MK Ultra was a series of covert mind control experiments conducted by the CIA on American and Canadian citizens, often illegally, and without knowledge or consent. The stated intent of the program was to find drugs and techniques for extracting information during interrogations. Test subjects were subjected to torture, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and large doses of hallucinogens like LSD. It officially lasted from 1953 until 1973, when the CIA director Richard Helms ordered all documents pertaining to it destroyed. MK Ultra was only brought to public knowledge in 1975, when Congress started investigating CIA misconduct through the Church and Rockefeller Commissions. Most modern evidence of the program exists from a cache of documents found in 1977, which accidentally did not get destroyed.
MK Ultra was initially started in response to alleged Soviet mind control on American POWs in the Korean War, with the CIA not wanting to fall behind in terms of intelligence. The foundations of the program were based upon the human experimentation of the Holocaust and Imperial Japan’s Unit 731, with Nazi scientists even brought on to assist in the early stages. Multiple secret detention camps were established around Europe and Asia, where suspected spies were subjected to torture and experimentation. The CIA began conducting LSD trials on Americans, distributing the drug to various universities and hospitals. Some of these trials had willing participants while others did not. Vulnerable people like mental patients, prisoners, and drug addicts were targeted; in one case, a mental patient was given LSD for 174 days straight. In Operation Midnight Climax, several brothels were set up in San Francisco, in order to get test subjects who would be too embarrassed to talk about their experiences. Patrons were secretly dosed with LSD and then observed through one way mirrors. CIA and other government employees were also given LSD and sometimes interrogated along with it. Some trials were exported to Canada, where subjects were put into drug induced comas for up to three months, electroshocked, and hypnotized. These experiments resulted in many deaths and immeasurable psychological damage. By 1961, it was clear that LSD was not the solution, and the CIA abandoned it in favor of more powerful and dangerous drugs. MK Ultra was gradually reduced in scope until its official end in 1973.
By the mid 1975, the Church and Rockefeller Commissions were set up to investigate past activities of the FBI, CIA, and Department of Defense, revealing the existence of MK Ultra to the public, but with little detail, as most documents were destroyed in 1973. In the end, no one was convicted of wrongdoing, and the government contested (and often won) most lawsuits filed against it in relation to the program.
Sources:
Image Source:
I found this article very intriguing, especially as MK Ultra remains mostly unknown to the general public. I had no prior knowledge of the experiments or programs until I read this article. After some further research, I discovered the situation when they were destroyed, wherein 1973, from Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK Ultra files to be destroyed. As a result, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MK Ultra nearly impossible. Despite this, some 20,000 documents still survived.
ReplyDeletehttps://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/files/MindControl.pdf
I found your post a really interesting retelling of the MK-Ultra story in America. It is interesting to think of how in our, as is claimed time and time again, free nation, the government still acts this way sometimes. Another incident where the US government was acting in "odd" ways was during the era of prohibition. When alcohol was banned in the country, people disregarded this fact, and kept drinking it. To solve this, the government ended up poisoning alcohol. And while prohibition did eventually end and this poisoning did eventually stop, much like the MK-Ultra experiment, I think that it is still a tale of skepticism for the modern US government and its actions.
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html