Declassified MKUltra documents Project MKUltra, also called the CIA mind control program, is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the United States —and which were, at times, illegal. The project was organized through the of the CIA and coordinated with the. The operation was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and officially halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities, including the use of U. The scope of Project MKUltra was broad with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement. Project MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the of the and 's. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director ordered all MKUltra files to be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms's destruction order. In 1977, a request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra which led to Senate hearings later that year. Some surviving information regarding MKUltra was declassified in July 2001. The project's intentionally obscure is made up of the MK, meaning that the project was sponsored by the agency's , followed by the word which had previously been used to designate the most secret classification of intelligence. Other related cryptonyms include and Project MKDELTA. The project was headed by but began on the order of CIA director on April 13, 1953. Its aim was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc in response to alleged , , and use of mind control techniques on U. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives, and they were interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques and invented several schemes to drug. They often conducted experiments without the subjects' knowledge or consent. In some cases, academic researchers were funded through grants from CIA front organizations but were unaware that the CIA was using their work for these purposes. The project attempted to produce a perfect for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the , and to explore other possibilities of mind control. However, the program was never carried out. Most MKUltra records were destroyed in 1973 by order of CIA director , so it has been difficult for investigators to gain a complete understanding of more than 150 funded research sub-projects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. CIA counter-intelligence chief believed that a mole had penetrated the organization at the highest levels. The agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining methods of influencing and controlling the mind and of enhancing their ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation. One 1955 MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort. Funding for MKSEARCH commenced in 1965, and ended in 1971. The project was a joint project between The U. Army Chemical Corps and the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Research and Development to find new offensive-use agents with a focus on. By March 1971 over 26,000 potential agents had been acquired for future screening. LSD Early CIA efforts focused on , which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs. The CIA wanted to know if they could make Soviet spies defect against their will and whether the Soviets could do the same to the CIA's own operatives. In one case, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. They also administered LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were often administered without the subject's knowledge or , a violation of the the U. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with , and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study. In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, U. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this. At the invitation of Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of and , volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a -financed study under the aegis of MKULTRA, at the Veterans' Hospital where he worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of , particularly , , , , , and on people. The Office of Security used LSD in interrogations but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas; he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed one could give it to high-ranking officials and in this way affect the course of important meetings, speeches etc. At first, everyone in Technical Services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. As the experimentation progressed, a point arrived where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Adverse reactions often occurred, such as an operative who received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car passing him. The experiments continued even after , an Army scientist who had not taken LSD before, went into deep depression after a surprise trip and later fell from a thirteenth story window. Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in were given LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. MKUltra's researchers later dismissed LSD as too unpredictable in its results. However, by 1962 the CIA and the army developed a series of such as the highly touted , which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. This resulted in the withdrawal of support by many academics and private researchers, and LSD research became less of a priority altogether. Other drugs Another technique investigated was the administration of a into one arm and an into the other. The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. The person would begin babbling incoherently, and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers. Other experiments involved , , used under code name MKSEARCH , , , , , , and. Hypnosis Declassified MKUltra documents indicate they studied in the early 1950s. Donald Ewen Cameron c. Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. These research funds were sent to Dr. Cameron by a CIA front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and as shown in internal CIA documents, Cameron did not know the money came from the CIA. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as at thirty to forty times the normal power. His experiments were often carried on patients who entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions. His treatments resulted in victims' , , forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were , in at least one case by several men. His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist at , London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who was also involved in the Intelligence Services and who experimented on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage. In the 1980s, several of Cameron's former patients sued the CIA for damages, which the Canadian news program documented. Their experiences and lawsuit was made into a 1998 television miniseries called. During this era, Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the as well as president of the and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron was also a member of the in 1946—47. In 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by , CIA Director ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MKUltra impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms' purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial records building and were discovered following a request in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977. In December 1974, alleged that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U. That report prompted investigations by the , in the form of the , and by a commission known as the that looked into the illegal domestic activities of the CIA, the , and intelligence-related agencies of the military. In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to find out how to influence and control human behavior through the use of such as LSD and and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject, had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about MKUltra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973. However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra. Subsequent orders by Presidents and expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation. These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, but much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report. At least one death, the result of the of Dr. The CIA itself subsequently acknowledged that these tests had little scientific rationale. The agents conducting the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers. In Canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a news show,. This revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the CIA as their U. Cameron died on September 8, 1967 after suffering a heart attack while he and his son were mountain climbing. None of Cameron's personal records of his involvement with MKUltra survived, since his family destroyed them after his death. General Accounting Office report The U. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested , a hallucinogen code-named. Note 37 Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MKULTRA program, established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known. Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of. Olson, a biochemist and researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November, 1953, as part of a CIA experiment and committed suicide by jumping out of a window a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson exited the window and fell thirteen stories to his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that had occurred during a severe psychotic episode. The CIA's own internal investigation concluded that the head of MKUltra, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson's prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to take into account Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies, which might have been exacerbated by the LSD. The Olson family disputes the official version of events. They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, about many of which he had direct personal knowledge. A few days before his death, Frank Olson quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland later Fort Detrick because of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological weapons research. Later forensic evidence conflicted with the official version of events; when Olson's body was exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window. On 28 November 2012, the Olson family filed suit against the U. A 2010 book by H. The revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting experiments without informed consent. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families. One subject of Army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects... Justice , writing a separate dissent, stated: No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential... In another lawsuit, Wayne Ritchie, a former , after hearing about the project's existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party which resulted in his attempting to commit a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest. While the government admitted it was, at that time, drugging people without their consent, U. District Judge found Ritchie could not prove he was one of the victims of MKUltra or that LSD caused his robbery attempt and dismissed the case in 2007. Kesey's experiences while under the influence of LSD inspired him to promote the drug outside the context of the MKUltra experiments, which influenced the early development of culture. Along with Ken Kesey, Hunter was an early volunteer MKUltra test subject at Stanford University. Stanford test subjects were paid to take , , and , then report on their experiences. These experiences were creatively formative for Hunter: Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist... By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane. In total, Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study. At his retirement in 1972, Gottlieb dismissed his entire effort for the CIA's MKUltra program as useless. The CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned, although writer Elizabeth Nickson claims that they continue today under a different set of acronyms. MKUltra plays a part in many due to its nature and the destruction of most records. Jonas who says he headed the project. Also, the protagonist, Jerry is reported by Dr. Jonas to be a test subject of Project MKULTRA. It is based on a by and its accompanying TV series. Rosen has access to certain files from the MKUltra project. The entire episode is based on the premise of using genetic predisposition to make someone commit an act that they most likely would not have done in the first place. Martin Brenner is discovered to have been involved in MKUltra. One of the young protagonists, , was raised in a government laboratory after being born to an MKUltra test subject. Kaczynski was the perpetrator of serial bombings over a 17-year period and became known as the. 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