In 1925, at the Geneva Conference for the Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms, world leaders took the initiative to renew the international prohibition on chemical warfare that had previously been affirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and to this prohibition was added a ban on what was then a new frontier in warfare, bacteriological weapons. Before World War II, every major world power had ratified the Geneva Protocols, except Japan and the United States, which actually would not ratify it until 1975. Before that time, though, the U.S. would undertake numerous secret experimentation projects that would violate these international standards as well as the forthcoming Nuremberg Code and many of our own laws, in order to keep up in an arms race that may have been, in large part, a paranoid fantasy. Intelligence reports in the early 1940s convinced the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that the Japanese, that other holdout from the Geneva Protocols, was developing advanced germ weapons, and in response, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first American biological weapons research agency, the War Research Service. By 1943, upon the direct request of Winston Churchill, who feared Nazi Germany was preparing a biological attack on Britain, Roosevelt authorized the Chemical Corps to begin developing and stockpiling biological weapons at its newly designated Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick, a training base under the command of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. At Churchill’s urging, the US began preparing 500,000 bombs full of anthrax spores, which were thankfully, never used. Throughout the war, administrators of the War Research Service were convinced that Nazis and the Japanese, who were engaged in experimentation on human subjects, were far more advanced in their biological weapons research, and when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was formed for the express purpose of recruiting Nazi scientists, those at Camp Detrick took interest. Typically any individual who had been an “ardent Nazi” or had been guilty of war crimes could not be recruited and would have to face a tribunal in Nuremberg, but Operation Paperclip, so called because of the use of paperclips to mark the files of “troublesome” cases, offered a way to bring even the worst Nazi offender into the fold of American scientific intelligence. They simply “bleached” their files, erasing their history of involvement with the SS or the Gestapo and expunging any record of human experimentation. Operation Paperclip is a mainstay in many a modern-day conspiracy theory about the clandestine activities of U.S. intelligence. Regardless of the lack of support for some conspiracy claims that revolve around Operation Paperclip, it is well established that the program existed, and that the U.S. government whitewashed the crimes of Nazi mad scientists so that we could put them to work for ourselves. After all, if we didn’t take them, the Soviets would, or so the justification went. Among the notorious figures who were shielded from international prosecution in exchange for their efforts to further American biological warfare research were Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, whose crimes were legendary. Blome murdered thousands of concentration camp prisoners by exposing them to nerve gas, infecting them with typhus, and experimenting with ways to give them cancer. Ishii, at his secretive Unit 731 labs in Manchuria, killed as many as 12,000 test subjects in some of the most horrific experiments ever conducted: exposing them to poison gas, electrocuting them, popping their eyes out in pressurized chambers, injecting subjects with air to cause embolisms, burning them alive with flamethrowers, and freezing them slowly to study hypothermia. He exposed his victims to countless diseases, including cholera, syphilis, bubonic plague, and anthrax. Frequently he concluded his experiments with vivisection, dissecting the subjects while they were still alive in order to better study their organs at the time of death. He was truly a monster, and rather than see him face justice, General Douglas MacArthur guaranteed him immunity in exchange for his expertise. This would prove to be the genesis of state-sponsored American mad science. We may never have committed atrocities at this level, but as you’ll see, we did not balk at secret human experimentation.

Besides reading thoughtful blog posts, I’m unsure what your preferences are for entertainment. I enjoy a good book, and I stream probably too many movies and series. If you’re like me, you recently enjoyed or intend to soon binge the latest season of Stranger Things. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the new season or even if you haven’t watched the show at all. I’ll reveal no spoilers here, beyond some vague references to its premise. This series will not be about the show, but rather about its historical and pseudohistorical basis. Recently I overheard someone talking about the program, telling someone else that it is based on real events. To clarify, the show prominently features a character who was the subject of human experimentation sponsored and overseen by the U.S. government. This person was referring to real CIA human experimentation programs and appeared to be suggesting that the American government really did conduct the kind of esoteric research and mad science portrayed in the show. But of course, this is only partially accurate. Clandestine intelligence programs did indeed engage in mind-bending experiments on human subjects, and these certainly did, in part, seem to serve as inspiration for what is portrayed in Stranger Things. You heard me refer to these programs before, in my series UFO Disinfo, which suggested that U.S. intelligence could feasibly be staging UFO sightings and encouraging UFO culture as part of a long-running psychological operation. That, of course, was, admittedly, a conspiracy theory, but it was supported by the fact that we know such psyops and programs that experimented on U.S. citizens definitely existed, having come to light despite being the subject of a massive government cover-up. This is no baseless conspiracy speculation. It happened. However, much of what is presented in Stranger Things, such as secret government development of psychic agents capable of remote viewing and telekinesis, derives from a combination of fact and fiction, and some of it, such as the idea of experimentation on abducted children and the opening of portals, entered the public consciousness through hoaxes and baseless conspiracy claims. In this series, I plan to reveal the astonishing truth of what U.S. government-sponsored mad scientists really did, after which I will descend into the realm of what is exaggerated or misrepresented and what is outright fabrication.

Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, two mad doctors guilty of crimes against humanity in WWII whose work was studied and furthered by U.S. scientific intelligence.

After the Second World War, President Harry Truman dissolved the secret intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services, but in signing the National Security Act two years later, in 1947, he formed a new clandestine intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency, to address the threats of Soviet Russia and Red China. Two years into its operations, in 1949, a particular event drove the agency into the business of mad science. That year, the show trial of Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty struck fear into the Western world. Mindszenty had resisted the Communist ruling party of Hungary, and after his arrest and confinement, he appeared befuddled during his show trial, speaking in an unconvincing monotone as he confessed to charges of conspiracy and treason. Senior CIA officials suspected that Mindszenty’s behavior proved that Communists had developed some revolutionary approach to interrogation or even some sort of mind control technique, accomplished with some drug or through hypnosis, or perhaps by a combination of the two. And the CIA were not alone. In response to the Mindszenty trial, the Chemical Corps formed a secret group at Camp Detrick to develop drugs specifically intended to be used for coercion. The next year, the CIA director approved a new project, called Bluebird, that authorized experimentation on prisoners, defectors, and refugees with the sole purpose of developing “Special Interrogation techniques” that could result in “control of an individual.” That year, as Project Bluebird got up and running, the CIA began to believe its own anti-Communist propaganda. An anti-Communist propagandist who formerly worked for the OSS created a media sensation with an article published in the Miami News alleging that Communist China had perfected a mind control technique the author dubbed “brain washing.” Believing this propaganda entirely, one CIA official who would later rise to become its director, Allen Dulles, focused much of the CIA’s resources on mind control projects. Project Bluebird established secret prisons and torture houses in Germany, and later in Japan, at which they employed former Nazi doctors whose records had been bleached by Operation Paperclip, at which they continued the legacy of Nazi human experimentation, studying all kinds of physical torture techniques and dosing prisoners with a variety of drugs, including amphetamines, heroin, and mescaline, all in an effort to see if these Special Interrogation techniques would make prisoners more cooperative, encourage them to reveal secrets, alter their personalities, or induce amnesia. These operations expressly violated the Nuremberg Code that such experiments be conducted only on witting and willing subjects, but those involved justified such violations through their belief that their enemies were doing the same, and such codes did not apply during conflicts with enemy states who themselves violated the codes. This rationalization was predicated on a fundamental error, though, as it would be revealed years later that Mindszenty and other prisoners who were believed to have been “brain washed” by Communists had not been the victims of some cutting edge drug-induced mind control, but rather had been worked over with rather mundane torture techniques and psychologically manipulated using the well-known, long-used approaches that interrogators had known for decades were effective at breaking spies and prisoners of war.

