“The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence organized the project, code-named Project MKUltra, in coordination with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. In some cases, academic researchers were funded through grants funneled to them from CIA front organizations while remaining unaware that the CIA sought to use their work for its own purposes. In other instances, however, top officials at these institutions knew about the CIA’s role.” Andrew Glass — Politico (April 13, 2019)

April 13 2020 — On April 13 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles ordered the agency to develop mind-controlling drugs to be deployed against members of the Soviet bloc. The ultra-secret program was purportedly launched in response to Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY

UPDATE (APRIL 13 2020) — I have mentioned the infamous Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger a couple of times before on this blog.

First, I wanted to remind you that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informer.

Next, I also pointed out that there is a possibility that Whitey Bulger offered the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to the IRA as ‘compensation’ for a shipment of weapons intercepted by the Irish navy a few years earlier.

In February of this year, Janet Uhlar — one of the 12 jurors who convicted James “Whitey” Bulger in 2013 — expressed regrets about her decision after learning that he was an unwitting participant in one of the MK-ULTRA CIA experiments.

In a desperate search for a mind control drug in the late 1950s, the agency dosed Bulger with the powerful hallucinogen more than 50 times when he was serving his first stretch in prison — something his lawyers never brought up in his federal trial. “Had I known, I would have absolutely held off on the murder charges,” Uhlar told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “He didn’t murder prior to the LSD. His brain may have been altered, so how could you say he was really guilty?” [PBS — After learning of Whitey Bulger LSD tests, juror has regrets]

Nevertheless, Uhlar said she would have voted to convict Bulger on the long list of other criminal counts.

Her belief that the gangster was wrongly convicted on the murder charges was reinforced after reading…

a new book by Brown University professor Stephen Kinzer: “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.”

“The CIA mind control program known as MK-ULTRA involved the most extreme experiments on human beings ever conducted by any agency of the U.S. government,” Kinzer said. “During its peak in the 1950s, that program and it’s director, Sidney Gottlieb, left behind a trail of broken bodies and shattered minds across three continents.”

On October 30 2018, at age 89, Bulger was beaten to death by fellow inmates shortly after arriving in his wheelchair at the Hazelton federal prison in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia.

No criminal charges have been filed.

Bulger always insisted he had received criminal immunity from a deceased federal prosecutor who once headed the New England Organized Crime Strike Force.

Why on earth did he believe that? LSD-induced long term delusion re-enforced by corrupt FBI officers?

Even corrupt former FBI agent John Morris had assumed Bulger would use the LSD experiments to mount an insanity defense.

But, for some reasons, Bulger’s lawyers did not opt for an insanity defense. Too bad. It could have been quite a trial…

END of UPDATE

The CIA sought to use similar methods on its own captives.

At the height of the Cold War, the project also attempted to produce an effective truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies and to explore other possibilities of mind control.

Moreover, the agency wanted to be able to manipulate foreign leaders using such techniques. It launched, for example, several failed schemes to drug Fidel Castro. (…) The agency often sponsored experiments without the subjects’ knowledge or consent. The experiments sought to identify and develop drugs and procedures to weaken interrogation subjects and force confessions through mind control. They involved surreptitious administration of drugs — especially LSD — and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse. Some 80 institutions, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies participated in the research program. In all, about 150 separate experimental investigations were carried out. The operation was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and halted in 1973. A 1973 order by CIA Director Richard Helms to destroy all the project’s files hampered subsequent oversight work, conducted both on Capitol Hill and within the executive branch. The public first learned about the project in 1975 through disclosures by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho). The Senate panel reported that “drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but … materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.”

America’s War on Drugs: The CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA | History

Learn more about how a secret government mind control program inadvertently fuelled the use of psychoactive drugs in 1960s counterculture circles.

REFERENCES

CIA launches mind control program, April 13, 1953 — Politico

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On This Day –CIA Launches Project MK-ULTRA (April 13, 1953)

On This Day — CIA Launches Project MK-ULTRA (April 13, 1953) [2020]