Project MK Ultra: The CIA’s Harmful, Pointless Quest for Mind Control

The Allied victory in World War II meant an end to war with the fascists in Germany, Japan, and Italy, but it did not mean an end to war. In fact, the war just shifted into something more shadowy and covert, where secret weapons, sleight of hand, and leveraging information could be more important than guns and bombs. Desperate to develop tactics and secret weapons that might give them an upper hand over their new Soviet enemies, the United States began to experiment on drugs like LSD, hoping that they might give them the power to control minds, get fodder for blackmail, or extract information from captured spies. The project, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from roughly 1953-1973, cost thousands of dollars, hundreds of deaths, and inflicted innumerable human rights violations and ended in complete and utter failure. It did not result in a single piece of useful information. Today, as part of our series on the Cold War, we’re talking about project MK Ultra.

Transcript for: Project MK Ultra: The CIA’s Harmful, Pointless Quest for Mind Control

Written by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Recorded by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, PhD

I’m Sarah

And I’m Elizabeth

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig!

Elizabeth: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Joey, Susan, Colin, Lauren, Edward, Denise, Maria, Megan, Jessy, Karen, Lisa, Alissa, and Ben! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Sarah: This episode is drawn from one book – The Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer. I really enjoyed this book; I’ve actually read it twice! This is a highly readable, concise book that focuses really tightly on the MK Ultra project and its predecessors, Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK Naomi. I highly recommend it. But it is a trade press book, which means that it’s written largely with a general reading audience in mind – it’s not a scholarly text. I say all that only to say that there are certainly more in depth and analytical histories of this project out there. This episode will be more of an introduction to this really vast and frankly bananas covert operation with a focus on narrative.

Elizabeth : And that narrative begins in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in Allied occupied Munich. Just days after VE Day, American troops, (specifically the War Department Military Intelligence) tasked with locating high ranking Nazis, apprehended Dr. Kurt Blome. Blome had joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and had risen through the ranks of the medical apparatus of the fascist state after Hitler came to power. During the war, Blome was headquartered at the University of Posen, where he oversaw a number of scientific and medical studies designed to enhance the Nazi war project. In his research, under the protection of the SS, Blome developed a poison gas, tested on tuberculosis patients, an aerosol system for nerve gas, which was tested at Auschwitz, and bred infected mosquitoes and lice, tested at Dauchu and Buchenwald.

Black-and-white portrait of an older man in a pinstripe suit — Kurt Blome. Photo taken while a defendant in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, 1946-47. | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Sarah: Blome’s guilt was not in doubt – US Intelligence already had a letter in hand from Heinrich Himmler, directing Blome to develop poisons to use on concentration camp inmates, and Blome admitted to its authenticity. What to do with Blome was the real question. Blome’s work made clear that the Nazis had been hard at work developing scientific tools that aided the military effort using experiments that could only be developed using unethical human experimentation that would be impossible in the United States. Most of these ‘studies’ relied on intentionally killing their subjects to test their efficacy. The US Military had been worrying about the scientific experimentation of the Axis powers since early in the war. The Japanese had been using biological and chemical warfare in China, killing civilians with cholera-poisoned water and anthrax bombs, spurring the US War Department to conduct a study of the state of biological and chemical warfare.

Elizabeth : Chemical and biological warfare were both prohibited by the post-World War I Geneva Protocol, the treaty that attempted to put in place protections for future wars. Even though the United States had been involved in the development of the Geneva Protocol, it did not sign it. The War Department felt that a new era of warfare meant that they couldn’t be caught unprepared when their enemies were clearly already developing these illegal weapons. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt: “Biological warfare is of course a ‘dirty business,’ but in light of the committee’s report, I think we must be prepared.” The US created an agency, the War Research Service, headed up by George Merck, the chemist and pharmaceutical developer, to do more research to determine whether the US should begin its own chemical or biological weapons development. Merck wrote a memo that affirmed that the US had no choice but to keep up with other nations’ scientific research, writing: “The value of biological warfare will be a debatable question until it is proven or disproven … there is but one logical course to pursue, namely, to study the possibilities of warfare from every angle.”^[1]

Sarah: The memo landed at the same time as a panic in the British government that Hitler was perhaps planning to deploy a biological weapon against England. This turned out – like many of the claims that we’ll talk about during this episode – to be completely unsubstantiated. Churchill approached the United States for help, which only reaffirmed to the US that it had no choice but to begin work researching biological warfare and developing their own weapons. The War Department turned to Ira Baldwin, a bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin, one of the very few scientists who did not tell them that what they wanted – the mass production of harmful bacteria to use against their enemies – was impossible. Baldwin became the head of the United States’ program to develop a bioweapons research program headquartered at a former air base outside of Frederick, Maryland named Camp Detrick. During the course of the next couple of years, Detrick grew from a mostly abandoned old air base to a booming research center. By the time the war ended and Baldwin returned to the University of Wisconsin, he had overseen the production of “industrial quantities of anthrax spores, bred mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, and even developed a ‘pigeon bomb,’ a bird whose feathers were impregnated with toxic spores.”^[2]

Elizabeth : When the war ended, the United States under Baldwin’s project at Detrick had advanced the country’s bioweapons program significantly. But the Americans now had a new fear: Japan and Germany had both made far more (and far deadlier) progress than had the US, and now that knowledge gained was in the wind. In the months after victory in Japan, the Americans had learned about Unit 731, the secret Japanese human experimentation program. Headed up by Shiro Ishii, both a general in the Japanese army and a medical doctor, Unit 731 was tasked with learning as much as possible about how the human body responded to various chemical and biological weapons.

