In popular culture, the CIA has traditionally been portrayed as something of a sinister outfit, an image that probably dates back to the 1970s when a dark mood of suspicion and disillusionment was reflected in such dread-laden movies as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. This image of the CIA as reckless and out of control has persisted for decades, up to and including the recent Jason Bourne movies. But in today’s looking-glass political climate, where the so-called “deep state” may be expected any day now to rein in the excesses of a rogue executive, the agency has taken on an improbable mantle of near saintliness.
So it is perhaps timely to recall one of the CIA’s earliest, and most nefarious, of projects – MK-Ultra.
This was a programme set up by the CIA’s first civilian director, Allen Dulles. It was in response to what he believed were Russian attempts to militarize the study of human psychology. According to Dulles, the Soviets were using mind-control techniques as a weapon in their prosecution of the Cold War. In a 1953 speech he made in Hot Springs, Virginia, he declared this to be a very sophisticated form of “brain warfare”. But as it would later transpire, what the Soviets were actually doing in terms of interrogation techniques was about as traditional and unsophisticated as you could get – beatings, torture, sleep deprivation, stress positions. There was no “brain washing”, no “sick science”, no mass production of “Manchurian candidates”. That was all a paranoid fantasy. But just to be sure, Dulles set up a top-secret programme of his own, the specific purpose of which was to explore the possibility of modifying an individual’s behavior by covert means, either to make them reveal classified information or to make them commit acts of violence and sabotage against their will.
Over the next twenty years, dozens of university, hospital and pharmaceutical-company research departments became involved in MK-Ultra – not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of test subjects, many of them unwilling or unwitting participants. The whole thing ballooned into a vast, drug-fuelled apparatus of mind-control and behavior modification, a state-sponsored programme that crossed all ethical boundaries.
And at the centre of this attempt to re-engineer the human brain – this “Manhattan project of the mind” – was the reckless and indiscriminate use of the hallucinogenic compound LSD. Identified early on as a potential “truth serum”, LSD developed into something of an obsession with the CIA, even though it must have been fairly obvious from the get-go that this strange drug – if not the inadverdant Pandora’s box it was ultimately to become – was certainly no effective tool where interrogation, enhanced or otherwise, was concerned.
It wasn’t until 1975, when the post-Watergate Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee hearings exposed the inner workings of the CIA, that most people heard of Project MK-Ultra for the first time. The initial reaction was incredulity, then abhorrence, but over time public awareness of the programme faded and it more or less became a sort of science-fiction or even comic-book trope – something synonymous, in most people’s minds, with crackpot conspiracy theories.
It was real, however, and for some people it was more than that – it was a devastating, irreversible eruption into their lives of unimaginable chaos and disorder. A few of these people became psychotic and died in “accidents”; others never recovered from the psychological trauma of their experience. However, with the release of the Church Committee Report in 1975, certain survivors did eventually discover the truth about what had been done to them, and class action suits followed, along with apologies and compensation. But there was nothing like full accountability, and this was chiefly because the CIA director of the time, Richard Helms, had destroyed most of the records relating to MK-Ultra a couple of years before the committee was even set up. Many victims, as a result, were unaccounted for – and many of these, presumably, along with their families, remained in the dark for the rest of their lives – never finding out what it was that they were victims of, or even that they had been victims at all.