MKUltra was an illegal human
experimentation program designed and undertaken by the United States
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify
drugs that could be used in altering human behavior. The program has
been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an
example of the CIA's abuse of power, with critics highlighting its
disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic
principles.
Project MKUltra began in 1953 and was
halted in 1972. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its
subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert
administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD)
and other chemicals without the subjects' consent. Additionally,
other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including
electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and
sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
Project MKUltra was preceded by Project
Artichoke. It was organized through the CIA's Office of Scientific
Intelligence and coordinated with the United States Army Biological
Warfare Laboratories. The program engaged in illegal activities,
including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as unwitting test
subjects. MKUltra's scope was broad, with activities carried out
under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions aside from
the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals,
prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated using front
organizations, although some top officials at these institutions were
aware of the CIA's involvement.
Project MKUltra was revealed to the
public in 1975 by the Church Committee (named after Senator Frank
Church) of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford's United States
President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States
(the Rockefeller Commission). Investigative efforts were hampered by
CIA director Richard Helms's order that all MKUltra files be
destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission
investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants
and on the small number of documents that survived Helms's order. In
1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of
20,000 documents relating to MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings.
Some surviving information about MKUltra was declassified in 2001.
Background
Name
The term MKUltra is a CIA cryptonym:
"MK" is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of
Technical Service and "Ultra" is an arbitrary word out of a
dictionary used to name the project.
Origin of the project
During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists
working in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during
World War II conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects.
Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and
hallucinogens such as mescaline were employed in experiments
conducted on Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and other prisoners
of war. These experiments aimed to develop a truth serum which would,
in the words of one laboratory assistant to Dachau scientist Kurt
Plötner, "eliminate the will of the person examined."
American historian Stephen Kinzer said that the CIA project was a
continuation of these earlier Nazi experiments, as evidenced by
MKUltra's use of mescaline on unwitting subjects, replicating
previous Nazi experiments conducted at Dachau. Numerous Nazi
scientists would be employed by the United States government after
the war as part of Operation Paperclip, with some figures such as
Kurt Blome becoming involved in MKUltra.
American interest in drug-related
interrogation experiments began in 1943, when the Office of Strategic
Services began developing a "truth drug" that would produce
"uninhibited truthfulness" in an interrogated person. In
1947, the United States Navy initiated Project CHATTER, an
interrogation program which saw the first testing of LSD on human
subjects.
In 1950, the Central Intelligence
Agency under the direction of General Walter Bedell Smith initiated a
series of interrogation projects involving human subjects, beginning
with the launch of Project Bluebird, officially renamed Project
Artichoke on August 20, 1951. Directed and overseen by Brigadier
General Paul F. Gaynor, the objective of Artichoke was to determine
whether an individual could be made to perform an act of attempted
assassination involuntarily. Morphine, mescaline and LSD were all
administered to unknowing CIA agents in an attempt to produce amnesia
in the subjects. In addition, Project Artichoke aimed to employ
certain viruses such as dengue fever as potential incapacitating
agents.
Aims and leadership
Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKUltra
sub-project on LSD in this June 9, 1953, letter.
The project was headed by Sidney
Gottlieb but began on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April
13, 1953. Its aim was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use
against the Soviet bloc in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and
North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war
during the Korean War. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their
own captives, and was interested in manipulating foreign leaders with
such techniques, devising several schemes to drug Fidel Castro. It
often conducted experiments without the subjects' knowledge or
consent. In some cases, academic researchers were funded through
grants from CIA front organizations but were unaware that the CIA was
using their work for these purposes.
The project attempted to produce a
perfect truth serum for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during
the Cold War and to explore other possibilities of mind control.
Subproject 54 was the Navy's top-secret "Perfect Concussion"
program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to
erase memory; the program was never carried out.
Most MKUltra records were destroyed in
1973 by order of CIA director Richard Helms, so it has been difficult
for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than
150 funded research subprojects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA
programs.
The project began during a period of
what English journalist Rupert Cornwell described as "paranoia"
at the CIA, when the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly and fear of
communism was at its height. CIA counter-intelligence chief James
Jesus Angleton believed that a mole had penetrated the organization
at the highest levels. The agency poured millions of dollars into
studies examining ways to influence and control the mind and enhance
its ability to extract information from resistant subjects during
interrogation. Some historians assert that one goal of MKUltra and
related CIA projects was to create a Manchurian Candidate–style
subject. American historian Alfred W. McCoy has claimed that the CIA
attempted to focus media attention on these sorts of "ridiculous"
programs so that the public would not look at the research's primary
goal, which was effective methods of interrogation.
