Project MKUltra: The CIA’s Mind Control Operation

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After World War Two, the tension between the two emerging superpowers, the United States and the then Soviet Union, was at an all-time high. The threat of a nuclear war and sequentially the end of human existence as we know it was banging on everyone's door. Everyone's life was hanging on by a thread. Neither side wanted to budge or fall behind the other in fear of losing power completely.

Technological development didn't stop with the atom bomb; it continued to get bigger and bigger, like you were rolling a ball of snow down a hill. At the beginning of World War Two, we were still using mediocre biplanes; by the end, we had fighter jets, Superfortress bombers, new technology. It was like when radio turned to television—a complete shift in focus. It turned from bombs to chemical warfare to more biological weapons, weapons that could enter in and change the mind itself. The most dangerous weapon is information.

It was rumored that the Nazis, at the end of World War Two, were doing research on the minds and behaviors of humans and that the secrets and answers to that research lied in the German scientists themselves. Countries such as China, the Soviet Union, and through the mission codenamed Operation Paperclip, even the United States took former German scientists and engineers back to their own individual countries. The United States was terrified by this. The thought of communist countries researching and developing mind control methods was the worst thing imaginable.

The idea of being able to brainwash your citizens or anyone into believing in the Communist agenda, or any agenda for that matter, was an extreme power. Of course, the solution to this is to just beat the other side to the finish line, and that's exactly what the United States government attempted to do, mainly the CIA.

The CIA was created in September of 1947, just a little over two years after the end of World War Two. The goal: gather intelligence information from both domestic and foreign entities. In a 1951 CIA memo, it breast the need to explore scientific methods for controlling the minds of individuals. The concerns of a Cold War world run by new Soviet mind-control and brainwashing technology was an actual and genuine fear of the United States.

Seriously, in an early 1950s CIA document, it states, "Hypnotism appears to have been used in some cases by the Soviets," as the possibilities of lowering resistance against telling the truth while also being able to induce specific action or behavior in a subject. It is possible for a skilled Russian operator to bring about an interrogation yet leave the subject with no specific recollection of having been interrogated.

Leverage you have for having this kind of power over other humans, whether they be spies, prisoners of war, or even normal citizens, it's almost unrivaled. The thing is, this isn't fiction; this isn't some made-up conspiracy theory. They're confirmed facts. In the mid to late 1970s, over 20,000 CIA documents were released regarding the United States' most illegal undertaking.

This is the story of how a single government agency planned and attempted to control and alter the minds of those who inhabited the country that they run, how the United States government attempted to develop psychological, biological, and radiological weapons to turn both foreign and domestic spies into sleeper agents, and how it could still be going on today. This is Project MKULTRA.

Thus, Project MKULTRA was born. But MKULTRA wasn't just one single project; look at it as a web of experiments that were all interconnected with one ultimate goal: control. Project Bluebird, Artichoke, MKSEARCH, and MKIOMMI are just a few, but it goes much, much further. Although it started earlier, MKULTRA was officially signed and begun in 1953 under CIA director Allen Dulles.

It was one of the largest projects ever known. Over 150 subprojects were created and handled by over 80 different institutions: universities, prisons, pharmaceutical companies, all of which you had little to no idea that they were doing work directly for the CIA. However, that didn't stop some of the most creative experiments from taking place. Many of these, as you might imagine, were very, very illegal. American as well as Canadian citizens were unknowingly and unwillingly tested on.

Project Artichoke was a sort of continuation of Project Bluebird. Both of these projects focused on hypnosis in many forms. In a 1975 CIA memo, Artichoke is the study and/or use of special interrogation methods and techniques. These methods have been known to include the use of drugs and chemicals, so-called truth serums, hypnosis, and total isolation—a form of psychological harassment. They were looking for ways to control human behavior.

These methods were to be used for several different reasons, some to protect against foreign spies, some more disturbing than others. The goal of the research was best defined in a 1954 CIA memo regarding Project Artichoke. It states, "Can an individual be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of Artichoke?" Artichoke eventually evolved into the more well-known MKULTRA, and the subprojects of MKULTRA attempted to find answers to that very question.

