The CIA once bought an entire supply of LSD to hunt for mind control
In the early 1950s the CIA's chemist Sidney Gottlieb arranged to buy the whole available supply of LSD for $240,000. It fuelled MKUltra, a secret programme that ran from 1953 to 1972 and dosed unwitting Americans and Canadians in a failed search for a truth serum and a way to control minds.
MKUltra began on 13 April 1953 on the orders of CIA director Allen Dulles, with Gottlieb in charge. Its stated purpose was to answer claims that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean captors were using mind-control methods on American prisoners in the Korean War. The agency wanted comparable techniques for its own interrogations and even explored ways to manipulate foreign leaders. The name is a cryptonym: MK stood for the Office of Technical Service, and Ultra was simply a word pulled from a dictionary.
It grew out of earlier efforts. The wartime Office of Strategic Services had sought a truth drug from 1943, the Navy's Project CHATTER first tested LSD on people in 1947, and the CIA's Project Bluebird became Artichoke in 1951, asking whether someone could be made to attempt an assassination against their will. MKUltra itself spread across more than 80 institutions, including universities, and ran over 150 funded subprojects. Beyond drugs given without consent, it used hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, isolation and abuse. One notorious strand, Subproject 68, was run at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal by the psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron.
The effort unfolded amid what journalist Rupert Cornwell called paranoia inside the CIA, after the US lost its nuclear monopoly and counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton became convinced a mole had reached the top. Spending ran to an estimated $10 million or more. A 1976 Church Committee report found the materials were used not only in interrogation but also to harass, discredit or disable people.
Gottlieb ordered the programme stopped on 10 July 1972 and later called the whole effort useless. Director Richard Helms had most files destroyed in 1973, so investigators relied heavily on testimony when the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission exposed the project in 1975. A cache of 700 pages found in 1977 added more detail. MKUltra is now widely condemned as an illegal abuse of power that ignored consent.
Source: MKUltra
