Project MKUltra , also called the CIA mind-control program , is the code name given for the experimental program on human subjects designed and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States - and which, sometimes, illegally. Human trials are intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures that will be used in interrogation to weaken individuals and force recognition through mind control. The project is run through the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence and coordinates with the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.
The operation was officially approved in 1953, reduced in scope in 1964, subsequently restricted in 1967, and officially discontinued in 1973. The program is involved in many illegal activities, including the use of US and Canadian citizens as a test subject without realized, that caused controversy about legitimacy. MKUltra uses a variety of methods to manipulate the human mental state and alter brain function, including the secretive administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse (including child sexual abuse) children), and other forms of torture.
The scope of the MKUltra Project is extensive with research conducted in 80 institutions, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operates through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes high-ranking officials in these institutions are aware of CIA involvement.
The MKUltra project was first brought to the public attention in 1975 by the United States Congressional Church Committee and the United States President Commission of Gerald Ford on CIA activities in the United States. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files to be destroyed in 1973; The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission's investigations rested on the sworn testimony of the direct participants and on a relatively small number of documents that survived the destruction order of Helms.
In 1977, the Freedom of Information Act request revealed a cache of 20,000 documents relating to the MKUltra project that led to the Senate hearing later that year. Some of the remaining information about MKUltra has been declassified in July 2001.
Video Project MKUltra
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Cptonym cryptonym deliberately obscured by the project consists of digraph MK , which means that the project is sponsored by the Agency Technical Services Staff, followed by the Ultra word that has previously been used to establish the most confidential classification. intelligence of World War II. Other related Cryptonyms include the MKNAOMI Project and the MKDELTA Project.
The project was led by Sidney Gottlieb but commenced on the order of CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles on 13 April 1953. The aim was to develop mind-control drugs for use against the Soviet bloc in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese and North Korean use of mind control techniques on US prisoners of war during the Korean War. The CIA wants to use similar methods on their own prisoners, and they are interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques and create some schemes for Fidel Castro's drugs. They often do experiments without the knowledge or consent of the subject. In some cases, academic researchers were funded through grants from CIA front organizations but were not aware that the CIA uses their work for this purpose.
The project sought to produce the perfect truth-medication to interrogate suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and to explore other possibilities of mind control. Subproject 54 is another MKUltra effort and is a perfect "Secret Concussion" program of the Navy, which should use sub-aural frequency explosions to erase memory. However, the program was never implemented.
Most of MKUltra's records were destroyed in 1973 by order of CIA director Richard Helms, making it difficult for researchers to gain a complete understanding of more than 150 sub-projects funded by the MKUltra sponsored research and related CIA programs.
The project began during the period described by Rupert Cornwell as a "paranoia" at the CIA, when the US lost its nuclear monopoly and the fear of Communism was reaching its peak. The head of CIA's counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, believes that moles have penetrated the organization at the highest level. The agency poured millions of dollars into studies that examined methods of influencing and controlling the mind and enhancing their ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation. Some historians claim that one of MKUltra's goals and related CIA projects is to create the subject of "Manchurian Candidate" through mind control techniques. Alfred McCoy has claimed that the CIA is trying to focus media attention on such "ridiculous" programs so the public will not see the main purpose of the research, which develops effective methods of interrogation.
A 1955 MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of efforts. This refers to the study of the various substances that alter the mind described as follows:
- Substance that will promote illogical and impulsive thinking to the point where the recipient will be discredited in public.
- Substances that improve deepening efficiency and perception.
- Material that will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity.
- Materials that will promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol.
- Materials that will produce signs and symptoms of a disease known to be reversible so they can be used to pretend to be sick, etc.
- Materials that will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and memory loss.
- Substances that will enhance the ability of individuals to resist privacy, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brainwashing".
- Materials and physical methods that will generate amnesia for events that occurred previously and during their use.
- The physical method of producing shock and confusion over a long period of time and being able to use secretly.
- Substances that produce physical disabilities such as leg paralysis, acute anemia, etc.
- Substances that will produce chemicals that can cause blisters.
- Substances that change the structure of the personality in such a way that the recipient's tendency becomes dependent on the other person is enhanced.