Subproject 68 is perhaps one of the most illegal of these entire subprojects, but that's not saying much. Both American and Canadian citizens were used as test subjects against their will or knowledge at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. Dr. Ewen Cameron led one of the most twisted projects of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Subproject 68 was fully funded by the CIA, who also paid Dr. Cameron $69,000—on today's world, nearly $600,000—to carry out secret CIA experiments.

Dr. Cameron was heavily interested in being able to erase and reprogram the human mind, and the CIA could obviously use that kind of power in many ways. These experiments would become so severe and damaging that patients, who came into the hospital for symptoms such as minor anxiety and depression, would leave with their minds fried. They'd experience amnesia; they triggered halotalk; their brains would be completely wiped, similar to that of a baby.

Cameron's patients were subject to some of the most mind-altering drugs and methods known to man: LSD, electroshock therapy at up to 40 times the normal power, drug-induced comas for extended periods of time, and much, much more. Take the case of Linda MacDonald, a typical mother who was experiencing the harder parts of being an adult: depression, physical pain, lack of sleep, and so on.

She visits Montreal to be assessed by Dr. Cameron, and almost immediately, he diagnoses her as a schizophrenic. Since her - what is known today as the sleeper - this is where it turns bad. Cameron decides to put Linda MacDonald into a drug-induced coma for 86 days straight. In the sleep room, patients were often subject to this electroshock therapy multiple times a day for weeks on end without any consent.

Linda MacDonald was subjected to over 100 of these shock therapy sessions. As time went on, she went from being able to tell the doctors her name and information about herself to having her brain completely wiped. In a 1998 documentary, she states, "I had to be toilet trained. I was a vegetable. I had no identity; I had no memory. I never existed in the world before, like a baby." Just like a baby that has to be.

She eventually was dismissed from the hospital and went back home to her family. However, she had no recollection of these people or even knowledge that these people were even her own family in the first place. This isn't the only case that happened at the Allen Institute, though. Various other cases took place. In many cases, patients would be recorded during therapy sessions talking about their families or other people or things that would bring them negative thoughts or have negative impacts in their life.

These negative messages would then be cut up and played on repeat for these patients, sometimes over hundreds of thousands of times. This exact thing happened to Robert Loki; he was admitted to the Institute for leg pain. They thought it was all in his head, and he was then sent to the sleep room. He was given LSD every two days, sometimes mixed with other drugs, and then while in a drug-induced coma, the message, "You killed your mother," was repeated to him for 23 days straight.

These experiments would take place on all ages, from children to old men and women. Many of the children at this Institute were the victims of abuse, and in one case, one of the children was filmed performing sexual acts with multiple government officials as a ploy to secure funding for these experiments. Cameron died in 1967 without anyone in the public knowing about what he had been doing for the past decade.

Subproject 54 studied techniques to cause concussions and other brain-damaging experiments. It was supposed to be handled by the United States Navy. Why? Well, the project was to use sub-oral frequency blasts to cause concussions, and although the program was supposedly never carried out, there is still some evidence that might show some kind of work being done.

In the hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in late September 1977, there's a passage that caught my eye. While talking about funding from various institutes across the country, Dr. Gachet Kerr, a CIA employee, mentioned something interesting. He first notes about a study on concussions where heads of animals were repeatedly rocked back and forth to cause concussion and then further amnesia. Next, however, is even more interesting.

There was apparently a later business, whatever that may be, that, through the use of radar, was attempting to put monkeys to sleep. A senator present at the meeting asked, "Could they?" As Dr. Gachet Kerr states, "Yes, they could." He goes on to say that it showed if you got into too deep a sleep, you injured the heat center of the brain—the way you cook meat. There was a borderline that made it dangerous.

So basically, the CIA was using radio and electromagnetic signals to attempt to put monkeys and other animals to sleep, and they could not only that but they could almost literally cook an animal's brain to the point where they would go brain-dead and in some cases even die. Now, I don't know about you, but if this could work on monkeys and supposedly other animals as well, I imagine that this very experiment took place with human subjects as well.

The problem is, after this hearing, I couldn't find any other papers or documents that even remotely talked about this sleep experiment—an experiment that seems to have succeeded was washed away and never mentioned again, and the mystery of Subproject 54 fades away. At this point, not much is out of the question when it comes to the lengths the CIA would go to in order to conduct their experiments.

