1953–1977 · from the public record

MKULTRA 2.0

In 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles authorised a programme called MKULTRA. Its aim was to discover whether the human mind could be broken open, emptied out, and refilled with someone else's instructions.

They spent years and millions of dollars trying. The records later revealed 149 subprojects connected to forty-four colleges or universities, twelve hospitals or clinics, three prisons, and fifteen research foundations or chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

The programme was run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Researchers used psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and other methods. Some people knew they were in experiments. Others did not.

In Montreal, psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron placed patients into drug-induced sleep and played recorded messages repeatedly. He called it psychic driving. People who had gone to hospital for psychiatric care emerged with profound memory loss and other injuries.

In San Francisco, a federal narcotics agent named George Hunter White used safe houses where men were given LSD without their knowledge and watched through one-way glass. The operation became known as Midnight Climax.

A CIA scientist named Frank Olson was given LSD without his knowledge at a work retreat. Nine days later he died after falling from a New York hotel window.

The programme did not find a reliable chemical key to the human will.

In 1973, MKULTRA files were destroyed. The programme's scale became clearer only when investigators found financial records that had survived elsewhere.

The failure is reassuring only if you ask the narrow question.

They did not produce obedient spies or assassins.

They did prove that people can be drugged without consent, studied without consent and injured by institutions that tell themselves the experiment is more important than the person.

The programme was shut down.

The desire to get inside the mind was not.

Sources: the US Senate's 1977 MKULTRA hearing · the CIA record describing participating institutions · the document-destruction record.