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. He had also served on the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946-1947. In Britain, the psychiatrist William Sargant paralleled his work at St Thomas' Hospital in London and Belmont Hospital in Sutton, treating patients without consent and causing similar long-term harm. Sargant acted as a consultant for MI5, but no evidence links his deep sleep treatment to intelligence services.

  More than one writer has argued that mind control was never the real purpose. Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, says Cameron's research was about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources'. In other words, torture." Alfred W. McCoy writes that, stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron's work built on an earlier breakthrough by Donald O. Hebb. In McCoy's view, it laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method. The first stage disorients the subject, and the second creates self-inflicted discomfort that the subject can end only by giving in.

  In Canada, the truth took much longer to emerge. It became widely known in 1984 through the CBC news show The Fifth Estate. The program revealed that the Canadian government had known about the CIA funding and had later given Cameron another $500,000. This undercut the victims' efforts to sue the CIA the way their American counterparts had. The Canadian government eventually settled out of court, paying $100,000 to each of 127 victims. Cameron died on the 8th of September 1967 of a heart attack while mountain climbing with his son. His family destroyed his personal records of the MKUltra work. A 1986 report found that Canadian officials had not fully understood his experiments. In the 1980s several former patients sued the CIA, and their story became the 1998 miniseries The Sleep Room. In 2025 the Quebec Superior Court authorized a class action over the Montreal experiments, naming as representatives a survivor admitted to the institute at age 15 and a relative of a deceased patient.

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• 6. The Death of Frank Olson

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  Frank Olson was an Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher who worked at Detrick, Maryland, later called Fort Detrick. In 1953, a few days before he died, he resigned as acting chief of the Special Operations Division. He was in a severe moral crisis over his work. His worries included the development of assassination materials for the CIA, the use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, and tests of biological weapons in populated areas. He also objected to collaboration with former Nazi scientists, to LSD mind-control research, and to psychoactive drugs used in "terminal" interrogations under Project Artichoke. According to Stephen Kinzer, Olson had asked to resign from the CIA after doubting the morality of the project.

  In November 1953, Olson was given LSD without his knowledge as part of a CIA experiment. He had never taken the drug before. Days later he fell from the window of a hotel room on the 13th floor in New York City. A CIA doctor assigned to watch him said he had been asleep in another bed in the room. At the time, officials described the death as a suicide during a severe psychotic episode.

  The CIA's own internal investigation concluded that Gottlieb had run the experiment with Olson's prior knowledge. Neither Olson nor the other men taking part were told what the drug was until about 20 minutes after they swallowed it. The report said Gottlieb deserved a reprimand, because he had failed to consider Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies, which the LSD might have worsened. The experiments carried on regardless.

  In 1975, Olson's family received a $750,000 settlement, along with formal apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby. Those apologies covered only the question of informed consent over the LSD. Then in 1994 Olson's body was exhumed. Cranial injuries showed that he had been knocked unconscious before he went through the window, which contradicted the CIA's long-standing account. The medical examiner called the death a "homicide."

  Since 2001 or earlier, the Olson family has argued that he was murdered. They say that after his LSD experience he had become a security risk who might expose secrets of highly classified CIA programs he knew firsthand. A 2010 book went further, alleging that the 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning in France was part of MKDELTA, that Olson was involved in it, and that the CIA eventually murdered him. On the 28th of November 2012 the family sued the federal government for wrongful death. The case was dismissed in July 2013, partly because of the earlier settlement. Judge James Boasberg added a note for the skeptical reader: "the public record supports many of the allegations in the family's suit, far-fetched as they may sound."

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• 7. Congress and the Courts

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  In December 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA had carried out illegal domestic activities during the 1960s, including experiments on American citizens. That report set off the Church Committee, named for Senator Frank Church, and the Rockefeller Commission appointed by President Gerald Ford. In the summer of 1975 their reports revealed to the public that the CIA and the Department of Defense had experimented on both unwitting and aware human subjects. Much of what they learned came from a 1963 Inspector General's report that escaped the destruction order, though it held little detail. Gottlieb, retired for two years, was interviewed but claimed to remember very little. The Church Committee concluded that "prior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects."

