brainwashing experiments

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The CIA's Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control

On April 10, 1953, Allen Dulles, the newly appointed director of the CIA , delivered a speech to a gathering of Princeton alumni. Though the event was mundane, global tensions were running high. The Korean War was coming to an end, and earlier that week, The New York Times had published a startling story asserting that American POWs returning from the country 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. Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all. As if that weren’t enough, the U.S. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran.

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Dulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees . “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”

Dulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective, but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values.

Fear of brainwashing and a new breed of “brain warfare” terrified and fascinated the American public throughout the 1950s , spurred both by the words of the CIA and the stories of “brainwashed” G.I.’s returning from China, Korea, and the Soviet Union. Newspaper headlines like “New Evils Seen in Brainwashing” and “Brainwashing vs. Western Psychiatry” offered sensational accounts of new mind-control techniques and technologies that no man could fully resist. The paranoia began to drift into American culture, with books like The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Lunch playing on themes of unhinged scientists and vast political conspiracies.

The idea of brainwashing also provided many Americans with a compelling, almost comforting, explanation for communism’s swift rise–that Soviets used the tools of brainwashing not just on enemy combatants, but on their own people. Why else would so many countries be embracing such an obviously backward ideology? American freedom of the mind versus Soviet “mind control” became a dividing line as stark as the Iron Curtain.

Three days after his speech decrying Soviet tactics, Dulles approved the beginning of MK-Ultra , a top-secret CIA program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials.” “American values” made for good rhetoric, but Dulles had far grander plans for the agency’s Cold War agenda.

MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school , to American soldiers , to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.

Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”

Bulger claimed he had been injected with LSD . Lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid, had become one of the CIA’s key interests for its “brain warfare” program, as the agency theorized it could be useful in interrogations. In the late 1940s, the CIA received reports that the Soviet Union had engaged in “intensive efforts to produce LSD,” and that the Soviets had attempted to purchase the world’s supply of the chemical. One CIA officer described the agency as “literally terrified” of the Soviets’ LSD program, largely because of the lack of knowledge about the drug in the United States. “[This] was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly,” the officer testified.

With the advent of MK-Ultra, the government’s interest in LSD shifted from a defensive to an offensive orientation. Agency officials noted that LSD could be potentially useful in “[gaining] control of bodies whether they were willing or not.” The CIA envisioned applications that ranged from removing people from Europe in the case of a Soviet attack to enabling assassinations of enemy leaders. On November 18, 1953, a group of ten scientists met at a cabin located deep in the forests of Maryland. After extended discussions, the participants agreed that to truly understand the value of the drug, “an unwitting experiment would be desirable.”

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The CIA remained keenly aware of how the public would react to any discovery of MK-Ultra; even if they believed these programs to be essential to national security, they must remain a tightly guarded secret. How would the CIA possibly explain dosing unassuming Americans with LSD? “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,” wrote the CIA’s Inspector General in 1957. “The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission.”

Operation Midnight Climax

The CIA’s initial experiments with LSD were fairly simple, if shockingly unethical. The agency generally dosed single targets, finding volunteers when they could, sometimes slipping the drug into the drinks of fellow CIA employees. Over time these LSD experiments grew increasingly elaborate. Perhaps the most notorious of these projects was Operation Midnight Climax.

In 1955, on 225 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, the CIA was devoting substantial attention to decorating a bedroom. George White oversaw the interior renovations. Not much of a decorator, White had a storied career in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. When the CIA moved into drug experiments, bringing White on board became a top priority.

White hung up pictures of French can-can dancers and flowers. He draped lush red bedroom curtains over the windows. He framed a series of Toulouse-Lautrec posters with black silk mats. For a middle-aged drug bureaucrat, each item evoked sex and glamour.

George White wasn’t building a normal bedroom, he was building a trap.

White then hired a Berkeley engineering student to install bugging equipment and a two-way mirror. White sat behind the mirror, martini in hand, and waited for the action to begin. Prostitutes would lure unsuspecting johns to the bedroom, where the men would be dosed with LSD and their actions observed by White from beyond the mirror. As payment for their services the sex workers receive small amounts of cash, as well as a guarantee from White that he’d intercede when the women inevitably had run-ins with law enforcement in the future.

Though the CIA piloted these safe houses as a stage for testing the effects of LSD, White’s interest shifted to another element of his observations: the sex. The San Francisco house became the center of what one writer called “the CIA carnal operations,” as officials began asking new questions about how to work with prostitutes, how they could be trained, and how they would handle state secrets. The agency also analyzed when in the course of a sexual encounter information could best be extracted from a source, eventually concluding that it was immediately after sex.

But perhaps unsurprisingly, much of White’s actions were driven by pure voyeurism: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White later said . “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"

The Demise of MK-Ultra

The CIA’s experiments with LSD persisted until 1963 before coming to a fairly anticlimactic end. In the spring of 1963, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff , learned about the project’s “surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects.” Though the MK-Ultra directors tried to convince the CIA’s independent audit board that the research should continue, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow new research ethics guidelines and bring all the programs on non-consenting volunteers to an end.

In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy oversaw congressional hearings investigating the effects of MK-Ultra. Congress brought in a roster of ex-CIA employees for questioning, interrogating them about who oversaw these programs, how participants were identified, and if any of these programs had been continued. The Hearings turned over a number of disturbing details, particularly about the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window several days after unwittingly consuming a drink spiked with LSD. Amid growing criminalization of drug users, and just a few years after President Nixon declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” the ironies of the U.S.’s troubling experimentation with drugs appeared in sharp relief.

But throughout the hearings, Congress kept hitting roadblocks: CIA staffers claimed they “couldn’t remember” details about many of the human experimentation projects, or even the number of people involved. The obvious next step would be to consult the records, but that presented a small problem: in 1973, amid mounting inquiries, the director of MK-Ultra told workers “it would be a good idea if [the MK-Ultra] files were destroyed.” Citing vague concerns about the privacy and “embarrassment” of participants, the men who crafted MK-Ultra effectively eradicated the paper record for one of the United States’ most obviously illegal undertakings. A program born in secrecy would hold onto many of its secrets forever.

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A brief, weird history of brainwashing

L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism—the race for mind control changed America forever.

• Annalee Newitz archive page

On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book Brain-Washing in Red China introduced a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated. 

But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, he was also an anticommunist activist who served as a propagandist for the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services—something that was considered normal and patriotic at the time. His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology.

When a senator asked about Hunter’s work for the OSS, the operative boasted that he was the first to “discover the technique of mind-attack” in mainland China, the first to use the word “brainwashing” in writing in any language, and “the first, except for the Chinese, to use the word in speech in any language.” 

None of this was true. Other operatives associated with the OSS had used the word in reports before Hunter published articles about it. More important, as the Chinese University of Hong Kong legal scholar Ryan Mitchell has pointed out , the Chinese word Hunter used at the hearing— xinao (洗脑), translated as “wash brain”—has a long history going back to scientifically minded Chinese philosophers of the late 19th century, who used it to mean something more akin to enlightenment. 

Yet Hunter’s sensational tales still became an important part of the disinformation and pseudoscience that fueled a “mind-control race” during the Cold War, much like the space race. Inspired by new studies on brain function, the US military and intelligence communities prepared themselves for a psychic war with the Soviet Union and China by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day.

Coercive persuasion and pseudoscience

Ironically, “brainwashing” was not a widely used term among communists in China. The word xinao , Mitchell told me in an email, is actually a play on an older word, xixin , or washing the heart, which alludes to a Confucian and Buddhist ideal of self-awareness. In the late 1800s, Chinese reformists such as Liang Qichao began using xinao —replacing the character for “heart” with “brain”—in part because they were trying to modernize Chinese philosophy. “They were eager to receive and internalize as much as they could of Western science in general, and discourse about the brain as the seat of consciousness was just one aspect of that set of imported ideas,” Mitchell said. 

