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MK-Ultra Facts

MK-Ultra Facts
MK-Ultra, officially known as "Project MK-Ultra," was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) top secret program from 1953 to 1973 that focused on controlling the minds of "subjects." The CIA agents preformed the project on both knowing and unknowing subjects in the United States and Canada using a variety of techniques and supplements that included: hypnosis, sleep and sensory deprivation, and the use of mind altering drugs, most notably lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD, or more commonly known as "acid"). The program was envisioned by CIA director Allen Dulles as a Cold War weapon to battle known Soviet brainwashing techniques that were used on captured American POWs during the Korean War. CIA agents and chemist Sidney Gottlieb was made the head of the program for most of its duration and was major factor in the use of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. Although the intent of MK-Ultra was to extract information from communist bloc spies, the experiments on American and Canadian citizens left many of the dead or with permanent psychological damage. MK-Ultra first came to the public attention in 1974 when an article in The New York Times alleged that the CIA had carried out mind control experiments. Although most of the MK-Ultra files had been destroyed at that point, there were enough witnesses to testify in the congressional Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission in 1975 to its existence.
Interesting MK-Ultra Facts:
"MK" was a CIA designation that the program was part of the Office of Technical Service. "Ultra" was a designation for it status being the most secretive in the CIA.
Early MK-Ultra experiments on unwitting subjects were usually carried out on mental patients, prisoners, and others in mental institutions. Volunteers for the project were often recruited from some of America's top college campuses.
The MK-Ultra program has been the subject of several movies, including: Conspiracy Theory, Firestarter, and American Ultra.
"Operation Midnight Climax" was the name of a MK-Ultra operation that involved the CIA running brothels in San Francisco and New York from 1954 to 1965. The agents would drug the johns with LSD.
Gottlieb was a somewhat unlikely person to run MK-Ultra. The son of Jewish immigrants, Gottlieb was a stutterer and had a club foot, which got him a deferment in World War II. He was, though, an excellent chemist and an expert on poisons, which eventually caught the eye of the CIA.
Experiments on Canadian citizens were conducted by British psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron from 1957 to 1964. The experiments became known as the "Montreal experiments."
Since documents pertaining to MK-Ultra were destroyed by CIA officials in the early 1970s, it's impossible to say how many people died of overdoses or suicides due to the project. Frank Olson, an CIA agent who worked on the project and was surreptitiously dosed with LSD, jumped out a window to his death in 1953. The CIA admitted in a 1975 that it was responsible for Olson's death.


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