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Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Saudi Arabia)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice
الرئاسة العامة لهيئة الأمر بالمعروف والنهي عن المنكر
Mukfellas.png
Seal of the Committee
Agency overview
Formed1940; 79 years ago
Agency executive
  • Sheikh Abdulrahman Al Alsanad , President
Websitehttps://www.pv.gov.sa

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Arabic: الرئاسة العامة لهيئة الأمر بالمعروف والنهي عن المنكر‎), abbreviated CPVPV and colloquially termed hai’a (committee), is a Saudi government religious authority charged with implementing the Islamic doctrine of hisbah. It traces its modern origin to a revival of the pre-modern official function of muhtasib (market inspector) by the first Saudi state (1745–1818). The committee was established in 1976 in its current form, with the main goal of supervising markets and public morality. It has been assisted by volunteers, and often described as Islamic religious police. It has been called mutawa, mutaween and by other similar names in English-language sources, with various translations.

In the early 2010s, the committee was estimated to have 3,500-4,000 officers on the streets, assisted by thousands of volunteers, with an additional 10,000 administrative personnel. Committee officers and volunteers have been known to patrol public places, with volunteers focusing on enforcing strict rules of hijab, segregation between the sexes, and daily prayer attendance. Officers were authorized to pursue, detain and interrogate suspected violators prior to the 2016 reforms.

Names

The name of the committee has also been translated as Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Elimination of Sin, abberviated CAVES. They are known colloquially as hai’a (literally "committee", also transliterated as Haia or Hayaa). 

In academic sources, committee officers or the volunteers have also been called by several Arabic terms derived from the root ṭ-w-ʿ, including mutaṭawwiʿūn (Arabic: متطوعون‎, volunteers), muṭawwiʿ (Arabic: مطوع‎, one who compels obedience), and muṭāwiʿa (no literal translation given). These words are etymologically related to the Quranically derived terms muṭṭawwiʿa and mutaṭawwiʿa (those who perform supererogatory deeds of piety). English-language press has used the names mutawa and mutaween.

History and structure

The committee's rationale is based on the classical Islamic doctrine of hisba, which is associated with the Quranic injunction of enjoining good and forbidding wrong, and refers to the duty of Muslims to promote moral rectitude and intervene when another Muslim is acting wrongly. In pre-modern Islamic history, its legal implementation was entrusted to a public official called muhtasib (market inspector), who was charged with preventing fraud, disturbance of public order and infractions against public morality. This office disappeared in the modern era everywhere in the Muslim world, including Arabia, but it was revived by the first Saudi state (1745–1818) and continued to play a role in the second (1823–87), due to its importance within Wahhabi doctrine. Under the third Saudi state, the most zealous followers of Ibn Sa'ud were appointed as muhtasibs, but their severity caused conflict with the local population and foreign pilgrims. In response, committees were established in Riyadh and Mecca in 1932 to check their excesses. In 1976 the committees were united under an official of ministerial rank, acting under direct royal command. The unified Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice is mainly responsible for supervising markets and public order. It has been assisted by volunteers, who enforce attendance of daily prayers and gender segregation in public places.

In 2009, the CPVPV created and formalized a special "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" to "educate the public about the evils of sorcery, investigate alleged witches, neutralize their cursed paraphernalia, and disarm their spells". The unit also had a hotline on the CPVPV website for Saudis to report any magic to local officials.

In January 2012, Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh was appointed head of the mutaween. He "holds the rank of cabinet minister and reports directly to the king". His agency employs more than 4,000 “field officers” and reportedly has another 10,000 administrative personnel. Its 2013 budget was the equivalent of $390 USD million.

Enforcement

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice enforces traditional Islamic morality by arresting or helping to secure the arrest of people who engage in conduct that violates Islamic principles and values. They are tasked with enforcing conservative Islamic norms of behavior defined by Saudi authorities. They monitor observance of the dress code and ensure that shops are closed during prayer times. In some instances, they broke into private homes on suspicion of untoward behavior, though this attracted criticism from the public and the government.

Upon being appointed head of the CPVPV, Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh identified "five areas the religious police should focus on": preserving Islam, preventing blackmail, combating sorcery, fighting human trafficking, and ensuring that no one disobeys the country’s rulers.

Saudi mutaween are often accompanied by the regular police, but also patrol without police escort. They recently launched a website on which un-Islamic behavior can be reported.

While on patrol, the duties of the Mutaween include, but are not restricted to:
  • ensuring that drugs including alcohol are not being traded.
  • checking that women wear the abaya, a traditional cloak.
  • making sure that men and women who are spotted together in public are related.
  • formerly, enforcing the ban on camera phones. This ban was enacted out of a fear that men would use them to secretly photograph women and publish them on the Internet without the consent of the subjects. The ban was enacted in April 2004 but was overturned in December that same year.
  • preventing the population from engaging in "frivolous" Western customs such as Valentine's Day.
The punishment for such offenses is severe, often involving beatings and humiliation, and foreigners are not excluded from arrest. The mutaween encourage people to inform on others they know who are suspected of acting unvirtuously, and to punish such activities.