In 1951, amid the fearmongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was creating a paranoid panic by convincing many that Communists had infiltrated every level of American society, Allen Dulles put the CIA’s mind control program into high gear, hiring one Sidney Gottlieb to head the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff—in other words, Project Bluebird, or as they then renamed the expanded program, Project Artichoke. Gottlieb was an unusual fellow, a chemist with a club foot and a love of folk dancing who lived a strange double life, as a spiritual back-to-nature type at home and as a zealot devoted to perfecting mind control at all costs at work. Gottlieb would rise to become the CIA’s mind control czar, as well as its chief developer of poisons and poison delivery systems, and the programs he directed would be responsible for the destruction of countless lives. He is by far the most notorious of American mad scientists, our own Dr. Mengele. Under his auspices, and under the supervision of Morse Allen, the callous former director of Bluebird, the “Special Interrogations” evolved to become known as the “Artichoke Method” and to include far darker practices. Their torture techniques came to include ever more creative and cruel approaches, such as exposing subjects to radiation and extreme heat, and giving them electroshock treatments. Allen unsurprisingly found these practices less than effective, especially electroshock. While he could easily reduce his subjects to vegetative states using this tool, he could not use it to extract information from them, nor could it erase specific memories and leave them otherwise unaffected. It was simply a needlessly elaborate way to lobotomize. Their use of drugs on subjects evolved during these years as well. First they used tetrahydrocannabinol, or what cannabis users may better know as THC, which they referred to as TD, or “truth drug.” But finding that it mostly either relaxed the subject or induced fits of laughter, they moved on to cocaine, hoping that its tendency to induce talkativeness may be useful, but as that talkativeness seemed to derive from elation rather than relaxed inhibitions, it proved useless as well. From there, they tested heroin, but they found this only useful when withheld from addicts, who would be more likely to cooperate in exchange for a fix. Lastly, they turned to psychoactive drugs, more specifically mescaline, following once again in the footsteps of Nazi madmen who had experimented with the drug in Dachau. It is unclear how many of their test subjects at their secret torture houses in Germany may have died, or how comparable their death count may have been to those of their Nazi counterparts, but one document did indicate clearly that the disposal of corpses was “not a problem.”

One of the few extant images of Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, seen here preparing to testify in 1977 about his career with the CIA.

Although Artichoke men did not find mescaline to be useful as a truth drug or mind control agent, another more recently discovered psychoactive drug piqued their interests. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25, more commonly known as LSD or just acid today, was derived by accident from ergot fungus in a Swiss laboratory in 1943. Although very little was produced in Switzerland at first, it showed up on the CIA’s radar, and Artichoke men performed some dosing experiments with it, finding it just as ineffective as other drugs they administered without further, more brutal Artichoke methods applied. Sidney Gottlieb, however, took especial interest in the substance, which he felt bore further study. As has long been common practice among chemists experimenting with drugs, Gottlieb and other scientists used LSD themselves in order to evaluate its effects, and Gottlieb was enamored of it. He marveled at how powerful an effect even the tiniest dose seemed to have and wondered what could be accomplished with larger doses combined with other Artichoke methods, like torture and hypnosis, deciding that LSD would prove to be the key to his quest for mind control. He sent men to Sandoz labs in Switzerland, who had developed the drug, bought out the world’s supply of it, extracted a promise from the lab not to produce any of it for Communist regimes, and then tasked an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, with cracking its chemical composition and synthesizing massive amounts for the CIA’s use. Furthermore, believing that environment and personality played a major role in each subject’s reaction to the drug, he convinced his superiors that their experiments must be expanded beyond their current scope. There was only so much they could learn by dosing themselves or dosing prisoners. They needed a variety of people from different backgrounds, who might be experimented on without their knowledge, outside of the specific context of captivity, which did not provide an accurate sense of how the drug might be used in the field. This required a massive domestic program to illegally experiment on civilians, a program that would be “ultra-sensitive” and require the utmost secrecy, with many levels of insulation to prevent all but a few from knowing its extent. Allen Dulles, now director of the CIA, authorized this program with Gottlieb at its head. Gottlieb named it MK-Ultra, using a prefix common for Technical Services Staff projects, along with a cryptonym that indicated how ultra-secret the program must be.