For Liang and his circle, brainwashing wasn’t some kind of mind-wiping process. “It was a sort of notion of epistemic virtue,” Mitchell said, “or a personal duty to make oneself modern in order to behave properly in the modern world.”

Meanwhile, scientists outside China were investigating “brainwashing” in the sense we usually think of, with experiments into mind clearing and reprogramming. Some of the earliest research into the possibility began in the 1890s, when Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist who had famously conditioned dogs to drool at the sound of a bell, worked on government-funded projects to investigate how trauma could change animal behavior. He found that even the most well-conditioned dogs would forget their training after intensely stressful experiences such as nearly drowning, especially when those were combined with sleep deprivation and isolation. It seemed that Pavlov had hit upon a quick way to wipe animals’ memories. Scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain subsequently wondered whether it might work on humans. And once memories were wiped, they wondered, could something else be installed their place? 

During the 1949 show trial of the Hungarian anticommunist József Mindszenty, American officials worried that the Russians might have found the answer. A Catholic cardinal, Mindszenty had protested several government policies of the newly formed, Soviet-backed Hungarian People’s Republic. He was arrested and tortured, and he eventually made a series of outlandish confessions at trial: that he had conspired to steal the Hungarian crown jewels, start World War III, and make himself ruler of the world. In his book Dark Persuasion , Joel Dimsdale, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the US intelligence community saw these implausible claims as confirmation that the Soviets had made some kind of scientific breakthrough that allowed them to control the human mind through coercive persuasion.

This question became more urgent when, in 1953, a handful of American POWs in China and Korea switched sides, and a Marine named Frank Schwable was quoted on Chinese radio validating the communist claim that the US was testing germ warfare in Asia. By this time, Hunter had already published a book about brainwashing in China, so the Western public quickly gravitated toward his explanation that the prisoners had been brainwashed, just like Mindszenty. People were terrified, and this was a reassuring explanation for how nice American GIs could go Red. 

Over the following years, in the wake of the Korean War, “brainwashing” grew into a catchall explanation for any kind of radical or nonconformist behavior in the United States. Social scientists and politicians alike latched onto the idea. The Dutch psychologist Joost Meerloo warned that television was a brainwashing machine, for example, and the anticommunist educator J. Merrill Root claimed that high schools brainwashed kids into being weak-willed and vulnerable to communist influence. Meanwhile, popular movies like 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate , starring Frank Sinatra, offered thrilling tales of Chinese communists whose advanced psychological techniques turned unsuspecting American POWs into assassins. 

For the military and intelligence communities, mind control hovered between myth and science. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the peculiar case of an anonymously published 1955 pamphlet called Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics , which purported to be a translation of work by the Soviet secret-police chief Lavrentiy Beria. Full of wild claims about how the Soviets used psychology and drugs to control the masses, the pamphlet has a peculiar section devoted to the ways that Dianetics—a pseudoscience invented by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard—could prevent brainwashing. As a result, it is widely believed that Hubbard himself wrote the pamphlet as black propaganda, or propaganda that masquerades as something produced by a foreign adversary. 

Still, US officials apparently took it seriously. David Seed, a cultural studies scholar at the University of Liverpool, plumbed the National Security Council papers at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, where he discovered that the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board had analyzed the pamphlet as part of an investigation into enemy capabilities. A member of the board wrote that it might be “fake” but contained so much accurate information that it was clearly written by “experts.” When it came to brainwashing, government operatives made almost no distinction between black propaganda and so-called expertise.

This gobbledygook may also have struck the NSC investigator as legitimate because Hubbard borrowed lingo from the same sources as many scientists of the era. Hubbard chose the name Dianetics, for instance, specifically to evoke the computer scientist Norbert Wiener’s idea of cybernetics, an influential theory about information control systems that heavily informed both psychology and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Cybernetics suggested that the brain functioned like a machine, with inputs and outputs, feedback and control. And if machines could be optimized, then why not brains?

An excuse for government abuse 

The fantasy of brainwashing was always one of optimization. Military experts knew that adversaries could be broken with torture, but it took months and was often a violent, messy process. A fast, scientifically informed interrogation method would save time and could potentially be deployed on a mass scale. In 1953, that dream led the CIA to invest millions of dollars in MK-Ultra, a project that injected cash into university and research programs devoted to memory wiping, mind control, and “truth serum” drugs. Worried that their rivals in the Soviet Union and China were controlling people’s minds to spread communism throughout the world, the intelligence community was willing to try almost anything to fight back. No operation was too weird. 

One of MK-Ultra’s most notorious projects was “Operation Midnight Climax” in San Francisco, where sex workers lured random American men to a safe house and dosed them with LSD while CIA agents covertly observed their behavior. At McGill University in Montreal, the CIA funded the work of the psychologist Donald Cameron, who used a combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy on patients with mental illness, attempting to erase and “repattern” their minds. Though many of his victims did wind up suffering from amnesia for years , Cameron never successfully injected new thoughts or memories. Marcia Holmes, a science historian who researched brainwashing for the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, told me that the CIA used Cameron’s data to develop new kinds of torture, which the US adopted as  “enhanced interrogation” techniques in the wake of 9/11. “You could put a scientific spin on it and claim that’s why it worked,” she said. “But it always boiled down to medieval tactics that people knew from experience worked.”

MK-Ultra remained secret until the mid-1970s, when the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee after its chair, Senator Frank Church, opened hearings into the long-­running project. The shocking revelations that the CIA was drugging American citizens and paying for the torment of vulnerable Canadians changed the public’s understanding of mind control. “Brainwashing” came to seem less like a legitimate threat from overseas enemies and more like a ruse or excuse for almost any kind of bad behavior. When Patty Hearst, granddaughter of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was put on trial in 1976 for robbing a bank after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American militant organization, the judge refused to believe experts who testified that she had been tortured and brainwashed by her captors. She was convicted and spent 22 months in jail. This marked the end of the nation’s infatuation with brainwashing, and experts began to debunk the idea that there was a scientific basis for mind control.

Still, the revelations about MK-Ultra led to new cultural myths. Communists were no longer the baddies—instead, people feared that the US government was trying to experiment on its citizens. Soon after the Church Committee hearings were over, the media was gripped by a crime story of epic proportions: nearly two dozen Black children had been murdered in Atlanta, and the police had no leads other than a vague idea that maybe it could be a serial killer. Wayne Williams, a Black man who was eventually convicted of two of the murders, claimed at various points that he had been trained by the CIA. This led to popular conspiracy theories that MK-Ultra had been experimenting on Black people in Atlanta.

Colin Dickey, author of Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy , told me these conspiracy theories became “a way of making sense of an otherwise mystifying and terrifying reality, [which is that America is] a country where Black people are so disenfranchised that their murders aren’t noticed.” Dickey added that this MK-Ultra conspiracy theory “gave a shape to systemic racism,” placing blame for the Atlanta child murders on the US government. In the process, it also suggested that Black people had been brainwashed to kill each other. 

No evidence ever surfaced that MK-Ultra was behind the children’s deaths, but the idea of brainwashing continues to be a powerful metaphor for the effects of systemic racism. It haunts contemporary Black horror films like Get Out , where white people take over Black people’s bodies through a fantastical version of hypnosis. And it provides the analytical substrate for the scathing indictment of racist marketing in the book Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority , by the Black advertising executive Tom Burrell. He argues that advertising has systematically pushed stereotypes of Black people as second-class citizens, instilling a “slave mindset” in Black audiences.

