Decades of Cover-up Torn Aside

A House Oversight Committee held an explosive hearing last Tuesday focused on new revelations concerning the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra program. This was a Cold War-era project that explored ways to master mind control with drugs and hypnosis and to program behavior—all as a means of combating Communist Russia, North Korea and other hostile regimes.

Partial information about the clandestine project seeped out in 1977, following a NY Times front-page story accusing top scientists working for the government of having conducted medical experiments on unwitting subjects with the mind-altering LSD drug, electroshock and hypnosis.

A Congressional probe at the time uncovered key facts about the CIA’S mind-control program—which by then had been shut down. The hearings were very disturbing. A public uproar erupted over the disclosure of the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window after consuming a drink spiked with LSD.

The investigators were hampered, however, by the fact that the official records of the MK-Ultra program had been ordered destroyed in 1973 by CIA Director Richard Helms, days before he left office.

When the government investigations produced no indictments or arrests, the furor eventually died down. From the disclosures at last week’s hearing, it now appears that the earlier allegations about MK-Ultra were but the tip of the iceberg.

The hearing, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., focused on newly surfaced records, as well as testimonies from experts that shone a light on the unprecedented scope of MK-Ultra’s criminal and morally debased activities in the United States and overseas.

MK-Ultra, led by biochemical genius Sidney Gottlieb from the 1950s to 1960s, involved 149 subprojects across 80 institutions, including many universities, hospitals, prisons and research facilities, using human guinea pigs in a wide range of criminal medical experiments.

‘Some of the Worst Crimes Against Humanity’

In her opening remarks, Luna stated that the newly unearthed files are now in the process of being declassified.

“The intelligence community has covered up the nature of the MK-Ultra experiments for decades,” Rep. Luna said. She revealed that the secret project was a “deliberate governmental operation that subjected American citizens and others to dangerous drugs and torture without consent, including electric shock, sensory deprivation, as well as inducing psychosis and mental collapse leading in some cases to death.”

“That, in my mind, constitutes some of the worst crimes against humanity in the twentieth century,” the Florida congresswoman said.  “The CIA committed these notorious acts, and then the Director of the CIA ordered the destruction of evidence.”

The objective of last week’s panel, Rep. Luna said, was to investigate the full reach of the mind-control program as well as why the CIA’s files remained classified so many years later.

“Americans have been misled repeatedly and deserve transparency and accountability from the CIA,” said Rep. Luna, pledging to secure further declassification in a bid to restore public trust.

She introduced two witnesses whom she said “have spent years unraveling the cover-up our government ordered:”

“Stephen Kinzer documented the life and crimes of top CIA agent Sidney Gottlieb in his book, “Poisoner in Chief. How the CIA Searched for Mind-Control.” And journalist Tom O’Neill, author of The CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, spent over 20 years investigating the secret project the CIA buried,” the Florida congresswoman said in her introduction.

CIA Rode Wave of Paranoia

From its inception, Project MK Ultra was a program shrouded in mystery. At its peak in the mid-1950s, only a handful of CIA personnel even knew of its existence, O’Neill told the panel.

Fear of brainwashing, dubbed a new kind of “brain warfare,” terrified and fascinated the American public throughout the 1950s, spurred by stories of “brainwashed” G.I.’s returning from China, Korea, and the Soviet Union, the author told the panel.

The New York Times had published a startling story asserting that American POWs returning home may have been “converted” by “Communist brain-washers.” Some GI’s were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists—a charge the U.S. categorically denied. Other American soldiers were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all.

To many Americans, Communist brainwashing seemed to explain the astonishing rise of communism in that era. They believed the Soviet Union had mastered the art of manipulating minds—not only those of captured enemies but of its own people. Otherwise, they reasoned, how could so many nations willingly embrace an ideology so backward and evil?

CIA Director Allen Dulles rode the wave of paranoia by launching MK-Ultra and handpicking biochemist Sidney Gottlieb to run it. If hostile nations were using brain-warfare, the United States could not afford to be left behind.

