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Historic memos about brainwashing “Russian agents” and drugging US inmates with LSD have been put online
Documents shedding light on the CIA’s notorious mind control program decades ago are being published by a transparency group.
The National Security Archive, an NGO dedicated to using Freedom of Information Act requests to expose government secrets, put some of the records online on Monday to mark 50 years since the CIA’s activities were exposed by the New York Times. A full collection of more than 1,200 documents is to be hosted by ProQuest, a scholarly research assistance firm.
Starting in the early 1950s, the CIA secretly searched for ways to control human behavior with drugs, including the then novel hallucinogen LSD, hypnosis, and extreme maltreatment, such as sensory deprivation.
The experiments, including those done on unwitting subjects, largely stemmed from interest in anti-war sentiments expressed by US troops who fought in the Korean War and went through captivity. The media coined the term ‘brainwashing’ to explain why soldiers would sympathize with the Communist enemy. The CIA hoped it could replicate the effect, conducting research under the code names BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA.
CIA Director Richard Helms and MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original records in 1973 in what the Archive called “perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history.” The bulk of its documents came from author John Marks, who in 1979 wrote a book about the controversial program.
One of the memos highlighted by the NGO claimed success in inducing amnesia in “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” In another one, Gottlieb signed off on giving federal inmates in Atlanta larger doses of LSD as part of the research. The Archive pointed the finger at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company as the supplier of “tonnage quantities” of LSD to the CIA.
It is “a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades,” the group said. Some of the research was akin to what was previously done by “the Nazi doctors who were tried at Nuremberg.”
The December 1974 expose of MKULTRA in the Times was penned by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. The veteran reporter has authored several explosive stories over the decades, most recently claiming that the US government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russia and Germany in 2022.