In 2010, a 27-year-old Saudi man was sentenced to five years in prison, 500 lashes of the whip, and a SR50,000 fine after appearing in an amateur gay video online allegedly taken inside a Jeddah prison. According to an unnamed government source, “The District Court sentenced the accused in a homosexuality case that was referred to it by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Hai’a) in Jeddah before he was tried for impersonating a security man and behaving shamefully and with conduct violating the Islamic teachings.” The case started when the Hai’a’s staff arrested the man under charges of practicing homosexuality. He was referred to the Bureau for Investigation and Prosecution, which referred him to the District Court.

Among the Western practices suppressed by the mutaween is the celebration of Valentine's Day. Condemning the festivities as a "pagan feast", Mutaween inspect hotels, restaurants, coffeehouses, and gift shops on 14 February to prevent Muslim couples from giving each other Valentines or other presents. The sale of red roses, red stuffed animals, red greeting cards and other red gift items is banned, according to store owners. These items are confiscated, and those selling them subject to prosecution.

The children's game Pokémon was banned in 2001. The sale of the fashion doll Barbie was banned as a consumer product for posing a moral threat to Islam, stating: "Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful." Fulla dolls were designed and approved as more acceptable. 

In 2006 the police issued a decree banning the sale of dogs and cats, also seen as a sign of Western influence. The decree which applies to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah and the holy city of Mecca bans the sale of cats and dogs because "some youths have been buying them and parading them in public," according to a memo from the municipal affairs ministry to Jeddah’s city government. In 2013 two Saudi men were arrested for giving "free hugs to passersby".

In December 2010 it was reported by Arab News that the Hai'a had launched a massive campaign against "sorcery" or "black magic" in the Kingdom. The prohibition includes "fortune tellers or faith healers". (Some people executed for sorcery following the announcement include a man from Najran province in June 2012, a Saudi woman in the province of Jawf, in December 2011, and a Sudanese man executed in September 2011. A Lebanese television presenter of a popular fortune-telling programme was arrested while on pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death, though after pressure from the Lebanese government and human rights groups, he was freed by the Saudi Supreme Court.)

In May 2012, the head of the mutaween, Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, stated that anyone using social media sites, such as Twitter, "has lost this world and his afterlife".

According to authors Harvey Tripp and Peter North, mutaween became involved in the city planning of the Eastern Province industrial city of Jubail sometime in the 1980s and 1990s. Halfway through the construction of that city the mutaween visited the engineering drawing office several times, first to insist that all planning maps included the direction of Mecca. On their second visit they ordered that city sewage lines (already built) not flow in the direction of Mecca. After being convinced that the curvature of the earth prevented this, the mutaween returned to insist that the drainage pipes of toilets inside the city's buildings also not violate this principle. The mutaween's demands came despite the fact that no Saudi building code mentioned their requirement and no other Saudi cities met it. While a good deal of the planners' and engineers' time was spent responding to the mutaween's concerns, the mutaween never returned to approve the contractor's solution and no pipes ended up having to be unearthed and redirected, leaving Tripp and North to conclude that Mutaween's "point" was not to protect Mecca but to demonstrate the supremacy of religion in Saudi Arabia to foreign builders.

Exemptions

The offices of Saudi Aramco, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and foreign embassies are off limits to mutaween. Not off limits are personnel of Saudi government agencies. Hai’a have been known to detain government officials, (A male government employee minder of American journalist Karen Elliott House was detained for mixing of the sexes, causing her to wonder that "a government employee following the instructions of his ministry runs afoul of that same government's religious police.")

Restriction of powers

On 11 April 2016, the Saudi Council of Ministers issued a new regulation that limits the jurisdiction of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

The new regulation has 12 clauses; most notable of them are:
The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is expected to uphold its duties with kindness and gentleness as decreed by the examples of Prophet Mohammed.
The Committee has the responsibility of reporting, while on patrol, to official authorities (depending on the suspected activity) any suspected crimes witnessed. Subsequent actions from pursuit of suspect, capture, interrogation and detainment will be left to the relevant official authorities.
Neither the heads nor members of The Committee are to stop or arrest or chase people or ask for their IDs or follow them - that is considered the jurisdiction of the police or the drug unit.

Controversy

Alleged abuses

One of the most widely criticized examples of mutaween enforcement of Sharia law came in March 2002, when 15 young girls died of burns or smoke asphyxiation by an accidental fire that engulfed their public school in Mecca. According to two newspapers, the religious police forcibly prevented girls from escaping the burning school by locking the doors of the school from the outside, and barring firemen from entering the school to save the girls, beating some of the girls and civil defense personnel in the process. Mutaween would not allow the girls to escape or to be saved because they were 'not properly covered', and the mutaween did not want physical contact to take place between the girls and the civil defense forces for fear of sexual enticement. The CPVPV denied the charges of beating or locking the gates, but the incident and the accounts of witnesses were reported in Saudi newspapers such as the Saudi Gazette and Al-Iqtisaddiyya. The result was a very rare public criticism of the group.