“Gottlieb operated almost completely without supervision,” asserted biographer Stephen Kinzer. “He had sort of a blank check from his bosses, first CIA director Allen Dulles and then Richard Helms. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing.”

Kinzer alleged that Gottlieb in effect “had a license to kill.” “He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal.”

“In the early 1950s, Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world’s entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States and spread it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and other institutions. He would ask them, through bogus foundations concealing the CIA’s role, to carry out research projects testing how the drug might be used for mind-control purposes.’

“He never had to file serious reports to anybody,” Kinzer said. “I think the mentality must have been that this project is so important, it needs free reign. That mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.”

Nazi Experiments Supplied Foundation for MK-Ultra

MK-Ultra was in some ways a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps, O’Neill and Kinzer revealed to the House Oversight panel. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come to this country and explain their findings, so that U.S. officials could build on their research.

For the Agency’s top brass, the program held huge promise: the potential to yield the tools for victory in the Cold War by mastering the keys to manipulating a person’s memory, identity and loyalties. The overall goal was to succeed, with the combined use of drugs and hypnosis, in persuading a subject to switch allegiances and to act against his or her own will and inclinations.

It is now known, O’Neill said, that Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. “These countries were largely under American control in the period of the early ‘50s, and Gottlieb didn’t have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places.”

CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who were what they called “expendable.” They would imprison these people and use them to test all kinds of drug potions and techniques like electroshock, extremes of temperature, and sensory isolation. All while bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego.

“So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it,” Kinzer said. “And that made Gottlieb, although paradoxically in some ways a compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.”

‘Congress Was Fed Pure Fabrication’

Tom O’Neill, investigative journalist and author of ‘The CIA and The Secret History of the Sixties,” used his opening statement at the House Oversight hearing about the MK-Ultra program to underscore his belief that “Congress was never told the truth about what this program actually achieved.”

“I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MK-Ultra as a failure,” O’Neill continued. He explained the grounds for his conviction by filling in some little known history about Dr. Louis West, one of the most influential psychiatrists in America in Gottlieb’s day.

In 1977, West was one of seven academic researchers named in a front-page New York Times story alleging that the CIA had used American universities, hospitals, and prisons as secret laboratories for experiments involving LSD and other drugs on unwitting human subjects.

West vigorously denied the allegations. He acknowledged that the agency had approached him, but insisted he had refused because LSD was “too dangerous and unpredictable” to be used on humans. He added that he limited all of his research with LSD to animals.

West’s denials were believed. He was never investigated, and his name never came up at the congressional hearings held that year.

The truth would emerge only decades later, when O’Neill learned that UCLA had inherited West’s papers following his death in 1999. Combing through more than 200 boxes of papers, O’Neill found the evidence he was searching for: correspondence between West and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the mastermind of MK-Ultra.

According to O’Neill, the letters begin in 1953, just two months after CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized MK-Ultra. In his first letter to Gottlieb, West proposed conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and psychiatric patients at the base hospital.

“He then outlined the experiments themselves in six more pages that could have been written by Joseph Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death of Auschwitz,’” O’Neill said.

Using LSD in combination with hypnosis, West proposed inducing confusion, amnesia, and specific mental disorders in people who would remember nothing of their interaction with him afterward.

He discussed techniques he was developing to extract true information and implant false information and beliefs in unwilling subjects, thereby completely switching their allegiance from one group or leader to another.

“These experiments,” he wrote, “must eventually be put to the test in practical trials in the field.” In other words, we need to use human beings as guinea pigs.

Gottlieb’s response gushed with enthusiasm. “My good friend,” he wrote, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. You have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after.”

West replied that there was “no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”

Smoking Gun Evidence

After detailing this correspondence to the panel, O’Neill cited a 14-page report that West wrote in 1956, just three years after he began working with Gottlieb. This letter, 70 years later, has turned out to be a retroactive “smoking gun” exposing West’s brazen lies and the CIA’s cover-up.