Sarah: We’re not going to go into great detail here, because Unit 731’s human experimentation is profoundly disturbing. I have done reading into it a few times, thinking I might include some information about it into a lecture for a class or maybe make an episode about, and every time I decide that I can’t do it because it is just that horrible. If you’re interested, though, I am going to link the Wikipedia article about it in the transcript, and I can also recommend Jeanne Guillemin’s book Hidden Atrocities and the volume Dark Medicine, edited by William LaFleur, Gernot Böhme and Susumu Shimazono. So here’s the least-detailed, most neutral possible description: Unit 731 was a research facility in Japanese-occupied Manchuria where Japanese military doctors and scientists performed experiments on people who were rounded up by the army or who were being held as prisoners-of-war. Most of the experimentation was in the hopes of developing useful biological or chemical weapons, while others were just to satisfy scientists’ curiosity about the human body and how it worked. Experiments were intentionally designed to kill the subjects; those who did not die as part of the research were killed afterward with poisons. When the war ended, despite the attempt to destroy the unit and control researchers, the Americans were able to get Shiro Ishii to reveal information by threatening to turn him over to the Soviets, who Ishii knew were more interested in exacting justice and less interested in making a deal. Ishii agreed to share what he knew, saying: “If you will give me documentary immunity for myself, superiors, and subordinates, I can get all the information for you. I would like to be hired by the US government as a biological warfare expert.” General Douglas MacArthur agreed and signed an amnesty decree for everyone who had worked at Unit 731. In short order, Ishii provided American researchers at Detrick with boxes of documents and research materials from Unit 731’s “work.” An American researcher wrote: “Information has accrued with respect to human susceptibility [to biological weapons]. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation … it is hoped that individuals who voluntarily contributed this information will be spared embarrassment because of it.”^[3] Ishii lectured to American researchers at Detrick, but remained in Japan for the rest of his life, and was never prosecuted for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Black-and-white group photo with several people, a man with glasses seated at center holding flowers — Shiro Ishii at a postwar reunion of the Unit 731 staff, granted amnesty by the United States. | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth : Getting information out of Ishii was considered a major success for the Americans – so when the War Intelligence unit finally found Kurt Blome in Munich, they were thrilled, not because they wanted to punish him but because they wanted to pick his brain and use his accumulated knowledge for the US. But saving Blome was slightly more complicated than Ishii – Unit 731 was extremely secret and virtually no one outside of the war in the far east was aware of its work or of Japan’s use of biological warfare, so MacArthur’s amnesty order created no public outcry. But Blome was swept up in the trial of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg, typically just referred to as “the Doctors’ Trial.” The military researchers at Detrick got to work helping ensure Blome was not convicted at the trial, held in 1946 and 1947. Blome argued that the evidence against him was only circumstantial, and further, that the experiments he had overseen were no worse than one that American doctors had conducted themselves, such as a study in which prisoners were intentionally infected with malaria. Detrick researchers also made sure that prosecutors were aware of Blome’s potential usefulness. When the verdicts were handed down in August 1947, Blome was acquitted.

Sarah: After the war, though, much to the dismay of the researchers at Detrick, the US government and military became less and less interested in biological weapons research. The future was in nuclear weapons. But when the US Army’s Chemical Corps began to learn about the research of a Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman, at least some in the military were convinced there was a future after all. Hoffman had experienced a “kaleidoscopic play of colors” in his mind after accidentally ingesting an enzyme derived from ergot, a fungus that usually grows on wheat. After taking the enzyme again, and dosing volunteers, Hoffman named the chemical lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD-25. Soon, it would be known simply as LSD. In 1949, L. Wilson Greene, technical director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at the Edgewood Arsenal military base in Maryland, learned about the chemical and became entranced. He then produced a report, entitled “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War,” which argued hard that the United States needed to begin research on the weaponization of mind-altering chemicals such as LSD, mescaline, and others.

Elizabeth : These chemicals, Greene believed, held great potential against enemies of the United States. He wrote: “Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensure. The symptoms which are considered to be of value in strategic and tactical operations include the following: fits or seizures, dissiness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania. Throughout recorded history, wars have been characterized by death, human misery, and the destruction of property, each major conflict being more catastrophic than the one preceding it. I am convinced that it is possible, by means of the techniques of psychochemical warfare, to conquer an enemy without wholesale killing of his people and the mass destruction of property.”^[4] The report convinced President Harry Truman and others that it was necessary for the US to take on such research, and to house it within the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Sarah: From this point, the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, who were interested in tools that they could use in spycraft, partnered with the existing (but languishing) military science project at Detrick. This joint program was nicknamed MK-NAOMI. (MK was a meaningless prefix given to projects within the TSS, and NAOMI was an arbitrary name given to this particular project. There isn’t a deeper meaning to the name; they just needed to call it something.) Essentially, in MK-NAOMI, Detrick scientists developed chemicals that might be helpful for getting information out of people, and the CIA tested them on prisoners in black sites in Europe and Japan. Within MK-NAOMI another program was developed: Project Bluebird, focused specifically on the development and testing of mind control methods and substances.