In May 2003, Al-Watan, a Saudi reform newspaper published several reports of people being mistreated by the police force, including the story of one woman from a remote southern town who had been beaten and held in solitary confinement for riding alone in the back of a taxi.

In May 2007, a man alleged to have alcohol in his home (Salman Al-Huraisi) was reported by Arab News to have been arrested and beaten to death in his own home by CPVPV members in the Al Oraija district of Riyadh. "The father of the deceased said that commission members continued to beat his handcuffed son, even though he was already covered in blood, until he died" at the Oraija CPVPV center in Riyadh. Another man who died while in custody of the CPVPV was Ahmed Al-Bulawi. He was a driver for a woman with whom he was accused of being in a state of seclusion (when a man and an unrelated woman are together) and died after being taken to a CPVPV center in Tabuk in June 2007. According to Irfan Al-Alawi, "in both cases, the families of the victims took the mutawiyin to court, and in both instances (as in others) charges against the mutawiyin were postponed indefinitely or dropped."

A case of "sorcery" that led to a sentence of death which was overturned was that of Ali Hussain Sibat, the Lebanese host of the popular TV call-in show aired on satellite TV across the Middle East. Sibat was arrested in Medina by the CPVPV in May 2008, while visiting Saudi Arabia to perform the Umrah pilgrimage. Sibat was charged with "sorcery" for making predictions and giving advice to the audience on his show. On 9 November 2009, after court hearings not open to the public or a defense lawyer Sibat was sentenced to death. The case was upheld on appeal but after an international outcry was overturned by the Supreme Court on November 11, 2010. The case was controversial in part because neither the defendant or "victims" were Saudis, and the "crime" was not committed in Saudi Arabia.

Mutaween suppression of religious activity by non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia is also controversial. Asia News alleges that "at least one million" Roman Catholics in the kingdom are being "denied pastoral care ... none of them can participate in mass while they are in Saudi Arabia ... Catechism for their children – nearly 100,000 – is banned." It reports the arrest of a Catholic priest for saying mass. On 5 April 2006 a Catholic priest, "Fr. George [Joshua] had just celebrated mass in a private house when seven religious policemen (muttawa) broke into the house together with two ordinary policemen. The police arrested the priest and another person."

In August 2008, a young Saudi woman who had converted to Christianity was reportedly burnt to death after having her tongue cut out by her father, a member of the Committee, though it was not an officially sanctioned act of punishment.

In January 2013, the CPVPV marched into an educational exhibit of dinosaurs at a shopping center, "turned off the lights and ordered everyone out, frightening children and alarming their parents". It was not clear why the exhibit—which had been "featured at shopping centres across the Gulf for decades"—was closed, and Saudis speculated irreverently as to the reason on Twitter.

In September 2013 the entrance of a Saudi religious police building "was intentionally set on fire by assailants", according to the Hai'a. No one was hurt and no further information was provided by the police. In early 2014, the head of Hai'a, Sheikh Abdul Latif al-Sheikh was quoted in the Okaz daily newspaper as saying that “there are advocates of sedition within the Commission" for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, and promised to remove them.

Internal dispute

In 2009, the head of the Hai'a in Mecca, Sheikh Ahmad Qasim al Ghamdi, stated that there was nothing wrong with men and women mixing in public places, and instructed his mutawa'a to not interfere with mixing. However religious conservatives pressured the national head of the Hai'a to fire him. "Within hours of the firing of the Sheikh Al Ghamdi, the Hai'a issued an embarrassing retraction: `The information sent out today concerning administrative changes at some Hai'a offices, particularly those concerning Mecca and Hail, was inaccurate and the administration has requested editors not to publish it.`" However the firing and the retraction of the firing became "major news". "Outraged conservatives went to Sheiksh Al Ghamdi's home, demanding to `mix` with his females... still other outraged opponents scrawled graffiti on his home," according to journalist Karen Elliott House.

Involvement in politics

Other accusations leveled at the CPVPV include that some of its members have been involved in political subversion, and/or are ex-convicts/prisoners who became Hafiz (i.e. memorized the Quran) to reduce their prison sentences. Author Lawrence Wright has written of a conflict between the Mutaween and at least one allied imam and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, the head of the Presidency of General Intelligence (Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah) between 1977 and 2001. After an imam denounced a female charitable organizations run by some of Turki's sisters and accused them of being "whores" during a Friday sermon, Turki demanded and received an apology. He then "secretly began monitoring members of the muttawa. He learned that many of them were ex-convicts whose only job qualification was that they had memorized the Quran in order to reduce their sentences." But Turki believed they had become "so powerful" they "threatened to overthrow the government."

