This is about the CIA's mind control program in which our intrepid CIA often gave subject mind-blowing drugs with their knowledge or consent. The overall goal was to develop enhanced interrogation techniques. However, many feel that it was about developing torture techniques.

1. Cocktails With the CIA
A Production of #BecomeUngovernable
Episode 7: Project MKUltra

2. Project MKUltra
● The CIA's mind control project
● Program of experiments conducted on human
subjects
● Intended to identify and develop drugs, alcohol,
stick and poke tattoos, and procedures for
interrogation and torture
● Drugs would weaken the individual to force
confessions through mind control

3. Project MKUltra
● Mind Control
– Also known as brainwashing, reeducation,
brainsweeping, coercive persuasion, thought
control or thought reform
– Controversial pseudoscientific theory
– Subjects can be indoctrinated to give up their
autonomy and ability to think independently
– Involuntary reeducation of beliefs and values

4. Project MKUltra

5. Project MKUltra
● What's in a name?
● Intentionally obscure CIA cryptonym
– MK means that the project was sponsored by the
agency's Technical Services Staff
– Ultra was previously used to designate the most
secret classification of WWII intelligence
– Other related cryptonyms include Project MKNaomi
and Project MKDelta

6. Project MKUltra
● Project started by Allen
Dulles on April 13, 1953
● Headed by Sidney Gottlieb
● Develop mind-control drugs
to be used against the Soviet
Bloc
● Response to alleged Soviet,
Chinese and North Korean
mind control techniques
used on American POWs
● Fidel Castro a target

7. Project MKUltra
● Experiments often
conducted without the
subject's knowledge or
consent
● Academic researchers
funded through grants
from the CIA front
organizations
● Unaware what their
work was used for

8. Project MKUltra
● Began during a period of “paranoia” within the CIA
● United States had lost its nuclear monopoly
● Great fear of Communism; Domino Principle
● James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-
intelligence, believed there was a mole at the
highest level of the organization
● Produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating
suspected Soviet spies

9. Project MKUltra
● CIA poured millions of dollars into controlling the mind
● Some historians assert that the end result would be a
“Manchurian Candidate”
● Others assert CIA focused media on “ridiculous” programs to
hide the real goal
– Develop effective methods of torture and interrogation
● Cite “studies at McGill University” reference in CIA's KUBARK
interrogation manual
● McGill researcher Donald Ewen Cameron used sensory
deprivation, drugs, isolation, and other methods
–

10. Project MKUltra
● Manchurian Candidate
A candidate running for office who
publicly supports one group to win
election, but uses his executive or
legislative powers to assist an
opposing group; it should not be
confused with a sleeper agent who
has been brainwashed into working
for a political party
● CIA's definition was definitely of the
sleeper agent variety, allowing them
more control

11. Project MKUltra: Sub-project
68
● CIA recruited Scottish
psychiatrist Cameron
● Inventor of “psychic driving”
concept
● Paid $69K from 1957-1964
from CIA front Society for
Investigation of Human
Ecology
● Experimented on people who
had entered the hospital for
minor problems like anxiety
or postpartum depression

12. Project MKUltra: Sub-project
68
● Worked with LSD and paralytic drugs
● Electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal
power
● “Driving” experiments put subjects into drug-induced coma for
weeks at a time (up to 3 months in one instance)
– Playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive
statements
● Many suffered permanently from his experimentation
– Incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting
their parents, thinking their interrogators were their
parents

13. Project MKUltra: Sub-project
68
● Cameron and Allen Dulles wanted to develop a
method that would remove a person's natural
personality
– Programmed with a new personality
– Carry out assassinations which could be written off
as the work of a “lone nutter”
● Naomi Klein “The Shock Doctrine” states his work
with MKUltra was all about torture
● During Watergate “panic” (1973) CIA Director
Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed

14. Project MKUltra:
Scope
● 1955 MKUltra Document
– Substances which will produce illogical thinking and
impulsiveness
– Materials which will cause temporary/permanent
brain damage and loss of memory
– Substances which will produce a chemical that
causes blisters
– Materials and physical methods which will produce
amnesia for events preceding and during their use
– Substances which disabilities such as paralysis of the
legs, acute anemia, etc.

15. Project MKUltra:
Scope
● Experiments
– CIA documents suggest “chemical, biological and
radiological” methods used for mind control
● Drugs
– LSD (dismissed as too unpredictable), heroin,
morphine, temazepam (under the code name
MKSearch), mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine,
marijuana, alcohol, and sodium pentothal
– Barbiturate in one arm; amphetamine in the other

16. Project MKUltra:
Scope
● Scientists Involved
– Harold Alexander Abramson
– Donald Ewen Cameron (McGill University, Canada)
– Sidney Gottlieb
– Harris Isbell
– Louis Joylon West
– Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado

17. Project MKUltra:
Scope
● Participants
– 44 American colleges and universities
– 15 research foundations, chemical or pharmaceutical
companies
● Sandoz (now Novartis), Eli Lilly & Company
– 12 hospitals or clinics
● In addition to those associated with universities
– Three prisons

18. Project MKUltra: Sub-
projects

19. Project Midnight Climax
● Safe houses (Brothels) in
Marin, San Francisco, NYC
● Prostitutes on the CIA payroll
lured clients to houses
● Given LSD and other
substances
● Monitored via one-way glass
● Research into sexual
blackmail, surveillance, use
of mind-altering drugs

20. Project MKUltra
● Sub-Project 54: “Perfect Concussion” Program
– Use of sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory.
(Never carried out.)
● MKDelta: Established to govern the use of MKUltra materials
abroad; possibly used as early as 1950
● MKSearch: Continuation of MKUltra; two projects
– MKOften: Testing toxicological, transmissivity, and
behavorial effects of drugs in animals/humans
– MKChickwit: Acquiring information and samples of new
drugs developed in Europe and the Orient

21. Project MKUltra
● First brought to the public's
attention by the Church
Committee in the summer of
1975
● About 20,000 documents had
survived Helms' purging
● Found documents led to
another investigation in 1977
● Acknowledged actions, but
provided little detail because
of destroyed records

22. Project MKUltra
● What do Ken Kesey, Robert
Hunter and Whitey Bulger
have in common?
● They all volunteered to be
subjects for MKUltra!

23. Project MKUltra
Was Lee Harvey Oswald an
MKUltra subject?
Nobody really knows the
answer to that. What we do
know is that he did not kill
JFK, at least not alone. And
this program – at one time
labeled a “conspiracy
theory” – is actually a very
real part of American history
that nobody teaches you.