MKUltra was authorized by Allen Dulles in April 1953 and run by the chemist Sidney Gottlieb. It ran for roughly twenty years across some hundred and forty-nine subprojects, funded through front foundations, and involved at least eighty institutions including universities, hospitals and prisons.
Its purpose was to determine whether behavior could be controlled — whether a person could be made to disclose, to forget, to obey, or to act against their own interests, through drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive therapy, or combinations of them.
The immediate motivation was fear. American prisoners in Korea had made propaganda statements, and the word brainwashing had entered English. Chapter 4 explains what had actually been done to them, which was not chemical at all; the agency did not know that.
Much of what was done was criminal by any standard, then or now. LSD was administered without consent to prisoners, psychiatric patients, and CIA employees. In Montreal, Donald Ewen Cameron's work at the Allan Memorial Institute — funded through an MKUltra subproject — subjected patients to weeks of drug-induced sleep, repeated electroconvulsive therapy at many times standard intensity, and taped messages played on loop for days, in an attempt to erase and rebuild personality. Patients were left with permanent amnesia and disability, and the Canadian government eventually paid compensation.
Frank Olson, an army biological warfare scientist, was dosed with LSD without his knowledge at a retreat in November 1953 and fell from a New York hotel window nine days later. The official finding was suicide; his family has contested it for seventy years.
The scientific finding, such as it was, is the point of the chapter and it is the opposite of what was sought.
Nothing produced controlled behavior. What the drugs and the isolation reliably produced was degraded cognition and increased suggestibility — a person less able to think, more susceptible to whatever account was supplied, and less able to distinguish their own experience from what they had been told. Donald Hebb's sensory deprivation work at McGill had found the same: isolation produces disorganization, hallucination and susceptibility, not obedience.
That is a real result, and it explains everything in Part 4. Coercive methods do not produce accurate information because they do not produce control; they produce compliance and confabulation, which is chapter 105 stated from the laboratory rather than from the Senate.
Richard Helms ordered the records destroyed in 1973. A misfiled set of financial documents survived and was found in 1977. Almost everything we know comes from that accident and from the Church Committee.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Interrogation Ethics Chapters