Another instance when the CPVPV has opposed the Saudi government came in 2005 when the Minister of Labor announced a policy of staffing lingerie shops with women. The policy was intended to give employment to some of the millions of adult Saudi women unhappily stuck at home (only 14.6% of Saudi women work in the public and private sectors in the Kingdom), and to prevent mixing of the sexes in public (ikhtilat), between male clerks and women customers. Conservative Saudis opposed the policy maintaining that for a woman to work outside the house was against her fitrah (natural state). The few shops that employed women were "quickly closed" by the Hai'i who supported the conservative position.

However, in 2011, during the Arab Spring, King Abdullah issued another decree giving lingerie shops—and then shops and shop departments specializing in other products for women, such as cosmetics, abayas and wedding dresses—one year to replace men workers with women. Further clashes followed between conservatives and Hai'a men on the one hand, and the ministry, women customers and employees at female-staffed stores on the other. In 2013, the Ministry and the Hai'a leadership met to negotiate new terms. In November 2013, 200 religious police signed a letter stating that female employment was causing such a drastic increase in instances of ikhtilat, that "their job was becoming impossible."

Political use

According to one journalist with many years of experience in Saudi Arabia, Karen Elliott House, the Hai’a are sometimes used to balance the policies of the government; specifically a loose rein on the Hai'a acts to calm the displeasure of the strong religious conservative forces in Saudi society. When the king dismissed a member of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars in 2009 for condemning gender mixing at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, he compensated for it by doing "nothing to curb the country's religious police from roaming the kingdom's streets and harassing ordinary Saudis mixing with anyone of the opposite genders".

Role

According to the US Library of Congress Country Studies, mutawwiin
"have been integral to the Wahhabi movement since its inception. Mutawwiin have served as missionaries, as enforcers of public morals, and as `public ministers of the religion` who preach in the Friday mosque. Pursuing their duties in Jiddah in 1806, the mutawwiin were observed to be `constables for the punctuality of prayers ... with an enormous staff in their hand, [who] were ordered to shout, to scold and to drag people by the shoulders to force them to take part in public prayers, five times a day.`"
Robert Lacey describes them as "vigilantes". "The righteous of every neighbourhood [that] banded themselves together into societies for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice."

According to a study by Michael Cook, based on "Wahhabi writings and rulers' decrees" the role of commanding good and forbidding wrong developed a prominent place during the second Saudi emirate, and the first "documented instance of a formal committee to enforces the duty dates to 1926", when the official Saudi newspaper in Mecca published the news of its establishment. In 1976, the Al al-Sheikh director of the Committee gained a seat on the Saudi cabinet, strengthening its prestige.

Following the November–December 1979 Grand Mosque Seizure, when religion became more conservative in Saudi Arabia,
"people noticed that imams and religious folk seemed to have more money to spend ... with the religious police benefiting most obviously from government injections of cash. They started to appear in imposing new GMC vans, with their once humble local committees of mutawwa ... taking on the grander, `Big Brother` aura of their original, collective name -- Al Hayah, `the Commission`. They developed attitude to match."
They were still, however, "essentially volunteers engaged in their own variety of social work."

The deaths of 15 young girls in 2002 in Mecca from the mutaween's refusal to let them leave a burning school was widely publicized and damaged the mutaween's image.

In May 2006 it was announced that the committee would no longer be allowed to interrogate those it arrests for behavior deemed un-Islamic. Prior to this, commission members enjoyed almost total power to arrest, detain, and interrogate those suspected of violating the Sharia.

In June 2007 the Saudi mutaween announced "the creation of a 'department of rules and regulations' to ensure the activities of commission members comply with the law, after coming under heavy pressure for the death of two people in its custody in less than two weeks". The governmental National Society for Human Rights criticised the behaviour of the religious police in May 2007 in its first report since its establishment in March 2004. In May 2006 the Interior Ministry issued a decree stating that "the role of the commission will end after it arrests the culprit or culprits and hands them over to police, who will then decide whether to refer them to the public prosecutor."

Time magazine ran a report about the mutaween in August 2007. It noted that "a campaign using text messages sent to mobile phones is calling on a million Saudis to declare that '2007 is the year of liberation.'" Despite statements of reform, the mutaween turned down Time's request for interviews.

At the beginning of October 2012, during the Arab Spring, Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh announced that the powers of the mutawiyin would be significantly restricted. According to Irfan Al-Alawi,
They will be barred from making arrests, conducting interrogations, or carrying out searches without a warrant from the local governor. They will no longer stand at the entrances of shopping malls to keep women out who do not adhere to the Wahhabi dress code or who are not accompanied by “approved” men—husbands, siblings, or parents.
"Community volunteers", who were the original mutaween, were forbidden from joining Hai’a men on their rounds and pursuing, chastising, and interrogating miscreants, as "a religious duty". Field officers were also ordered to “approach people with a smile,” and forbidden from using their "private e-mails, cellphones, or social media accounts to receive and act on anonymous tips."