- Material that will cause mental confusion of such a type, the individual under his influence will find it difficult to maintain fabrication in interrogation.
- Substances that will lower the ambition and efficiency of the general work of men when given in undetectable amounts.
- Substances that promote weakness or distortion of vision or the sense of hearing, preferably without permanent effects.
- The knockout pills that can be secretly given in drinks, food, cigarettes, as aerosols, etc., will be safe to use, provide maximum amnesia, and are suitable for use by agent types on basic ad hoc.
- Materials that can be secretly managed by the route above and which in very small quantities will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity.
The report of the Church Committee in 1976 found that, in the MKDELTA program, "Drugs are used primarily as aids for interrogation, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA material is also used for harassment, discredit, or disable goals."
In 1964, MKSEARCH was the name given to continue the MKULTRA program. The MKSEARCH program is divided into two projects dubbed MKOFTEN/CHICKWIT. Funding for MKSEARCH began in 1965, and ended in 1971. The project is a joint project between the US Army Chemical Corps and the Office of Research and Development of the Central Intelligence Agency to search for new offensive agents with a focus on agents that do not able. The aim of the project is to develop, test, and evaluate capabilities in the use of biological materials, chemistry, and radioactive materials systems and techniques to produce predictable changes in human behavior and/or physiological changes in favor of highly sensitive operational requirements.
By March 1971, more than 26,000 potential agents had been obtained for future screening. The CIA is interested in the migratory pattern of birds for CBW research under MK/ULTRA where, a 139 sub-project designated "Bird Disease Study" at Penn State.
MKOFTEN is to deal with testing and toxicology, transmissivity and drug behavioral effects in animals and, ultimately, humans.
MKCHICKWIT is concerned with obtaining information about the development of new drugs in Europe and the East, and by obtaining samples.
Maps Project MKUltra
American Experiments
The CIA documents show that they are investigating the methods of mind control "chemistry, biology, and radiology" as part of MKUltra. They spend about $ 10 million or more, about $ 87.5 million adjusted for inflation.
LSD
The early CIA efforts focused on LSD-25, which later dominated many of the MKUltra programs. The CIA wanted to know if they could make Soviet spies defective of their will and whether the Soviets could do the same to the CIA's own operations.
After the MKUltra Project began in April 1953, trials included managing LSD for mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers - "people who could not resist," as one agency official said. In one case, they gave LSD to mental patients in Kentucky for 174 days. They also gave LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agencies, and members of the general public to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs are often given without the knowledge or informed consent of the subject, violations of the US Nuremberg Code have agreed to follow after World War II. The goal is to find drugs that will bring deep recognition or clear the mind of the net subject and program it as a "robotic agent."
In the Climactic Midnight Operation, the CIA set up several brothels in an agent's transit house in San Francisco, California, to get a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the incident. The men were given LSD, the brothel was equipped with a one-way mirror, and the sessions were filmed for later sight and study. In another experiment in which people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated in bright light with doctors in the background taking notes. They told the subjects that they would extend their "journey" if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, US military personnel, and agents suspected of working for others in the Cold War. Long-term setbacks and some deaths result from this. Heroin heroin addicts to take LSD by offering more heroin.
At the invitation of Stanford Vik Lovell's graduate student of psychology, an acquaintance of Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be CIA-funded research under the protection of MKULTRA, at the Menlo Park Veteran Hospital. where he works as a night maid. This project studies the effects of psychoactive drugs, especially LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT in humans.
The Security Office used LSD in interrogation but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas; he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since the effect is temporary, it believes that someone can give it to high-ranking officials and in this way affects the course of important meetings, speeches etc. Because he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in the laboratory and using it in clandestine surgery, he initiated a series of experiments in which LSD was given to people in a "normal" setting without warning. Initially, everyone at Technical Services tried it; A typical experiment involves two people in a room where they watch each other for hours and take notes. As the experiment progressed, a dot arrived where outsiders were drugged without any explanation and surprised the acid journey became a danger to work among CIA agents. Adverse reactions often occur, such as a surgery that receives drugs in morning coffee into a psychotic and runs across Washington, seeing monsters in every car that passes through it. The experiment continued even after Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who had never used LSD before, suffered severe depression after a surprise trip and then fell out of a thirteenth story window.