Elizabeth : At the same time that Bluebird was launching, the CIA gained a new deputy director: Allen Dulles. Dulles, a former member of the wartime intelligence unit the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was fascinated by the possibility of mind control substances or techniques. Dulles believed that projects like NAOMI and Bluebird were going to be vital in the new and existential cold war against Communism that would become known soon as the Cold War. Dulles’s career in the CIA began just as the United States ramped up this war against its former ally, the Soviet Union, and the fear that spies were hiding everywhere, ready to extract information and deliver it to the enemy. Dulles doubled down on mind control as perhaps the most powerful potential tool of the Cold War, if only it could be developed. Dulles wrote to his deputies in 1951: “ [in a previous conversation] I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science.” This had to happen at black sites, Dulles added, because these techniques would not be “permitted by the United States government (ie, anthrax, etc.).”^[5] Other documents from the era explain how Project Bluebird was to be conducted. One reads: “Bluebird teams are to include persons qualified in medicine, psychological interrogation, the use of the electroencephalograph, electric shock and the polygraph.” Another instructs staff to investigate how a person “can be made to commit acts useful to us under post-hypnotic suggestion” and try to discover ways that the CIA might “condition our own people so they will not be subject to post-hypnotic suggestion.”^[6]

Sarah: Bluebird was first headquartered at Camp King, a prison in Oberursel, Germany. Camp King was already essentially a torture site, where prisoners were ‘roughed up’ in hopes they would provide information. According to Kinzler, “Senior CIA officers saw Bluebird as a portal that might lead them toward an undiscovered world. At Camp King they had a site where they could test any drug or coercive technique. They had a ready supply of human subjects. If any died, disposing of bodies would be “no problem.” Best of all, since their work would be in American-occupied West Germany, they were beyond the reach of law.”^[7] Works was split between Camp King and a villa-turned-black site a few miles away called Villa Schuster. When a prisoner came to Camp King who might be an interesting candidate for Bluebird, they would be transferred to the villa, a few miles from Camp King, to assure that they had the utmost secrecy. Kinzler writes: “This set a precedent that marked a breakthrough for the CIA. By opening prisons, the Agency established its right not only to detain and imprison people in other countries, but to interrogate them harshly while they were in custody without regard for US law.”^[8] With these two sites (among a few others) in occupied West Germany, the CIA decided to do the same in occupied Japan, where during the Korean War they experimented with drugs like sodium amytal, Benzedrine, Coramine, and Picrotoxin – variously depressants and stimulants – on captured North Korean soldiers to see if they could exploit their physical and psychological state into offering up information.

Elizabeth : The head physician at Camp King was Walter Schreiber, who had been surgeon general of the Nazi army for the majority of the war. Though Schreiber later distanced himself from Nazi medical experimentation, under his watch, inmates at numerous concentration camps had been subjected to experiments. In the early 1950s, in exchange for his valuable information, the CIA offered to bring him to the United States through Operation Paperclip, the program that identified Nazi scientists and physicians whose knowledge would be worthwhile to the United States and brought them to the United States. (Werner von Braun, for instance, the architect of the US space program, was a Paperclip recipient.) But when Schreiber arrived in the US, he was met with a huge media backlash that got his Paperclip contract revoked and led him to choose retirement in Argentina. This meant that Schreiber’s old job – as medical director at Camp King – was open. Kurt Blome, the high ranking Nazi doctor who had overseen bioweapons development, was in need of a job. Given the backlash to Schreiber’s Paperclip contract, Blome had no chance to come to the US – but he was the perfect guy to take over the medical direction of the CIA’s Bluebird operations at Camp King.

Sarah: One outcome of the Nazi Doctors trial at Nuremberg was the development of the Nuremberg Code, the ten points that outline ethical human experimentation. The CIA ignored it. Instead, Bluebird operated on its own points, written as questions, identified in a memo from 1951. Answering these questions were critical, they believed, to the success of the CIA’s sensitive work during the Cold War. The questions included: “Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals?”, “Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?”, “Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents?”, “How can drugs be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum, water, common medicines, Coke, toothpaste?” The quest for drugs that might make all these things possible became one of the central aims of the CIA. In fact, it was so vital that it needed further investment.

CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, director of MK-ULTRA from 1951-1973 | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth : In 1951, Allen Dulles hired Sydney Gottlieb, a biochemist who had studied at the University of Wisconsin under Ira Baldwin, who had headed up the research at Detrick during World War II. Dulles and Gottlieb decided to centralize the more ad hoc research happening under Bluebird and bring it under Gottlieb’s control as a new project: Project Artichoke. Gottlieb was an interesting and weird guy. He was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants who settled in New York and went on to marry the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. He and his wife, Margaret, were endlessly curious people, equally interested in investigating spirituality and documenting and learning folk dances. They raised several children at a remote cabin in the backwoods of Virginia with no electricity or running water. Gottlieb attacked his work with Artichoke with vigor. Artichoke became particularly focused on whether or not you could control a subject’s mind using some kind of outside force, whether that might be drugs, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, or other methods.

Sarah: This kind of power seemed especially critical starting in the early ‘50s because of the unfounded panic that Communists were ‘brainwashing’ people. Believe it or not, the concept of brainwashing was itself a CIA invention – a journalist named Edward Hunter, working for the CIA to shape how world news was presented in the American media, published an article in which he claimed that he had discovered a “secret program by which Chinese Communists were controlling their peoples’ minds.” The idea of brainwashing took off. Hunter published more articles and books, and even testified by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), arguing that ‘psychic attacks’ could be turned against Americans to force them, through mind-control, to become Communists. In 1953, when the Korean War came to an end, Americans were even more convinced of brainwashing when thousands of American soldiers were released from North Korean prisons and among them were many who had written statements praising Communism, criticizing the United States, or even chosen to defect to China or North Korea. In conformist-minded, nuclear age America, it was inconceivable that red-blooded American could do such a thing – they must have been brainwashed.