  In 1976, Ford issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities. It banned drug experiments on human subjects unless each person gave informed consent in writing, witnessed by a disinterested party. Later orders from Presidents Carter and Reagan widened the ban to cover any human experimentation.

  In 1977, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, told a Senate committee about the surviving records. They concerned mostly the financing of projects, yet they taught investigators far more than the 1963 report had. About 700 pages of new information in those files showed that experiments had continued until Gottlieb ordered the program halted on the 10th of July 1972. Gottlieb had retired that year and dismissed his whole MKUltra effort as useless. On the Senate floor, Senator Ted Kennedy said the CIA's deputy director had revealed testing on unwitting citizens at over thirty universities and institutions. Kennedy added that the CIA itself acknowledged the tests had little scientific rationale and that the monitoring officers were not qualified scientific observers.

  A 1994 report from the General Accounting Office, issued on the 28th of September, found that between 1940 and 1974 the Department of Defense and other agencies had tested hazardous substances and radiation on hundreds of thousands of people. The Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs added that, between 1953 and 1964, MKUltra consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting people. A 1977 Senate report conceded that the full impact of the experiments, including deaths, may never be known.

  The courtroom record is mixed. In CIA v. Sims in 1985, the Supreme Court accepted the "mosaic effect" argument. Under Exemption 3 of the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA could withhold even harmless-looking MKUltra details, because combined disclosures might expose intelligence sources. In 1987, United States v. Stanley dismissed the suit of James Stanley, an Army sergeant used in drug experiments, under the Feres doctrine. The vote was 5-4. Justice William Brennan, dissenting, wrote that the Nuremberg trials had taught the world that experimenting on unknowing people is morally and legally unacceptable. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in a separate dissent, said the least society could do was compensate the victims.

  In another case, Wayne Ritchie, a former United States Marshal, learned of MKUltra in 1990. He alleged the CIA had laced his drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party, leading him to attempt a bar robbery. The government admitted it was drugging people at that time, and that his behavior fit someone on LSD. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel still dismissed the case in 2005, because Ritchie could not prove he was a victim or that LSD caused the attempt. Some plaintiffs elsewhere did win compensation through court order, settlement or acts of Congress.

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• 8. Famous Subjects

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  Allen Ginsberg first took LSD in an experiment at Stanford University, where he could choose records to hear. He picked a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala mantra and Richard Wagner. The experience left what he called "a slight paranoia" that stayed with him through the mid-1960s, until meditation taught him to disperse it. He later became an outspoken advocate of psychedelics. After hearing suspicions that the experiment was funded by the CIA, he wrote, "Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the CIA's lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control?"

  Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, took part through an invitation from Vik Lovell, a Stanford psychology graduate student. Kesey worked as a night aide at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital, where the CIA-financed study tested LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT and DMT. His experiences under LSD led him to promote the drug outside the experiments, which influenced the early development of hippie culture. Robert Hunter, the lyricist best known for his work with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, was also said to be an early volunteer at Stanford. Subjects there were paid to take drugs and report on their experiences. Hunter's account of one trip ends with the line "By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane."

  Not every subject came out transformed. Harold Blauer, an American tennis player, died after injections of a drug related to MDMA at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He had checked in voluntarily for depression after a divorce.

  Several famous names are only alleged subjects. The crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger said he received weekly LSD injections in an Atlanta prison in 1957. Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber, spent 200 hours in a Harvard study led by the psychologist Henry Murray, which the author Alston Chase called "purposely brutalizing." Some sources link that study to MKUltra. Sirhan Sirhan's attorney, Lawrence Teeter, believed his client was under MKUltra mind control when he assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. The author Tom O'Neil has tied Charles Manson to government drug experiments, beginning in prison.

  The missing records have made MKUltra a favorite of conspiracy theories, including the idea that such experiments continue today. Fiction has taken up the subject too. The 2009 film The Killing Room, the series Granite Flats from 2013 to 2015, and John Burdett's novel The Bangkok Asset all draw on it. A critic wrote that parts of Stranger Things were inspired by MKUltra, and Will Wood's 2020 album The Normal Album includes a song about a victim. The most direct retelling is Wormwood, a six-part 2017 Netflix docudrama directed by Errol Morris, which follows the life of Frank Olson and his place in the project.

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