The participation of some subjects is consensus, and in this case they seem to be selected for more extreme experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in Kentucky were given LSD for seventy-seven days in a row.
MKUltra researchers then rejected LSD because it was too unpredictable in the results. They succumbed to the idea of ​​LSD being "the secret that would unlock the universe," but still had a place in the armory and daggers. However, in 1962 the CIA and the army developed a series of superhallucinogens such as the highly praised BZ, which was considered to hold a greater promise as a mind-controlling weapon. This resulted in withdrawal of support by many private academics and researchers, and LSD research became less of a priority at all.
Other drugs
Another technique under study is the intravenous administration of barbiturates into one arm and amphetamines into another. Barbiturates are released to the first person, and as soon as a person begins to fall asleep, amphetamine is released. The person will start babbling unclearly, and it is sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.
Other experiments included heroin, morphine, temazepam (used under the code name MKSEARCH), mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, and pentotal sodium.
Hypnosis
Unclassified MKUltra documents showed they studied hypnosis in the early 1950s. Experimental goals include: the creation of "hypnotic-induced anxiety," "increased hypnotic ability to learn and recall complex written material," studying hypnosis and polygraph examination, "increased hypnotic ability to observe and recall complex physical object arrangements," and studying "personality relationships with susceptibility to hypnosis." They conducted experiments with hypnotic-induced drugs and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia under the influence of these drugs.
Canadian Experiments
They exported their experiments to Canada when the CIA recruited British psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, the creator of the "psychic driving" concept, which the CIA found interesting. Cameron had hoped to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the soul. He returned from Albany, New York, to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University and was paid $ 69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (which would be $ 603,580 in current currency, adjusted for inflation) to bring experiments MKUltra there. The research fund was sent to Dr. Cameron by the CIA's front organization, the Institute for Human Ecological Investigation, and as indicated in the CIA's internal documents, Cameron does not know the money came from the CIA. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times normal strength. His "driving" experiments consist of putting the subject into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while twisting the vocal cords or simple repetitive statements. His experiments are often performed on patients entering the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorder and postpartum depression, many of whom suffer from the permanent effects of their actions. Her treatment causes incontinence of victims, amnesia, forgets the way of talking, forgets their parents, and thinks that their interrogators are their parents. Some of the children that Cameron conducted experiments were sexually abused, at least in one case by some men. One of the children claimed he was filmed repeatedly of sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme he said was established by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail officials to ensure further funding for the experiment.
His work was inspired and aligned by British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who was also involved in Intelligence Services and who experimented on his patients without their consent, caused similar long-term damage. In the 1980s, and some former Cameron patients sued the CIA for damage, which the Canadian news program The Fifth Estate is documented. Their experience and lawsuit was made into a 1998 television miniseries entitled The Sleep Room .
During this era, Cameron became famous worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron was also a member of the Nuremberg medical court in 1946-47.
Naomi Klein argues in his book The Camo Research Chock and his contribution to the MKUltra project is not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "scientifically based systems to extract information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture. "Alfred W. McCoy writes" Stripped of the strange excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiment, built on the previous breakthrough of Donald O. Hebb, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method, " which refers to first creating a disorientation state in the subject, and then the second creating a situation of "self-inconvenience" in which subjects experiencing disorientation can alleviate their pain by surrender.
Revelation
In 1973, amid the panic of government caused by Watergate, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. According to this order, most of the CIA documents on the project were destroyed, making a complete MKUltra investigation impossible. The cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms cleaning, as they had been incorrectly stored in building financial records and discovered after FOIA requests in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the 1977 Hearing Senate.
In December 1974, The New York Times alleged that the CIA had engaged in illegal domestic activities, including experiments on US citizens, during the 1960s. The report prompted an investigation by the US Congress, in the form of a Church Committee, and by a commission known as the Rockefeller Commission that investigated the CIA's illegal domestic activities, the FBI, and military-related intelligence agencies.
