Experiments on Americans
[
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CIA documents suggest that they investigated "chemical, biological, and radiological" methods of mind control as part of MKUltra.
[49] They spent an estimated $10 million or more, roughly $87.5 million adjusted for inflation.
[50]
During a hearing by the
Senate Health Subcommittee, a testimony by the Deputy Director of the CIA stated that over 30 institutions and universities were involved in the experimentation program of testing drugs on unknowing citizens "at all social levels, high and low, Native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the issuing of LSD to unaware subjects in social situations.
[1]
The Army was subject to the testing of LSD which occurred in three phases. The first phase included over 1,000 American soldiers who willingly volunteered for testing of chemical warfare experiments. Phase two had 96 volunteers who were induced with LSD in evaluation of the possibility of intelligence uses of the drug. The third phase included Projects THIRD CHANCE and DERBY HAT which conducted experiments on 16 unwitting nonvolunteer subjects that after receiving LSD were interrogated as a part of operation field tests.
LSD
[
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In 1943, LSD was created by
Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. The early directors of MKUltra became aware of the existence of LSD and sought to use it for "mind-control". In the early 1950s, MKUltra director Sidney Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to buy the entire supply of LSD for $240,000, which in 2024, would be $4,227,079.
[51] This LSD supply gave Gottlieb the ability to now fulfill his experiment by spreading LSD to prisons, hospitals, institutions, clinics, and foundations in order to see how citizens would react to the drug without knowing exactly what is happening to themselves.
Early CIA efforts focused on
LSD-25, which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs.
[52] 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.
[53]
Documents obtained from the CIA by
John D. Marks under
Freedom of Information in 1976 showed that, in 1953, the CIA considered purchasing 10 kilograms of LSD, enough for 100 million doses. The proposed purchase aimed to stop other countries from controlling the supply. The documents showed that the CIA purchased some quantities of LSD from
Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland.
[54]
Once Project MKUltra started, in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes – "people who could not fight back", as one agency officer put it.
[55] 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. The aim was to find drugs that would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program them as "a robot agent".
[56] Military personnel who received the mind-altering drugs were also threatened with court-martials if they told anyone about the experiments.
[57] 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. Many veterans who were subjected to experimentation are now seeking legal and monetary reparations.
In
Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several
brothels within agency safehouses in San Francisco 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.
[58] 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.
[11][59]
At the invitation of Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of
Allen Ginsberg,
Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a
CIA-financed study under the aegis of MKUltra,
[60] at the
Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital
[61][62] where he worked as a night aide.
[63] The project studied the effects of
psychoactive drugs, particularly
LSD,
psilocybin,
mescaline,
cocaine,
AMT and
DMT on people.
[64]
The Office of Security used LSD in interrogations, but
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 it could be given 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, D.C., seeing a monster in every car passing him. The experiments continued even after
Frank Olson, an army chemist who had never taken LSD, was covertly dosed by his CIA supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story New York City hotel room, supposedly as a result of deep depression induced by the drug.
[65] According to
Stephen Kinzer, Olson had approached his superiors some time earlier, doubting the morality of the project, and asked to resign from the CIA.
[66]
Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. In one case, seven drug-addicted African-American volunteers at the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center in
Kentucky were given LSD for 77 consecutive days.
[67][68]
MKUltra's researchers later dismissed LSD as too unpredictable in its results.
[69] 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 super-hallucinogens 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
[
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Another technique investigated was the
intravenous administration of a
barbiturate into one arm and an
amphetamine into the other.
[70] The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. Other experiments involved ,
morphine,
temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), , ,
scopolamine,
alcohol and
sodium pentothal.
[71]
Hypnosis
[
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Declassified MKUltra documents indicate they studied
hypnosis in the early 1950s. Experimental goals included creating "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".
[72] They conducted experiments with drug-induced hypnosis and with
anterograde and
retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs.
Experiments on Canadians
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edit]
CenterLargeAccessibilityDelete
Donald Ewen Cameron c. 1967
The CIA exported experiments to Canada when they recruited Scottish 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 (US$766,936 in 2024, adjusted for inflation) to carry out MKUltra experiments there. The
Montreal experiments 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.
[73]: 141–142
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 out on patients who entered the institute for common problems such as
anxiety disorders and
postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions.: 140–150 His treatments resulted in victims'
urinary incontinence,
amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents.
[74]
During this era, Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the
World Psychiatric Association as well as president of both the
American Psychiatric Association and the
Canadian Psychiatric Association. Cameron was also a member of the
Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–1947.: 141
Motivation and assessments
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His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist
William Sargant at
St Thomas' Hospital, London, and
Belmont Hospital, Sutton, who was also involved in the
Secret Intelligence Service and who experimented on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.
[75]
In the 1980s, several of Cameron's former patients sued the CIA for damages, which the Canadian news program
The Fifth Estate documented.
[76] Their experiences and lawsuit were adapted in the 1998 television miniseries
The Sleep Room.
[77]
Naomi Klein argues in her book
The Shock Doctrine that 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."
[78]
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",
[79] referring to first creating a state of
disorientation in the subject, and then creating a situation of "self-inflicted" discomfort in which the disoriented subject can alleviate pain by capitulating.
Secret detention camps
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edit]
In areas under American control in the early 1950s in Europe and East Asia, mostly
Japan,
West 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.
[3]
Revelation
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Frank Church headed the Church Committee, an investigation into the practices of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
In 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by
Watergate, CIA Director
Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed.
[80] 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's 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.
[81] 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 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 and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject, , 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.
[82] However, it contained little detail. , who had retired from the CIA two years previously and had headed MKUltra, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra.
[18]
The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator , concluded that "prior 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.
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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,
[83] 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#cite_note-86
At least one death, the result of the alleged
defenestration of , was attributed to Olson's being subjected, without his knowledge, to such experimentation nine days before his death.[
citation needed] The CIA itself subsequently acknowledged that these tests had little scientific rationale. The officers conducting the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.
[85][86]
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 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. 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 because his family destroyed them after his death.
[87][88]