Other similar groups

Outside Saudi Arabia, in Iran, the Guidance Patrol functions as the country's main public religious police, imposing Islamic dress codes and norms in public. The Taliban regime, or Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, also had a "Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" with a very similar religious policing function. The Taliban are thought to have borrowed the Saudi policing policy not only because they also had a strict Sharia law policy, but because of alleged financial and diplomatic support from Saudi Arabia. According to a Pakistani journalist who spent much time among the Taliban, the Taliban who had been to Saudi Arabia before taking power in Afghanistan "were terribly impressed by the religious police and tried to copy that system to the letter". 

Church Committee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Church Committee report (Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence)
 
The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a U.S. Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church (D-ID), the committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the "Year of Intelligence", including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee's efforts led to the establishment of the permanent U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Background

By the early years of the 1970s, a series of troubling revelations had appeared in the press concerning intelligence activities. First came the revelations by Army intelligence officer Christopher Pyle in January 1970 of the U.S. Army's spying on the civilian population and Senator Sam Ervin's Senate investigations produced more revelations. Then on December 22, 1974, The New York Times published a lengthy article by Seymour Hersh detailing operations engaged in by the CIA over the years that had been dubbed the "family jewels". Covert action programs involving assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens.

The creation of the Church Committee was approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate.

Overview

The Church Committee's final report was published in April 1976 in six books. Also published were seven volumes of Church Committee hearings in the Senate.

Before the release of the final report, the committee also published an interim report titled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders", which investigated alleged attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Fidel Castro of Cuba. President Gerald Ford urged the Senate to withhold the report from the public, but failed, and under recommendations and pressure by the committee, Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (ultimately replaced in 1981 by President Reagan's Executive Order 12333) to ban U.S. sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders.

In addition, the committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but only the one on Chile was released, titled "Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973". The rest were kept secret at CIA's request.

According to recently declassified documents by the National Security Archive, the Church Committee also helped to uncover the NSA's Watch List. The information for the list was compiled into the so-called "Rhyming Dictionary" of biographical information, which at its peak held millions of names - thousands of which were US citizens. Some prominent members of this list were Joanne Woodward, Thomas Watson, Walter Mondale, Art Buchwald, Arthur F. Burns, Gregory Peck, Otis G. Pike, Tom Wicker, Whitney Young, Howard Baker, Frank Church, David Dellinger, Ralph Abernathy, and others.

But among the most shocking revelations of the committee was the discovery of Operation SHAMROCK, in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the Watch List. In 1975, the committee decided to unilaterally declassify the particulars of this operation, against the objections of President Ford's administration.

Together, the Church Committee's reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but over 50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

Committee members

Majority (Democratic) Minority (Republican)

Opening mail

The Church Committee learned that, beginning in the 1950s, the CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation had intercepted, opened and photographed more than 215,000 pieces of mail by the time the program (called "HTLINGUAL") was shut down in 1973. This program was all done under the "mail covers" program (a mail cover is a process by which the government records—without any requirement for a warrant or for notification—all information on the outside of an envelope or package, including the name of the sender and the recipient). The Church report found that the CIA was careful about keeping the United States Postal Service from learning that government agents were opening mail. CIA agents moved mail to a private room to open the mail or in some cases opened envelopes at night after stuffing them in briefcases or in coat pockets to deceive postal officials.

The Ford administration and the Church Committee

On May 9, 1975, the Church Committee decided to call acting CIA director William Colby. That same day Ford's top advisers (Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Philip W. Buchen, and John Marsh) drafted a recommendation that Colby be authorized to brief only rather than testify, and that he would be told to discuss only the general subject, with details of specific covert actions to be avoided except for realistic hypotheticals. But the Church Committee had full authority to call a hearing and require Colby's testimony. Ford and his top advisers met with Colby to prepare him for the hearing. Colby testified, "These last two months have placed American intelligence in danger. The almost hysterical excitement surrounding any news story mentioning CIA or referring even to a perfectly legitimate activity of CIA has raised a question whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted by the United States."

Results of the investigation

On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, and discussed the NSA, without mentioning it by name:
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. (...) Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. (...)
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Aftermath

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., editor of the conservative magazine The American Spectator, wrote that the committee "betrayed CIA agents and operations." The committee had not received names, so had none to release, as confirmed by later CIA director George H. W. Bush. However, Senator Jim McClure used the allegation in the 1980 election, when Church was defeated.

The Committee's work has more recently been criticized after the September 11 attacks, for leading to legislation reducing the ability of the CIA to gather human intelligence. In response to such criticism, the chief counsel of the committee, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., retorted with a book co-authored by Aziz Z. Huq, denouncing the Bush administration's use of 9/11 to make "monarchist claims" that are "unprecedented on this side of the North Atlantic".

In September 2006, the University of Kentucky hosted a forum called "Who's Watching the Spies? Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans," bringing together two Democratic committee members, former Vice President of the United States Walter Mondale and former U.S. Senator Walter "Dee" Huddleston of Kentucky, and Schwarz to discuss the committee's work, its historical impact, and how it pertains to today's society.

Project MKUltra

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Declassified MKUltra documents

Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra), also called the CIA mind control program, is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—and which were, at times, illegal. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control. The project was organized through the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. Code names for drugs-related experiments were Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke.

