Newly Declassified Files Reveal More Details About CIA’s Secret MKULTRA Mind-Control Operation
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The Digital National Security Archive of The George Washington University recently published over 1,200 pages of declassified documents and files about Project MKULTRA and several other similar Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations. The collection exposes even more details about the infamous series of CIA mind control experiments.
“Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test,” the National Security Archive wrote.
“Today’s announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh touched off probes that would bring MKULTRA abuses to light. The new collection also comes 70 years since U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA’s chief supplier of the newly discovered psychoactive chemical central to many of the Agency’s behavior control efforts.”
Project MKULTRA began in 1953 and ran until 1973 when it was disbanded. Over those 20 years, the CIA used high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture on people – many times without the subjects’ consent – as potential mind control techniques.
Project ARTICHOKE, initially referred to as Project BLUEBIRD, was another secret mind control program that predated MKULTRA, running from 1951 to 1953. In that operation, the CIA conducted in-house and overseas experiments using LSD, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, peyote, mescaline, hypnosis and total isolation as forms of physiological testing of human subjects. The operation also researched the potential use of dengue fever and other diseases as short-term and long-term incapacitating agents.
“The challenges facing this documentation project were considerable, as CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973,” the National Security Archive continued. “It is a story about secrecy — perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history. It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences.
“Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind.”
View the full set of declassified MKULTRA documents released by the National Security Archive here.
