On December 23, 2024 the Central Intelligence Agency declassified 20 documents consisting of 1,200 pages related to the MKUltra mind control program which ran from 1953 to 1964. The documents themselves are found at the bottom of the National Security Archive article.

“Washington, D.C., December 23, 2024 – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs,” the National Security Archive said. “The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.”

While the newly declassified documents don’t exactly reveal anything that has not yet been suspected or alleged, they do however offer documented proof the CIA was drugging unsuspecting test subjects scooped up from various medical and government institutions, electrocuting them and just generally torturing them in hopes of controlling their minds.

The CIA’s mind control program codenames consisted of the well known ‘MKULTRA’, but also lesser known ‘BLUEBIRD’ and ‘ARTICHOKE’. The activities of these operations included experiments on unsuspecting individuals using drugs, hypnosis, isolation and sensory deprivation, along with other bizarre and torturous procedures.

BLUEBIRD specifically explored “the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques” which expanded into ARTICHOKE which was where the CIA “first began to more systematically recruit the top researchers and court the most prestigious institutions to collaborate in its mind control research.”

One of these researchers was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Technical Services Staff of the CIA’s Chemical Division and later became the director of the Technical Services Division.

“From his position deep inside the CIA’s secret corridors, Gottlieb led the Agency’s decades-long effort to find ways to use drugs, hypnosis, and other extreme methods to control human behavior and, it was hoped, turn them into usable tools for intelligence agencies and policymakers,” the National Security Archive said.

Another infamous figure connected to the program was Allen Dulles.

“The elevation of Allen Dulles to deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 led to an expansion of BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under the direction of Gottlieb at TSS,” the National Security Archive said. “The new program was to include, among other projects, the development of ‘gas guns’ and ‘poisons,’ and experiments to test whether ‘monotonous sounds,’ ‘concussion,’ ‘electroshock,’ and ‘induced sleep’ could be used as a means to gain ‘hypnotic control of an individual’.”

Grants from fake foundations which were funded by the CIA were used to carry out some of the programs. One of these programs was able to attain a ‘ready supply’ of patients and students to use as test subjects.

“One of these, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, run by Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University, steered millions of CIA dollars into research programs at Georgetown and other institutions,” the National Security Archive said. “As part of the agreement, the CIA gained access to a medical safehouse at the newly constructed Gorman Annex of Georgetown University Hospital along with a ready supply of patients and students to use as subjects for MKULTRA experiments.”

Cornell Medical Center neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff wrote an early study on communist brainwashing techniques for Dulles. Wolff also worked with the CIA in developing a drug cocktail which was to be used with sensory deprivation in hopes that it could be used to erase the human mind. Perhaps Wolff’s most heinous experiments were those he conducted with Dr. Ewen Cameron, however.

“Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded through Wolff’s group were the infamous ‘depatternin’ experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada,” the National Security Archive said. “Cameron’s methods combined induced sleep, electroshocks, and ‘psychic driving,’ under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.”

Informed consent was not given prior to the extended torture sessions. It lacked, in particular, the ‘informed’ part.

“…human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test,” the National Security Archive said, going on to discuss where these experiments were carried out. “…during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences.”

The National Security Archive said that 50 years ago a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh first triggered an inquiry which revealed MKUltra to the public, also stating that Big Pharma company Eli Lilly & Company developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954. The firm became the CIA’s main supplier of the psychedelic drug which was central to the mind control operation.

The true extent of the CIA’s mind control experiments may never be known, as much of the evidence has already been destroyed.

“CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973,” the National Security Archive said.