Mind Control Documents & Links
proof mk-ultra exists
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case, Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project.
1995 U. S. congressional hearing:
MKULTRA Victim Full Testimony (U.S. Mind Control Child Abuse Victims A-C Testimony, U.S. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Public Meeting, Washington DC, March 1995. Valerie Wolf (A), Chris DeNicola Tucson Arizona (B), Claudia Mullen (C): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbhpRmsEq44
Mind Control Survivors’ Testimony at the Human Radiation Experiments Hearings:
Valerie Wolf – Therapist of mind control survivors who gave testimony about mind control experiments in the 1995 US Presidential hearings on radiation experiments. https://web.archive.org/web/20150322091253/http://www.whale.to/b/wolf.html
1977 Congressional Hearings
Mind Control Documents & Links – Evidence mk-ultra occurred
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case, Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/
Luna Announces Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust Published: Jun 23, 2026
WASHINGTON—Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) today announced a hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments.” During the hearing, members will examine the history and timeline of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MKULTRA project and its original classification and how the project meets the CIA’s obligation to protect the United States. Members will also analyze the intelligence community’s unwillingness to declassify information related to MKULTRA and how the lack of transparency has reduced Americans’ trust in government institutions.
“The intelligence community has covered up the nature and classification of the MKULTRA experiments for decades. Americans have been misdirected repeatedly and deserve transparency and accountability from the CIA. The intelligence community’s unwillingness to deliver the truth has fueled dangerous conspiracy theories and eroded public trust in the federal government. This hearing aims to explore the history of the MKULTRA experiments, how they have impacted Americans’ wellbeing, and how the intelligence community can win back trust,” said Task Force Chairwoman Luna.
WITNESSES:
Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Tom O’Neill, Investigative Journalist, Author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
https://oversight.house.gov/release/luna-announces-hearing-on-mkultra-experiments-and-its-impact-on-public-trust/
Congress Reopens the CIA’s MKULTRA Files as Witnesses Call for Answers
Congress revisited the program as calls for more file declassification and answers into unanswered questions remain decades later. Military Daily News Published Jul 6, 2026
More than four decades after Congress last took a deep look at the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program, lawmakers are once again asking how much the public still doesn’t know.
The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing June 30 titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” The hearing revisited one of the Cold War’s most controversial intelligence programs while examining whether decades of document destruction and government secrecy have prevented a full accounting of what happened.
Witnesses included Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at Brown University and author of Poisoner in Chief; investigative journalist Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties; and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former National Institutes of Health official who appeared as the minority witness.
Much of the hearing focused on whether additional MKULTRA records still exist and whether victims have ever received meaningful accountability.
What Was MKULTRA?
MKULTRA was a CIA research program launched in 1953 to study methods of influencing or controlling human behavior.
At its peak, MKULTRA encompassed 149 known subprojects carried out at more than 80 institutions, including military bases, universities, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies.
The CIA frequently used front organizations to conceal its involvement while researchers experimented with drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, amphetamines and scopolamine. Some experiments combined those drugs with hypnosis, electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and isolation.
The program also included safe houses that operated as brothels, where unsuspecting patrons were secretly dosed with LSD so agents could observe their behavior. Congressional investigations later found that some subjects suffered lasting psychological harm, and at least one death was directly linked to the experiments. Many experiments were conducted without informed consent.
The program remained largely unknown until the mid-1970s, when investigations by the Church Committee and subsequent Senate hearings revealed portions of its existence. Former CIA Director Richard Helms had ordered most MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, leaving investigators with only financial records that had escaped destruction.
‘Medical Torture’
Kinzer testified that MKULTRA represented one of the most extensive secret human experimentation programs ever conducted by the U.S. government.
“MK-ULTRA conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a U.S. government agency,” he testified. “By any standard they qualify as medical torture.”
Kinzer argued that Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who oversaw MKULTRA, deliberately sought out vulnerable populations referred to as “expendables” for experimentation. He testified that agency officials targeted prisoners, psychiatric patients and other people who were unlikely to attract public attention if something went wrong. Kinzer urged lawmakers not to view MKULTRA solely as history…..
Tom O’Neill focused much of his testimony on what he believes Congress still does not know about MKULTRA….
He also discussed years of research that formed the basis of his book Chaos. O’Neill examined psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who conducted CIA-funded research and later became connected to investigations surrounding Charles Manson.
O’Neill stopped short of claiming the CIA controlled Manson or orchestrated the Tate-LaBianca murders. Instead, he argued that inconsistencies in government records and previously undisclosed relationships between West and MKULTRA officials justify additional investigation.
O’Neill believes the historical record remains incomplete because so many documents were destroyed before Congress could examine them. He also highlighted two other figures whose names surfaced repeatedly during his research: Jack Ruby and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ruby, who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, became a focal point because West evaluated Ruby while he was in custody. O’Neill testified that Ruby’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly after his arrest and questioned why West, who had connections to CIA-funded behavioral research, became involved in his case.
