The CIA's Behavioral Control Experiments at the Heart of a New Scientific Collection
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National Security Archive publishes key documents about the infamous MKULTRA program. The agency was looking for drugs and behavioral control techniques to use in "special interrogations" and offensive operations. Sidney Gottlieb's personal file at the CIA and his sworn testimony from 1983 are among the new documents available.
Washington, D.C., December 23, 2024 – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (a subsidiary of Clarivate) welcome the release of a new collection of scientific papers, the result of many years of work, on the secret and shocking history of the CIA's mind control research programs. The new collection, titled "CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA," brings together more than 1,200 critical documents about one of the most notorious and abusive programs in CIA history.
Under code names such as MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who were generally unaware of what was being done to them or that they were participating in a CIA test.
Today's announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation led by Seymour Hersh sparked investigations that uncovered MKULTRA's abuse. The new collection also comes 70 years after U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA's main supplier to the new psychoactive substance at the heart of the agency's many behavioral control efforts.
Highlights of the new MKULTRA collection include:
• A plan approved by the DCI in 1950 for the creation of "interrogation teams" that would "use polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to achieve the best possible results in interrogation techniques." (Document 2)
• A 1951 memo that reports on a meeting between the CIA and foreign intelligence officials about mind control research and their shared interest in the concept of individual mind control. (Document 3)
• A 1952 entry in the daily diary of George White, a federal narcotics agent who ran a shelter where the CIA tested drugs like LSD and conducted other experiments on Americans without their knowledge. (Document 5)
• A 1952 report on the "successful" use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods that combined the use of "narcosis" and "hypnosis" to induce regression and then amnesia in "Russian agents suspected of being double agents." (Document 6)
• A 1956 memo in which Sidney Gottlieb, director of the MKULTRA program, approves a project to "evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25 on normal human volunteers" among federal prisoners in Atlanta. (Document 13)
• The 1963 report of the CIA inspector general, which led the CIA leadership to re-examine the use of Americans without their knowledge in its secret drug testing program. (Document 16)
• The deposition of Sidney Gottlieb, director of the MKULTRA program, in 1983 in a civil case brought by Velma "Val" Orlikow, a victim of the CIA-sponsored projects led by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. (Document 20)
As Chief of Operations in the CIA's
Directorate of Plans (1952-1962), Deputy Director of Plans (1962-1965), Deputy Director of
Central Intelligence (1965-1966), and Director of Central
Intelligence (1966-1973), Richard Helms had a keen interest in the development of
techniques for using biological and chemical
substancesas part of covert intelligence operations.
As director of the CIA in 1973, he gave the order to destroy the CIA's
MKULTRA files.
The challenges this documentation project faced were considerable, as CIA Director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA program director Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original documents for the project in 1973. It's a story of secrecy, perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency's history. It is also a history of near-total impunity, both institutionally and individually, for countless abuses committed over decades, not during interrogations of enemy agents or in times of war, but during routine medical treatment, in prison hospitals, drug rehabilitation clinics and juvenile detention centers, and in many cases under the direction of eminent figures in the field of human sciences. behavior. Despite the Agency's efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived that purge and have been collected here present a compelling and disturbing account of the CIA's decades-long efforts to discover and test ways to erase and reprogram the human mind.
Most of these documents come from the archives compiled by John Marks, a former State Department official who filed the first Freedom of Information Act requests on this subject and whose 1979 book, "The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences" (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), remains the most important source on this episode. Marks later donated his FOIA documents and other research materials to the National Security Archive. Many of the redacted passages in the documents have been suppressed over time, as official investigations, civil depositions, and detailed accounts have shed significant light on some of these episodes. In many cases, copies of declassified documents donated by Marks to the National Security Archive bear his handwritten annotations.
Federal narcotics agent George Hunter White was hired by
Sidney Gottlieb to run CIA shelters in New York and San
Francisco, where he secretly administered LSD, among other
substances, to unconscious subjects and recorded their behavior.