The operation was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and recorded to be halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities, including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as its unwitting test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of torture.

The scope of Project MKUltra was broad with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement.

Project MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford'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 order that all MKUltra files to be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms's destruction order. In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra which led to Senate hearings later that year. Some surviving information regarding MKUltra was declassified in July 2001. In December 2018, declassified documents included a letter to an unidentified doctor discussing work on six dogs made to run, turn and stop via remote control and brain implants.

Background

Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKUltra sub-project on LSD in this June 9, 1953, letter.

Origin of cryptonym

The project's intentionally obscure CIA cryptonym is made up of the digraph MK, meaning that the project was sponsored by the agency's Technical Services Staff, followed by the word Ultra which had previously been used to designate the most secret classification of World War II intelligence. Other related cryptonyms include Project MKNAOMI and Project MKDELTA.

Origin of project

According to author Stephen Kinzer, the CIA project “was a continuation of the work begun in WWII-era Japanese facilities and Nazi concentration camps on subduing and controlling human minds”. Kinzer wrote that MKUltra’s use of mescaline on unwitting subjects was a practice that Nazi doctors had begun in the Dachau concentration camp. Kinzer proposes evidence of the continuation of a Nazi agenda, citing the CIA’s secret recruitment of Nazi torturers and vivisectionists to continue the experimentation on thousands of subjects, and Nazis brought to Fort Detrick, Maryland, to instruct CIA officers on the lethal uses of sarin gas.

Aims and leadership

The project was headed by Sidney Gottlieb but began on the order of CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles on April 13, 1953. Its aim was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives, and was interested in manipulating foreign leaders with such techniques, devising several schemes to drug Fidel Castro. 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 for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, 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 Richard Helms, 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.

The project began during a period of what Rupert Cornwell 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 believed that a mole 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. Alfred McCoy has claimed that the CIA attempted to focus media attention on these sorts of "ridiculous" programs so that the public would not look at the research's primary goal, which was effective methods of interrogation.

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:
  1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
  2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
  3. Materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity.
  4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
  5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so they may be used for malingering, etc.
  6. Materials which will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.
  7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".
  8. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
  9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
  10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
  11. Substances which will produce a chemical that can cause blisters.
  12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
  13. 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.
  14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
  15. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
  16. 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.
  17. 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 Church Committee 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/CHICKWIT. 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 to find new offensive-use agents, with a focus on incapacitating agents. 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 patterns for chemical & biological warfare (CBW) research; subproject 139 designated "Bird Disease Studies" at Penn State.

MKOFTEN was to deal with testing and toxicological transmissivity and behavioral effects of drugs in animals and, ultimately, humans.

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, 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.

Once Project MKUltra got underway in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers—"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. LSD and other drugs were often administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code the U.S. had agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent."

In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels within agency safehouses in San Francisco, California, 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 mirrors, 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 addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin.

LSD was slipped into deputy U.S. marshal Wayne Ritchie's drink of bourbon and soda. He had a bad LSD trip that culminated in his holding up the bar at gunpoint. Ritchie was fired and only decades later, in 1999, learned he had been the subject of secret drug testing. He was one of many test subjects.

At the invitation of Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a CIA-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, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people.

The Office of Security used LSD in interrogations, but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas: he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed one could give it 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 Dr. Frank Olson, an army chemist who had not taken LSD before, went into deep depression after a surprise trip and later fell from a thirteenth story window.

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 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 superhallucinogens 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 administration of a barbiturate into one arm and an amphetamine 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. The person would begin babbling incoherently, and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.

Other experiments involved heroin, morphine, temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, cannabis, alcohol, and sodium pentothal.

Hypnosis

Declassified MKUltra documents indicate they studied hypnosis in the early 1950s. Experimental goals included: the creation of "hypnotically induced anxieties", "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter", studying hypnosis and polygraph 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 while under the influence of such drugs.

Experiments on Canadians

Donald Ewen Cameron c.1967
 
The CIA exported experiments to Canada when they recruited British psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the "psychic driving" 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, to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (which would be US$558,915 in 2018, adjusting for inflation) to carry MKUltra experiments there, the Montreal experiments. 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 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 loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were often carried on patients who entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions. His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.

His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas' Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who was also involved in the Intelligence Services and who experimented on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.[64] 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 was made into a 1998 television miniseries called The Sleep Room.

During this era, Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron was also a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.

Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine 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 writes "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method," which refers to first creating a state of disorientation in the subject, and then second creating a situation of "self-inflicted" discomfort in which the disoriented subject can alleviate their pain by capitulating.

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

Frank Church headed the Church Committee, an investigation into the practices of the US intelligence agencies.
 
In 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by Watergate, CIA Director Richard Helms 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' 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 alleged that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by the United States Congress, in the form of the Church Committee, and by a commission known as the Rockefeller Commission that looked into the illegal domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military. 