O’Neill argued that the circumstances surrounding West’s examination and his later proposal to transfer Ruby to his own care deserve additional scrutiny. O’Neill also discussed the government’s surveillance of King, arguing that intelligence agencies during the Cold War often blurred the line between legitimate national security investigations and intrusive domestic operations. O’Neill cited the government’s extensive monitoring of the civil rights leader as evidence of how broadly intelligence agencies operated during the era and why lawmakers should continue examining classified records from that period….
The existence of MKULTRA itself is not disputed. The CIA has acknowledged the program existed, and Congress investigated it decades ago. What remains disputed, however, is how extensive the experiments became, how many people were affected, and whether all surviving records have ever been made public.
Kinzer and O’Neill argued that unanswered questions remain because the destruction of records prevented investigators from fully reconstructing the program…. Whether Congress ultimately uncovers new information remains to be seen. https://www.military.com/congress-reopens-the-cia-mkultra-files-as-witnesses-call-for-answers
The CIA’s ‘Heart Attack Gun’: A Cold War Weapon for Targeted Assassinations
Of all the secrets revealed by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured imaginations as vividly as the ‘heart attack gun.’
US Military History Updated Jul 7, 2026 ….Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the American public’s imagination as vividly as the agency’s “heart attack gun.”
During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA wouldn’t do to get a leg up on the Soviet Union, from simple operations such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious — and equally illegal — acts such as dosing “unwitting, nonvoluntary human subjects” with LSD and seeing how well they would hold up to interrogation. We know about these secret efforts because Congress investigated the agency — as well as the FBI, National Security Agency and IRS — in 1975 and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were, to put it lightly, alarming.
Led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which became known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First, a whistleblower revealed the Army was spying on American citizens at home. Almost as soon as the dust from that discovery settled, The New York Times published a story reporting that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping files on some 10,000 Americans it suspected of being foreign agents, including at least one member of Congress.
The Church Committee soon uncovered the CIA’s robust assassination program, targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and, famously, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who survived numerous CIA assassination attempts.
But if the agency was going to kill world leaders, it couldn’t look like an assassination, of course. The CIA needed the perfect weapon, and it found one in shellfish. Once extracted, the potent neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a pistol, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. In a 1975 public hearing, Sen. Church showed the CIA’s “heart attack gun” to the world.
The weapon itself resembled a Colt M1911 pistol with a scope, but it didn’t fire .45-caliber bullets. Instead, it fired a frozen pellet of saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consumed toxic algae blooms. The pellet could be silently fired up to 100 meters away and would enter the body through a pinprick entry wound. The poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead….
The heart attack gun wasn’t a uniquely American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union’s secretive intelligence and internal security force, had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the KGB’s hired guns, was known to have murdered two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activists, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces, causing death within minutes. Their causes of death both looked like heart attacks. The CIA learned their true causes of death when Stashinsky eventually defected to the West in 1961.
The CIA’s heart attack gun wasn’t just shocking because it was a clandestine weapon of targeted assassination. President Richard Nixon had imposed a ban on biological weapons in 1969 and ordered the CIA to destroy its stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed he never received such an order. Others said the poisons were warehoused by CIA men who believed in the program. Enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people eventually found its way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was formally halted in 1970, according to The New York Times.)
Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:
Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the American public’s imagination as vividly as the agency’s “heart attack gun.”
During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA wouldn’t do to get a leg up on the Soviet Union, from simple operations such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious — and equally illegal — acts such as dosing “unwitting, nonvoluntary human subjects” with LSD and seeing how well they would hold up to interrogation. We know about these secret efforts because Congress investigated the agency — as well as the FBI, National Security Agency and IRS — in 1975 and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were, to put it lightly, alarming.
Led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which became known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First, a whistleblower revealed the Army was spying on American citizens at home. Almost as soon as the dust from that discovery settled, The New York Times published a story reporting that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping files on some 10,000 Americans it suspected of being foreign agents, including at least one member of Congress.
The Church Committee soon uncovered the CIA’s robust assassination program, targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and, famously, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who survived numerous CIA assassination attempts.
But if the agency was going to kill world leaders, it couldn’t look like an assassination, of course. The CIA needed the perfect weapon, and it found one in shellfish. Once extracted, the potent neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a pistol, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. In a 1975 public hearing, Sen. Church showed the CIA’s “heart attack gun” to the world.
The weapon itself resembled a Colt M1911 pistol with a scope, but it didn’t fire .45-caliber bullets. Instead, it fired a frozen pellet of saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consumed toxic algae blooms. The pellet could be silently fired up to 100 meters away and would enter the body through a pinprick entry wound. The poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead.
Weaponized saxitoxin was the discovery of Mary Embree, who joined the CIA right after leaving high school in the 1960s. She began her career as a secretary, working to create small electronics and deliver passports and other documents to field agents. She was later moved to a project known as MKNaomi, with a mission that included stockpiling “severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of the Technical Services Division” — the agency’s source for the specialized devices used in their spy operations. Her job was to find a poison that was undetectable, and saxitoxin was the silver bullet the CIA was looking for.