Applications
The 1976 Church Committee report found
that, in the MKDELTA program, "Drugs were used primarily as an
aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used
for harassment, discrediting or disabling purposes."
Other related projects
In 1964, MKSEARCH was the name given to
the continuation of the MKULTRA program. The MKSEARCH program was
divided into two projects dubbed MKOFTEN and MKCHICKWIT. Funding for
MKSEARCH commenced in 1965 and ended in 1971. The project was a joint
project between the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and the CIA's Office of
Research and Development to find new offensive-use agents, with a
focus on incapacitating agents. Its purpose was to develop, test, and
evaluate capabilities in the covert use of biological, chemical, and
radioactive material systems and techniques of producing predictable
human behavioral and/or physiological changes in support of highly
sensitive operational requirements.
By March 1971, over 26,000 potential
agents had been acquired for future screening. The CIA was interested
in bird migration patterns for chemical and biological warfare (CBW)
research; subproject 139 designated "Bird Disease Studies"
at Pennsylvania State University. MKOFTEN was to deal with testing
and toxicological transmissivity and behavioral effects of drugs in
animals and, ultimately, humans. MKCHICKWIT was concerned with
acquiring information on new drug developments in Europe and Asia,
and with acquiring samples.
In January 1957, the CIA started a
subproject of MKUltra in an effort to broaden its scientific
research. "Subproject 68", conducted at the Allan Memorial
Institute in Montreal under the direction of psychiatrist Dr. Donald
Ewen Cameron, represents one of the most infamous and ethically
controversial endeavors within the MKUltra program. This subproject
aimed to explore innovative techniques for manipulating and
controlling human behavior, particularly through the methods of
"psychic driving" and "depatterning". Psychic
driving involved subjecting patients to continuous playback of
recorded messages, often with themes of self-improvement or identity
reinforcement, while they were under the influence of powerful
psychoactive substances such as LSD or barbiturates.
Experiments on Americans
CIA documents suggest that they
investigated "chemical, biological, and radiological"
methods of mind control as part of MKUltra. They spent an estimated
$10 million or more, roughly $87.5 million adjusted for inflation.
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
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
dosed with LSD in the evaluation of the possibility of intelligence
uses of the drug. The third phase included Project Third Chance and
Project Derby Hat, which conducted experiments on 16 unwitting
nonvolunteer subjects that, after receiving LSD, were interrogated as
part of operation field tests.
After retiring in 1972, Gottlieb
dismissed his entire effort for the CIA's MKUltra program as useless.
Files discovered in 1977 containing 700 pages of new information
showed that experiments had continued until Gottlieb ordered the
program halted on July 10, 1972.
LSD
In 1938, LSD was isolated 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. This
LSD supply gave Gottlieb the ability to fulfill his experiment by
spreading LSD to prisons, hospitals, institutions, clinics, and
foundations to see how citizens would react to the drug without
knowing exactly what was happening to them.
Early CIA efforts focused on LSD-25,
which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs. 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.
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.
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. 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". Military personnel who received the mind-altering
drugs were also threatened with court-martial if they told anyone
about the experiments. 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 later sought
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. 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 subjected to these interrogations were CIA
employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working
for the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and
several deaths resulted from this. Heroin addicts were bribed into
taking LSD with offers of more heroin.
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, at the Menlo Park
Veterans' Hospital where he worked as a night aide. The project
studied the effects of hallucinogens and other psychoactive drugs,
particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on
people.
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.
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.
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 participants at the National Institute of Mental
Health Addiction Research Center in Kentucky were given LSD for 77
consecutive days.
MKUltra's researchers later dismissed
LSD as too unpredictable in its results. 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
Another technique investigated was the
intravenous administration of a barbiturate into one arm and an
amphetamine into the other. 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 heroin,
morphine, temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), mescaline,
psilocybin, scopolamine, alcohol and sodium pentothal.
A 1955 MKUltra document details
research objectives to identify drugs that could be used as cognitive
enhancers, disease mimetics, euphoriants “without letdown,” and
agents to diminish ambition, among other uses. The extent of testing
toward these objectives is unclear, given the deliberate destruction
of most drug-related MKUltra files in 1973.
Hypnosis
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". They conducted
experiments with drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde and
retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs.
Experiments on Canadians
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.
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. His treatments resulted in victims' urinary
incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their
parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.
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.
Motivation and assessments
His work was inspired and paralleled by
the British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas' Hospital,
London, and Belmont Hospital, Sutton, who experimented on his
patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.
Although Sargant acted as a consultant for MI5, no evidence has
emerged that his work with deep sleep treatment at St Thomas'
hospital had any links with intelligence services.