MKULTRA's legacy goes far beyond the various "sub-projects" described in these documents that were largely abandoned in the mid-1970s. As author Stephen Kinzer points out, the CIA's behavior control research programs "contributed decisively to the development of the techniques used by the Americans and their allies in detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world." MKULTRA techniques were cited in the CIA's 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, which served as the basis for prisoner interrogations in Vietnam and then in the anti-communist dictatorships of Latin America.1
While many MKULTRA projects were conducted in hospitals, laboratories, or other institutional institutions, others were conducted in clandestine CIA shelters, where the staff was not doctors or clinicians, but intransigent federal narcotics agents like George Hunter White. Under Gottlieb's direction, White adopted the persona of a bohemian artist named "Morgan Hall" to lure unsuspecting victims to his "lair”, where he and his CIA collaborators secretly conducted experiments on them and recorded their behavior. A former member of the OSS who worked on the development of a "drug of truth" for the military during World War II, White secretly administered LSD to many of his victims, a drug that the CIA had in abundance thanks to Eli Lilly, who had developed the ability to produce the drug in "industrial quantities" and had agreed to become the Agency's supplier. Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and CIA psychologist John Gittinger were among the CIA officials who frequently visited White's shelters.
As Chair of the Department of Psychology at McGill University
and Director of the Allan Memorial Institute, Dr. D. Ewen
Cameron conducted terrifying experiments on psychiatric patients
and others as part of the MKULTRA program.
The mysterious death of Frank Olson in 1953 is particularly interesting. Olson was a chemist in the Army and an aerosol specialist for the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army Chemical Corps, the CIA's military partner in behavior control research. Officially ruled a suicide, Olson's death, following a fall from the 10th floor in New York City, came 10 days after Gottlieb and TSS staff added LSD to his cocktail at a CIA-SOD work retreat in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. It was later determined that the administration of drugs contributed to his death, but many, including members of his family, questioned the conclusion that Olson, who shared a room with Lashbrook that night, threw himself out of the window of the Statler Hotel.
At the center of it all was Sidney Gottlieb, chief of staff for the CIA's Chemical Division Technical Services (TSS) and then director of the Division of Technical Services (TSD). Gottlieb was "the CIA's leading poison maker”, according to Kinzer, whose book, "Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control" (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), is the go-to work on this Mercurian chemist. From his position in the heart of the CIA's secret corridors, Gottlieb led the agency's decades-long efforts to find ways to use drugs, hypnosis, and other extreme methods to control human behavior and, it was hoped, turn them into tools for use by intelligence agencies and policymakers.
The Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, was the site of the MKULTRA experiments in the 1950s and 1960s.
Accounts of the CIA's involvement in the failed assassination attempts on Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others, are among the most legendary, if not the most successful, examples of the Agency's efforts to implement the schemes and tools developed by Gottlieb's unit. Less well known is his role in drug experiments and "special interrogation" programs that have left hundreds psychologically traumatized and others "permanently broken”, according to Kinzer.2
Although MKULTRA was approved at the highest level, it operated virtually without any controls. As Marks notes, MKULTRA's initial budget authorization "exempted the program from the CIA's usual financial controls" and allowed the TSS to initiate research projects "without signing the usual contracts or other written agreements”3. With few responsibilities, unlimited resources, and the support of the CIA's head of covert operations, Richard Helms, Gottlieb and his team at the TSS devised a series of bizarre experiments that they believed would improve covert intelligence operations while strengthening the Agency's defenses against the use of similar techniques by enemy forces.
Dr. Charles Geschickter was a professor of pathology at Georgetown University and director of the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, a foundation through which the CIA funded various drug and behavior control research and experiments through the MKULTRA program and other related programs.
When Gottlieb arrived at the CIA in 1952, Project BLUEBIRD, which explored "the possibility of controlling an individual through the application of special interrogation techniques”, was already well underway4. Led by the head of the Security Bureau, Morse Allen, the first BLUEBIRD experiments were conducted by teams of polygraphy experts and psychologists on suspected detainees and informants at U.S. secret interrogation centers in Japan and Germany.
