MK/ULTRA
MK/ULTRA was a series of top secret projects that conducted drug experiments on humans by CIA Technical Services Division (TSD).
MK is a cryptonym that the CIA that uses to notate the project is assigned to TSD.
The proper format of a cryptonym is all caps with a forward slash, MK/ULTRA.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (Sid) was a scientist and chemist working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran the mind control projects as director of TSD.
MK/ULTRA had many projects under this umbrella project, approximately 160+ subprojects.
Mind Control
Experiments using humans as guinea pigs for testing of drugs and techniques that might allow someone to control the mind of someone else.
These experiments were conducted with and WITHOUT informed consent.
The Nuremberg Code was the ethical medical standard set after WW II because of the Nazi’s human experiments, and torture programs.
Ironic that the US GOV moved Nazi scientists to America to help them escape punishment and retribution (like NASA) to help advise on the methods and techniques of brainwashing and torture that they found successful.
Double ironic that Sid was Jewish.
Operation Paperclip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
MK/ULTRA Purposes and Goals
Develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture
It used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse, in addition to other forms of torture.
Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric-shock, psychology,
psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.
The ultimate goals were:
Create the Manchurian Candidate
What if the US GOV could “program” an ordinary citizen to kill without remorse or restraint, and not remember a thing?
Movies that came about because of the interest in brainwashing and zombie assassins
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Book and Screenplay
Axelrod was highly regarded for his adaptation of Richard Condon's novel for director John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. Axelrod, who co-produced, considered it his best screen adaptation. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the movie was taken out of circulation and wasn't re-released until 1988, when it became a box office hit and was deemed by critics to be a classic of American cinema.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Axelrod]
How the search started
CIA officials started preliminary work on drugs and hypnosis shortly after the Agency's creation in 1947, but the behavior-control program did not really get going until the Hungarian government put Josef Cardinal Mindszenty on trial in 1949. With a glazed look in his eyes, Mindszenty confessed to crimes of treason he apparently did not commit. His performance recalled the Moscow purge trials of 1937 and 1938 at which tough and dedicated party apparatchiks had meekly pleaded guilty to long series of improbable offenses. These and a string of postwar trials in other Eastern European countries seemed staged, eerie, and unreal. CIA men felt they had to know how the Communists had rendered the defendants zombielike.
Marks - page 22
China and North Korea
By the end of the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190 U.S. prisoners held in China had either made confessions or signed petitions calling for an end to the American war effort in Asia. Fifteen percent collaborated fully with the Chinese, and only 5 percent steadfastly resisted. The American performance contrasted poorly with that of the British, Australian, Turkish, and other United Nations prisoners—among whom collaboration was rare, even though studies showed they were treated about as badly as the Americans. Worse, an alarming number of the prisoners stuck by their confessions after returning to the United States. They did not, as expected, recant as soon as they stepped on U.S. soil. Puzzled and dismayed by this wholesale collapse of morale among the POWs, American opinion leaders settled in on Edward Hunter's explanation: The Chinese had somehow brainwashed our boys. But how? At the height of the brainwashing furor, conservative spokesmen often seized upon the very mystery of it all to give a religious cast to the political debate. All communists have been, by definition, brainwashed through satanic forces, they argued—thereby making the enemy seem like robots completely devoid of ordinary human feelings and motivation. Liberals favored a more scientific view of the problem. Given the incontrovertible evidence that the Russians and the Chinese could, in a very short time and often under difficult circumstances, alter the basic belief and behavior patterns of both domestic and foreign captives, liberals argued that there must be a technique involved that would yield its secrets under objective investigation.
Marks - pages 111-112
Marks, John D. (1979). The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control. Times Books. ISBN 0-8129-0773-6.
“Erase” someone’s memory
To get a subject to forget confidential information, so that info is not leaked.
Determine if the Chinese or Russian Intel agency had brainwashed the subject first
Useful in counterespionage in case a “defector” was not for real and was a decoy when they turned themselves in.
Scale of Project
Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way, so they may be used for malingering, etc.
Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brainwashing".
Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time, and capable of surreptitious use.
Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
Substances which will produce "pure" euphoria with no subsequent let-down.
Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type, the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
A knockout pill which can be surreptitiously administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Scale_of_project]
Frank Olson
Was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and an employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) who worked at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick) in Maryland.
At a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his colleague Sidney Gottlieb (head of the CIA's MK/Ultra program) and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler.