Elizabeth : Artichoke was now focused on ways to control the enemy’s mind. Here are some of the goals of Artichoke, according to a CIA memo: “Specific research should be undertaken to develop new chemicals or drugs, or to improve known elements for us in Artichoke work….An exhaustive study should be made of various gases and aerosols … gas guns, jets, or sprays, both concealed [and] open, should be studied. The effects of high and low pressures on individuals should be studied … .Bacteria, plant cultures, fungi, poisons of various types…are capable of producing illnesses which in turn would produce high fevers, delirium, etc. … If an electronically induced sleep could be obtained, and that sleep is used as a means for gaining hypnosis of an individual, this apparatus might be of extreme value to the Artichoke work.”^[9]

Sarah: Early in his work with Artichoke, Gottlieb was reading about the CIA’s previous work on mind-altering drugs when he started to wonder why the previous experiments on LSD had petered out. Experiments on marijuana, cocaine, mescaline, and heroin – some of them conducted on students at colleges like the University of Rochester – had all proved to be disappointments. Mescaline seemed the most promising because the Nazi doctors had been investigating it in concentration camps, but later investigations proved that it was just too unpredictable. But Gottlieb thought LSD might still have potential. Gottlieb got an allergist-turned-LSD evangelist named Harold Abramson who worked with the CIA to give him a dose and after this first ‘trip,’ Gottlieb was even more convinced that LSD held the key. But while other LSD boosters like L. Wilson Green in the US military had envisioned LSD as some kind of weapon of war, Gottlieb saw its future as a mind-control tool, to be deployed in smaller, even one-on-one situations. He also wanted to expand the way the CIA thought about the potential role for such drugs – while previous work had focused on identifying a potential ‘truth serum,’ like sodium amytal was sometimes believed to be, Gottlieb saw LSD as “powers yet to be understood.”^[10] Further, the CIA worried that the Soviets might also be experimenting with LSD, and perhaps even stockpiling it. The Americans had to get out in front of it.

Elizabeth : Gottlieb began experimenting with LSD intensively. Allen Dulles provided Gottlieb with cart blanche power to design whatever experiments he desired. In addition to lab research at Detrick, Gottlieb traveled to both Germany and Japan to oversee experiments on people detained for working for the Soviets. They dosed prisoners and tried to see if they would ‘denounce Communism.’ These experiments resulted in nothing useful and all the prisoners – referred to as ‘expendables’ – were killed. Gottlieb’s project gained even more strength in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, and he in turn promoted Allen Dulles to director of the CIA. Dulles’s brother, John Foster Dulles, was also named Secretary of State, meaning that Gottlieb was basically free to do whatever he wanted- the state department would provide support to any experiments conducted abroad. In a speech at a gathering of fellow Princeton alumni, Dulles spoke about the importance the human mind held in this “cold war:” “We might call it, in its new form, “brain warfare.” The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside… The human mind is the most delicate of instruments. It is so finely adjusted, so susceptible to the impact of outside influences, that it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men. The Soviets are now using brain perversion as one of their main weapons in prosecuting the Cold War. Some of these techniques are so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.”

Sarah: But, Dulles added, the United States would fall behind in this kind of warfare that the Soviets were innovating, saying, “We in the West are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare. We have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.”^[11] This was, of course, categorically untrue – Dulles had authorized human experimentation years before. Further, Dulles knew that even at that moment, the CIA was ramping up its own “brain warfare” research. Just three days after this speech, Dulles authorized a new program for Gottlieb, giving him a new budget and complete permission to create and conduct new experiments with no oversights. The new project had a new name, too: Project MK Ultra.

Elizabeth: While Bluebird and Artichoke had focused their experimentation on prisoners at CIA black sites, in MK Ultra Gottlieb was thinking much, much bigger. He worked with psychiatrists and doctors at medical centers to test drugs on their patients. One, Paul Hoch at New York Psychiatric Institute, injected his patients with mescaline – and killed one subject when he injected him with one particularly massive dose. They funded research into ‘magic mushrooms’ in Mexico. Sometimes ‘research’ literally meant dosing basically random people. In 1952, two Americans working undercover in Paris dosed a random art student they met at a coffee shop – it caused a psychic break and the young man never fully recovered function. Why dose a random art student? We probably won’t ever know (I guess it’s possible it wasn’t even the CIA, but something else!) but files do show that Glickman had been hospitalized for hepatitis; later, after his poisoning, CIA scientists wrote a memo on the effects of LSD on individuals with liver problems. Gottlieb also hired George Hunter White, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics officer who had a long history of working with the OSS/CIA. White loved group sex (this will become relevant later on, I promise) and thought nothing of arresting celebrities like Billie Holliday for possession while stealing confiscated drugs for his own personal use. It was White’s job to find unsuspecting individuals in New York City, convince them to come back to the CIA “safe house” he had opened on Bedford Street, dose them with LSD, and record their reactions. According to one account of White’s career, “he posed alternately as a merchant seaman or bohemian artist, and consorted with a vast arrange of underworld characters, all of whom were involved in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling, and pornography…It was under this assumed, bohemian artist persona that White would entrap most of his MK Ultra victims.”^[12] When a victim escaped, White’s connections ensured that the CIA’s experimentation went undiscovered. One woman went to the hospital claiming that she had been drugged, only to be turned away just a couple hours later with the doctors telling her that she was probably mistaken. White and Gottlieb became close friends – Gottlieb taught White how to folk dance and White gave Gottlieb a handcrafted leather belt for his birthday.

