MKUltra: The CIA's Secret Mind Control Program

De: Jonathan Sloane

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized a program that would become the most extensive effort to control the human mind ever undertaken by any government. For the next two decades, MKUltra funded experiments at more than eighty universities, hospitals, and prisons, subjecting thousands of unwitting Americans and Canadians to LSD, massive electroshock treatments, sensory deprivation, and psychological manipulation. The scientists who conducted this research believed they were protecting the nation from communist mind control techniques that may never have existed.

The victims of MKUltra came from every corner of society. Prisoners were given hallucinogens for months at a time in exchange for drugs to feed their addictions. Psychiatric patients seeking help for depression emerged from treatment unable to recognize their own children. Ordinary citizens were dosed with LSD at CIA safehouses while agents watched through one-way mirrors, and at least one Army scientist fell to his death from a hotel window nine days after being drugged without his knowledge.

When CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of MKUltra files in 1973, he ensured that the full scope of the program would never be known. The documents that survived by accident reveal only a fraction of what was done, leaving gaps that can never be filled. The identities of most victims, the details of most experiments, and the true number of lives destroyed remain lost to history.

This book traces MKUltra from its origins in Cold War paranoia through its exposure by the Church Committee and into its disturbing afterlife in the interrogation programs of later decades. It examines the techniques developed in American laboratories that later appeared in the torture chambers of Vietnam, Latin America, and the war on terror. The history of MKUltra is not safely contained in the past but continues to shape how governments treat those they designate as enemies.