In the 1980s, several of Cameron's
former patients sued the CIA for damages, which the Canadian news
program The Fifth Estate documented. Their experiences and lawsuit
were adapted in the 1998 television miniseries The Sleep Room.
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."
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", 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
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 (black
sites) 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 undergo various types of torture and
human experimentation. 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.
Project Bluebird
In October 1950, during the Korean War,
North Korean POWs under U.S. custody were reportedly subjected to
experiments under Project Bluebird, a precursor to MK-ULTRA.
According to declassified documents released by the National Security
Archive in 2024–2025, these experiments involved the use of various
drugs and advanced interrogation techniques, with the stated aim of
"controlling an individual to the point where he will do our
bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of
nature as self-preservation".
Revelation
In 1973, amid a government-wide panic
caused by the Watergate scandal, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered
all MKUltra files destroyed. 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. 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 Rockefeller Commission
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 mescaline and other chemical,
biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least
one subject, Frank Olson, 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. However, it contained little detail. Sidney
Gottlieb, 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.
The congressional committee
investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church,
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.
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, 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 LSD to "unwitting
subjects in social situations."
At least one death, the result of the
alleged defenestration of Frank Olson, was attributed to Olson's
being subjected, without his knowledge, to such experimentation nine
days before his death. The CIA itself subsequently acknowledged that
these tests had little scientific rationale. The officers conducting
the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.
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 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. A 1986
report found that Canadian government officials were not fully aware
of Cameron's experiments.
1994 U.S. General Accounting Office
report
The U.S. General Accounting Office
issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940
and 1974, the Department of Defense and other national security
agencies tested hazardous substances and radiation on hundreds of
thousands of human subjects.
Based on this report and other sources,
the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs concluded:
Working with the CIA, the Department of
Defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer"
soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also
tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named BZ. Many of
these tests were conducted under the so-called MKULTRA program,
established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in
brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted
of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting
human subjects.
CIA vs Sims
In CIA v. Sims (1985), the U.S. Supreme
Court endorsed the mosaic effect to justify broad judicial deference
under FOIA Exemption 3, allowing the CIA to withhold seemingly
innocuous details about MKUltra because aggregated disclosures could
expose intelligence sources. This rationale has since granted the
agency near-total immunity from FOIA and has been broadly applied by
lower courts.
Death of Frank Olson
Several known deaths have been
associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of Frank Olson. By
1951, Olson was a United States Army biochemist and biological
weapons researcher. In 1951 academic sources attributed the 1951
Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning incident to ergot poisoning through
a local bakery (which appeared to be plausible because ergot
naturally contains lysergic acid, the chemical precursor to LSD).
In 1953, a few days before his death,
Frank Olson quit his position as acting chief of the Special
Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick) because
of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological
weapons research.
Among Olson's concerns were:
the development of assassination
materials used by the CIA
the CIA's use of biological warfare
materials in covert operations
experimentation with biological weapons
in populated areas
collaboration with former Nazi
scientists under Operation Paperclip
LSD mind control research
In November 1953, Olson was given LSD
without his knowledge or consent as part of a CIA experiment, and
died after falling from a 13th-story window a week later. A CIA
doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in
another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson fell to his
death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that had
occurred during a severe psychotic episode. The CIA's own internal
investigation concluded that the head of MKUltra, CIA chemist Sidney
Gottlieb, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson's prior
knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in
the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until
some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested
that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to
take into account Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies,
which might have been exacerbated by the LSD.
In 1975, Olson's family received a
$750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and formal apologies
from President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, though
their apologies were limited to informed consent issues concerning
Olson's ingestion of LSD.
In 1977, the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence and the Committee on Human Resources wrote:
Given the CIA's purposeful destruction
of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols
with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the
experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of
MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known.
In 1994, Olson's body was exhumed, and
cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious
before he exited the window. This means the forensic evidence
conflicted with the former official version of events by the CIA. The
medical examiner termed Olson's death a "homicide".
Since 2001 (or earlier), the Olson
family disputes the official version of events. They maintain that
Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his
LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state
secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, about many of
which he had direct personal knowledge.
A 2010 book alleged that:
the 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass
poisoning was part of MKDELTA
Olson was involved in that event
he was eventually murdered by the CIA
On November 28, 2012, the Olson family
filed suit against the U.S. federal government for the wrongful death
of Frank Olson. In 2013 (July) the case was dismissed, due in part to
the 1976 settlement between the family and government.
