Learn about how the CIA experiment with mind control techniques under OPERATION MKULTRA. Dive deeper by reading the book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer -

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Transcript:

How the CIA Experimented with Mind Control Under Operation MKUltra

MKUltra was the principal CIA program for developing chemical and biological agents to be used for human behavior control in clandestine operations.

The program was formally approved by Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, on April 13th, 1953, after Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Helms, offered up a proposal for the program’s enactment.

The program’s core activities were largely the products of two men: Ira Baldwin and Sidney Gottlieb.
Ira Baldwin was a bacteriologist from the University of Wisconsin who worked on bioweapons for the U.S. military out of Camp Detrick, Maryland, in the 1940s.

Sidney Gottlieb was a special student of Baldwin’s at Wisconsin who was rising within the CIA’s ranks.
Baldwin and Gottlieb together took cues from former Nazi director of biowarfare research, Kurt Blome, who was at Camp Detrick courtesy of Operation Paperclip, the operation which allowed Nazi scientists to come to America and work under asylum.

The cues they took were on biological warfare methods and how their research could be applied with other opportunities such as with radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.

Sidney would ultimately become the program’s lead, taking Baldwin’s and Blome’s ideas and growing them into a monstrous program of human experiments.

The core of what Sidney focused on was mind control: finding ways to manipulate others through chemical substances and psychological probing.

Even before the formal approval of the program, Gottlieb was running experiments to test various drugs’ effects.
In 1951, CIA scientists under Gottlieb went to Tokyo to experiment on four Japanese men suspected of working for the Russian government.

In the detention, CIA doctors used depressants and stimulants on the men to extract a confession, ultimately leading to the men confessing that they were working for the Russians.

Those men were shot and killed with their bodies dumped in Tokyo Bay.

These kinds of experiments were not limited to interrogations of foreign agents.

Gottlieb had experiments conducted in a variety of contexts and locations, from tests performed on incarcerated persons in Germany and the Philippines, to Americans sitting in hospitals, to unwitting persons forcibly drugged without their knowledge because they were a threat to the program.

One of the most notorious examples of unwitting experimentation was on Frank Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher who had moral qualms with the MKULTRA program.

Olson’s vocal criticisms led to retaliation by Gottlieb who conducted an experiment on him using LSD without his consent.

Olson died jumping out of a 13th story window a week after the experiment in November 1953.
The government claimed that he had committed suicide.

Uniquely for this kind of situation, Olson’s family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and a formal apology from both President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby.

However, later autopsy and medical testimony revealed that Olson’s death was more likely a product of foul play as forensic evidence from Olson being exhumed in 1994 suggested that he had a cranial injury consistent with being first knocked unconscious.

The family tried suing the government in 2012, but the case was dismissed because of the prior settlement, despite the judge acknowledging that the family’s evidence was supportive of their suit’s allegations.

How many more people suffered this same fate?

We may never know.

In January 1973, MKULTRA records were destroyed by the CIA’s Technical Services Division, the division responsible for coming up with all the tools and gadgets CIA agents use in their secret operations.

Dr. Gottlieb himself ordered the records destroyed, claiming that he was carrying out the verbal order of the then Director for Plans, Richard Helms.

The largest public exposure of this program came about from the U.S. Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975 where Congressman Frank Church noted that the MKULTRA program’s activities were of questionable legality and were professionally unethical.

Due to fears of international blowback from total disclosure, the report from that committee was limited to speaking about the program in generalities.

It would take years of further research to uncover more of the program’s activities in specificity, especially with the help of award-winning reporter Stephen Kinzer, whose book, Poisoner in Chief, exposed Sidney Gottlieb’s chain of direction in the MKULTRA program.

If there’s one thing to learn from this, it’s that the more government keeps secrets, the more they can manipulate you.

Sources:

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
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MKULTRA and the CIA's War on the Human Mind