Mind Control Program "Project MKULTRA"

HISTORY

Project MKULTRA is an illegal CIA human research program run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence to study torture and brainwashing; early experiments into mind control during
World War II. The Project began in the early 1950s,continuing at least through the late 1960s.
The project used U.S and Canadian citizens as its test subjects and over 44 different college and universities were used in Project MKULTRA. Furthermore, numerous hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies were paid by CIA front companies to conduct various CIA subprograms experiments

OBJECTIVE

Project MKULTRA document

The published evidence indicates that Project MKULTRA involved the use of many methologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious adminstration of drugs and other chemical, sensory deprivation, isolation and both verbal and sexual abuse.

The project also involved in examine methods of controlling and influencing the mind primarily for the extraction of information from resistant subjects during interrogation

EXPERIMENTATION

Experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes, "people who could not fight back", as one agency officer put it.In one case LSD was administered to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days.LSD was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent

In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels in San Francisco, California 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. The subjects were told that their "trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people being interrogated this way 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.

LSD was not the only drug used during Project MKUltra. Many drugs were experimented with in the various tests, including but not limited to heroin, morphine, MDMA, mescaline, sodium pentothal, alcohol, and marijuana. Doctors also experimented with drug combinations, in one instance injecting a patient with barbiturates in one arm and amphetamines in another.

Electronics,Hypnosis and other experiments

MkUltra subproject was about the electronic control of human behaviour.
the survey encompassed five main areas: techniques of activation of the human organism
by remote electronic means, bio-electric sensors, recording, analysis and standardization of data.

Donald Ewen Cameron

Hypnosis experimental goals included: the creation of "hypnotically induced anxieties," "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter," studying hypnosis and polygraph examinations, "hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects," and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis." Experiments were conducted with drug induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs.

Hypnosis was a large part of the program. The CIA recruited noted Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron , who had been experimenting with reprogramming the human psyche by erasing memories. Some of the experiments were inhumane and secretive enough to warrant the CIA moving Cameron’s operations to Canada, away from U.S. jurisdiction and the media’s eyes.

Cameron’s methods would involve putting patients into a drug-induced coma for several weeks while playing loops of repetitive noises or sounds. He would use electroshock therapy at 30-40 times normal power. He would use sensory deprivation, locking patients in a room with no stimulus for weeks at a time. There was significant collateral damage from these experiments; Cameron’s his patients would become incontinent, start to develop amnesia, and in the most extreme cases forget who their parents were or even how to talk.Throughout his career Donald Cameron insisted he had honorable intentions of researching methods to correct schizophrenia through the reprogramming of the psyche, but the string of discarded patients who became permanently disabled under his care tell a different tale.

DEATHS

Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of Frank Olson.

Frank Olson

Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November, 1953, as part of a CIA experiment and died under suspicious circumstances a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson exited the window and fell thirteen stories to his death

In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, researcher H. P. Albarelli Jr. concurs with the Olson family and concludes that Frank Olson was murdered because a personal crisis of conscience made it likely he would divulge state secrets concerning several CIA programs, chief among them Project ARTICHOKE and an MKDELTA project code-named Project SPAN

THE CIA LOST OR  DESTROYED ALL RECORDS OF  PROJECT MKULTRA

Sadly, but not surprisingly, almost no records remain of the 10 years of covert activity. As Senator Kennedy noted:

"Perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of experimentation on human subjects was unknown. The records of all these activities were destroyed in 1973, at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms."

Notably, however, some records were overlooked during the CIA’s destruction because new records were found in 1977, as noted by Senator Kennedy:

"We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records . . . . The records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had previously been thought."

Nonetheless, these records still leave an incomplete record of the program.