Though Embree discovered the right poison, the CIA still needed a delivery method that would allow an operative to literally get away with murder. Dr. Nathan Gordon, a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, discovered that mixing the toxin with water and freezing it would allow a poison dart the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long to be fired from a modified M1911.
Once in the body, the victim experiences paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can present as a tingling sensation, followed by shortness of breath, abdominal pain, choking and lack of coordination. The victim is paralyzed before dying of respiratory failure in a process that can take seconds. The only evidence of foul play would be a small red puncture wound, one not easily found by a coroner not looking for it. The cause of death would appear to be a heart attack, even to a medical examiner.
The heart attack gun wasn’t a uniquely American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union’s secretive intelligence and internal security force, had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the KGB’s hired guns, was known to have murdered two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activists, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces, causing death within minutes. Their causes of death both looked like heart attacks. The CIA learned their true causes of death when Stashinsky eventually defected to the West in 1961.
The CIA’s heart attack gun wasn’t just shocking because it was a clandestine weapon of targeted assassination. President Richard Nixon had imposed a ban on biological weapons in 1969 and ordered the CIA to destroy its stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed he never received such an order. Others said the poisons were warehoused by CIA men who believed in the program. Enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people eventually found its way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was formally halted in 1970, according to The New York Times.)
None other than then-CIA Director William Colby himself brought the famed heart attack gun to the infamous congressional hearing in 1975, describing it in clinical language as a “nondiscernible microbionoculator.” Although he detailed how it could be used, he never revealed if or when it was ever used.
The Church Committee’s findings eventually led President Gerald Ford to sign an executive order forbidding employees of the United States government to “engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” In the end, the CIA would just have to figure out how to eliminate its foreign adversaries without directly contributing to their deaths —as it did in Afghanistan, Argentina, Poland, Chad, Nicaragua and elsewhere….
https://www.military.com/history/cias-heart-attack-gun-cold-war-weapon-targeted-assassinations.html
Hektoen International A Journal of Medical Humanities
Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
– The Nuremburg Code, Section on Permissible Human Experiments (1946)
Louis J. West, M.D. (1924–1999), was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a poor immigrant family. He enlisted in the US Army during World War Two, was sent to medical school at the University of Minnesota, and graduated in 1949. After a psychiatry residency, he served in the US Air Force until 1956. His studies of “brainwashing” and psychological torture helped exonerate American airmen who, after capture in Korea, confessed to or cooperated with Korean accusations against the US of war crimes, particularly those of bacteriological warfare. West’s testimony saved the Americans from courts-martial….
Some of West’s research on mind control was done as part of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Project MKUltra, from 1953–1973. Illegal human experimentation was done to develop procedures and drugs to weaken people and force confessions through psychological torture and brainwashing. These experiments were carried out at over eighty institutions, including military bases, schools, universities, hospitals, and prisons. Special brothels were established where customers were secretly dosed with psychoactive substances. The drugs tested included LSD, amphetamines, mescaline, psilocybin, and scopolamine. The drugs were combined, in institutional settings, with electroconvulsive (“shock”) treatments, hypnosis, isolation, and sensory deprivation. Several people died or were permanently damaged….
https://hekint.org/2024/01/25/louis-jolyon-west-m-d-a-dangerous-doctor/
Documents Reveal Just How Crazy The CIA’s MKULTRA Mind-Control Program Really Was Eireann Van Natta Intelligence State Reporter December 26, 2024
A new collection of over 1,200 documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) infamous mind control program, MKULTRA, was published by the National Security Archive and ProQuest on Monday.
The collection was announced 50 years after Seymour Hersh’s New York Times investigation illuminated the program’s abuses, according to the Archive. It was also published 70 years after the U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly & Company, became the CIA’s primary source of the psychoactive drug LSD, the Archive added.
The MKULTRA project was conducted in the 1950s, and most of the original records were destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms and head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division Sidney Gottlieb, according to the Archive. Gottlieb would eventually serve as director of the agency’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA
About this Collection
This collection explores the Central Intelligence Agency’s foray into behavioral and mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Most commonly known as Project MKULTRA, which refers to the research carried out by the CIA and affiliated institutions between 1953-1963, this codename came to be used as an umbrella term for an array of scientific, psychological, and military endeavors that began well before the official start of MKULTRA in 1953 and that continued in the years after the project officially ended. In this collection, researchers will find many documents relating to MKULTRA as well as its predecessors, Project BLUEBIRD and Project ARTICHOKE, and its various sister projects and successors, including MKNAOMI, MKDELTA and MKSEARCH. This collection also contains records relating to investigations into the CIA’s mind control program, both by the Agency itself and Congress, during the mid to late 1970s. The set has been carefully curated to highlight the clearest, most substantive documents available on MKULTRA and to focus on those records that provide insight into the scope and purpose of the Agency’s mind control program.