A social and political phenomenon

Today, even as the idea of brainwashing is often dismissed as pseudoscience, Americans are still spellbound by the idea that people we disagree with have been psychologically captured by our enemies. Right-wing pundits and politicians often attribute discussions of racism to infections by a “woke mind virus”—an idea that is a direct descendant of Cold War panics over communist brainwashing. Meanwhile, contemporary psychology researchers like UCSD’s Dimsdale fear that social media is now a vector for coercive persuasion, just as Meerloo worried about television’s mind-control powers in the 1950s. 

Cutting-edge technology is also altering how we think about mind control. In a 2017 open letter published in Nature , an international group of researchers and ethicists warned that neurotechnologies like brain-computer interfaces “mean that we are on a path to a world in which it will be possible to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions.” It sounds like MK-Ultra’s wish list. Hoping to head off a neuro-dystopia, the group outlined several key ways that companies and universities could guard against coercive uses of this technology in the future. They suggested that we need laws to prevent companies from spying on people’s private thoughts, for example, as well as regulations that bar anyone from using brain implants to change people’s personalities or make them more neurotypical. 

Many neuroscientists feel that these concerns are overblown; one of them, the University of Maryland cognitive scientist R. Douglas Fields, summed up the naysayers’ position with a column in Quanta magazine arguing that the brain is more plastic than we realize, and that neurotech mind control will never be as simple as throwing a switch. Kathleen Taylor, another neuroscientist who studies brainwashing, takes a more measured view; in her book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control , she acknowledges that neurotech and drugs could change people’s thought processes but ultimately concludes that “brainwashing is above all a social and political phenomenon.” 

Perhaps that means the anonymous National Security Council examiner was right to call Hubbard’s black propaganda the work of an “expert.” If brainwashing is politics, then disinformation might be as effective (or ineffective) as a brain implant in changing someone’s mind. Still, scholars have learned that political efforts at mind control do not have predictable results. Online disinformation leads to what Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, identifies as stochastic terrorism , or acts of violence that cannot be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. She writes that stochastic terrorism is inspired by online rhetoric that demonizes groups of people, but it’s hard to know which people consuming that rhetoric will actually become terrorists, and which of them will just rage at their computer screens—the result of coercive persuasion that works on some targets and misses others. 

American operatives may never have found the perfect system for brainwashing foreign adversaries or unsuspecting citizens, but the US managed to win the mind-control wars in one small way. Mitchell, the legal scholar at Hong Kong University, told me that the American definition of brainwashing, or xinao , is now the dominant way the word is used in modern Chinese speech. “People refer to aggressive advertising campaigns or earworm pop songs as having a xinao effect,” he said. The Chinese government, Mitchell added, uses the term exactly the way the US military did back in the 1950s. State media, for example, “described many Hong Kong protesters in 2019 as having undergone xinao by the West.”

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U.S. Government Mind Control Experiments

Hypnosis, lsd, and the unabomber..

Posted April 26, 2020 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• What Is Hypnosis?
• Find a hypnotherapist near me

Project MKULTRA was the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) mind control program that used LSD and hypnosis techniques to brainwash individuals. Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a participant in one of Henry Murray’s experiments at Harvard where Murray’s team bullied, harassed, and psychologically broke down participants. Henry Murray had previously worked for the CIA’s predecessor and may have been funded by the clandestine MKULTRA program.

A History of Ethic Breeches

Science has had its share of ethical breaches, often with populations that are vulnerable to exploitation (Davis, 2006). From 1932-1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis study recruited black men for syphilis studies (Amdur, 2011). Children in mental hospitals have been infected with hepatitis (Willowbrook Hepatitis studies of the 1950s), exposed to radioactive materials (Davis, 2006), and patients with compromised immune systems have been injected with live cancer cells (Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Studies of the 1960s, Amdur, 2011). Reaction to incidents of this type led to the modern Institutional Review Board System, based on the principles of the 1974 Belmont Report (Amdur & Bankert, 2011; Bankert & Amdur, 2006).

The U.S. Government’s Secret Behavioral Research

The CIA reacted to reports of chemicals used for interrogations and brainwashing in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in the 1940s and 1950s. In response to this national security threat, they developed a series of programs including MKULTRA (Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources, 1977). From 1953-1964, the U.S. government conducted behavioral modification research on people in which they tested, among other things, the utility of hypnosis and LSD for clandestine purposes. (CBS Network, 1984; CIA, 1977; Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources, 1977).

Hypnosis is an attention -focusing, consciousness-related procedure that consists of an induction stage and a suggestion stage (Kassin, 2004). In the induction stage, a person’s attention becomes hyperfocused. In the suggestion stage, a person is open to suggestions made by the hypnotist . Hypnosis is sometimes used to treat phobias, stress , and pain (Zimbardo, Johnson, & Weber, 2006). Evidence shows that those who are hypnotized will not comply with suggestions against their will (Wade & Tavris, 2000).

Individuals differ in their susceptibility to hypnosis (Kirsch & Braffman, 2001). Solomon Asch captured a historical context of hypnosis with a discussion of how interest in hypnosis had been the catalyst for social psychology’s empirical research on more general suggestibility (Asch, 1952). The CIA’s PROJECT ARTICHOKE used sodium pentothal and hypnosis on participants in search of more effective interrogation techniques (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, 1976).

The CIA’s MKULTRA program consisted of 162 secret CIA-backed projects at 80 institutions with 185 researchers (Eschner, 2017). Most of the records of the program were destroyed on the orders of CIA Director Richard Helms in 1973, but some that were missed in the destruction were found in 1977 (Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources, 1977). CIA Chemist Sidney Gottleib ran the MKULTRA program (Gross, 2019). The program was conducted specifically to have a structured way to finance the behavioral research related to brainwashing without drawing negative public attention or ethical questions from the mainstream scientific community. The studies examined brainwashing and interrogations and included field applications after laboratory studies.

What were some of these studies like? One theme is that many were devoid of informed consent and appropriate ethical oversight. Ewen Cameron attempted to erase memories by repeated electro-shock treatments, forcing months of drug-induced sleep, and repeatedly administering LSD to his patients in Montreal (Kassam, 2018). The drug commonly known as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) , is a serotonin agonist that creates distorted visual perceptions (Carlson, 2010). Many of these patients came to the clinic to be treated for moderate depression and instead were subjected to months of horrific exploitation.

As part of the MKULTRA program, a CIA Agent hired prostitutes to slip LSD into people’s drinks and noted what happened through a two-way mirror (Zetter, 2010). In 1953, Dr. Frank Olson was given LSD by CIA agents without his knowledge and died as a result (Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources, 1977). CIA Agents administered LSD to other citizens they met at bars and elsewhere. The agents invited the citizens to “safehouses” in San Francisco and New York City where they were administered the drugs without consent.

Prisoners, terminally ill cancer patients, and American soldiers were also used for some of the studies, and some proposed studies sought to produce brain concussions with sound waves. Much of the research targeted the development of a “truth serum” that would facilitate compliance in an interrogation (Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources, 1977).

The National Institute of Mental Health funded some of the studies conducted on drug-addicted prisoners. LSD was administered to over 1,100 soldiers in the U.S. Army. (Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources, 1977.) According to the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976), “These experimental programs originally included testing of drugs involving witting human subjects, and culminated in tests using unwitting, non-volunteer human subjects. These tests were designed to determine the potential effects of chemical or biological agents when used operationally against individuals unaware that they had received a drug” (p. 385).

Harvard’s Unabomber

Another ethically problematic study was conducted by Henry A. Murray. Murray was a professor at Harvard University and had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA) during World War II. He wrote “Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler,” which was the psychological analysis of Hitler that was used by the military. During this time, he also helped develop tests to screen soldiers, conducted tests on brainwashing, and determined how well soldiers could withstand interrogations. The interrogation studies included intense mock interrogations on soldiers as part of assessing the limits of their psychological breaking points (Chase, 2000). From 1959-1962, Murray conducted such interrogation studies on Harvard undergraduates (Chase, 2000). Theodore Kaczynski, who later became known as The Unabomber, was one of the 22 participants in Murray’s study, subjected to several years of interrogations designed to psychologically break the young man.