In the report, West described administering LSD and other drugs in conjunction with hypnosis on unwitting human subjects, declaring that with these experiments, he had found the key to replacing true memories with false memories in people without their knowledge.

If West’s report was truthful, this was far from the “failure” the CIA described to Congress in 1977. Quite the opposite. It was, in fact, the core aim of the MK-Ultra operation—to seize control of a person’s perceptions, memories, and ultimately his behavior.

But this report was never seen by Congress.

According to O’Neill, who plumbed through the CIA’s MK-Ultra records which were released to Congress after the 1977 hearings, West’s 1956 14-page report had been replaced by a 4-page summary that appears to have been written by someone else.

This paper makes no mention of West’s claims regarding replacing memories by using LSD to “speed the induction of the hypnotic state and deepen the trance” in people, as he had detailed in the first report.

The revised version makes the sweeping statement that the effects of LSD and similar drugs on people had “never been studied.”

“The cover-up could not be more stark,” O’Neill told the congressmen.

“The 1977 congressional committee believed it had been given the truth about MK-Ultra. In place of the truth, it was fed pure fabrication.”

Mind-control Technology in our Own Day?

In the wake of last week’s hearing, lawmakers began calling for transparency, recognition and justice for victims of past experiments, alongside speculation about possible modern applications of mind-control technology in our own day.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna stated that the committee is actively pressing the intelligence community to declassify the remaining heavily redacted files and to determine whether additional hidden records about MK-Ultra still exist at the CIA.

The debate now hinges on whether public pressure and political will can uncover the full truth about both historical abuses committed by the agency and any current clandestine programs.

“In addition to searching for unknown documents, this Committee could do a tremendous service by simply asking for the end of redactions on the documents that we now have,” Dr. Stephen Kinzer pointed out to the panel.

“There are reams of documents about MK-Ultra that still have huge sections redacted from the 1970s. This was justified by the argument that it had been only 20 years since these terrible events, and that revealing details might affect national security. Now 70 years have passed. That argument can no longer be valid.”

“That being the case,” Kinzer said, “I would urge this committee to try to fill out all the blank spaces in the documents that we have, because we know that important information is there.”

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The Man Who Sold His Soul

Historians have tried to unravel the deeper motivations that drove Sidney Gottlieb in his grotesque mind-control experiments on unaware victims.

In his 2019 biography Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer wrote that Gottlieb suffered from two visible challenges from childhood through adulthood. One was a clubfoot; the other was his lifelong stuttering. By one account, his schoolmates “viciously harassed” him for his disabilities. During his high school years, he was virtually ostracized.

Psychologists have theorized that relentless bullying can foster suppressed rage and a desire to exact vengeance on the society that inflicted the wounds. In Gottlieb’s case, that impulse may have found its outlet in his bizarre quest to achieve mind control—the ultimate revenge.

He became obsessed with finding a way to bend human minds to his will—to erase a person’s identity, replace it with one he deemed politically desirable, and ultimately wield power over others.

By his own admission in 1977 hearings before Congress, Gottlieb had taken LSD, the mind-altering drug, hundreds of times himself. As his biographer Stephen Kinzer speculated, it is possible that its mind-expanding hallucinatory effects convinced him he was some kind of world savior.

Gottlieb’s saga carries another chilling message: it shows the profound depths of moral corruption to which a person can sink when he trades his spiritual foundations for the political ideology of the day.

According to biographical accounts, he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He abandoned his faith as an adult, choosing to experiment with various cults and religions, even running a leper colony in India for 18 months in a quest to find meaning in life.

Yet, as he advanced in his career as an expert in biological warfare, it became ever easier for him to rationalize evil as a necessary means to a supposedly noble end. For him, that end was securing American supremacy over the Soviet Union by whatever means necessary

To achieve it, he was willing to sacrifice not only the lives and sanity of countless unsuspecting victims but his own humanity.  Collaborating with Nazi and Japanese war criminals, conducting horrific human experiments, and trampling every moral boundary—none of it was too high a price to pay.

In surrendering his conscience to the political crusade of his age, he became the very kind of monster he believed he was fighting.