Most of the documents were donated to the National Security Archive by John Marks, the author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a book widely considered to be the most authoritative recounting of the CIA’s involvement in behavior and mind control experiments. They consist primarily of CIA records Marks obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Another source for the collection are documents that the CIA released to the family of Frank Olson, an Army biochemist who died in 1953 after he was secretly administered LSD by a CIA employee and then fell from a 10th-story window. Congressional hearings and testimony and the CIA’s reading room were also researched to supplement the collection…
.
The collection includes records that managed to survive the agency’s “purge” of secretive documents, according to the Archive. The CIA conducted mind control research under Operations MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the Archive noted. The collection — CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA — is mainly composed of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents previously compiled by former State Department official John Marks.
“The MKULTRA program was shut down more than 40 years ago, and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov,” a CIA spokesperson told the Daily Caller. The Caller also reached out to the Archive but has not heard back as of publication. “Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind,” the organization stated in its report….
Another document was seemingly written by the Technical Services Staff (TSS) Chemical Division after DCI Allen Dulles and other officials discussed whether using Georgetown University Hospital for certain experiments was worth the cost, according to the Archive. The officials requested that the TSS provide them with a list of advantages, the organization claimed.
The document detailed various “materials and methods” the group was working on, such as “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness.” Additionally, it included substances that would result in “physical disablement.” The document also mentioned the development of materials that create symptoms of diseases “in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering,” or the exploitation of a pretend or exaggerated disease for one’s personal benefit. The records also indicate that TSS was attempting to develop “physical methods of producing shock and confusion” along with substances that “alter personality structure” as well as a “knockout pill” for undercover drugging….
Legal documents were also released, including Gottlieb’s depositions by attorneys for Velma Orlikow. She was a patient of the Allan Memorial Institute, a Canadian facility where Dr. Ewen Cameron experimented on psychiatric patients in the 1950s and 60s. Cameron’s experiments were funded in part by the CIA’s MKULTRA program, according to the CBC.
The Archives noted that while MKULTRA had approval from the “highest levels,” there was little to no oversight of the program. (RELATED: Declassified Documents Claim CIA Secretly Collected Americans’ Private Data)
It was not until 1975 when the Church Committee investigated the intelligence community that various intelligence operations, including MKULTRA, were brought to public light. Eireann Van Natta https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/64
Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Project MKULTRA, Subproject 35,” Top Secret, November 15, 1954, 13 pp.
Description
The CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS) requests authorization for a project at Georgetown University Hospital that would provide cover for research under the Agency’s “biological and chemical warfare program.” Using a philanthropic organization as a “cut-out,” the CIA would partially fund “a new research wing” of the hospital (the Gorman Annex) and would use one sixth of the new annex to conduct “Agency-sponsored research in these sensitive fields.” MKULTRA, the memo observes, provides research and development funding “for highly sensitive projects in certain fields, including covert biological, chemical and radiological warfare” but does not specifically authorize funds to establish cover for these programs.
An attachment describes the rationale for the use of a university hospital as cover for conducting such experiments, noting that “competent individuals in the field of physiological, psychiatric and other biological sciences are very reluctant to enter into signed agreements of any sort which would connect them with this activity since such connection might seriously jeopardize their professional reputations.”
The Agency’s clandestine funding and use of the hospital would be channeled through the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, named for Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University Hospital who had been secretly working with the CIA since 1951. The Fund was used “both as a cut-out for dealing with contractors in the fields of covert chemical and biological warfare, and as a prime contractor for certain areas of biological research.” In addition to Geschickter, at least two other board members of the Fund were aware that it was being used to conceal the CIA’s “sensitive research projects.”
Agency sponsorship was “completely deniable since no connection would exist between the University and the Agency.” Three “bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division of TSS” would be given “excellent professional cover” while “human patients and volunteers for experimental use will be available under excellent clinical conditions” and with hospital supervision.
The document was found among the papers of James Srodes, author of Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999), which are housed at the George C. Marshall Research Library of the Virginia Military Institute.
Source George C. Marshall Research Library, James Srodes Collection, Box 8, Folder: “AWD [Allen Welsh Dulles]: Mind Control 1953-1961”
Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Successful Application of Narco-Hypnotic Interrogation (ARTICHOKE),” Classification unknown, 3 pp. Jul 14, 1952
Description
In a memo to the DCI, the CIA Security Office reports on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” Using the cover of a “psychiatric-medical” evaluation, officials from the Security Office and the CIA Medical Office combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and, in one case, “a subsequent total amnesia produced by post-hypnotic suggestion.” In the second case, CIA handlers used “heavy dosages of sodium pentothal,” a barbiturate, “coupled with the stimulant Desoxyn,” a methamphetamine, “with outstanding success.” The officers involved believed “that the ARTICHOKE operations were entirely successful” and “that the tests demonstrated conclusively the effectiveness of the combined chemical-hypnotic technique in such cases.”