It is no wonder that Richard Condon’s 1959 book, The Manchurian Candidate, captured so much attention during the tail end of the MKULTRA program. A stream of other movies shortly after the 1977 Senate hearings touched on many citizen’s fears of government psychological abuse (e.g., The Secret of NIMH in 1982 and Project X in 1987). Lingering fears of hypnotic exploitation are found in characters like the Screenslaver in Incredibles 2 from 2018. An unethical study’s negative impact on the public perception of science is enduring.

Amdur, R. (2011). A brief history of the IRB system. In R. Amdur & E. A. Bankert (Eds.) Institutional Review Board: Member handbook (3rd ed.) (pp. 7-18). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Amdur, R., & Bankert, E. A. (2011). Institutional Review Board member handbook (3rd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Asch, S. E. (1952). Social psychology . New York: Prentice Hall.

Bankert, E. A., & Amdur, R. J. (2006). Institutional Review Board: Management and function (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Carlson, N. R. (2010). Physiology of behavior (10th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

CBS Network. (1984, December 23). 60 Minutes: MK-Ultra/mind control experiments. Radio TV Reports . CIA.gov (online).

Central Intelligence Agency (1977, September 21). Statement of Director of Central Intelligence before Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, Senate Committee on Human Resources. CIA.gov (online).

Chase, A. (2000, June). Harvard and the making of the Unabomber. The Atlantic (online).

Condon, R. (1959). The Manchurian candidate . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Davis, A. L. (2006). The study population: Women, minorities, and children. In E. A. Bankert & R. J. Amdur (Eds.) Institutional Review Board: Management and function (2nd ed.) (pp. 129—133). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Eschner, K. (2017, April 13). What we know about the CIA’s midcentury mind-control project. Smithsonian Magazine (online).

Gross, T. (2019, September 9). The CIA’s secret quest for mind control: Torture, LSD, and a ‘Poisoner in Chief’. National Public Radio (online).

Kassam, A. (2018, May 3). The toxic legacy of Canada’s CIA brainwashing experiments: ‘They strip you of your soul’. The Guardian (online).

Kassin, S (2004). Psychology (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Kirsch, I., & Braffman, W. (2001). Imaginative suggestibility and hypnotizability. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10 , 57-61.

Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources. (1977, August 3). Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate. New York Times (online).

Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (1976, April 24). Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Wade, C., & Tavris, C. (2000). Psychology (6th ed.). Upper Sadde River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Zimbardo, P. G., Johnson, R. L., & Weber, A. L. (2006). Psychology: Core concepts (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Robert D. Mather, Ph.D. , is an experimental social psychology researcher and management consultant.

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What We Know About the CIA’s Midcentury Mind-Control Project

Project MKUltra began on this day in 1953 and continued for years

Kat Eschner

On this day in 1953, the then-Director of Central Intelligence officially approved project MKUltra.

The project, which continued for more than a decade, was originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology. It ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.  It wasn’t the first time that the American government “without permission or notice, secretly gathered information on its people,” writes Melissa Blevins for Today I Found Out . But MKUltra has gone down in history as a significant example of government abuse of human rights, and for good reason.

The intent of the project was to study “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,” according to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977. The project was conducted in extreme secrecy, Turner said, because of ethical and legal questions surrounding the program and the negative public response that the CIA anticipated if MKUltra should become public.

Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could: “promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;” “render the induction of hypnosis easier;” “enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;” produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients–"people who could not fight back,” in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.

“The research and development program, and particularly the covert testing programs, resulted in massive abridgements of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences,” concluded a Senate hearing in 1975-76. “The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects.” While controlled testing of substances like LSD “might be defended,” the committee went on, “the nature of the tests, their scale and the fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the value of human life.”

MKUltra wasn’t one project, as the US Supreme Court wrote in a 1985 decision on a related case. It was 162 different secret projects that were indirectly financed by the CIA, but were “contracted out to various universities, research foundations and similar institutions.” In all, at least 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, but many didn’t know they were dealing with the CIA.

Many of MKUltra’s records were destroyed in a 1973 purge, and many had been destroyed throughout the program as a matter of course. But 8,000 pages of records–mostly financial documents that were mistakenly not destroyed in 1973–were found in 1977, launching a second round of inquiries into MKUltra.

Although the renewed inquiry resulted in public interest and even two lawsuits, Blevin writes, the 1977 documents “still leave an incomplete record of the program,” and nobody ever answered for MKUltra. Two lawsuits related to the program reached the Supreme Court in the 1980s, she writes, “but both protected the government over citizen’s rights.”

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Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto.

What Was MK-Ultra, The CIA’s Top-Secret Cold War Research Program?

During the 1950s and '60s, the cia used brainwashing, hypnosis, and torture on thousands of subjects brutalized by the infamous project mk-ultra experiments..

Though they may sound like science fiction and though the CIA tried to deny them for years, the mind-control experiments of project MK-Ultra were all too real. For more than a decade at the height of the Cold War, CIA researchers abused helpless subjects in some of the most disturbing experiments in history.

Convinced that the Soviet Union had developed mind-control capabilities, the CIA tried to do the same with MK-Ultra starting in 1953. What followed was an expansive program undertaken across 80 institutions, universities, and hospitals. Each one carried out torturous experiments, including electrocution, verbal and sexual abuse, and dosing subjects with massive quantities of LSD.

Getty Images A doctor squirts LSD into the mouth of another doctor as part of project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments.

What’s more, these experiments often used unwitting subjects who were left with permanent psychological damage.

Unsurprisingly, the CIA conducted the project with the utmost secrecy, even giving it multiple code names. And when it finally ended in the 1970s, most of the records pertaining to it were destroyed on the orders of the director of the CIA himself — that is, all but a small misfiled cache accidentally left intact.

Eventually, those documents and several government investigations helped bring the project to light. Today, the public even has access to some 20,000 documents concerning project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments.

But even this provides only a small window into what is perhaps one of the largest and most heinous government programs and cover-ups in American history.

The Birth Of Project MK-Ultra At The Height Of The Cold War

Wikimedia Commons The MK-Ultra program also operated under the cryptonyms MKNAOMI and MKDELTA. The “MK” indicated that the project was sponsored by the Technical Services Staff of the CIA and “Ultra” was a nod to the codename that had been used for classified documents during World War II.

As the Cold War moved into its peak era in the early 1950s, the American intelligence community grew increasingly obsessed with the growing technological advancements of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government feared, in particular, that it was already falling behind the Soviet Union in regard to novel interrogation techniques. Reports during the Korean War (which later proved erroneous) suggested that North Korean and Soviet forces had developed mind-control capabilities and the U.S. couldn’t let them have that advantage.

Thus, on April 13, 1953, then-director of the nascent CIA Allen Welsh Dulles sanctioned project MK-Ultra. The program was quickly headed by chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb, who was known in covert circles as the “Black Sorcerer.”

One of Gottlieb’s original goals was to create a truth serum that could be used against Soviet spies and prisoners of war in order to gain intelligence.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, generating a truth serum proved difficult. Instead, researchers believed that a kind of mind control could be achieved by placing the subject in a heavily altered mental state — typically with the help of wildly experimental drugs.

According to journalist Stephen Kinzer , Gottlieb realized that in order to control the mind, he’d have to wipe it first. “Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void,” Kinzer explained. “We didn’t get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one.”

In Gottlieb’s own words, project MK-Ultra’s mind experiments extensively researched extensively how drugs could “enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion,” as well as “produce amnesia, shock and confusion.”