The appointment of Allen Dulles as Deputy Director of the CIA in 1951 led to the expansion of the BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under Gottlieb's leadership at the TSS. The new programme was to include, among other projects, the development of 'gas guns' and 'poisons', as well as experiments to test whether 'monotonous sounds', 'concussions', 'electroshocks' and 'induced sleep' could be used as means of achieving 'hypnotic control of an individual'.5
It was through ARTICHOKE that the Agency began to recruit the best researchers more systematically and to solicit the most prestigious institutions to collaborate on its research on mind control. One of the first to participate was the deputy director of the Boston Psychiatric Hospital, Dr. Robert Hyde, who in 1949 was the first American to "get high" on LSD after the hospital acquired samples of the drug from the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. In 1952, the CIA began funding the hospital's LSD research, in which Hyde used himself, his colleagues, student volunteers, and hospital patients as subjects. Hyde worked on four MKULTRA sub-projects over the next decade.
At the insistence of Dr. Geschickter, the CIA paid $375,000 for
the construction of a new medical facility at Georgetown University Hospital. In exchange, Geschickter agreed to let the CIA use one-sixth of the new "Gorman Annex" as a
"hospital refuge" and to provide "human patients and volunteers for experimental purposes”.
Shortly after becoming director of the CIA in 1953, Dulles authorized MKULTRA, expanding the agency's research into behavior control and refocusing it on developing a "capability for the covert use of biological and chemical materials" in "present and future clandestine operations” 6. Many of the 149 MKULTRA subprojects have been led by reputable universities such as Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University, led four MKULTRA subprojects, all of which involved the use of drugs, including LSD, to induce psychotic states. This series of horrific experiences left lifelong scars on many of his subjects, including prisoners in the Atlanta federal prison and juveniles held in a detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey. Many other MKULTRA subprojects have been set up thanks to grants from fake CIA-funded foundations. One of them, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, headed by Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University, has pumped millions of dollars from the CIA into research programs at Georgetown and other institutions. As part of the agreement, the CIA was granted access to a medical shelter in Georgetown University Hospital's new Gorman Annex, as well as a steady supply of patients and students who could serve as subjects for MKULTRA experiments.
Another important "front" foundation of the MKULTRA program, the Human Ecology Society, was headed by Dr. Harold Wolff, a neurologist at Cornell Medical Center, who authored one of the first studies on communist brainwashing techniques for Allen Dulles, and then partnered with the CIA to develop a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation that could be used to erase human memory. Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded by Wolff's group were the infamous "depatterning" experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron's methods combined induced sleep, electroshock and "psychic driving”, in which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.
These archives also shed light on a particularly dark period in the history of behavioral science, during which some of the best doctors in the field conducted research and experiments typically associated with the Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg. While some medical professionals hired by the CIA apparently faced ethical questions related to conducting harmful tests on non-consenting human subjects, others were eager to participate in a program in which, according to a 1953 memo, "no area of the human mind is to remain unexplored” 7. Just as CIA psychologists later oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and the CIA's "black sites”, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, many of the doctors and clinicians recruited to work on MKULTRA were leaders in their fields, whose participation enhanced the program's prestige and attracted others. Scholars and researchers interested in the involvement of psychologists and other medical professionals in the horrific American detention and interrogation programs that have come to light in recent years will find parallels and historical antecedents in this collection.
This collection is also very valuable for those who want to learn more about the early years of the CIA and some of its major figures, such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Richard Bissell, Frank Wisner, and others, who envisioned and created an intelligence agency that favored bold, often covert actions, and where controversial projects like MKULTRA could secretly take root and thrive.
Kinzer, pp. 274-77.
Stephen Kinzer, "Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control" (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), p. 2.
Marks, p. 61.
Marks, p. 24; Kinzer, pp. 38-39.
Kinzer, p. 55.
Marks, pp. 60-61; Kinzer, pp. 69-71.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum, "Mushrooms – Narcotic and Poisonous Varieties," June 26, 1953.