Sarah: One of the issues that Gottlieb encountered with his experiments was getting his hands on a reliable supply of LSD. A Swiss biochemical company called Sandoz owned the patent. The CIA was terrified that the company was selling its supply to the Soviets, so they sent agents to Switzerland to try to convince the company to work exclusively with the Americans. The agents reported back to Dulles and Gottlieb that Sandoz had “a fantastically large amount” of LSD on hand – ten kilograms (roughly 22 pounds). Dulles approved the expense of $240,000 to buy it, thus controlling essentially the entire global supply of the drug. But when CIA agents arrived back in Switzerland to buy it, they discovered that the previous agent didn’t understand the metric system and there was actually only 10 grams, not kilograms. (This was a teensy fraction of a pound.) This was clearly not going to work. Soon, a ‘subproject’ of MK Ultra was paying scientists at Eli Lilly Company to figure out how to manufacture LSD themselves.

Declassified government memorandum dated June 9, 1953, concerning Project MKULTRA Subproject 8, with heavy redactions — A declassified document, signed by Sidney Gottlieb, authorizing an MK Ultra “subproject” on LSD. | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons.

Elizabeth : Gottlieb also contracted with scientists at universities across the nation to try to test drugs or develop tools that would be of use to the CIA. Despite tons of evidence that it was useful in any way to spycraft, Gottlieb was obsessed with the potential of hypnosis and contracted with Dr. Louis Jolyon West, a psychology professor at the University of Oklahoma, to try to find ‘dissociative states’ during which the CIA might control a subject’s mind. West was paid over $20,000 to study the ways that drugs might help create a hypnotic state that could be manipulated. They contracted with Donald Ewen Cameron, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, who was working on finding ways to ‘repattern’ the brains of people with mental illness. Cameron drugged patients (or gave them electroshock therapy) to keep them semi-comatose for a period of several months, then drugged them with LSD and began to use a method called “psychic driving” to try to more or less rewire their brains. For instance, a patient would be awoken from their semi-comatose state, dosed with LSD to induce a hallucinogenic state, placed in a dark room, and then fitted with a helmet that had headphones in it. Over the headphones, a voice would endlessly repeat a phrase that was intended to change the patient’s thinking. The real restful was essentially torture – he reduced patients to weeping, tormented insensibility with no positive or useful result. In one case, Cameron later reported: “Although patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained.”^[13]

Sarah: If you’ve heard anything about MK Ultra on university campuses, it’s likely that you’ve heard that MK Ultra was responsible for making Harvard student Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber – a reclusive technophobe who used bombs (murdering 3 people and wounding dozens) to protest technology and modernism that he believed were destroying the natural environment. Kaczynski entered Harvard at 16 as a mathematics prodigy, and while he seemed to adjust fairly well, he also seems to have started to develop his antisocial feelings. During his time at Harvard, Kaczynski was a subject in a large psychological study led by Dr. Henry Murray. Murray had collaborated with the OSS during World War II. After the war, Murray resumed his major research project at Harvard, entitled “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.” The study asked students to take a huge number of personality tests and assessments, then write, over the course of about a month, an essay describing their ‘philosophy of life’ or guiding principles. They would then be asked to return to the testing center, where they would debate their philosophy with another student. But when they arrived, they were fitted with electrodes that measured their blood pressure and heart rate and seated in a blindly bright room where a young lawyer (not a fellow student) was prepared to aggressively attack their ideas and philosophies. The study subjects, understandably, did not enjoy this experience, and described it as upsetting and traumatic. When Ted Kaczynski was later arrested as the Unabomber, his lawyers at one point tried to make the argument that Murray’s experiment had helped to shape one of Kaczynski’s central motivating concerns – that institutions tried to control individuals into conformity through mind control The connection of Murray’s experiment to MK Ultra is not proven. In a document on MK Ultra that the CIA released in 2018, they state that “a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MK Ultra experiments conducted at Harvard University in the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.” No direct evidence exists that the experiment was explicitly linked to or funded by the CIA, but the nature of the study certainly aligns. But importantly, there is not even circumstantial evidence that this study involved the use of LSD. Kaczynski himself stated that he did not believe he’d ever been dosed, even covertly, with the drug, and biographer Alston Chase wrote that he “found no evidence that LSD was ever used in Murray’s research.”^[14] So, yes, the Unabomber was part of a university-based psychological study that was unethical by today’s standards, but no, MK Ultra did not turn Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber.

( Alston Chase’s real argument about Ted Kaczynski is that it was actually Harvard’s education that turned him into the Unabomber because of it’s general education requirements and courses that emphasized moral relativism and post-modernism, which Chase argues gave Kaczynski a sense that anything could be rationalized and there was no foundational “truth.” Apparently post-modernism will make you a disaffected, anti-social murderer.)

Elizabeth : Those working with the CIA on MK Ultra sometimes purported to learn about the effects of LSD by basically just dosing each other and partying. According to one report, “They spiked each other’s coffee and liquor; they spread it on their food. They tripped out in their office and in safe houses in Washington and beyond … they were stoned for days at a time. There were moments of black comedy: A hallucinating scientist suddenly decided he was Fred Astaire and grabbed the nearest secretary convinced she was Ginger Rogers. Dr. Gottlieb regarded such incidents as the usual hiccups in searching for the magic technique he was convinced the Communists were using.”^[15] Harold Abramson, the allergist who had dosed Gottlieb for the first time, was given a supply of LSD by Gottlieb that he then used to hand out to his doctor-friends and pass out to friends at parties at his Long Island home. According to a friend, these parties were “wild and crazy, along with all the sex and what have you.”^[16] After receiving a hefty payment from Gottlieb for further experimentation, Abramson experimented on everything and everyone. He fed it to his betta fish and recorded their reactions. He decided it would be interesting to see the drug’s effect on kids, so dosed somewhere around 30 children between 6 and 11 every day for six weeks.