A declassified document from 1955 added that MK-Ultra sought to observe “materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity” and “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.”

With these goals in mind, project MK-Ultra scientists began devising mind-altering experiments with insidious goals — and disastrous results.

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How Did MK-Ultra’s Mind-Control Experiments Work?

CIA Sidney Gottlieb, the man who oversaw all of the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments.

From the beginning, MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments were conducted with great secrecy in part because the CIA was well aware of the dubious ethics involved. For secrecy’s sake, the program’s 162 experiments were spread out across multiple cities, college campuses, prisons, and hospitals. In total, 185 researchers were involved — and many of them didn’t even know that their work was meant for the CIA.

In all of these dozens of settings, the primary experimental method often involved administering large quantities of various mind-altering substances in hopes of wiping the human mind in the way Gottlieb wanted to.

Subjects were dosed with LSD, opioids, THC, and the synthetic government-created super hallucinogen BZ, as well as widely available substances such as alcohol. Researchers would also sometimes administer two drugs with opposite effects (such as a barbiturate and an amphetamine) simultaneously and observe their subjects’ reactions, or give subjects already under the influence of alcohol a dose of another drug like LSD.

Aside from drugs, researchers also used hypnosis, often in an effort to create fear in subjects that could then be exploited to gain information. Researchers went on to investigate the effects of hypnosis on the results of polygraph tests and its implications for memory loss.

Wikimedia Commons Donald E. Cameron, who had been present at the Nuremberg Trials as a psychiatric evaluator for leading Nazi Rudolf Hess, was one of the lead researchers in MK-Ultra’s mind experiments.

MK-Ultra participants were also subjected to experimentation involving electroconvulsive therapy, aural stimulation, and paralytic drugs.

Meanwhile, experimenter Donald Cameron (the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association and the president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations) drugged patients and repeatedly played tapes of noises or suggestions while they were comatose for long periods of time, hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing memories in order to reprogram subjects’ minds.

In reality, these tests left his subjects comatose for months at a time and permanently suffering from incontinence and amnesia.

John C. Lilly, a noted animal behaviorist, was also involved in the experiments. For his research in human communication with dolphins, he created the first sensory deprivation flotation tank. MK-Ultra scientists commissioned the tank to create a sensory-free environment for their subjects to experience their acid trips without the stimuli of the outside world.

With such an arsenal of tools at their disposal, the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments succeeded in severely disrupting the human mind, but at great cost to its unwitting subjects.

Who Were The Subjects Of These Ghastly Experiments?

Wikimedia Commons An electroconvulsive machine used during the experiments.

Due to the classified nature of the program, many of the test subjects were unaware of their involvement and Gottlieb admitted that his team targeted “people who could not fight back.” These included drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers, and both mental and terminal cancer patients.

Some of the subjects of MK-Ultra were volunteers or paid students. Others were addicts who were bribed with the promise of more drugs if they participated.

Though many of MK-Ultra’s records were destroyed, there are a few notable documented subjects, including: Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ; Robert Hunter, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead; and James “Whitey” Bulger , a notorious Boston mob boss.

Some participants were voluntarily vocal about their involvement. Kesey, for example, was an early volunteer and joined the project while he was a student at Stanford University to be observed while taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs.

Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images Ken Kesey’s experience with MK-Ultra in part inspired the writing of his seminal work, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

His experience was, according to him, a positive one and he went on to publicly promote the drug. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was also, in part, inspired by his experiences.

Unlike Kesey, however, some participants did not have such positive experiences.

The Horrors Experienced By The Participants

Untold numbers of MK-ULtra subjects were subjected to chilling abuses in the name of science. In one experiment, an unwitting mental patient in Kentucky was given a dose of LSD every day for 174 consecutive days. Elsewhere, Whitey Bulger reported that he would be dosed with LSD, monitored by a physician, and repeatedly asked leading questions like: “Would you ever kill anyone?” He later suggested that his murderous career as a crime lord was partially brought on by his participation in MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments.

Internet Archive Alleged MK-Ultra subject Ted Kaczynski in prison, 1999.

Unabomber Ted Kaczynski may also have been involved as a subject in the MK-Ultra mind experiments conducted at Harvard in the early 1960s.

Another undocumented but suspected participant was the infamous Charles Manson , convicted of ordering a string of brutal Los Angeles murders that shocked the nation in 1969.

According to author Tom O’Neill in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties , Manson not only had people in his circle later connected to the CIA, but the way in which he ran his cult, by doping his followers with a constant flow of LSD, was oddly similar to the kinds of experiments carried out by MK-Ultra.

Wikimedia Commons Charles Manson’s 1968 mugshot.

The unsuspecting subjects of MK-Ultra weren’t all civilians, though; some of them were CIA operatives themselves. Gottlieb claimed that he wanted to study the effects of LSD in “normal” settings — and so he began to administer LSD to CIA officials without warning.

The experiments continued for over a decade even after an Army scientist, Dr. Frank Olson, began to suffer from drug-induced depression and jumped out a 13th-story window right at the project’s outset in 1953.

For those who survived, the fallout of the experiments included things like depression, anterograde and retrograde amnesia, paralysis, withdrawal, confusion, disorientation, pain, insomnia, and schizophrenic-like mental states as a result of the experiments. Long-term effects like these largely went untreated and unreported to authorities.

How MK-Ultra’s Mind-Control Experiments Finally Came To Light

Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images CIA Director Richard Helms.

In early 1973, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra files destroyed. He feared that all government agencies would be investigated and he would not risk a breach of information on such a controversial topic. But in 1975, President Gerald R. Ford commissioned an investigation into CIA activities, hoping to eradicate conspiracies within the organization. Two committees spawned from the investigation: the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress and the Rockefeller Commission.

The overall investigation revealed that Helms had destroyed most of the evidence regarding MK-Ultra, but that same year, a collection of 8,000 documents were discovered in a financial records building and later released under a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977.

When the remaining documents were made available to the public, the Senate launched a collection of hearings on the ethics of the project later that year. Survivors soon filed lawsuits against the CIA and the federal government regarding informed consent laws. In 1992, 77 form MK-Ultra participants were awarded a settlement, though many more were denied any retribution because of how difficult it was for them to prove definitively that these secret experiments caused their mental anguish.

In 2018, the families of a group of ex-patients filed a class-action lawsuit against the provincial and federal governments of Canada for the experiments Dr. Cameron ran on their loved ones in the 1960s.

Since the documents were revealed, countless shows and movies have been inspired by project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments, most notably The Men Who Stare at Goats , the Jason Bourne series, and Stranger Things .

The government does not deny that the MK-Ultra experiments took place — but most of what transpired remains a mystery. It has admitted that the experiments took place across 80 institutions and often on unwitting subjects. But most of the discussion surrounding the experiments today comes from conspiracy theorists. The CIA is adamant that the experiments ceased in 1963 and that all related experiments were abandoned. Due to the destruction of records, the secrecy surrounding the project, and its various, ever-changing code names, conspiracy theorists aren’t so sure.

Some of them even believe that the experiments are still taking place today. There is, of course, no way to be sure.

After learning about project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments, read up on the CIA’s remote viewing experiments . Then, learn about other terrifying science experiments throughout history.

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The CIA's Secret Mind Control Experiments

Stephen Kinzer's book, 'Poisoner in Chief,' exposes how CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies of the U.S. government. Gottlieb believed the key to mind control was LSD, and is credited with bringing the drug to the U.S. He also experimented on unwitting people in prisons and detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. (Originally broadcast Sept. 2019) Also, Justin Chang reviews, 'Small Axe,' Steve McQueen's new collection of five films set in London's West Indian community.

