Historian says MKULTRA experiments were medical torture as House hearing sheds new light
WASHINGTON (TNND) — Lawmakers are taking a fresh look at one of the CIA’s most notorious Cold War-era programs, reopening questions about secrecy, oversight and whether similar efforts could exist today.
Stephen Kinzer, author of a book about Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who ran MKULTRA, testified about the scope of the experiments and the culture that allowed them to continue. (TNND)
A House Oversight Committee task force held a hearing titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project,” examining the agency’s decades-old, top-secret effort to develop techniques for controlling the human mind. The program ran for nearly 20 years and included dosing unaware people with LSD and subjecting them to hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock and psychological torture, often in secret safe houses, prisons and hospitals.
Many MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973, but surviving documents have indicated the program operated with little oversight. The hearing, led by the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, aimed to press for greater transparency and accountability decades after the program began.
Stephen Kinzer, author of a book about Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who ran MKULTRA, testified about the scope of the experiments and the culture that allowed them to continue.
“In its search for ways to destroy a human mind and body, MKULTRA conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a U.S. government agency,” Kinzer told The National News Desk. “By any standard, they qualify as medical torture.”
Kinzer described MKULTRA as a product of Cold War fear and what he said was a mistaken belief inside the CIA that adversaries had mastered mind control.
“The height of the Cold War. And there was a terrifying feeling in the United States that the world was coming to an end. The Soviets were going to attack. We were on the edge of disaster in this kind of an environment. Fantasies run wild,” Kinzer said. “The CIA developed an idea which turned out to be mistaken, that the Soviets or the Chinese Communists had discovered the secret of mind control.”
Kinzer said Gottlieb concluded early on that the path to “insert a new mind into somebody’s brain” required first destroying the existing one — a premise that drove what he called “gruesome experiments.”
Kinzer said experiments inside the United States were often conducted in clinics, hospitals, prisons and federal drug facilities, where people “had no real control over their own fate.” Abroad, he said, Gottlieb could ask CIA stations for “expendables,” which Kinzer described as people “who, if they disappeared, wouldn’t be missed by anyone else.”
Kinzer also pointed to what he described as an internal culture of deliberate ignorance.
“And back at the CIA, it was considered important not to know anything about what Gottlieb was doing in the culture of the CIA and other secret services. Ignorance can be an asset. You don’t want to know anything,” Kinzer said.
He said blame for MKULTRA ultimately fell on Gottlieb, rather than the institution. “
And I think what happened in the end was that everybody wound up blaming the excesses of MKULTRA on Sidney Gottlieb, and that was the plan from the beginning,” Kinzer said. “That’s why he was hired. And essentially he took the fall.”
As lawmakers push for more declassification, Kinzer said he wants to see existing documents released with fewer redactions and to determine whether additional records remain at the CIA despite the 1973 destruction. “The first thing I’d like to have is documents that we now have that have been heavily redacted,” he said. “Next step would be to look for documents still out at the CIA that we haven’t seen yet.”
Kinzer said the existence of a “covert sphere” in American life fuels public suspicion and conspiracy thinking, and he argued MKULTRA remains an example of how far intelligence agencies may go under pressure.
“The emergence of the covert sphere in America is the basis of all conspiracy theories,” he said. “The very existence of MKULTRA is an example of how far our intelligence agencies are willing to go when they feel that they’re under stress and under pressure and need to produce results.”