In the summer of 1975, the report of the congressional Church Committee and the report of the presidential Rockefeller Commission was publicly disclosed for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defense have conducted experiments on unconscious and conscious human subjects as part of an extensive program to discover how to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological methods. They also revealed that at least one subject, Frank Olson has died after the administration of LSD. Much of what the Rockefeller Church Commission and Commission learned about MKUltra was published in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, which had survived the devastation of records ordered in 1973. However, it contains little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years earlier, was interviewed by the committee but admitted to having very little recollection of MKUltra's activities.
The congressional committee investigating CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concludes that "[p] rior consent is clearly not obtained from any of the subjects". The committee notes that "experiments sponsored by these researchers [...] questioned the decision by the agency to not improve the guidelines for the experiment."
Following the recommendation of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, inter alia, prohibited "experiments with drugs on human subjects, except by consent, in writing and witnessed by uninterested parties. of each human subject "and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent orders by President Carter and Reagan broadened the direction to apply to human experiments.
In 1977, during a hearing organized by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to look further at MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of notes, consisting of about 20,000 pages, who survived the 1973 extermination order because they were not stored properly in a recording center that is not normally used for the documents. These files are related to the financing of MKUltra projects and contain some details of the project, but more is learned from them than from the 1963 Inspector General's report.
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
The CIA's Deputy Director revealed that more than thirty universities and institutions were involved in "extensive testing and experiments" programs that included covert drug tests on unconscious citizens "at all social levels, high and low, Native Americans and foreigners." Some of these tests involve the LSD administration for "unconscious subjects in social situations."
At least one death, Dr. Deen defenestrations. Frank Olson, attributed to the targeted, unconscious Olson in such an experiment, nine days before his death. The CIA himself later admitted that this test had little scientific thought. The monitoring agent does not meet the requirements of a scientific observer.
In Canada, this problem surfaced longer, becoming widely known in 1984 on the CBC news show, The Fifth Estate . It is well known that not only the CIA is funding Dr. Cameron, but also that the Canadian government is fully aware of this, and then provides $ 500,000 to continue the experiment. This revelation largely hampered the efforts of the victims to sue the CIA as their US partner, and the Canadian government finally got out of court with $ 100,000 for each of the 127 victims. Dr Cameron died on September 8, 1967 after suffering a heart attack when he and his son climbed the mountain. None of Cameron's personal records of his involvement with MKUltra survived, since his family destroyed them after his death.
1984 report of the US General Accounting Firm
The US General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1984, stating that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving harmful substances.
Quote from this research:
Working with the CIA, the Department of Defense provided hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested quinuclidinyl benzylate, a hallucinogenic code named BZ. (Note 37) Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MKULTRA program, established to counter the Soviet and Chinese progress felt in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other research on unconscious human subjects
Deaths
Given the destruction of most of the CIA's intended records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the nature of uncontrolled experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra's experiments, including death, may never have occurred. known.
Some of the known deaths have been attributed to the MKUltra Project, mainly from Frank Olson. Olson, a US Army biochemist and biological weapons 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 windows a week later. A CIA doctor was assigned to monitor Olson claiming to have fallen asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson out of the window and fell thirteen stories until his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that occurred during a severe psychotic episode. The CIA internal investigation itself concludes that the head of MKUltra, the CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, had experimented with LSD with Olson's previous knowledge, although both Olson and other men who took part in the experiment were informed of the exact nature of the drug until about 20 minutes after digestion. Further reports indicate that Gottlieb remained due to reprimands, as he failed to account for the suicidal tendencies that Olson had diagnosed, which may have been aggravated by LSD.
The Olson family debates the official version of the event. They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially after his LSD experience, he has become a security risk that may leak state secrets associated with CIA's highly classified programs, of which many have direct personal knowledge. A few days before his death, Frank Olson quit his post as acting head of the Special Operations Division in Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick) due to a severe moral crisis regarding the nature of his biological weapons research. Among Olson's concerns were the development of murder materials used by the CIA, the use of CIA biological warfare materials in covert operations, experiments with biological weapons in resident areas, collaboration with Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, LSD mind control research, and drug use psychoactive during the "terminal" interrogation under a project called Project ARTICHOKE. The forensic evidence then goes against the official version of the event; when Olson's body was dug up in 1994, a skull injury showed that Olson had fainted before he came out of the window. The medical examiner called Olson's death a "murder". In 1975, the Olson family received a $ 750,000 settlement from the US government and an official apology from President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, although their apologies were limited to informed consent issues regarding the use of Olson LSD. On November 28, 2012, the Olson family filed a lawsuit against the US federal government for the false death of Frank Frankson.