Source John Marks Collection, Box 6
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32721-document-06-memorandum-director-central-intelligence-successful-application-narco
John S. Earman, Inspector General, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum for the Record, “MKULTRA Program,” Secret November 29, 1963, 2 pp. Nov 29, 1963
Description
This memo records a meeting held in the office of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gen. Marshall Carter to settle the one major point of disagreement among CIA officials over the inspector general’s MKULTRA recommendations: whether to continue with the testing of MKULTRA substances on unwitting U.S. citizens. Others present were Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms, CIA executive director (and former inspector general) Lyman Kirkpatrick, current CIA inspector general John Earman, and Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
Both Gottlieb and Helms “argued for the continuation of unwitting testing,” while Earman, Carter and Kirkpatrick disagreed. Carter was concerned with the “unwitting aspect,” and a discussion ensued “on the possibility of unwitting test on foreign nationals,” which “had been ruled out” due to opposition from “senior chiefs of stations” as “too dangerous” and who said they lacked “controlled facilities.” Earman finds this “odd,” emphasizing the slipshod nature of some of the safehouses used for unwitting tests in the U.S.
Concluding the meeting, the participants agree that if the Directorate for Plans determined “that unwitting testing on American citizens must be continued to operationally prove out these drugs, it may become necessary to place this problem before the Director [of Central Intelligence] for a decision.” The attached cover memo from 1975 indicates that the DCI decided to defer a decision on testing U.S. citizens for one year and requested that until then the Agency “please continue the freeze on unwitting testing.” The authors of the cover memo found “no record … that this freeze was ever lifted.” Source John Marks Collection
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32732-document-17-john-s-earman-inspector-general-us-central-intelligence-agency
PROJECT MK ULTRA, THE CIA’S PROGRAM OF RESEARCH INBEHAVIORAL MODIFICATION 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 NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION August 3, 1977
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-hearings-95mkultra.pdf
January 2015 An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability B.M. Disbennett (Disbennett, B.M. (2015) “An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability System,”Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice: Vol. 3: Iss. 2, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.70658/2693-3225.1058 Available at: https://ir.law.utk.edu/rgsj/vol3/iss2/4
….This paper will explore the top-secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) human medical experiment, MKULTRA, and the possible avenues of relief for service members involved in the project….This article will take a brief look into the history of human medical trials, followed by a history of the CIA program MKULTRA, and other related programs. Next, it will explore case law that bars veterans from constitutional remedies as well as tort remedies against the U.S. government. Finally, the article will discuss challenges for veterans in the VA disability compensation system to determine if MKULTRA victims could successfully seek service-connection. Ultimately, a veteran attempting to recover damages from MKULTRA testing will likely be unable to prevail under a constitutional analysis, but an MKULTRA victim may be able to seek service-connection under the VA.
https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=rgsj
2010 Court Case – Veterans vs CIA
CIA Tries Again to Duck Responsibility for Doing Drug Experiments on Veterans By MARIA DINZEO December 14, 2010 SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – The Central Intelligence Agency in January will argue for dismissal of Vietnam veterans’ claims that the CIA must provide them with information about the health effects of chemicals used on them during Cold War-era human experiments. The CIA also claims it is not obligated to provide the veterans with medical care for side effects of the drugs. It’s the CIA’s third attempt to get the case dismissed.
In a 2009 federal lawsuit, Vietnam Veterans of America claimed that the Army and CIA had used at least 7,800 soldiers as guinea pigs in “Project Paperclip.” They were given at least 250 and as many as 400 types of drugs, among them sarin, one of the most deadly drugs known to man, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, phosgene gas and LSD.
Among the project’s goals were to control human behavior, develop drugs that would cause confusion, promote weakness or temporarily cause loss of hearing or vision, create a drug to induce hypnosis and identify drugs that could enhance a person’s ability to withstand torture.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110104214546/https://www.courthousenews.com/2010/12/14/32562.htm
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA – OAKLAND DIVISION VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, et al., Defendants. Case No. CV 09-0037-CW Noticed Motion Date and Time: January 13, 2011 2:00 p.m. DEFENDANTS’ PARTIAL MOTION TO DISMISS PLAINTIFFS’ THIRD AMENDED COMPLAINT
https://web.archive.org/web/20120106141316/http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/12/14/CIADismiss.pdf
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTNORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA – OAKLAND DIVISION VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, et al., Defendants. Case No. CV 09-0037-CW PLAINTIFFS’ OPPOSITION TO DEFENDANTS’ PARTIAL MOTION TO DISMISS THIRD AMENDED COMPLAINT Date: January 13, 2011 https://web.archive.org/web/20120314072157/http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/12/14/VetsvCIA.pdf
