Newly compiled records are spilling the beans on one of the CIA’s most notorious and shadowy programs: MKUltra, a wild attempt to develop mind control techniques through drugs, hypnosis, and psychological manipulation.
The collection was published by the Digital National Security Archive of The George Washington University in December 2024, detailing more than 1,200 documents on the CIA’s foray into behavioral and mind control experiments from 1953 until the 1970s.
Much of the information comes from records gathered by John Marks, a former State Department official who initiated the first Freedom of Information Act requests on the topic and authored the 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
Some fascinating insights come from Document 6, a memo from 1952 about Project Artichoke, the predecessor of Operation MKUltra. It explains the “successful application of narco-hypnotic integrations” on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” In sum, suspects underwent drug-induced hypnosis in experiments aimed at causing amnesia.
The dosed-up individuals would be interviewed for over an hour and, if all went to plan, they would have little-to-no memory of the grilling. In one experiment, the subjects were given “heavy dosages” of sodium pentothal (a fast-acting, sedative barbiturate) along with Desoxyn (a potent methamphetamine stimulant). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the integration was declared an “outstanding success.”
Another interesting tidbit comes from Document 5, a daily planner entry written by federal narcotics agent George White in 1952. White explains that he has been approach by Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and leading figure in Operation MKUltra, to be a consultant for the CIA. He agrees. White later managed CIA safehouses in New York and San Francisco, where unsuspecting US citizens were covertly dosed with LSD and exposed to various mind control experiments.
A recurring theme throughout the documents is the CIA’s extensive reliance on LSD. One particularly intriguing memo from 1953, labeled Document 8, reveals that “most LSD obtained by the CIA comes from the Eli Lilly Company.” However, the memo cryptically notes that the exact means by which the agency secured the drug remains murky.
Adding to the intrigue, the document discloses that caches of CIA-owned LSD were stashed at field stations in far-flung locations, including Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and Atsugi, a Japanese city with a US Navy Base. Meanwhile, White, the intriguing figure mentioned above, reportedly had his hands on an unspecified quantity of the mind-altering substance.
A particularly interesting insight comes from Document 9, a 1953 letter by Vincent Ruwet, the head of the Special Operations Division of the Army Chemical Corps, regarding the death of Frank Olson, an Army chemist and aerosols specialist who died upon falling from a 10-story building in New York City just 10 days after Gottlieb and others spiked his cocktail with LSD.
Olson is described as a “very popular, ‘life of the party’ type” who was “outstanding” at his job. The day before his death, Olson spoke on the phone with Ruwet and appeared to be “quite relaxed.” Olson’s death, which the CIA initially ruled as suicide, remains one of the most enigmatic aspects of Operation MKUltra and was explored in the Netflix miniseries Wormwood.
While the documents provide plenty of clues and anecdotes, the full depth and scale of MKUltra’s dark secrets remain shrouded in mystery. Operation MKUltra was publicly revealed in 1975 by the Church Committee, a US Senate select committee investigating CIA abuses, following an exposé by The New York Times. Fifty years on, the project still remains shrouded in secrecy, not least because the CIA attempted to destroy all MKUltra files in 1973.
Thankfully, however, these newly complied documents throw some fresh light onto this strange chapter of US history.
“Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind,” the National Security Archive said in a statement.