In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defense 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 psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject, Frank Olson 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. However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, 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, concluded that "[p]rior 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 Gerald Ford 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 and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation. 

1977 United States Senate report on MKUltra
 
In 1977, during a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 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 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 to "unwitting subjects in social situations.
At least one death, the result of the defenestration of Dr. Frank Olson, was attributed to Olson's being subjected, unaware, to such experimentation, nine days before his death. The CIA itself subsequently acknowledged that these tests had little scientific rationale. The agents 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 Dr. 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. Dr. 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, since his family destroyed them after his death.

1994 U.S. General Accounting Office report

The U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.

The quote from the study:
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 Frank Olson. Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November 1953, as part of a CIA experiment and committed suicide by jumping out of a 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 exited the window and fell thirteen stories 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 Sidney Gottlieb, 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, LSD mind-control research, and the use of psychoactive drugs during "terminal" interrogations under a program code-named Project ARTICHOKE. 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. 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 Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, 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.

A 2010 book by H. P. Albarelli Jr. alleged that the 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning 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 William Colby 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 a legal doctrine—known as the Feres doctrine, after a 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States—that prohibits members of the Armed Forces from suing the government for any harms that were inflicted "incident to service."

In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed this defense in a 5–4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case: United States v. Stanley. 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:
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.... [I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials ... began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 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, 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 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 2007.

Notable people

Experimenters
Documented subjects
  • Ken Kesey, 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 culture.
  • Robert Hunter is an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, translator, and poet, best known for his association with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. 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 LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, then report on their experiences. These experiences were creatively formative for Hunter:
    Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells ... By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.
  • Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger alleged he had been subjected to weekly injections of LSD and subsequent testing while in prison in Atlanta in 1957.
Alleged subjects
  • Ted Kaczynski, a 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, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alton Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment", led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. In total, Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.
  • Lawrence Teeter was the attorney for Sirhan Sirhan who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, and he believed that Sirhan was "operating under MK-ULTRA mind control techniques".
  • American fashion model and radio host Candy Jones claimed to have been a victim of mind control in the 1960s.

Aftermath

At his retirement 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, although Canadian investigative journalist Elizabeth Nickson (whose mother had been a subject) claims that they continue today under a different set of acronyms. Victor Marchetti, who had held several positions at the CIA before resigning in 1969, stated in 1992 that the CIA routinely conducted disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. He called the claim that the program had been abandoned a cover story.

In popular culture

MKUltra plays a part in many conspiracy theories due to its nature and the destruction of most records.

Films

  • 2008 film Pineapple Express depicts Project MKUltra in the intro scene, although it is portrayed as taking place in 1937.
  • 2015 film Mr. Right depicts Hopper (portrayed by Tim Roth) mentioning the MKUltra program (at 27 minutes 15 seconds) as part of the foundation to the main character's motives and backstory.
  • 2009 film The Killing Room invokes Project MKUltra as the foundation to the base plot.
  • 2013 film The Banshee Chapter is largely based around MKUltra.
  • 1990 film Jacob's Ladder alludes to Project MKUltra throughout the movie.
  • 1997 film Conspiracy Theory Project MKUltra is referred to by Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart) who says he headed the project. Also, the protagonist, Jerry (Mel Gibson) is reported by Dr. Jonas to be a test subject of Project MKUltra.
  • 2015 film American Ultra stars Jesse Eisenberg as a stoner slacker who discovers he is the sole survivor of the "Ultra" program, which turned him into the ultimate assassin.
  • The Jason Bourne books and films starring Matt Damon, written by Robert Ludlum, are all based on MKUltra techniques.
  • 2006 film Shadow Man starring Steven Seagal has a plot that revolves around a (fictional) cancer-causing biological weapon called "MK Ultra".
  • Marvin Boggs (played by John Malkovich) in the films RED (2010) and RED 2 (2013) had unknowingly been provided daily doses of LSD over a period of 11 years, making him highly paranoid, echoing the actions of MKUltra.