Veterans say CIA tested drugs, mind control on them By Jay Price – Staff Writer 1/11/09 Instead of equipment testing, though, the Onslow County native found himself in a bizarre, CIA-funded drug testing and mind-control program, according to a lawsuit that he and five other veterans and Vietnam Veterans of America filed last week. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco against the Department of Defense and the CIA. The plaintiffs seek to force the government to contact all the subjects of the experiments and give them proper health care. The experiments have been the subject of congressional hearings, and in 2003 the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs released a pamphlet said nearly 7,000 soldiers had been involved and more than 250 chemicals used on them, including hallucinogens such as LSD and PCP as well as biological and chemical agents. Lasting from 1950 to 1975, the experiments took place at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. According to the lawsuit, some of the volunteers were even implanted with electrical devices in an effort to control their behavior. Rochelle, 60, who has come back to live in Onslow County, said in an interview Saturday that there were about two dozen volunteers when he was taken to Edgewood. Once there, they were asked to volunteer a second time, for drug testing. They were told that the experiments were harmless and that their health would be carefully monitored, not just during the tests but afterward, too. The doctors running the experiments, though, couldn’t have known the drugs were safe, because safety was one of the things they were trying to find out, Rochelle said. “We volunteered, yes, but we were not fully aware of the dangers,” he said. “None of us knew the kind of drugs they gave us, or the aftereffects they’d have.” https://web.archive.org/web/20090201142021/http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/12-8
Vets sue CIA, DoD over military experiments By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press Writer 1/7/09 SAN FRANCISCO – Six veterans who say they were exposed to dangerous chemicals, germs and mind-altering drugs during Cold War-era experiments filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA, Department of Defense and other agencies Wednesday. The veterans say they volunteered for military experiments as part of a wide-ranging program started in the 1950s to test nerve agents, biological weapons and mind-control techniques, but were not properly informed of the nature of the experiments. They blame the experiments for poor health and are demanding the government provide their health care. They also want the court to rule that the program was illegal because its administrators failed to get their consent….The suit, filed in San Francisco, alleges that at least 7,800 U.S. military personnel served as volunteers to test experimental drugs such as LSD at the Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore, Md., during a program that lasted into the 1970s, and that many others volunteered for similar experiments at other locations. “In virtually all cases, troops served in the same capacity as laboratory rats or guinea pigs,” the lawsuit states. The suit contends that veterans were wrongfully used as test subjects in experiments such as MK-ULTRA, a CIA project from the 1950s and ’60s that involved brainwashing and administering experimental drugs like LSD to unsuspecting individuals. The project was the target of several congressional inquiries in the 1970s and was tied to at least one death. Harf said that MK-ULTRA “was thoroughly investigated and the CIA fully cooperated with each of the investigations.” The plaintiffs say many of the volunteers’ records have been destroyed or remain sealed as top secret documents. They also say they were denied medals and other citations they were promised for participating in the experiments. They are not seeking monetary damages but have demanded access to health care for veterans they say were turned away at Department of Veterans Affairs facilities because they could not prove their ailments were related to their military service. In 1988, the Justice Department agreed to pay eight Canadians a total of $750,000 to settle their lawsuit alleging they suffered psychological trauma from CIA-financed mind-control experiments that included the use of LSD.
Operation Artichoke
CIA FILES – Operation ARTICHOKE – BACM RESEARCH – WWW.PAPERLESSARCHIVES. About BACM Research – PaperlessArchives.com BACM Research/PaperlessArchives.com publishes documentary historical research collections….
CIA ARTICHOKE FILES “Manchurian Candidate” ARTICHOKE CIA Files – ARTICHOKE was the CIA’S cryptonym for the study and/or use of special interrogation methods that have been known to included hypnosis, drugs and total isolation. It grew out of the Agency’s Operation BLACKBIRD and was a forerunner to the Agency’s MKULTRA. Project ARTICHOKE also known as Operation ARTICHOKE was run by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. The project went deeper into interrogation methods studied in the CIA’s Project BLUEBIRD. ARTICHOKE offensive mind control techniques experiments attempted to induce amnesia and highly suggestive states in its subjects. ARTICHOKE focused on the use of hypnosis, forced morphine addiction, forced morphine addiction withdrawal, along with other drugs, chemicals, and techniques. The main focus of the program was summarized in a January 1952 CIA memo, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”
One program experiment attempted to see if it was possible to produce a “Manchurian Candidate.” In Richard Condon’s 1959 novel “The Manchurian Candidate” an American soldier, who has been placed into a hypnotic state by Communist forces, returns home to assassinate on command. Five years earlier the CIA considered the possibility. A January 1954 CIA report asks the question, “Can an individual of [redacted] descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?” https://web.archive.org/web/20150703083554/http://www.paperlessarchives.com/FreeTitles/ARTICHOKECIAFiles.pdf
CIA Supreme Court Cases
U.S. Supreme Court CIA v. SIMS, 471 U.S. 159 (1985) 471 U.S. 159 CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY ET AL. v. SIMS ET AL. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT No. 83-1075. Argued December 4, 1984 Decided April 16, 1985 ….Between 1953 and 1966, the Central Intelligence Agency financed a wide-ranging project, code-named MKULTRA, concerned with “the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.” The [471 U.S. 159, 162] program consisted of some 149 subprojects which the Agency contracted out to various universities, research foundations, and similar institutions. At least 80 institutions and 185 private researchers participated. Because the Agency funded MKULTRA indirectly, many of the participating individuals were unaware that they were dealing with the Agency.
