The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence organized the project, code-named Project MKUltra. | Carolyn Kaster, File/AP Photo THIS DAY IN POLITICS CIA launches mind control program, April 13, 1953

On this day in 1953, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, ordered the agency to develop mind-controlling drugs to be deployed against members of the Soviet bloc. The ultrasecret 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.

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 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.

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.”

At about the same time, President Gerald Ford set up a reform-minded commission to study CIA activities within the United States, headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project, which led to further Senate hearings later that year. Some surviving documents were declassified in July 2001. In December 2018, a trove of newly declassified documents included a letter to an unidentified doctor discussing work on six dogs made to run, turn and stop via remote control and brain implants.

SOURCE: www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/one-shocking-cia-programs-time-project-mkultra/