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• Copy story information for sharing Brainwashed: The echoes of MK-ULTRA: During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded mind control experiments on unwitting Canadians in a program codenamed MK Ultra. The experiments laid the groundwork for modern day torture techniques. And victims and their families are still seeking recognition and justice.

Brainwashed: The echoes of MK-ULTRA

During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded mind-control experiments on unwitting Canadians in a program codenamed MK-ULTRA. The experiments laid the groundwork for modern-day torture techniques. And victims and their families are still seeking recognition and justice.

By Michelle Shephard, Lisa Ellenwood and Chris Oke

October 21, 2020

The following story is based on material from the CBC podcast Brainwashed , a six-part series co-produced with The Fifth Estate that investigates the CIA's covert mind-control experiments — from the Cold War and MK-ULTRA to the so-called U.S. war on terror . The series is available on CBC Listen , Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts .

When Lloyd Schrier tells his story, it sounds more like a conspiracy than his family's tragic past.

But many of the details are laid out in a thick file of documents, correspondences and reports. He has news articles and pictures spanning decades, all describing what his family went through. And he has his mother's heartwrenching medical report that is still hard for him to comprehend.

"She had her 30th and last day of sleep on March 24th," Schrier said as he read from the 1960 hospital record.

"They gave her all the drugs … about four or five barbiturates and amphetamines at a time."

Esther Schrier received electroshock therapy, massive amounts of drugs and so-called psychiatric treatments that sound as if they were lifted from the pages of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

She was a patient at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute in the 1960s. She had gone to "the Allan," as the hospital is known, to seek treatment for what today would be considered anxiety or postpartum depression.

But once she walked through those hospital doors and into the care of a psychiatrist named Dr. Ewen Cameron, she became an unwitting experiment subject for a massive CIA brainwashing operation codenamed MK-ULTRA.

And Schrier was part of this clandestine program, too, because his mother was pregnant with him at the time.

"It's crazy," said Schrier. "I don't think it was fair to do that to a developing fetus."

Schrier is now 60 years old, semi-retired, living in Toronto and still fighting to be recognized as an experiment victim.

Hundreds of relatives whose loved ones were experimented upon by Cameron are now demanding compensation for family members and an apology from the Canadian government.

Canada has never provided a list of the victims of the experiments that took place during Cameron's tenure from 1943 to 1964. In the decades since, no government has ever admitted liability, let alone apologized — despite the fact that part of the experiments in Montreal were funded not only by the CIA, but also by the Canadian government.

"I think eventually they should come out with the truth. I think after all this time I don't know what they're trying to prove, who they're trying to protect. I don't think it's right," said Schrier. "I think they should come out and just, you know, deal with it."

To "deal with it" means acknowledging the legacy of a dark period that still reverberates today.

The idea of mind control has been constantly revisited by governments in periods of fear and uncertainty.

For Schrier and other relatives who have launched two separate lawsuits against the Canadian government and others, their mission is personal. They say their lives were irrevocably damaged by what happened. Families split up. Children were placed in foster homes. The trauma has been generational.

But the story of MK-ULTRA isn't just relegated to Cold War history.

The idea of mind control — the theory that breaking a person down will make them do something against their will — has been constantly revisited by governments during other periods of fear and uncertainty, when the military and medicine collide.

What happened at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute laid the groundwork for torture spanning decades to follow.

• Listen to Episode 1 | Psychiatric patients treated as human guinea pigs:

Lloyd Schrier's mother, Esther, had a difficult childhood, losing both her parents at an early age. In 1936, when she was four years old, her father died. Slightly more than a year later, her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a lobotomy. Unable to look after her children, she was committed to a psychiatric institution.

Esther and her older brother were moved around from the care of relatives and to foster homes, and suffered wherever they went.

But she was resilient and smart. In her late teens, she trained as a nurse and got a job at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. She met her future husband, Haskell Schrier, on a blind date. After they married in 1955, the couple became a fixture in Montreal's Jewish social scene.

Three years later, after an uneventful pregnancy, she gave birth to their first child, a baby girl they named Lynn Carole. But the baby died of a staph infection when she was just three weeks old, and Esther struggled with her grief. Medical records show she felt she was responsible for her daughter's death.

When she was pregnant again, two years later, she was still struggling with this guilt. Part of her "condition" identified in her medical records when she was admitted to the Allan was her anxiety over possibly losing another baby.

Haskell Schrier had read an article about Cameron and was impressed by the Allan's reputation for offering cutting edge psychiatric care.

"Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say," said Lloyd Schrier. "I think he was head of the Canadian and the American psychiatric associations. And even the World Psychiatric Association."

Cameron, a Scottish-born American psychiatrist, did hold all those titles at various points in his career, and he was the first director of the Allan.

What wasn't known, until many years later, was that Cameron's reputation also came to the attention of the CIA. They were interested in his psychiatric research that involved extreme sensory deprivation, drugs, and an intense repetition of recorded messages.

Three years after the CIA launched MK-ULTRA, they approached Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation and one of their front organizations through which they funnelled money. They encouraged him to apply for a grant, which he did, and quickly received. From January 1957 to September 1960, the CIA gave Cameron $60,000 US, equivalent to slightly more than $500,000 today.

Esther Schrier entered the hospital in February 1960 to receive what her family thought was the best care money could buy.

But her medical notes show disregard for her well-being and that of her unborn child right from the start.

She spent 30 days in what was called the "sleep room," a place where patients were put in a drug-induced coma and roused only for three feedings and bathroom breaks per day. She lost 13 pounds that month. Her records show she couldn't stand up because she was too weak.

She also underwent a treatment called "depatterning."

Cameron believed that breaking down a patient's minds to a childlike state — through drugs and electroshock therapy — would allow him to work from a clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed "psychic driving," which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up to 20 hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake.

These voices were played through headphones, helmets or speakers, sometimes installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show some patients would hear these messages up to half a million times.

By March 12, 1960, Esther Schrier's medical records state that she was "considered completely depatterned." She was incontinent, mute and had trouble swallowing.

"That's crazy, to do that to a pregnant woman," said her son. "When she woke from the sleep room, she didn't know who my father was. She didn't know it was her husband. I guess she didn't know anything. You know, she used to tell me she had to relearn everything."

Lloyd Schrier remembers his mother telling him that among the many things she forgot was how to boil water.

Several times during her treatments, she developed gynecological symptoms. Her records indicate she started to bleed and they brought in an obstetrician to treat her.

They would let her rest for four or five days and then resume treatments. Cameron's notes say that on Aug. 17, 1960, six months after she entered the Allan, she had 29 electroshock treatments, with most of them of the extreme variety he was using. But because she was "now in her eighth month of pregnancy," the treatments stopped.

On Sept. 27, 1960, Lloyd was born, and Esther Schrier said she felt helpless. She couldn't remember basic life functions, let alone how to take care of a newborn.

Years later, in a 2004 BBC Scotland interview, Esther Schrier recalled how lost she had been.

"I had a new baby, and I didn't know what to do with the baby. I had help, a baby nurse, but she had to have a day off and she left me a book, and I'll just give you a little example [from the book]: 'When you hear the baby cry, go to the room. Pick up baby and step by step how to feed the baby,' and that was very frightening."

Esther and Haskell Schrier are now deceased. She died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 84 and despite all she went through and what she lost, her son said she managed to live a full life and they remained close.

And he feels he was fortunate despite having lived under the dark shadow of what happened to his mother and uncertainty of how it impacted his health.

Many patients of Cameron emerged from the Allan completely broken, unable to find their way back to the lives they once lived. Relatives from across Canada have reached out to the CBC, describing the ongoing trauma the experiments have caused. Families were ripped apart by divorce or children were taken to foster homes. The grief rippled outward and spanned generations.

