MKUltra

What Sidney Gottlieb did is exactly what we sentenced Nazi doctors to death after the Second World War for doing in concentration camps.

— Stephen Kinzer, US historian

Document describing roughly the use of LSD-25 in Project MKUltra

Project MKUltra was a human experimentation program carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency with wide-ranging objectives, including study of the use of torture and the possibility of brainwashing. The program was headquartered at Fort Detrick, Maryland, but it spanned multiple continents over several decades and involved the use of psychedelics, electronic shocks, sensory deprivation methods, and other methods of torture. The program was uncovered by the 1975 Church Committee and was ostensibly halted. However, most of the documents in CIA storage relating to MKUltra were destroyed. MKUltra was headed by Sidney Gottlieb; psychologists Ewen Cameron and John Gittinger are among the many key figures in the massive program. MKUltra deliberately chose vulnerable targets such as mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, prostitutes, and orphans — as one CIA officer put it, "people who could not fight back".

Background

Nazi and Japanese experimentation

During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists working in the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects. Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and hallucinogens such as mescaline were employed in concentration camp experiments on Jews and Russian prisoners of war 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". MKUltra was roughly based on these endeavors and was in effect a continuation of their research.

Project Artichoke

Main article: Project Artichoke

Project Artichoke was the Central Intelligence Agency's secret code name for carrying out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD, hypnosis and total isolation as forms of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects. At first agents used cocaine, marijuana, heroin, peyote and mescaline, but they increasingly saw LSD as the most promising drug. The subjects who left this project were fogged with amnesia, resulting in faulty and vague memories of the experience. In 1952, LSD was increasingly given to unknowing CIA agents to determine the drug's effects on unsuspecting people. One record states that an agent was kept on LSD for 77 days.Project Artichoke existed from 1951 to 1953, when it was succeeded by MKUltra.

History

After World War II, the United States hired Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip and put them to work on several projects, including advising the CIA on their mind control and drug research. Several Nazi experimenters, including Kurt Blome, who had recently been tried and acquitted at Nuremburg at the intervention of the United States, lectured at Fort Detrick on topics like "how long it took for people to die from sarin and was there a difference in how long it took to die if you were a small child or an infant, whether you were an elderly person or whether you were a healthy middle-aged person." The Nazis had discovered this data through direct experimentation, and the CIA was "eager" to expand on their research.

Although Sidney Gottlieb, head of the project, was himself Jewish, he apparently expressed no qualms about working with Nazis who had only recently been torturing Jews.

Drugs

Project MKUltra mainly used LSD-25 and Mescaline for purposes of manipulating the subjects.

Notable victims

• Frank Olson: Expressed moral reservations about the project and considered quitting the CIA, Gottlieb and his team covertly subjected Olson to LSD
• One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson's family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick.
• A CIA scientist covertly subjected to LSD, Olson expressed moral reservations about the project, leading to his fatal fall from a New York City hotel window nine days after the dosing.

Whitey Bulger

Ted Kaczynski

For 20 years, mathematics prodigy and primitivist Theodore Kaczynski successfully carried out anonymous mail bombings of several locations in the United States, killing 3 and wounding several others. When he was apprehended in 1996 and his identity revealed, it came to light that he had been a participant in a Harvard university psychological experiment in which he was subject to intense verbal abuse related to his political views, with his reaction monitored. Kaczynski participated in at least 200 hours of this experiment. The head of the program, Henry A. Murray, had connections to the CIA, and it has been argued on this and other grounds this experiment was connected to or part of MKUltra.

Victims of Kaczynski

• Charles Epstein: A scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, Epstein, lost several fingers when he opened a package containing a bomb mailed by Ted Kaczynski, who was allegedly linked to the MKUltra project.
• David Gelernter: A computer science professor at Yale University, Gelernter lost sight in one eye, hearing in one ear, and a portion of his right hand after opening a bomb mailed by Ted Kaczynski.
• Thomas J. Mosser: An executive at Burson-Marsteller, Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent by Ted Kaczynski to his New Jersey home.
• Gilbert Brent Murray: The president of the California Forestry Association, Murray was murdered by a mail bomb sent by Ted Kaczynski.
• Phillip Sharp: A geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sharp received a threatening letter following the murder of Gilbert Brent Murray, who was also targeted by Ted Kaczynski.