Sarah: Dosing each other and partying with LSD weren’t harmless. In November 1953, a bacteriologist named Frank Olson who, like, Gottlieb, had also studied under Ira Baldwin at the University of Wisconsin, was unwittingly dosed. When in military training during World War II, Olson had been ushered into bioweapons research at Detrick by Baldwin, where he remained after he left the service at the end of the war. Over the following years, Olson rose through the ranks largely because of his prowess with aerosolization, specifically “the airborne distribution of biological germs…Dr. Olson had developed a range of lethal aerosols in handy-sized containers. They were disguised as shaving cream and insect repellants. They contained, among other agents, staph enteroxin, a crippling food poison; the even more deadly Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis; and most deadly of all, anthrax…Further weapons he was working on [included] a cigarette lighter which gave out an almost instant lethal gas, a lipstick that would kill on contact with skin, and a neat pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia.”^[17] By the 1950s, Olson had also joined the CIA and was working alongside the MK Ultra staff. But by 1953, Olson was disenchanted and distressed – he was affected by the research lab animals who died by the droves and by the horrific torture he had to witness in interrogations at CIA black sites. In November 1953, Olson was invited to a CIA gathering at a remote cabin in Maryland by Sidney Gottlieb. The gathering, nicknamed the “Deep Creek Rendezvous,” was something that Gottlieb organized regularly. This time, as the gathered agents sat around drinking cocktails one evening, Gottlieb asked if anyone felt anything unusual – then revealed that he had dosed everyone’s Cointreau with LSD.

Black-and-white portrait of a man in a U.S. military uniform — Frank Olson. | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth : After that point, Olson did not seem well. He told his wife that he had “made a terrible mistake,” but then wouldn’t divulge more. When Olson returned to work, he seemed ready to leave the project and quit the CIA and Detrick – something unfathomable to the agents who ran MK Ultra, which was top secret. Any breach of secrecy, or potential leaks, had to be treated with the utmost seriousness. Gottlieb determined that Olson should be delivered to Abramson in New York City. Olson’s wife was told that he was being taken to Abramson because he was a physician with equal security clearance with whom he could speak freely – but the reality was that Abramson was loyal to MK Ultra. On November 28, Frank Olson fell – or jumped? – from room 1018A of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan and died.

Sarah: Olson’s death has remained one of the deepest mysteries of Project MK Ultra. Did the CIA orchestrate his death to protect the project that he was having serious doubts about? Did they kill him because he had a bad experience with LSD and had not recovered well? Did Olson jump because he was still dealing with the after effects of the LSD he had been slipped without his consent? Did he simply jump to his own death to escape his profound depression from working on the inherently unethical project? We’ll likely never know. I highly recommend the fascinating Netflix documentary Wormwood, which is half documentary, half movie, that explores the various possibilities in the Frank Olson story and features his son, Eric, and his mom trying to make sense of Frank’s death. It’s really sad and creative and interesting. Also, Eric has put together a really interesting website that tells his dad’s story and includes many primary sources from Frank Olson’s life and death.

Elizabeth : Frank Olson’s death did not dampen Sidney Gottlieb’s quest to learn more about the possibilities of LSD. He turned next to White, his old friend from the subproject in New York City, and asked him to do a similar investigation in San Francisco. This was subproject 42, code named Operation Midnight Climax. Here, Gottlieb was curious about the powerful cocktail of LSD and sex. White set up a ‘pad’ in the city and wired it with surveillance equipment. One CIA agent who visited the pad later recalled that the place “was so wired that if you spilled a glass of water, you’d probably electrocute yourself.”^[18] The pad was decorated like a brothel, with mirrors, red curtains, sex toys and risque art. Through a colleague named Ike Feldman in the narcotics bureau, White and Gottlieb solicited sex workers who would be paid between $50 and $100 and a “get out of jail free card” to be used on a future arrest whenever she brought a john to the pad. Once at the pad, the men would be dosed with LSD and their reactions carefully recorded while they had sex. According to Kinzler, “Gottlieb wanted to systematize the study of how sex, especially in combination with drugs, could loosen men’s tongues.” Maybe adding sex to the drugs would get future spies to divulge useful information. Feldman recalled later that he would tell the sex workers: “Honey, I want you to do a favor for me … I want you to pick up Joe Blow, take him to the apartment and give him a blow job. And while he’s there, I want you to ask him, ‘Hey, you know that airplane? How high does it fly?”^[19] Meanwhile, White would be behind a two-way mirror, sitting on a portable toilet, drinking a pitcher of martinis, watching the whole thing happen.

Sarah: Pleased with this experiment, Gottlieb took it up a notch and added a second more rural ‘pad’ to the experiment. At this quieter and more secluded location, Gottlieb added other types of substances to the experiment – men who stopped by looking for sex were used as guinea pigs for “stink bombs, itching powder, sneezing powder, and diarrhea inducers” among other potential tools of spycraft. At one point, Gottlieb had plans to test aerosolized LSD, but the day turned out to be so hot that they kept the windows open and ruined the experiment. Like it had in the Washington area, the testing spilled out from pads. A federal marshall named Wayne Ritchie attended a Christmas party at the San Francisco federal building, had a cocktail, became disoriented, and tried to rob a bar. He was released without having to serve time, but struggled with depression for the rest of his life. Decades later, he sued the CIA after reading about Sidney Gottlieb’s exploits. Ritchie couldn’t prove definitively that he was drugged by the CIA, but in a deposition, a CIA agent did admit that they had drugged people around San Francisco as part of this ongoing project. Ultimately, Ritchie wasn’t successful in his lawsuit, but the judge said: “If Ritchie’s claims are indeed true, he has paid a terrible price in the name of national security.”^[20]