The U.S. government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure, while others allege murder. The Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA in 1975 acknowledged their having conducted covert drug studies on fellow agents. Olson's death is one of the most mysterious things to come out of the CIA mind control project MK/Ultra.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson]
POTUS and CIA apology and pay out
Shortly after the news came out, President Ford invited the Olsons to the White House, where he apologized on behalf of the federal government and set in motion a Congress approved compensation of $750,000. CIA director William Colby also felt compelled to offer an apology, and in the summer of 1975 he met the three grown Olson children in his office on the seventh floor of the agency’s headquarters.
[https://frankolsonproject.org/the-story/]
Frank’s Son Eric
Inside story of Frank Olson by Eric Olson
[https://frankolsonproject.org/]
Netflix movie - Wormwood (2017)
CIA Connection
Olson served as a captain in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. In December 1942, he got a call from Ira Baldwin, his thesis adviser at UoW and the future mentor of Sidney Gottlieb (Sid), who would go on to be the CIA's leading chemist and director of MK-ULTRA. Ira had been called to leave his University post to direct a secret program regarding the development of biological weapons, and wanted Olson to join him as one of the first scientists at what would become Fort Detrick. The army transferred him to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. A few months later, the Chemical Corps took over Detrick and established its secret Biologicals Warfare Laboratories.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson]
1975 - Although Olson's family told friends that he "fell or jumped" and had suffered "a fatal nervous breakdown" which resulted in the fall, the family had no real knowledge of the specific details surrounding the tragedy, until the Rockefeller Commission uncovered some of the CIA's MK/ULTRA activities in 1975. That year, the government admitted that Olson had been dosed with LSD, without his knowledge, nine days before his death. After the family announced they planned to sue the Agency over Olson's "wrongful death," the government offered them an out-of-court settlement of $1,250,000, later reduced to $750,000 (about $3.8 million in 2021 prices), which they accepted. The family received apologies from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA director William Colby.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson]
Project Midnight Climax
In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels within agency safehouses in San Francisco to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors, and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study. In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. They told subjects they would extend their "trips" if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this. Heroin addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax]
Known Subjects of MK/ULTRA Brainwashing
Once Project MK/Ultra got underway in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers – "people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. They also administered LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were often administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code the U.S. had agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program them as "a robot agent.
At the invitation of Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a CIA-financed study under the aegis of MK/Ultra, at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital where he worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT and DMT on people.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra]
Documented consenting subjects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hunter_(lyricist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger
Undocumented consenting / non-consenting subjects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Teeter
Charles Manson
Organizations that willing participated
Using “cutouts” funding all these subprojects:
It was 162 different secret projects that were indirectly financed by the CIA, but were “contracted out to various universities, research foundations and similar institutions.” In all, at least 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, but many didn’t know they were dealing with the CIA.
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/#:~:text=But%20MKUltra%20has%20gone%20down%20in%20history%20as,testimony%20of%20CIA%20director%20Stansfield%20Turner%20in%201977.]
CIA cutout
“CIA cutout” can be explained as a mutually trusted/creditable intermediary or channel of communication that facilitates the exchange of information between intelligence personnel or those involved in espionage. Normally cutouts know only the source & destination of the information to be transmitted, not the identities of any others involved in the intelligence or espionage process. This is based on the adage if someone is cleared for sensitive/classified material information and has a need to know. This prevents a cutout that is compromised & therefore unable to help identify a specific type of cell/group. The process is also helped with the cutout isolates the source from the destination, so neither one may know each other.
There can be 2 forms of “cutouts” that are connected with intelligence/espionage. They are the “block and chain cutouts” that are in use. The block cutout is an agent/intelligence personnel familiar with the entire spy network or cell and the info along with the spy who is receiving the info while the chain cutout is simply a person/agent who is aware of only the person providing the info & the spy receiving the info. The chain cutout helps maintain the compartmentalization ( mentioned earlier as the need to know) of the spy network which enhances security by maintaining everyone’s anonymity.
The term cutout could also be used more generously to describe a person or agency used as a “pawn” or “front” go-between by intelligence agencies.
[https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-CIA-cutout]
J. “Kahuna Kuya” Alota - Retired US Army Special Operations/ US Intelligence Officer
Summary
The idea of stopping the enemy from leveraging mind control against citizens and soldiers was a good idea. During the early 1950s and 1960s, it seemed like a possibility.
MK/ULTRA was a long set of experiments that went off the rails and into unethical and immoral treatment of human beings.
Despite the warnings of history and the Nuremberg code, unaccountable scientist plowed ahead.
No one in control ever asked if this "research" had gone too far.
We will never know the names of the thousands of victims and the true costs of driving so many into madness, some not even knowing this happened to them on purpose. Many are stuck in a living hell, inside some mental institution or prison.
The death count of victims will never be known.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Background Information on my CIA Father