Some of Gottlieb’s early experiments on civilians appear to have been conducted brazenly, in public. In 1952, some agents lured a young American artist named Stanley Glickman to a café in Paris popular among expatriates. There it is likely they dosed Glickman, who panicked when the drug hit him and fled. Seeking treatment at American Hospital, which had a secret relationship with the CIA, Glickman later claimed he was further dosed with hallucinogens and given electroshock. Glickman’s life was ruined. He never resumed his artistry and was transformed into a paranoid recluse for the rest of his years. Meanwhile, in America, he engaged Dr. Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute to secretly dose one of his patients, a tennis player who was being treated for depression after a divorce. This poor unsuspecting patient, Harold Blauer, was injected with psychoactive drugs 6 times over the course of a month, and when he requested the treatment be stopped, Dr. Hoch injected him with a dose 14 times greater than the previous doses. He died after about 2 hours of flailing. Conscious of the fact that he would need to exercise more discretion, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a corrupt narcotics officer and alcoholic who had developed a taste for the drugs he confiscated, to set up a safehouse in New York in which subjects could be unwittingly drugged in a safe and controlled environment completely wired with surveillance so that Gottlieb and others could later examine the resulting behavior. White posed as an artist or a sailor and prowled Greenwich Village, luring underworld types back to the safehouse where he dosed them, confident that their various illicit lifestyles would discourage them from going to the authorities following their experiences, not all of which were unpleasant. And even when a subject inevitably sought medical attention and declared they had been drugged, White’s law enforcement connections protected both him and MK-Ultra. As this safehouse operation continued, Gottlieb remained interested in mental health institutions as useful environments for more terminal experiments, which could be taken to further extremes. In 1953, he arranged with Dr. Harris Isbell of the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky to perform the most egregious LSD experiments ever undertaken. Using drug addicted patients as subjects, many of them African-Americans who technically agreed to the experiments in exchange for a fix of heroin, Isbell administered lysergic acid in exponentially larger doses over the course of 77 days. Even the most ardent enthusiast of the recreational use of LSD will shudder in horror at the thought of tripping every day for two and a half months. It would be mind-breaking.

A photo of the notorious George Hunter White, on file at Stanford Special Collections in Palo Alto, via SFWeekly.

Astonishingly, Gottlieb directed these human drug experiments with immunity until 1953, when finally a slipup of his own caused him some difficulties and threatened to expose MK-Ultra. In the fall of that year, Gottlieb invited several Camp Detrick men to a classified retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake, in Maryland. Among the attendees was one Frank Olson, an expert in the aerosol delivery of chemicals. Olson was a man privy to many sensitive secrets. He had played a role in Operation Sea-Spray, in 1950, when the U.S. Navy attempted to simulate a biological weapons attack by releasing what it believed was a harmless bacteria on San Francisco and ended up making numerous San Franciscans ill with urinary tract infections, one of whom died, and possibly causing a mysterious pneumonia cluster. Recently, after visiting European black sites where Artichoke work continued, he became disillusioned with his work. He confided to a friend that he was troubled by the CIA’s use of drugs and torture on prisoners, and their collaboration with Nazi scientists. Before attending the Deep Creek retreat, he had spoken of resigning. While at the retreat, he and several other Camp Detrick men were unknowingly dosed with LSD by Gottlieb himself, who only informed them after the drug had taken effect. Later reports indicate that, while he was under the influence of the drug, some of his colleagues may have confronted him about his decision to leave the CIA. Afterward, Olson became depressed and preoccupied. His family worried about him. The CIA assigned a psychiatrist to speak with him. He became increasingly agitated over the next several days, and paranoid about being dosed again or being arrested. Just before Thanksgiving, he was taken by his colleagues to New York, where he slipped away and wandered around the city in something like a fugue state. On November 28th, he plunged to his death from the window of a hotel room he shared with Gottlieb’s chief lieutenant, Robert Lashbrook. According to Lashbrook, Olson, in a state of undress, had run across the room and leapt at the window with such force that he crashed through the drawn curtains and the glass to fall to his death. Outside of the exact dimensions and extent of the crimes against humanity committed during the course of the program, Olson’s death is perhaps the central enduring mystery related to MK-Ultra. Was Olson dosed more than once during the days after Deep Creek, thus explaining his increasingly aberrant behavior? Was he targeted by his colleagues as a subject for testing because of his recent reservations about their work? Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered to cover up MK-Ultra? One thing is certain, as evidence would later show: a cover-up did occur. Police were told the death must be kept quiet as a matter of national security, Lashbrook’s background was falsified to investigators, and Olson’s family was handled by convincing them their patriarch had died from a “classified illness” and paying them off with survivor’s benefits. In the end, there were a few investigations, but it resulted, at the time, in nothing more than a memo stating Gottlieb had shown “poor judgement.” It was less of a genuine slap on the wrist and more a pantomime of one.

