CIA documents  suggest that "chemical, biological and                                                                                                                radio-logical" means were investigated for the purpose of                                                                                                              mind control as part of MK Ultra. A secret memorandum                                                                                                                granted the MK Ultra director up to six percent of the CIA                                                                                                              research budget in fiscal year 1953, without oversight or                                                                                                              accounting. An estimated $10 million USD (roughly $87.5                                                                                                            million adjusted for inflation) or more was spent.

                                                                                                    Early CIA efforts focused on LSD, which later came to                                                                                                                  dominate many of MK Ultra's programs. Technical Services                                                                                                          Staff officials understood that LSD distorted a person's                                                                                                                  sense of reality, and they felt compelled to learn whether it                                                                                                            could alter someone's basic loyalties. The CIA wanted to                                                                                                              know if they could make  Russian spies  defect against their                                                                                                        will and whether the Russians could do the same to their                                                                                                              own operatives.

                                                                                                    Once Project MK Ultra officially got underway in April, 1953,                                                                                                        experiments included administering LSD to mental patients,     prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes, "people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case LSD was administered to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days.

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LSD was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the  Nuremberg Code  that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent."

In  Operation Midnight Climax,  the CIA set up several brothels in San Francisco, California to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with one-

way mirrors, and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study. In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. The subjects were told that their "trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people being interrogated this way were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this. Heroin addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin.

The office of Security used LSD in interrogations but  Dr. Sidney Gottlieb,  the chemist who directed MK Ultra, had other ideas:

         he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed it could be given to high officials and in this way affect the course of important meetings, speeches etc. Since he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory and using it in clandestine operations, he initiated a series of experiments where LSD was given to people in "normal" settings without warning. At first, everyone in Technical Services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. As the experimentation progressed, a point was reached where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Adverse reactions often occurred, for example an operative

who had received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car that passed him. The experiments continued even after Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who had not taken LSD before, went into deep depression after a surprise trip and later fell from a thirteenth story window (it is unclear whether he committed suicide or was murdered).

Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme

experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in Kentucky were given LSD

for 77 consecutive days. LSD was eventually dismissed by MK Ultra's

researchers as too unpredictable in its results. They had given upon the

notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe,"

but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal.

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However, by 1962 the CIA and the army had developed a series of super

 hallucinogens  such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold

greater promise as a mind control weapon. This resulted in the

withdrawal of support by many academics and private researchers, and

LSD research became less of a priority.

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Another technique investigated was connecting a barbiturate IV into one

arm and an  amphetamine  IV into the other. The barbiturates were

released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall

asleep, the amphetamines were released. The person would then begin babbling incoherently, and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.

Other experiments involved drugs such as  temazepam  (code name MK SEARCH), heroin, morphine, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, sodium pentothal, and ergine.

In 1973, with the government-wide panic caused by Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK Ultra files destroyed. Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MK Ultra impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms' purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial records building and were discovered following a FOIA request in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977. In December 1974, The New York Times alleged that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by the U.S. Congress, in the form of the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the  Rockefeller Commission  that looked into domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military.

In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defence had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behaviour through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the  Church Committee  and the Rockefeller Commission learned about MK Ultra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973. However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MK Ultra.

On the Senate floor in 1977,  Senator Ted Kennedy  said:

                                                                                           The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of  Dr. Olson,  resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

The  U.S. General Accounting Office  issued a report on September 28, 1984, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.

The quote from the study:

                                        Working with the CIA, the Department of Defence gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested  quinuclidinyl benzilate,  a hallucinogen codenamed BZ. Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MK ULTRA program, established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects.

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 Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent 

 protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, 

 and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MK Ultra experiments, including deaths, 

 will never be known. 

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