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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.
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
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:
- Substances which will promote illogical thinking and
impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in
public.
- Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
- Materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity.
- Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
- Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized
diseases in a reversible way so they may be used for malingering, etc.
- Materials which will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.
- Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to
withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and
so-called "brain-washing".
- Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
- Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
- Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
- Substances which will produce a chemical that can cause blisters.
- Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the
tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is
enhanced.
- 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.
- Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
- Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Frank Church
John Tower
Philip Hart
Howard Baker
Walter Mondale
Barry Goldwater
Walter Huddleston
Charles Mathias
Gary Hart
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