As the Korean War came to an end in 1953, a plan that would further threaten American lives was brewing; this time domestic. The end of the war meant the return of soldiers and prisoners of war (POWs) from enemy territories like the Soviet Union and North Korea. Soldiers came home claiming the U.S had used biological weapons in Korea (something the U.S always denied) and praised the Korean lifestyle, while criticizing the U.S’s. Because of this, Americans and government agencies like the CIA pushed the narrative that POWs came back as shells of the men they once were, after being brainwashed by North Korea and the Communists.
On April 10, 2023, newly appointed head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, coined the term, “brain warfare,” to describe the “brainwashing” conducted by the Soviet Union. Dulles announced that the U.S, in comparison to the Soviet Union, was “handicapped” when it came to brain warfare, particularly because mind control and other forms of non-consensual experimentation were strictly antithetical to American values.
Yet a desperation to keep up with Soviet strides in mind control influenced Dulles to approve a project known as MKUltra just three days later. $25 million dollars was given to the Technical Services Division to fund the project. MKUltra, created and run by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, consisted of experiments “centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.” The project, which used psychedelic drugs to attempt mind control, continued throughout the height of the Cold War, during the 1950s and 1960s. The hope was that the CIA would be able to produce a “truth drug” for interrogations and torture to win the Cold War. Gottlieb’s main goal was to see if he could destroy the current mind and configure a new one.
The concept of mind control and brainwashing wasn’t new. The CIA built MKUltra as a continuation of work conducted in Japanese facilities and Nazi concentration camps. For example, Nazi doctors used the drug mescaline, which the CIA later incorporated into its experiments. Additionally, the CIA secretly recruited Nazis, ranging from torturers to vivisectionists, some of whom taught CIA officials the “lethal uses of sarin gas.”
Throughout nearly a decade of MKUltra, 162 projects had been financed indirectly by the CIA. These projects had been contracted out to at least 80 different institutions and 185 researchers. In order to maintain the secrecy of the project, many of these institutions and researchers didn’t even know they were conducting these experiments for the CIA. Some experiments even took place in detention centers created by the CIA in other countries to avoid criminal prosecution, such as Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. The participants across seas were subject to even harsher and more inhumane tests. They were mainly refugees, enemy agents, or POWs, people the CIA believed to be easily forgotten and “expendable.” Test subjects were tested on with drugs, electroshock, extreme temperatures, and sensory isolation, while being bombarded with questions from MKUltra officials. Through these extensive experiments, Gottlieb attempted to perfect how to destroy the human mind.
Many of the experiments were conducted at universities, hospitals, and prisons, making many of the test subjects some of the most vulnerable in American society like marginalized sex-workers, terminal cancer patients, or prisoners, who were more likely to consent in exchange for extra recreation time or shortened sentences. Some of these participants volunteered while others had no idea they were part of an experiment. The CIA relied on these particular groups of people because if they ever found out about their involvement in MKUltra experiments, their standings in society would make it unlikely for them to be believed.
All of this meant MKUltra was the CIA’s perfect opportunity to research its latest obsession: Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). The CIA first received reports of the Soviet Union using LSD in the late 1940s. The Soviet Union had partaken in efforts to produce and buy LSD. The CIA was terrified of the Soviet Union’s growing LSD program, especially because the U.S. had little to no knowledge about the drug and its capabilities in brain warfare. The agency was particularly interested in whether the drug could make Soviet soldiers defect against their will and if the Soviet Union could do the same to American soldiers.
Gottlieb played a critical role in introducing LSD to the CIA. In the early 1950s, Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to spend $240,000 to buy the world’s supply of LSD. He then spread the drugs across institutions, using fake philanthropic foundations as fronts, in order to kickstart LSD experimentation.
In an effort to learn more about LSD, yet still keep the operations under lock and key, the CIA stuck to “unwitting experiments,” as the American public could not know the agency was conducting unethical and illegal experiments. These experiments started off in laboratories but then expanded to testing on people in regular settings, through methods like spiking drinks. Agency workers would experiment on their own colleagues.
Much like with the testing for other drugs, the CIA continued to target “people who could not fight back” when experimenting with LSD. For example, they bribed heroin addicts to take LSD on the promise of receiving more heroin. They particularly targeted prisoners, under the premise that they were testing a drug for schizophrenia. In one experiment in the largest CIA run hospital, in Lexington, Kentucky, seven African-American inmates were given triple doses of LSD everyday for 77 days. Gottlieb wanted to see the effects that overdoses of the drug could have on people.
Eventually, the methods grew more out of hand. One of the CIA’s most notorious projects on LSD was Operation Midnight Climax. Test subjects were completely unaware that they were being tested on, as employed prostitutes lured men to CIA “safe houses” where they would be drugged. CIA agents would sit behind a two way mirror, cocktails in hand, and watch and film the effects of LSD on the subjects. The test subjects would supposedly be too embarrassed about the ordeal to disclose what had happened to them, thus maintaining MKUltra’s secrecy.
The CIA’s experiments with LSD through MKUltra lasted until 1963. That year, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff, learned about the project’s experimentation on “nonvoluntary human subjects.” After this discovery the Inspector General insisted the CIA follow newer, more ethical research guidelines. Thus, the non-consenting experiments and programs were brought to an end, despite attempts by MKUltra directors to convince the independent audit board that the research should continue.
The end of MKUltra also brought a need for answers from the American public. Multiple Congress hearings were held, where ex-CIA officials were brought in for questioning. Congress wasn’t able to get the full story, as these officials claimed they couldn’t remember some details of the MKUltra operations. Unfortunately, Congress had little means to fill these gaps in knowledge. Very little documentation remained about MKUltra because a majority of records had been destroyed by Sidney Gottlieb in 1973. That same year, Gottlieb’s “patron” and director of the CIA, Richard Helms had been fired by President Nixon. Gottlieb knew it was only a matter of time before he was gone too. Helms was the only person who knew what Gottlieb had been doing with MKUltra. So in an effort to keep MKUltra under wraps, the two agreed that Gottlieb would drive to the CIA records center and destroy all MKUltra records.
Although Gottlieb managed to eliminate most of the records, it is estimated that around 20,000 documents of financial records still remain, due to being kept in other locations, apart from the record center. Still, the destruction of key MKUltra records means many operations and activities conducted by the CIA, in relation to MKUltra, may remain a secret forever, just as the agency and Gottlieb intended.
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