Operation Midnight Climax was kept relatively a secret up until the mid-1970s. In cities such as San Francisco, California, and New York City, CIA-funded safe houses were built for one specific reason: prostitution. Well, not exactly that; what prostitutes did have a large role in this operation. These safe houses were often hotel rooms, but not just any normal hotel room; they would be equipped with one-way mirrors so that a person on the outside could see through it, but anyone inside couldn't see out.

The CIA would often pay prostitutes in these cities a good bit of cash to bring men back to these hotel rooms so they could be observed. But not normally after these women would bring men back to the safehouse; they would prepare drinks for them, but the women would slyly put LSD in the men's drinks for hours on end. CIA agents would sit behind these one-way mirrors and observe how the LSD affected these various men and what kind of information could be extracted from these men.

They were never informed or told that they would be taking part in these experiments. There were no doctors present at any of these encounters—just CIA employees sitting back and watching. For the CIA, there's no downside here. They would often pay these prostitutes large sums of money, enough to keep their mouths shut and out of trouble. Some of our problems would arise there; the men lured back to these hotels were also unlikely to speak out against the things that occurred and would never know that the CIA was even involved.

What are the odds of one of them going to a news outlet claiming that the CIA drugged him with LSD and then forced him to follow a prostitute back to a hotel room? Practically zero. It didn't end there; the operation soon expanded, and the CIA began to reach out to those people in restaurants, bars, and even beaches—all of which took place on American citizens who didn't even have the slightest bit of knowledge that they were being experimented on by their own government.

On a foggy Wednesday morning in late November of 1953, a group of United States CIA operatives from Camp Dietrich took a weekend getaway to a lake house in Maryland—a little Thanksgiving retreat, we'll call it. The group contained many people: Frank Olson, an army scientist turned CIA employee; Benson Truitt, a friend and vision chief of Olson. They were also accompanied by Sidney Gottlieb, head of the technical service staff at the CIA, his deputy, Robert Lashbrooke, and a few others.

The three-day getaway was just as normal as any other company getaway could get: jokes, laughs, good food, and much more. The group of men ate dinner, and then afterwards, they did what men do best—drink. Two bottles of liquor lay on the table, both the same, both indistinguishable from one another. Robert Lashbrooke proceeded to pour drinks for eight out of the ten men present, but afterwards, he poured himself and Sidney Gottlieb the same drink from the other bottle. No one suspected a thing; besides, liquor is liquor, right?

Everyone took the drink, including Frank Olson. After the trip, life continued on as normal for everyone else; however, for Olson, his life changed drastically. He fell into a deep depression and felt as if his life had no purpose. He had doubts about the work that he was doing, a family man who fell into solitude. Olson decided that this was enough and met with Vincent Ruiet; he said he was dissatisfied with his work and his performance at the retreat.

As a top employee at the CIA who happened to be deeply involved with the germ warfare business, he had enough and wanted to devote his life to a completely different field and wanted to resign. Vincent Ruiet and Robert Lashbrooke both attempted to talk Olson out of his resignation and suggested he see a psychiatrist in New York City. He agreed, and Olson and Lashbrooke set off in New York in hopes of help.

The story goes dark here; that is until over 20 years later when, in 1975, the Rockefeller Commission reported on the CIA and its activities within the United States. In this report, it contained many things—299 pages of information. The CIA engaged in unlawful activities, domestic spying, wiretaps, the use of multiple drugs against unsuspecting US citizens, and much more. It also contains a story of a 1953 CIA experiment on Dr. Frank Olson.

At that retreat, Olson was given LSD unknowingly by the CIA supervisors there, Lashbrooke and Gottlieb. Their drinks were spiked with LSD, although supervisors observed the results. Just nine days after this incident, Frank Olson supposedly fell or jumped from a tenth-story window out of a hotel room in New York City. Olson's family would never see Frank's body again. He was immediately placed into a casket, taken back to Camp Dietrich, and kept locked up.