In the decision dismissing the suit,
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote,
While the court must limit its analysis
to the four corners of the complaint, the skeptical reader may wish
to know that the public record supports many of the allegations [in
the family's suit], far-fetched as they may sound.
Legal issues involving informed consent
The revelations about the CIA and the
Army prompted many subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits
against the federal government for conducting experiments without
informed consent. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes
successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did
receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or
acts of Congress. Frank Olson's family received $750,000 by a special
act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director William
Colby met with Olson's family to apologize publicly.
Previously, the CIA and the Army had
actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating
information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the
families. One subject of army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an
army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The
government argued that Stanley was barred from suing under the Feres
doctrine.
In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed
this defense in a 5–4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case:
United States v. Stanley. The majority argued that "a test for
liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would
call into question military discipline and decision making would
itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon,
military matters." In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued
that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the
government from liability and punishment for serious violations of
constitutional rights:
The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947
deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing
human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States
Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard
against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human
subjects... [I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence
officials began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological
materials, including LSD.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing a
separate dissent, stated:
No judicially crafted rule should
insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human
experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as
Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental
role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented
with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards
that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior
of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human
subject is absolutely essential to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal
concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society
can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can
be, by the perpetrators.
In another lawsuit, Wayne Ritchie, a
former United States Marshal, after hearing about the project's
existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD
at a 1957 Christmas party, which resulted in his attempting to commit
a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest. While the government
admitted it was, at that time, drugging people without their consent
and that Ritchie's behavior was typical of someone on LSD, U.S.
District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel found Ritchie could not prove he
was one of MKUltra's victims or that LSD caused his robbery attempt,
and dismissed the case in 2005.
In Canada, a class action lawsuit on
the Montreal experiments has been authorized by the Quebec Superior
court in 2025, granting representation status to a survivor –
admitted at the Allan Memorial Institute at age 15 – and a family
member of a deceased patient.
Notable people
Documented experimenters
Confirmed experimenters:
Harold Alexander Abramson
Donald Ewen Cameron
Sidney Gottlieb
Harris Isbell
Martin Theodore Orne
Louis Jolyon West
George Hunter White
Alleged experimenters:
Jim Jones
Charlie Siragusa
Documented subjects
Confirmed subjects:
Allen Ginsberg first took LSD in an
experiment on Stanford University's campus, where he could listen to
records of his choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan
mandala mantra, and Richard Wagner). He said the experience resulted
in "a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences
through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse
that." He became an outspoken advocate for psychedelics in the
1960s and, after hearing suspicions that the experiment was
CIA-funded, wrote, "Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of
the CIA's lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful
experiments in mind control?"
Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest, is said to have volunteered for MKUltra experiments
involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs at the Veterans
Administration Hospital in Menlo Park while he was a student at
nearby Stanford University. Kesey's experiences while under the
influence of LSD inspired him to promote the drug outside the context
of the MKUltra experiments, which influenced the early development of
hippie culture.
Harold Blauer was an American tennis
player who died from injections of 3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine in
the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which he had voluntarily
checked into due to his depression following a divorce.
Robert Hunter was an American lyricist,
singer-songwriter, translator, and poet, best known for his
association with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Along with Ken
Kesey, Hunter was said to be an early volunteer MKUltra test subject
at Stanford University. Stanford test subjects were paid to take LSD,
psilocybin, and mescaline, then report on their experiences. These
experiences were creatively formative for Hunter:
Sit back picture yourself swooping up a
shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall
unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist and then sort of
cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so
slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver
vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells
By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me
to remain insane.
Alleged subjects:
James "Whitey" Bulger, an
organized crime boss, alleged he had been subjected to weekly
injections of LSD and subsequent testing while in prison in Atlanta
in 1957.
Ted Kaczynski, an American domestic
terrorist known as the Unabomber, was said to be a subject of a
voluntary psychological study alleged by some sources to have been a
part of MKUltra. As a sophomore at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in
a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely
brutalizing psychological experiment", led by Harvard
psychologist Henry Murray. In total, Kaczynski spent 200 hours as
part of the study.
Sirhan Sirhan's attorney, Lawrence
Teeter, believed that Sirhan was "operating under MKUltra mind
control techniques" when he assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.
Charles Manson has been tied to MKUltra
by author Tom O'Neill, beginning with his time in prison, when Manson
took part in drug-induced psychological experiments run by the
federal government. Such experiments hypothetically could have been
continued through his ongoing connection to the Haight Ashbury Free
Clinic in San Francisco once out of prison in 1967.
Jimmy Shaver, convicted killer and
rapist.