MKULTRA was established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques. Over the years the program included various medical and psychological experiments, some of which led to untoward results. These aspects of MKULTRA surfaced publicly during the 1970’s and became the subject of executive and congressional investigations. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/471/159.html
U.S. Supreme Court UNITED STATES v. STANLEY, 483 U.S. 669 (1987) 483 U.S. 669 UNITED STATES ET AL. v. STANLEY CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 86-393. Argued April 21, 1987 Decided June 25, 1987 Respondent, a serviceman, volunteered for what was ostensibly a chemical warfare testing program, but in which he was secretly administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) pursuant to an Army plan to test the effects of the drug on human subjects, whereby he suffered severe personality changes that led to his discharge and the dissolution of his marriage. Upon being informed by the Army that he had been given LSD, respondent filed a Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) suit. The District Court granted the Government summary judgment on the ground that the suit was barred by the doctrine of Feres v. United States, 340 U.S. 135 , which precludes governmental FTCA liability for injuries to servicemen resulting from activity “incident to service.” Although agreeing with this holding, the Court of Appeals remanded the case upon concluding that respondent had at least a colorable constitutional claim under the doctrine of Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 , whereby a violation of constitutional rights can give rise to a damages action against the offending federal officials even in the absence of a statute authorizing such relief, unless there are “special factors counselling hesitation” or an “explicit congressional declaration” of another, exclusive remedy. Respondent then amended his complaint to add Bivens claims and attempted to resurrect his FTCA claim. Although dismissing the latter claim, the District Court refused to dismiss the Bivens claims, rejecting, inter alia, the Government’s argument that the same considerations giving rise to the Feres doctrine should constitute “special factors” barring a Bivens action….In February 1958, James B. Stanley, a master sergeant in the Army stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, volunteered to participate in a program ostensibly designed to test the effectiveness of protective clothing and equipment as defenses against chemical warfare. He was released from his then-current duties and went to the Army’s Chemical Warfare Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. Four times that month, Stanley was secretly administered doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pursuant to an Army plan to study the effects of the drug on human subjects. According to his Second Amended Complaint (the allegations of which we accept for purposes of this decision), as a result of the LSD exposure, Stanley has suffered from hallucinations and periods of incoherence and memory loss, was impaired in his military performance, and would on occasion “awake from sleep at night and, without reason, violently beat his wife and children, later being unable to recall the entire incident.” App. 5. He was discharged from the Army in 1969. One year later, his marriage dissolved because of the personality changes wrought by the LSD. December 10, 1975, the Army sent Stanley a letter soliciting his cooperation in a study of the long-term effects of LSD on “volunteers who participated” in the 1958 tests. [483 U.S. 669, 672] This was the Government’s first notification to Stanley that he had been given LSD during his time in Maryland. After an administrative claim for compensation was denied by the Army, Stanley filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. 2671 et seq., alleging negligence in the administration, supervision, and subsequent monitoring of the drug testing program. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/483/669.html
The Sleep Room – Cameron
The Sleep Room’s Missing Memories by Ray Conlogue Quebec Arts Correspondent, Montreal – Cameron he Sleep Room’s Missing Memories by Ray Conlogue Quebec Arts Correspondent, Montreal “A new CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] miniseries tells how mental patients in Montreal were once subjected to CIA-sponsored brainwashing….recalls a series of barbaric experiments conducted on mental patients over a nine-year period beginning in 1955…the “psychic driving” technique invented by psychiatrist Ewen Cameron took on a science-fiction quality when it was revealed in 1977 that the CIA had helped finance the work. The CIA thought it had potential as a brainwashing technique to be used on “enemies” of the United States during the Cold War….a human catastrophe that stripped more than 300 people of their identities….she sued Ottawa instead, and forced the government to pay $100,000 to each surviving Allan patient.” http://web.archive.org/web/20030402163532/www.serendipity.li/cia/slprm.html (The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 1998-01-10, page C2)
This week on the fifth estate – “The Sleep Room” 1/6/98 – When Canadians first learned that CIA brainwashing experiments had been carried out on Canadians… in Canada… with the knowledge of our government… at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal …the story of Cameron’s experiments and the victims’ struggle for justice have been made into a riveting movie, to be broadcast on CBC Television… For the victims of The Sleep Room, the horror has never really ended. VELMA ORLIKOW (patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): The man who I had thought cared about what happened to me didn’t give a damn. I was a fly, just a fly. VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: Revisiting Canada’s infamous Sleep Room. LINDA MACDONALD (patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron): I was…had to be toilet-trained. I was a vegetable. VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER: In the 1960s, Dr. Ewen Cameron conducted CIA-funded experiments on troubled Canadian patients he was meant to help… MacIntyre: …the CIA caved in the day before the trial was to begin. They settled out of court for $750,000 – at the time it was the largest settlement the CIA had ever awarded. http://web.archive.org/web/20021225185605/http://www.radix.net/~jcturner/980106-Fifth-Estate.htm
Ottawa finally aids brainwashing victims Broadcast Date: Jan. 28, 1984 (digital clip) It sounds like a science fiction plot or a horror movie: A front organization for the American CIA sets up shop in Canada to engage in mind control experiments. But it’s no fiction, it’s the discussion on the floor of the House of Commons and among lawyers for the Department of External Affairs. Canadians caught up in the research, including a member of Parliament’s wife, may finally get some action from the government in their pursuit of answers and compensation. https://web.archive.org/web/20101221054533/http://archives.cbc.ca/society/crime_justice/clips/15125/
Project Paperclip
Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis By SAM ROBERTS December 11, 2010 After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12holocaust.html
The report, “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War,” ( HITLER’S SHADOW Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda Published by the National Archives http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf
Operation Paperclip – CIA’s Denial of Protecting Nazis is Blatant Lie (Part 1) by Hank P. Albarelli Jr. Leaks or revelations are often more compelling because of what they don’t reveal. Through Operation Paperclip, the U.S. organized a monumental transfer of black technology by actively recruiting Nazi scientists guilty of war crimes for employment by U.S. intelligence. In his three-part investigation, author H. P. Albarelli dredges up the part that was omitted from the recently-outed official report: the U.S. pointedly chose ’fervent’ Nazi scientists with experience in chemical, biological and radioactive warfare to become the architects of the CIA’s darkest military experiments involving human guinea pigs, as was the case in Nazi Germany.
