MKULTRA: documented, and worse than the myth

This one is documented. Not alleged, not reconstructed from testimony — there are congressional hearings, a presidential commission, and roughly twenty thousand pages of surviving records in the public domain.

It is also, on the evidence, worse than most popular accounts of it, and in a different way from the one people expect.

What it was

MKULTRA was authorised in April 1953 under CIA director Allen Dulles, and ran for about twenty years. Its stated purpose was research into behaviour modification and interrogation, prompted by a fear that Soviet and Chinese services had developed techniques the United States lacked.

It was not one experiment. It was an umbrella of some 150 subprojects, contracted out to universities, hospitals, prisons and private researchers, many of whom did not know who was funding them.

What was done

The best-known strand involved LSD, including administration to subjects who had not consented and in some cases did not know they had been dosed. Other work covered hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive treatment and various drugs.

Subjects included prisoners, psychiatric patients, and members of the public. In one line of work run through safe houses, unwitting members of the public were dosed and observed.

Frank Olson, an army scientist, was given LSD without his knowledge at a 1953 retreat and died days later in a fall from a hotel window in New York. The circumstances have been contested ever since; the dosing is not in dispute.

How it came out

Badly, and by accident. In 1973, with the Watergate investigations closing in, director Richard Helms ordered the MKULTRA files destroyed. Most were.

What survived did so because a set of records had been stored with financial paperwork in a separate location and was missed. They were located in 1977 after a records request, and they are the basis of almost everything known.

The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission had already examined the programme in 1975 on thinner material. The 1977 documents came afterwards and confirmed considerably more.

What it did not achieve

Anything. Twenty years of work produced no reliable interrogation technique, no method of behaviour control, and nothing operationally useful. The programme’s own assessments were largely negative.

That is worth stating, because the popular version imagines a hidden capability. The documented version is an intelligence service doing enormous harm to people over two decades and getting nothing for it.