In April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved a program called MKULTRA — a massive, secret research project to develop techniques for mind control, interrogation, and psychological manipulation. It was born from paranoid fear: American POWs in Korea appeared to have been "brainwashed." Soviet and Chinese interrogators seemed to have capabilities the CIA didn't understand. Project ARTICHOKE and its successor MKULTRA were the answers.
Over 20 years, the CIA conducted 150+ subprojects across 80 institutions — hospitals, universities, prisons, and mental health facilities. Unwitting American and Canadian citizens were given LSD, mescaline, heroin, scopolamine, and other drugs without consent. Subjects were subjected to electroconvulsive therapy at 75 times the normal dose. Sensory deprivation. Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation for weeks.
In 1953, CIA officer Frank Olson — a biological weapons expert who had been secretly dosed with LSD — fell (or was pushed) from a 10th-floor Manhattan hotel window. His family was told it was suicide. Decades of investigation suggest otherwise.
Predecessor to MKULTRA. Tested "special interrogation" using hypnosis, drugs, and torture on suspected double agents, defectors, and foreign nationals. Conducted partially at US military bases overseas to evade US law.
CIA-funded research at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute under Dr. Ewen Cameron. Patients were subjected to "psychic driving" — 16 hours/day of recorded voices, induced sleep for months, massive electroshock. Several patients lost memories and regressed to childlike states. Canada later paid $100,000 to each surviving victim.
CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York where sex workers were hired to lure men. Men were given LSD in their drinks while CIA officers watched from behind two-way mirrors. The program ran with little oversight for a decade. No participants were ever prosecuted.
DCI Richard Helms, days before his resignation was effective, ordered all MKULTRA files destroyed. An estimated 95% of records were shredded. The program might have remained completely unknown had a 1977 FOIA request not discovered 20,000 surviving documents misfiled in a financial records building.