"I think I was lucky. I think the only side-effects that I know of, I guess in school, I was a bit slow in the beginning," said Lloyd Schrier.

"But I ended up going through high school, and I went, we have in Montreal CEGEP, I did the two years, and then I went on to McGill, and I did a bachelor of commerce. So … I was able to get my degrees and everything." But, he said, "I will never know what I could have been."

• Listen to Episode 2 | Dr. Ewen Cameron's experiments.

While MK-ULTRA officially ended in 1963, the mind-control experiments continued to echo into the early years of the 21s century, reaching from one amorphously named war to another: the Cold War to the U.S. war on terror.

Hundreds of captives who were rounded up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ended up the U.S. offshore prison on the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But the CIA was also holding those they considered "high-value detainees" in a network of secret prisons around the world that were collectively known as black sites.

These men were considered prized captives and their interrogators believed they might have information about impending attacks. They wanted answers, and they wanted them fast.

In 2002, in a secret CIA prison in Thailand, the FBI interrogated a prisoner named Abu Zubaydah. He had been shot and captured during a raid in Pakistan. The FBI had used traditional interrogation techniques, including what they termed "rapport-building," to try to earn his trust.

But the CIA didn’t think they were getting the answers they needed from him, so the agency turned to two psychologist contractors they had paid more than $80 million US to develop a new interrogation regime. It had been euphemistically named "enhanced interrogation techniques" and Abu Zubaydah was the first test case.

• Listen to Episode 3| The shocking truth behind MK-ULTRA.

The "techniques" that psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen devised included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement boxes, shackling and exposing detainees to extreme temperatures, sounds and pain.

The details of what happened to Abu Zubaydah are contained in the 6,700-page U.S. Senate intelligence committee report on torture , which was released in 2014, although only a 549-page executive summary has been declassified.

An excerpt: "After Abu Zubaydah had been in complete isolation for 47 days, the most aggressive interrogation phase began.… Security personnel entered the cell, shackled and hooded Abu Zubaydah.… The interrogators then removed the hood, performed an attention grab, and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor."

• Listen to Episode 4 | How do you sue one of the most powerful agencies in the world?

The Senate report goes on to describe in detail how over 19 days of torture, on a "near 24-hour-per-day basis," he was waterboarded 83 times, placed in the coffin-like wooden box, held naked and his body contorted into stress positions.

The report states: "After the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques ended, CIA personnel at the detention site concluded that Abu Zubaydah had been truthful and that he did not possess any new terrorist threat information."

At least 118 detainees were subjected to this type of tortured interrogation.

"I think it's important [to note] that Mitchell and Jessen really were not the wizards that designed and imagined the program," said retired U.S. army general and psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis. "I do think that they were used by authorities above them in the agency and probably the White House to come up with something like that."

Xenakis specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and has worked extensively with soldiers and veterans, as well as Guantanamo detainees and former captives from the CIA black sites.

"I think that essentially what they based their understanding on was bad science, completely not validated in any way," he said. "There’s no reason to think that it would have any positive effect to be useful."

And that "bad science" reaches all the way back to Cameron's work at the Allan.

WATCH | In 1980, The Fifth Estate interviewed two Canadians who went through the MK-ULTRA program :

As Kinzer notes in his book, even after MK-ULTRA was shut down, the CIA’s fascination about mind control continued. In the early 1960s, some of the experiments from MK-ULTRA were detailed in the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual.

Over 128 pages, the Kubark manual suggests interrogation methods, including "deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis and narcosis," and long sections devoted to sensory deprivation, which was drawn from "a number of experiments at McGill University."

Kubark relies directly on Cameron's work at McGill University, which the Allen is part of, and his theory that to make a mind malleable, you need to break it down to an infantile state.

By the 1980s, the CIA had devised the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (HRE), which was essentially an updated version of Kubark. As a Baltimore Sun investigation revealed in 1997, Honduran military forces accused of kidnapping, torture and murder had been trained by the CIA and were using the HRE.

Then came the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

"The idea that people were going to produce truthful information, valid information, in those states of mind had never, ever been established," said Xenakis.

"We knew from lots of records of PoWs – I, in fact in the '70s, interviewed a number of PoWs coming out of Vietnam – that they didn't produce good information when they were under high duress, when they were tortured. They just said what they needed to say to stop it."

• Listen to Episode 5 | The torturous experiments were supposed to end in the 1960s. They didn't.

Only twice in the years since Cameron experimented on psychiatric patients has their suffering been officially acknowledged. For the victims and their families, both times fell short of what they were seeking.

Nine patients of Cameron sued the CIA in the U.S. in the 1980s for their treatment as part of MK-ULTRA. It became a landmark case when it was settled out of court in 1988, and they received compensation, but the CIA did not accept any liability.

Esther Schrier could have been the 10th complainant but was too embarrassed to have people know about her mental health challenges.

WATCH | Bob Logie describes the experimental treatments he was given:

During the trial, it was exposed that the Canadian government had provided even more funding to Cameron, and for a longer period, than the CIA.

Eventually, in 1994, almost 20 years after the experiments were first publicly exposed, the Canadian government offered compensation for people who were experimented upon by Cameron from 1950 to 1965 (even though some believe Cameron started his experiments in the late 1940s). The patients had to prove they had experienced "full or substantial depatterning," to be eligible.

Seventy-seven former patients received $100,000 each. They were known as ex gratia payments, which essentially means giving compensation without the admission of liability.

Esther Schrier received a payment, but her son was rejected. Even after taking the case to the Federal Court of Canada in 1996, Lloyd Schrier was denied, with a judge upholding previous decisions saying that he was not a patient.

He received a letter from Allan Rock, who was the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada at the time.

"Payments under this plan are made on compassionate and humanitarian grounds to former patients," the letter said. "As the Government of Canada does not accept any liability or negligence for the treatment given to patients of Dr. Cameron, we have limited this payment to former patients. The government can only do so much and, therefore, limiting payments was necessary."

WATCH | How experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute affected a family:

Lloyd Schrier can’t see why he wouldn’t be eligible.

"When you look at the order it says they’re giving it on humanitarian grounds and I cannot see why I wouldn’t be included in that," he said.

"No one's taking any responsibility and I think they should."

Schrier is just one of hundreds of relatives who say they bear the emotional scars of those who were unwitting human experiment subjects of Cameron. They’ve recently found each other and came together after a 2017 story by the CBC's The Fifth Estate . Through two lawsuits against multiple defendants, including McGill University Health Centre, Royal Victoria Hospital and the attorney general of Canada, they are hoping to force the Canadian government into apologizing for its support of the experiments at the Allan.

But the Canadian government appears to have not changed its position. A spokesperson from the Department of Justice responded to an email from CBC, saying that Canada has already "taken action to provide assistance to those affected."

And McGill University seems to be trying to erase this history from its past. In the Allan Memorial Institute, a portrait of Cameron, who was the hospital's first director and leader for 21 years, still hangs in the halls alongside other past directors. But his name has been removed.

There is also no mention of this history on the university's official website. CBC asked the university why, and while a spokesperson did not answer the question directly, they wrote that they are "truly empathetic to those who were impacted."

• Listen to Episode 6 | How MK-ULTRA entered mainstream pop culture.

WATCH | The 2017 Fifth Estate documentary about MK-ULTRA:

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39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America

• A former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov claimed in 1984 that Russia has a long-term goal of ideologically subverting the U.S.
• He described the process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages.
• The first stage, he said, is called “demoralization,” which would take about 20 years to achieve.

In 1954, early on in the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the Committee for State Security, more commonly known in the West as the KGB. The group came to oversee the Soviet Union’s internal security, secret police, and domestic and foreign intelligence operations.