Elizabeth : Into the 1960s, while the experimentation on LSD and other drugs continued, the work of MK Ultra shifted toward developing useful tools that might further the Cold War goals of the United States. Gottlieb developed a secret suicide pin that was concealed inside a silver dollar that American pilots wore on a chain around their necks while flying secret U2 spy plane missions. If they were shot down, to protect their secrets and prevent being ‘brainwashed’ into defection, the pilots were strictly instructed to use the pin inside the silver dollar. With one prick, the saxitoxin, derived from shellfish, in the pin would kill within seconds. Gottlieb also developed glass ampules of cyanide that pilots could carry with them – if they were captured, they would die within seconds of crushing the ampule between their teeth. As nations around the world turned toward communism, Gottlieb also turned toward developing tools for assassination. In 1955, Gottlieb was asked to find a way to assassinate Prime Minster Zhou Enlai of China after an attempt to kill him by blowing up his plane failed. Gottlieb’s plan was to find a way to apply a deadly toxin to a bowl of rice. The poison would be slow acting enough that it would not kill him until about 48 hours later, ensuring that his poisoners wouldn’t be suspected. Ultimately, the plan was nixed because – probably accurately – CIA leaders feared it would be easily linked to the US.

Sarah: Later, in the early 1960s, Gottlieb was asked again to come up with a plan for an assassination, this time of Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected prime minister of the First Congolese Republic (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Congo had just overthrown their Belgian colonizers and was now in a state of unrest. The Americans worried that in this period of uncertainty, the country would turn not to the US, but to the Soviets, for help. Unwilling to allow the Congo to fall into the hands of the Soviets, the White House concluded that the easiest path forward was to kill Lumumba. Apparently, in response to a cable from agents in Congo that read that it seemed clear that “Anti-West forces” already had their claws in the country’s leadership, President Eisenhower simply directed CIA director Allen Dulles to “eliminate” Patrice Lumumba. Gottlieb was just the man. His secret bioweapons could take out Lumumba without anyone guessing he had been assassinated. He determined that botulinum toxin was the best option and created an “assassination kit” that included “a hypodermic syringe with an ultra-thin needle; a small jar of chlorine that could be mixed with the botulinum to render it ineffective in an emergency; and “accessory materials” including protective gloves and a face mask to be worn while conducting the operation.”^[21] The idea was to use the hypodermic needle to inject the toxin into Lumumba’s food or, potentially, his toothpaste. But the CIA wasn’t able to penetrate Lumumba’s security and the attempts failed. Lumumba was assassinated instead by a squad of Congolese enemies and Belgian military officers.

Elizabeth : The other person that the CIA was almost desperate to kill was Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leftist leader of Cuba. The CIA approached Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli to help them kill Castro using his mob ties to the island nation. Roselli confirmed that killing Castro would be no problem for his mafia assassins, but that poison would be better than using a sniper. Thus, Gottlieb had another assassination to plan. He had been thinking about destroying Castro for a while. His first idea was to ruin Castro’s reputation by making him do something stupid or embarrassing. Gottlieb thought he might start with aerosolized LSD, sprayed into Castro’s radio broadcasting booth, so that when he gave a speech to the nation he would become incoherent and people would lose faith in him. Another plot was to dose him with thallium, which would make his iconic beard fall out, causing him terrible embarrassment and emasculation and driving his supporters away. The CIA probably correctly pointed out that this was not all that practical. They also had a plan to poison a box of cigars with botulinum, but when they were made, the agent tasked with getting them to Castro couldn’t figure out how to get them through his tight security, so they were basically put in a safe and forgotten. This is when they turned to Chicago mobster Roselli. There was a plan to plant an exploding sea shell underwater in an area where Castro was known to SCUBA dive; another plan was to line his dive suit with various toxins including the tubercule bacillus, which he would take in through his breathing apparatus. Then there was a plan to sneak botulinum pills into Castro’s food; to infect a handkerchief with bacteria; to poke him with a poisoned pin; to sneak bacteria into his soup or coffee. They came up with weird devices that would allow an agent or mob assassin to poison or inject Castro covertly – a pencil with concealed pills in it; a ballpoint pen with a super thin hypodermic needle so fine that Castro couldn’t feel that he had been injected. But while both presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had continued to believe that Castro’s assassination as a worthwhile goal, when Kennedy was himself assassinated, his successor Lyndon Johnson put an end to what he called the “goddamn Murder Inc in the Caribbean.”^[22]

Sarah: Toward the middle and end of the 1960s, MK Ultra slowly began to die. At the beginning of the project, LSD had been a rare and mysterious drug that was difficult to get and little understood. But by the late 1960s, thanks to the bizarre choices and tactics of the scientists behind MK Ultra, LSD had started to become a popular party drug. Harold Abramson, the allergist that Gottlieb worked with closely on MK Ultra, had been throwing parties at his house where he shared LSD freely with guests. These parties were so notorious that they were reported on in Time magazine in 1955: “Harold Abramson of the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory has developed a technique of serving dinner to a group of subjects, topping off the meal with a liqueur glass containing 40 micrograms of LSD.” Anyone in the upper echelons of New York society had taken LSD. At the same time, it was catching on with young people, mostly through people who had experienced the drug as part of university or hospital based MK Ultra projects. Timothy Leary, a young Harvard clinical psychiatry professor, read an article that – unbeknownst to him – had been funded by Gottlieb and MK Ultra on psychedelic mushrooms. He traveled to Mexico to experience the mushrooms for himself and had a self-described profound religious experience – then became a psychedelic evangelist at Harvard until he was fired and took his campaign for the drugs directly to America’s youth. (He even visited UB in the late ‘60s!) Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was part of an MK Ultra study at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital and liked the LSD so much he got a job at the hospital essentially so he could steal the drug and share it with his friends. Soon, he became famous for doing essentially what Gottlieb and his buddies had been doing for years – sharing LSD with friends, sometimes even just mixing it into a punchbowl. According to Kinzler, Kesey was “as responsible for anyone for turning it into a symbol of youth culture, free love, hippie rebellion, and opposition to the Vietnam War.”^[23]