Television

  • The 1998 CBC miniseries The Sleep Room dramatizes brainwashing experiments funded by MKUltra that were performed on Canadian mental patients in the 1950s and 60's, and their subsequent efforts to sue the CIA.
  • BYUtv's drama Granite Flats is a fictional dramatization of the implementation of MKUltra by a military hospital in Colorado.
  • In season 2, episode 19 of Bones, "Spaceman in a Crater", Jack Hodgins mentions that Frank Olson was an unwitting participant and committed suicide, but that an exhumation 45 years later proved he was murdered.[110]
  • In an episode of ABC's Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., "The Things We Bury", one of the characters makes a reference to MKUltra.
  • In season 2, episode 5 of Fringe, "Dream Logic", Walter Bishop briefly mentions his involvement with MKUltra.
  • In season 6, episode 7 of Archer, "Nellis", Archer briefly mentions MKUltra while bluffing his way into Area 51; in season 7, episode 8, "Liquid Lunch", the program is explained to Archer's colleagues.
  • In episode "Via Negativa" from the eighth season of The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen mention MKUltra while discussing a case with Agent Doggett.
  • In The X-Files third-season episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space", Jose Chung mentions the experiments as an example of the powerful effect "mere words" can have over the human mind.
  • In Alphas, events imply that the Alphas program had its starts in the MKUltra program, and Dr. Rosen has access to certain files from the MKUltra project.
  • In season 3, episode 10 of NUMB3RS, Don Eppes investigates the assassinations of a senator and a psychiatrist with links to MKUltra.
  • In the fourth episode of Season 2 of The Blacklist, Cooper mentions Project MKUltra while talking to Elizabeth Keen. The entire episode is based on the premise of using genetic predisposition to make someone commit an act that they most likely would not have done in the first place.
  • In season 1 of Stranger Things, the antagonist Dr. Martin Brenner is discovered to have been involved in MKUltra. One of the young protagonists, Eleven, was raised in a government laboratory after being born to an MKUltra test subject.
  • In Season 5, Episode 10 of The West Wing, the White House press secretary is questioned by a reporter about mind control, leading her to investigate MKUltra and the budgetary allocations of DARPA for the project.
  • Netflix original series Manhunt: Unabomber portrays the psychological torture of 16-year-old Harvard student Theodore Kaczynski by MKUltra researchers. Kaczynski was the perpetrator of serial bombings over a 17-year period and became known as the Unabomber.
  • The 2017 Netflix documentary re-enactment mini-series Wormwood tells the story of Frank Olson and MKUltra through the eyes of his son, Eric.

Audio

  • The song "MK Ultra" by British band Muse makes direct reference to this project in the title and uses lyrics to convey the effects of the project directly on a subject.
  • Lyrics of "Look ... The Sun is Rising", the opening track to The Flaming Lips' 2013 album The Terror, narrate "a little spaceship" as a mechanism for MKUltra mind control.
  • The song "The 4th Branch" by rapper Immortal Technique from his album Revolutionary Volume 2, compares modern media to MKUltra, "controlling your brain".
  • The songs "US Government" and "MK Ultra" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club make direct reference to the project, as well as more oblique references in the lyrics.
  • The song, "MK Ultra" by progressive metal band Periphery makes direct reference to the project in the title and speaks of the supposed abuse children received from the CIA during the experiments.
  • Olympia-based band Unwound recorded a song named "Mkultra" on both theA Single History: 1991–1997 and Rat Conspiracy compilations.
  • In 2019 Legendary British guitar amplifier manufacturer Orange Music Electronic Company designed a custom "one off" amplifier for blues guitarist Marcus King named the "MK Ultra". "Instagram". Instagram @realmarcusking. July 23, 2019. Retrieved July 23, 2019.
  • The song "They. Resurrect. Over. New." by rapper Lupe Fiasco from his 2015 album Tetsuo & Youth mentions MKUltra.
  • The album Chemistry of Consciousness by heavy metal band Toxic Holocaust contains several references to the experiments, including a song titled "Mkultra".
  • On metal band Arsonists Get All the Girls' 2013 album, Listen to the Color, a song references the program through title and lyrics called "MK-ULTRA: Psychotropic Puppets". Another song of the album is titled "MK-DELTA: Glorified Killers".
  • The song "MK Ultra" by German band [:SITD:] bears the name of the project as its title; the lyrics describe a person under the influence of drugs used in the project, losing their grasp on their humanity and mind.

Others

  • The Stephen King book Firestarter is based on a fictionalized version of the MK Ultra experiments, and the protagonists all acquire powers as a result of the experimentation.
  • Alan Glynn, the Irish novelist, uses Project MKUltra as part of the background for his plot in Limitless (also a film) and Paradime (2016).
  • The horror game Outlast makes several major references to MK Ultra and implies that the experiments on the asylum inmates in the game are either a part of or associated with the program.
  • Project MKUltra is mentioned in Call Of Duty: Black Ops as the Soviet Union's attempt to turn protagonist Alex Mason into a Soviet sleeper agent with orders to assassinate President Kennedy. Mason's handler, CIA agent Jason Hudson, even mentions it when telling Mason he had been brainwashed by the Soviets.
  • The game Manhunt 2 is based around "The Pickman Project" which has several similarities to MKUltra and it is likely it was directly inspired by it.
  • A cannabis strain called MKUltra has been developed by T.H.Seeds of Amsterdam.
  • Project MKUltra is mentioned in the 2016 video game Mafia III. It is mentioned by one of the characters, an ex-CIA agent John Donovan.
  • In the broadway musical We Will Rock You, MKUltra is referred to as the Bohemians are brainwashed and experimented on to become vegetables.
  • The online, anonymously-written science fiction and horror story 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 borrows from and refers to the MKUltra project directly.
  • The fictitious video game known as Polybius had spread around as an urban myth in 1981. Many of the key points of Polybius allude to government control testing and other "men in black" type figures, suggesting Polybius took inspiration from project MKUltra at the time of its creation.

Rejuvenation

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