The story was that his body was too gruesomely injured to be seen, which obviously makes sense; he had a closed casket funeral, and his family would never see him again. That is until 1993 when Frank's wife died. They were to be buried together, and a second autopsy on Frank Olson's body was performed. The 1953 autopsy stated that there were cuts and abrasions all across Frank's body; however, in a 1994 autopsy, there weren't any to be found. Instead, there were large swellings on Olson's head, as well as a large injury on his chest—but not from the fall.

It appears that the trauma had occurred before the fall. Again, the difference here between falling and jumping—these are two very different things. This then changes it from a suicide to a CIA murder. From falling out of the window to being thrown, the changes in the cover story over the course of 40 years have started to show, and too many questions are being left unanswered.

On the night of the incident, Olson's and Lashbrooke's hotel room received a phone call only mere minutes after the event supposedly occurred. A number was dialed, and the person on the other end picks up. Robert Lashbrooke is silent until he breaks it by saying, "Well, he's gone." The receiving end replies, "That's too bad." The call ends directly after.

After doing some research, I found this document that was released with the Rockefeller investigation in 1975. It appears that Lashbrooke called Gottlieb before he called the disc, meaning that it was him on the receiving end of that phone call. Sidney Gottlieb's career goes much deeper than just entry-level CIA stuff. He joined the CIA in 1951 as a poisons expert.

As an experienced chemist, Gottlieb was very involved with preparing lethal poisons and other mind-bending drugs. He eventually became known as the "black sorcerer" and the "dirty trickster," and eventually became head of a secret previously undisclosed government project: MKULTRA. Over the course of his career, he devised plans on killing multiple large foreign government officials. He proposed multiple ways of attempting to kill Fidel Castro; these include poison cigars, exploding conch shells, and much more.

So, the thought of him being involved in a domestic homicide definitely isn't out of the picture. Seymour Hersh was a journalist who was deeply involved in this story for decades. After his years of research, in 2017 he said the government had a security process that would allow them to identify and execute domestic citizens who posed a risk. Olson is believed to have fallen under this category, and the CIA and other government agencies have been covering it up all along.

If this is true, then the US government considered an accidental death resulting from illegal human experimentation to be a better cover story than the actual truth. I honestly can't tell you which story sounds worse. On top of that, after looking at the CIA's 1953 study of assassination—which, let's be honest, is basically the CIA's assassination manual—it even has a section for this very incident with the title "Accidents."

The most efficient accident and simple assassination is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unseen windows, and bridges will serve. This wasn't about the LSD; it was about biological warfare, about interrogation, getting a means to an end. The LSD and other drugs were just a cover story to get people to look in the wrong direction. Look over here so you won't ask questions about the other stuff—the deeper reasons behind it all.

The Olson family had become pretty much celebrities, and there’s no way you could just take them all out of the picture without anyone asking questions. While they were out researching and diving in, the CIA and other agencies were just playing the long game, until everyone involved with it faded out of existence.

The events of Project MKULTRA are an enigma; almost all of the records were destroyed in 1973 by Richard Helms, the director of the CIA at the time. Every bit of information we have today is just a fragment of the entire picture. But from what we have, obvious claims about the ethics of the entire project can be made. However, even the declassified release documents could just be another cover story.

All of those documents, although still pretty disturbing, could just be like the Olson family—a distraction from what was really going on. Also, just like Project Bluebird that turned into Project Artichoke, all they did was rescan the previous project into a new one. It's more than possible, and I think very likely, that the same thing happened here.

All of the documents we have today are just the tip of the iceberg, although a much bigger story lies beneath. Many news sources you see will say that MKULTRA ended in 1964, but funding continued throughout the 1970s under projects called MKSEARCH and MKOFTEN, which study things that I don't even want to talk about.

All I'm saying is, whether you consider it a conspiracy theory or fact, more and more findings keep showing their face. It's entirely possible that these projects never ended and that the research that dominated the second half of the 20th century still continues on to this very day. This almost 70-year-long deep-rooted mystery may never truly be resolved.

As I said at the start of the video, it's all about control. If you have control, you have power, and power is a replaceable. Imagine having access to the entire population of a country, having access to every launch code and password imaginable at the press of a button. The amount of information you would hold is limitless.

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