A group of people seated on a stage floor bathed in red light, with musical instruments and candles visible nearby — Timothy Leary leading a psychedelic lecture at the University at Buffalo in 1969 | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth : LSD had gone from being a drug with scientific possibility studied and enjoyed by a CIA inner circle to being a popular and widely used mind-altering experience for the youth counterculture. Years later, a government agency studied how LSD had spread across the US and blamed it on ‘early use by small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities.” Conveniently, though, they failed to mention how those groups had been introduced to LSD. A later researched named John Marks wrote, “The authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country…they have left out only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing: that somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be seen the men of MK Ultra.” Timothy Leary, after the extent of the MK Ultra project became more publicly known, said “The LSD movement was started by the CIA … I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.” John Lennon said: “We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it, Harry? So get out of the bottle, boy and relax. They invented LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.”^[24]

Sarah: As LSD was going mainstream, Gottlieb and others in the CIA were realizing that the project was a failure. Nothing – not one thing – that they had experimented with or studied had brought their hoped for results. It was not possible to control minds or brainwash; LSD did not make people easier to manipulate into becoming “Manchurian candidates” or revealing important secret information. In 1960, Gottlieb wrote a memo in which he said, “As of 1960, no effective knockout pill, truth serum, aphrodisiac, or recruitment pill is known to exist.” From this point on, MK Ultra just lost steam. According to Kinzler, “With the use of enough powerful drugs and other extreme measures, Gottlieb had found, it is possible to destroy a human mind. He had discovered no way, however, to embed a new personality into the resulting void, or to open the wiped-away mind to control by an outsider.”^[25] While the CIA continued to work on strange projects, like the “acoustic kitty,” a cat that had a recording device embedded in her ear to record secret conversations, MK Ultra was allowed to simply peter out. In 1964, the cryptonymn was retired and the project was officially shuttered. It remained, however, top secret and under the protection of Richard Helms, who was rising from a deputy director of the CIA to Director by 1966.

Elizabeth : Gottlieb continued to work for the CIA for another several years, aiding the US Army’s work in Vietnam. In 1973, though, things changed when the “White House Plumbers” broke into the Watergate Hotel at the direction of the Committee to Reelect the President, hoping to gather information to use to help ensure President Nixon’s re-election. Eager for help to cover up the crime, Nixon asked Richard Helms for help, and when Helms refused, he fired him. On his way out, Helms met with Gottlieb and the two concluded that, without Helms to protect the history of MK Ultra from prying eyes, the remaining documents had to be destroyed. Gottlieb himself drove to the records retention center to oversee the destruction of seven boxes of MK Ultra documents. When Helms’ successor arrived to lead the CIA, one of the first things he did was push out Sidney Gottlieb. Nixon ordered that all poisons be destroyed; they ended up finding enough poison in Gottlieb’s own freezers to kill 55,000 people.

Sarah: But in 1975, investigative journalists started to dig into the CIA’s shady Cold War projects. Seymour Hersh reported on project MH CHAOS, in the New York Times. (MH CHAOS was a project to compile dossiers as the anti-war left and journalists critical of the government.) Congress responded by calling for an investigation, but, concerned that Congress would reveal too much if they were allowed to head up the investigation, President Gerald Ford decided to try to control the investigation by calling for one himself. The investigation, led by Nelson Rockefeller, resulted in the Rockefeller Commission Report. The report did not mention MK Ultra by name, but did refer to a “project to test potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting citizens of the United States.” It also referred, obliquely, to the death of Frank Olson. The Washington Post published a front-page story about Olson’s death, which prompted Olson’s family to finally revisit his death and question the story they’d been told. They sued the CIA – a plan that had the potential to disclose remaining documents to the public. Under Gerald Ford’s direction, the US government made a private settlement with Olson’s family for $750,000. That wasn’t the end of the investigations into the CIA’s cold war experimentation. Idaho senator Frank Church headed up another investigation. This one honed in on Sidney Gottlieb, now enjoying his retirement by traveling the world. Gottlieb was compelled to testify under a pseudonym, but journalists managed to identify him and link him publicly to the experiments and assassination planning of the 1950s and 60s. That wasn’t it. For the next few years, more and more investigations into the CIA’s work in MK Ultra appeared, some headed by journalists and writers, others by Congress, others headed up by Frank Olson’s family. Gottlieb was sued by that art student that had been dosed in Paris. If he lost the case, it would be a turning point. As one journalist wrote, “If Gottlieb is found guilty, it would be a real first. The Agency has protected its own very well – not only with Gottlieb but others who were part of MK Ultra.” But that never came to be – Sidney Gottlieb died in March 1999.

Though it has inspired untold conspiracies (Alex Jones refers to it all the time) MK Ultra’s real legacy was that it failed at every single thing it tried to do. It never (that we are aware of!) successfully assassinated anyone, convinced anyone to defect, squeezed information out of anyone, or controlled anyone’s mind. What it did do, more than anything, was ruin lives. Its real legacy is one of paranoia, excess, and an absolute lack of integrity and ethics in the United States government, all justified by the perceived existential threat of the Cold War.