A book of 2010 by H. P. Albarelli Jr. alleging that the 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning was part of MKDELTA, that Olson was involved in the event, and that he was eventually killed by the CIA. However, academic sources link the incident to ergot poisoning through a local bakery.
Legal issues involving informed consent
Disclosure about the CIA and the Army encouraged a number of their subjects or victims to file lawsuits against the federal government to conduct experiments without consent. Although the government is aggressively, and sometimes successful, trying to avoid legal liability, some plaintiffs receive compensation through court orders, out-of-court settlements, or congressional action. The Frank Olson family received $ 750,000 with a special act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director William Colby met with the Olson family to apologize publicly.
Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively and successfully attempted to withhold incriminating information, even when they secretly provided compensation to the family. One of the subjects of the Army's drug experiment, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, carried an important clothing, though it did not work. The Government argues that Stanley was banned under a legal doctrine - known as the Feres doctrine, after the 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States of America - which prohibits members of the Armed Forces from prosecuting the government for any loss incurred "incident on services".
In 1987, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this plea in a 5-4 decision that rejected Stanley's case: United States v. Stanley . The majority argue that "a test for accountability that depends on the extent to which a particular lawsuit will question military discipline and decision-making itself will require a judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion over, military issues." In disagreement, Judge William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from responsibility and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights:
The medical experiments at Nuremberg in 1947 greatly impressed the world that experimenting with unknown human subjects morally and law was unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard for judging German scientists experimenting with human subjects... [I] against this principle, military intelligence officials... began quietly testing chemicals and biology, including LSD.
Judge Sandra Day O'Connor, writing disagreements separately, stated:
There are no legally created rules that should protect against the unintentional and unconscious responsibility of human experiments suspected to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in criminal prosecutions against Nazi officials experimenting with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards developed by the Nuremberg Military Courts to assess the behavior of defendants stated that 'Voluntary approval of human subjects is very important... to fulfill the moral, ethical, and legal concepts. ' If this principle is violated, at least what the community can do is to see that the victim is compensated, as best as possible, by the perpetrators.
In another suit, Wayne Ritchie, the former US Marshal, upon hearing about the existence of the project in 1990, accused the CIA of tying his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party that resulted in him trying to rob in the bar and subsequent arrests. While the government admitted, at the time, drugging people without their consent, US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel found Ritchie unable to prove he was one of MKUltra's victims or that LSD led to his robbery and dismissed the case in 2007.
Scientists involved
- Harold Alexander Abramson
- Donald Ewen Cameron
- Sidney Gottlieb
- Harris Isbell
- Louis Jolyon West
- JosÃÆ' Â © Manuel Rodriguez Delgado
- Mark Hinton
Important subject
Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for a MKUltra experiment involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park when he was a student nearby. Stanford University. Kesey's experience while under the influence of LSD inspired him to promote the drug outside the context of MKUltra's experiments, which affected the early development of the hippie culture.Sit down imagine yourself swooping on the purple shell with a soft crystal drop foam top near them falling into a creeping ocean-so-smooth-fog... and then a kind of tinkley-bell-like cascade (I have to take you by hand, every kind so slowly) and then the conglomerate suddenly becomes a passionate, uncompleted silver roar, the bells of blood, the bells blaring with joy... With my faith if this becomes madness, then for the sake of God's love let me keep mad.
- Boston mafia James "Whitey" Bulger volunteered for testing while in jail in Atlanta in 1957.
Aftermath
In his retirement in 1972, Gottlieb rejected his entire attempt to program the MKUltra CIA as useless. The CIA asserts that the MKUltra-type experiment has been abandoned, although author Elizabeth Nickson claims that they continue today under a series of different acronyms. Author Victor Marchetti stated that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and CIA mind-control research proceeded, claiming that it was a "cover story" that the program had been abandoned.
In popular culture
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