Across the world, the KGB did whatever it could to thwart pro-Western and anti-Soviet political movements and figures. The group would assassinate political leaders with cyanide and other weapons. It would fund and arm leftist groups, especially those in developing nations . And the KGB successfully established moles in U.S. intelligence agencies, though the exact number still isn’t — and may never be — known for sure.

Also unclear were the group’s long-term plans involving the U.S. One glimpse, however, comes from a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970. He claimed to know details of a Soviet plan to undermine the U.S., not on the battlefield but in the psyche of the American public.

In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.

Bezmenov made the point that the work of the KGB mainly does not involve espionage, despite what our popular culture may tell us. Most of the work, 85% of it, was “a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare.”

What does that mean? Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. “You can see it with your own eyes,” he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it.

Here’s how he further defined ideological subversion:

“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages. The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. According to the former KGB agent, that is the minimum number of years it takes to re-educate one generation of students that is normally exposed to the ideology of its country — in other words, the time it takes to change what the people are thinking.

He used the examples of 1960s hippies coming to positions of power in the 1980s in the government and businesses of America. Bezmenov claimed this generation was already “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values. Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe but Bezmenov’s larger point addressed why people who have been gradually “demoralized” are unable to understand that this has happened to them.

Referring to such people, Bezmenov said:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.

In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person:

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”

It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions.

Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.

The third stage would be “crisis.” It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.

This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”

It bears saying that when he made this statement, he was warning about baby boomers and Democrats of the time.

In another somewhat terrifying excerpt, here’s what Bezmenov had to say about what is really happening in the United States: It may think it is living in peace, but it has been actively at war with Russia, and for some time:

“Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime,” said the former KGB agent. “False. United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system.”

You can watch the full interview here:

Class action suit by families of those brainwashed in Montreal medical experiments gets go-ahead

Treatments included chemically induced sleep for weeks, rounds of electroshocks.

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A lawsuit against the Canadian government, the Royal Victoria Hospital and the McGill University Health Centre is moving ahead.

About 55 families of victims who underwent medical experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s are suing for millions of dollars.

Alison Steel says her mother was never the same after undergoing brainwashing experiments at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute.

Treatments included chemically induced sleep for weeks, rounds of electroshocks and experimental drugs.

"She just wasn't there for me; she wasn't emotional," Steel said. "I believe I suffered as a child, even though I love my mother."

Steel is one of the main plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Canadian government, the Royal Victoria Hospital and the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

• How the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments laid the groundwork for torture methods used today

The plaintiffs allege the Government of Canada funded psychiatric treatments by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute between 1950 to 1964. They claim the government played a role in the supervision and control of these experiments, which were part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program of covert mind-control.

The defendants had moved to partially dismiss the case, but Quebec Superior Court dismissed the defence's request on Feb. 23.

Lawyer Alan Stein says the lawsuit, seeking about $1 million per family on top of legal costs "to compensate them for their [physical and emotional] loss," can now move ahead.

In a statement to CBC News, the MUHC said Cameron acted independently and was not considered by law to be an employee of the Royal Victoria Hospital.

The Department of Justice says it is reviewing the court's latest decision.

with files from Sharon Yonan Renold

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Shattered by montreal mind-control experiments, but undeterred in a suit.

Families of patients in a Cold War-era mind-control experiment in Montreal are pressing forward after a recent setback in their class-action lawsuit.

By Vjosa Isai

Every weekend was an adventure for Julie Tanny when she was a young girl.

Her father, Charles, made sure of it, surprising his three children with trips and visits to the amusement park. His warmth radiated physically, too, when he would rub his children’s ice-cold feet back to life after a skate at their backyard rink in Montreal.

Everything changed in the winter of 1957. A tooth filling gone awry spurred an excruciating neurological condition that stumped five of his doctors. They referred him to the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, where he was admitted for three months of treatment.

When Ms. Tanny’s father was released, the man who came home was distant, irate, confused and physically abusive. He did not remember that he owned a snowblower business. He was barely able to recognize his family.

It was as though his brain had been reprogrammed.

As Ms. Tanny would later learn, it largely was. Her father had unknowingly become a patient of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist running a secret mind-control experiment claimed to be funded by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a Cold War-era program known as MK-ULTRA.

“He was like a shell of what he was before,” Ms. Tanny, a retired wholesale jeweler, said. “He was just a completely different person.”

Ms. Tanny, 70, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 against the institutions linked to the experiment and the Canadian and United States governments. About 400 people, mostly families of former patients who were treated at the clinic between 1948 and 1964, have joined the effort, she said.

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Group of mothers fighting to protect key to unraveling top-secret CIA experiment in Montreal

04 september 2024, 11:48 am ist, indigenous women in montreal are fighting to halt construction at a former hospital, believing it holds the key to understanding the fate of children missing from a cia experiment..

Mohawk Mother Kwetiio looks through a fence at the Royal Victoria Hospital construction site, in Montreal, Canada. Bulldozers are back at work at Montreal's former Royal Victoria Hospital, but a group of Mohawk mothers have not given up their fight to excavate the site in search of remains of children who went missing some 60 years ago (Photo: Alexis Aubin / AFP)

A group of indigenous women are fighting to halt construction at a former Montreal hospital, convinced it may hold the key to understanding the fate of children still missing from a troubling CIA experiment conducted half a century ago.

For the past two years, they have been working to delay a major construction project led by McGill University and the Quebec government.

"They took our children and subjected them to all sorts of experiments," said Kahentinetha, an 85-year-old activist from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, who is known by a single name.

The activists are drawing on archival evidence and testimonies suggesting that unmarked graves of children who were once housed at the Royal Victoria Hospital and the adjacent Allan Memorial Institute may be located on the site.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the old psychiatric institute was a site for MK Ultra, a secret human experimentation program funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The Cold War-era program sought to develop methods and drugs for brainwashing.

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Experiments under MK Ultra took place in Britain, Canada, and the United States, involving Indigenous children in Montreal who were subjected to electroshock therapy, hallucinogenic drugs, and sensory deprivation.

"They wanted to erase us," Kahentinetha said.

A prominent figure in the Indigenous rights movement, Kahentinetha has traveled internationally to denounce colonialism and now considers this struggle "the most important of her life".

"We want to understand why this was done and who will be held accountable," she added.

In the fall of 2022, the activists secured an injunction halting the construction of a new McGill University campus and research center on the site, a project valued at CAD 870 million (USD 643 million).

Kwetiio, 52, another activist who also goes by a single name, said they chose to represent themselves in court because 'in our traditions, no one speaks for us.'

Last summer, sniffer dogs and specialized equipment were used to search the expansive and deteriorating buildings on the property. They identified three areas of interest for possible excavation.

However, according to McGill and the Société Québécoise des Infrastructures (SQI), 'no human remains have been discovered'.

The Mohawk women accuse the university and the government infrastructure agency of breaching an agreement by selecting their own archaeologists for the search and ending the work prematurely.

"They took it upon themselves to lead the investigation into crimes potentially committed by their own predecessors," said Philippe Blouin, an anthropologist working with the activists.

Despite their appeal being rejected earlier this month, the activists remain determined to continue their fight.

"People need to know history so it doesn’t repeat itself," said Kwetiio.

Canada has increasingly confronted its past injustices in recent years. The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report described the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in residential schools as “cultural genocide.”

From 1831 to 1996, approximately 150,000 Indigenous children were removed from their homes and placed in 139 residential schools, with several thousand never returning to their communities.

The discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia in May 2021 triggered a nationwide reflection on this dark chapter and prompted searches for more graves across Canada.

"It wasn’t only residential schools; hospitals, sanatoriums, churches, and orphanages were involved too," Kwetiio noted.

For her, the crucial goal is to illuminate the past to bring about change and restore the harmony that existed before colonialism.

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