On 11 November 1954, thirty-nine of the German-born scientists who entered the United States through Project Paperclip were sworn in as U.S. citizens. Military Intelligence “cleansed” the files of Nazi references. By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the U.S. and given prominent positions in the American scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans at concentration camps, had used slave labor, and had committed other war crimes.
The article focused on a 600-page “secret report” that had been produced by the U.S. Justice Department. The report, which Justice Department officials had suppressed from public release for years, details the American government’s importation into the U.S., following the end of World War II, of countless numbers of Nazis.
Written in a dry, bureaucratic style, the report recounts a number of examples of well-known Nazis to whom both the CIA and Department of State had provided both shelter and employment to, including Adolph Eichman, Otto Von Bolschwing, Dr. Josef Mengele, and Arthur Rudolph. To the purposes of this article, it is important to underscore here that the long-concealed report makes no mention whatsoever of the many Nazi scientists who specialized in chemical, biological and radioactive warfare and who were secretly relocated in the United States between the years 1946 and 1958….
“Operation Paperclip” transferred to the U.S. over 1,600 Nazi scientists, largely escaping the Nuremberg trials. Men who were classified as ’ardent Nazis’ were chosen – just weeks after Hitler’s defeat – to become ’respectable’ U.S. citizens, some of whom are allegedly still working in places like Brookhaven labs, Cold Spring Harbor and Plum Island. Photo: Gen. Reinhard Gehlen (middle) and his SS united were hired, and swiftly became agents of the CIA when they revealed their massive records on the Soviet Union to the US.
Officials: CIA gave waterboarders $5M legal shield (AP) 12/17/10 WASHINGTON (AP) — When the CIA decided to waterboard suspected terror detainees in overseas prisons, the agency turned to a pair of contractors. The men designed the CIA’s interrogation program and also personally took part in the waterboarding sessions. But to do the job, the CIA had to promise to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for them in case there was trouble down the road, former U.S. officials said https://web.archive.org/web/20141026152948/http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/dec/17/officials-cia-gave-waterboarders-5m-legal-shield/
Morgellons and the CIA’s MK/NAOMI Project (Part 2) by Hank P. Albarelli Jr., Zoe Martell Why is it that the U.S. state apparatus is standing in the way of any serious medical investigation into Mogellons disease? For the simple reason that it would inexorably lead to the covert biological war programmes of the 1950’s. Hank Albarelli lifts the veil on a period – which may not necessarily be over – when the military-industrial complex proclaimed to safeguard the “free world” while testing new experiments on the civilian population that it purported to protect; a period when members of the medical profession – including the CDC – developed diseases that they should have been preventing but which they used instead to contaminate the very people they were supposed to protect.
….MK/NAOMI was the cryptonym for an ultra-secret project instituted by the CIA for its partnership with the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Army’s biological warfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The general objectives of MK/NAOMI, as stated in contemporaneous CIA documents, were:
– To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements.
– To research, develop, and stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of CIA’s Technical Services Division.
– To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials.
– To provide for the required surveillance, testing, upgrading, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions.
Recently obtained CIA documents reveal that in the mid-1950s, scientists at Fort Detrick’s SOD undertook intensive research and experimentation with a large number of “paralysis agents.” This phase of MK/NAOMI was referred to in-house at Fort Detrick as the “K Project” and the “K Problem.” According to CIA documents, K indicates both “knockout” and “kill”, depending upon the circumstances under which researched biological products were employed by CIA operatives in the field operations conducted under “Project Artichoke” and later programs. https://www.voltairenet.org/article166027.html