In popular culture
MKUltra plays a part in many conspiracy
theories due to its nature and to the destruction of most records
concerning it. This has also led to the idea that the human
experiments performed by the CIA are ongoing in the present day.
The Ipcress File is a 1965 British spy
film directed by Sidney J. Furie, from a screenplay by Bill Canaway
and James Doran, based on Len Deighton's 1962 novel The IPCRESS File.
It stars Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, an intelligence officer from
the War Office investigating the disappearances of high-level
scientists. The mind control system used throughout the film followed
the same guidelines.
The sixth and final volume of John
Burdett's Bangkok detective novel series (2003–2015), The Bangkok
Asset, features MKUltra as a major theme. The novel expands the
impacts of the program to ultimately include the creation of super
soldier-spies with "transhuman abilities".
The 2009 film The Killing Room is a
thriller based on the real life MKUltra top secret government
psychological program in which various volunteer test subjects are
put in a tense situation.
The seventh track on the Muse album The
Resistance, "MK Ultra", is about project MKUltra.
The BYU television series Granite Flats
(2013–2015) was based on the CIA's implementation of an MKUltra
experiment on one of the series's characters, Lt. Frank Quincy (Scott
Christopher), in an attempt to transform him into a conscienceless
assassin.
Screenrant writer Kara Hedash wrote
that plot points in the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–2025)
were inspired by MKUltra experiments.
Wormwood is a 2017 American six-part
docudrama miniseries directed by Errol Morris and released on
Netflix. The series is based on the life of the scientist Frank Olson
and his involvement in Project MKUltra.
Will Wood's 2020 album The Normal Album
features a song titled "BlackBoxWarrior – OKULTRA", which
describes the experience of an MKUltra victim among other themes.
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Further reading
External videos
video icon Presentation by Stephen
Kinzer on Poisoner in Chief, October 3, 2019, C-SPAN
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and
the CIA Search for Mind Control, Henry Holt and Co., by Stephen
Kinzer, 2019, ISBN 978-1250140432
The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the
CIA's Base for Mind Control Experiments, by Stephen Kinzer, Politico,
2019.
Potash, John L. (2015). Drugs as
Weapons Against Us. Trine Day LLC. ISBN 978-1-937584-92-4.
"U.S. Congress: The Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence (Church
Committee report), report no. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess.
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976), 394".
"U.S. Senate: Joint Hearing before
The Select Committee on Intelligence and The Subcommittee on Health
and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th
Cong., 1st Sess. August 3, 1977". Archived from the original on
March 3, 2016. Retrieved April 20, 2005.
"The Search for the "Manchurian
Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the
Behavioral Sciences". Archived from the original on March 3,
2016. Retrieved August 6, 2010.
Acid: The Secret History of LSD, by
David Black, London: Vision, 1998, ISBN 1901250113. Later edition
exists.
Acid Dreams: The Complete Social
History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin Lee and
Bruce Shlain, New York: Grove Press, 1985, ISBN 0802130623
The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the
CIA, by John Ranelagh, pp. 208–10.
80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time,
by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalin, chapter 1, "CIAcid Drop".
In the Sleep Room: The Story of CIA
Brainwashing Experiments in Canada, Anne Collins, Lester & Orpen
Dennys (Toronto), 1988.
Journey into Madness: The True Story of
Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, by Gordon Thomas, NY:
Bantam, 1989, ISBN 0553284134
Operation Mind Control: Our Secret
Government's War Against Its Own People, by W H Bowart, New York:
Dell, 1978, ISBN 0440167558
The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon
Ronson, Picador, 2004, ISBN 0330375482
The Search for the Manchurian
Candidate, by John Marks, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1999, ISBN
0393307948
Storming Heaven: LSD and The American
Dream, by Jay Stevens, New York: Grove Press, 1987, ISBN 0802135870
Lisle, John (2025). Project Mind
Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA. St.
Martin’s Press. ISBN 9781250338747.
External links
Wikimedia Commons logo
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
Project MKUltra.
Entire Four CD-ROM set of CIA / MKUltra
Declassified documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), image format, The Black Vault
MKUltra Declassified documents (PDF)
U.S. Supreme Court, CIA v. Sims, 471
U.S. 159 (1985) 471 U.S. 159[link removed], FindLaw
U.S. Supreme Court, United States v.
Stanley, 483 U.S. 669 (1987) 483 U.S. 669[link removed], FindLaw
Mind Control and MKULTRA by Richard G.
Gall
Results of the 1973 Church Committee
Hearings, on CIA misdeeds, and the 1984 Iran/Contra Hearings
XXVII. Testing and Use of Chemical and
Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community
List of MKULTRA Unclassified Documents
including subprojects