Afterward, MK-Ultra continued its work in renewed secrecy. George Hunter White moved to San Francisco and opened new safehouses wired for surveillance, this time staffed with prostitutes whom he trained to dose johns, engage in less than typical sex acts with them, and afterward to get their sex partners talking. It was part of a new initiative to study sex in conjunction with drugs as a means of eliciting sensitive information, an initiative White called Operation Midnight Climax. In practice, however, these brothels became dens of debauchery. George White spent most of his time sitting on a portable toilet behind a one-way mirror, watching sex acts and drinking martinis by the pitcher. MK-Ultra contractors and CIA agents, including Sidney Gottlieb, would visit regularly not on business, but rather for pleasure, seeking the free services of sex workers employed by the agency. Meanwhile, MK-Ultra’s engagement of medical professionals to perform horrific human experiments only increased, insulated through an academic organization, The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which they used as a front to dispense “grant money.” One contractor, who like others was unaware that he actually worked for the CIA, was Donald Ewen Cameron, president of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. At facilities in Canada, Cameron conducted experiments that on their surface seem very similar to those depicted in the fictional program Stranger Things, as they involved sensory deprivation, a procedure that is shown numerous times on the show. But Cameron’s work is far more horrific than it appears in Stranger Things. Believing that he needed to “depattern” the minds of his subjects before they’d be susceptible to the “psychic driving” he attempted in his mind control experiments, Cameron’s subjects were first sedated and then subjected to extreme periods of sensory deprivation. These were not a matter of hours but rather of weeks, and sometimes months, locked in dark water tanks. It resulted in patients forgetting how to walk. Afterward, he administered electroshocks far stronger than any other psychiatrists dared. Finally, the patients were fed LSD and fitted with helmets that played recorded phrases like “My mother hates me” on repeat. These horrifying experiments typically resulted in complete mental breakdown, with subjects reverting to infantile development stages. These were otherwise normal individuals who had come to him for help with issues like anxiety and post-partum depression. The destruction of their minds was nothing less than a state sponsored crime against humanity.

Donald Ewen Cameron, prominent psychologist and conductor of horrific torturous medical experiments funded by the CIA.

There is no telling how many lives were destroyed by the MK-Ultra program over the course of its existence, as after it was finally shut down, having failed to produce any working technological or pharmacological mind control techniques, the CIA had all records relating to the project destroyed during the panic caused by Watergate. What we know only emerged later in the 1970s, when the Presidential Rockefeller Commission, the Congressional Church Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were formally tasked with investigating CIA crimes and abuses. By that time, Gottlieb had retired, and when questioned, he claimed to have little recall of the project’s activities. In 1976, journalist John Marks obtained boxes of redacted files under the Freedom of Information Act and wrote the first definitive exposé of MK-Ultra, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. By that time, the wider effects of Gottlieb’s experiments had been felt by everyone in America, if not the world, as it became clear that his encouragement of experimentation with hallucinogens extended to universities, where major counter-culture figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey helped to spread its use as a recreational drug and means of enlightenment among the general populace. And as the years have passed, more and more people have come forward to sue the CIA for being the unwitting subjects of their experiments, including Frank Olson’s family, who went on a crusade against the agency. We have further learned that their psychological experiments may have unexpectedly resulted in mass murders. It was in later years revealed that mafia figure Frank “Whitey” Bulger had been extensively experimented on early in his prolific criminal career, during which he murdered 19 or more. The Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was also part of an abusive, CIA sponsored psychological experiment during his time at Harvard, long before his reign of terror. And there is even a conspiracy theory that Charles Manson was the subject of CIA experiments, although I am not prepared right now to evaluate those claims, which smack a bit of unsupported conspiracy speculation. Suffice it to say that the extent of the terrible effects of these Nazi-esque crimes committed by U.S. intelligence can only be speculated on. And at the end of John Marks’ revelatory book, he speculates about the different directions that MK-Ultra mind control research may have taken afterward, under some other classified cryptonym. He mentions genetic engineering, a science that we know has grown by leaps and bounds, as well as brain stimulation, the domination of subjects by surgically inserting electrodes to remotely stimulate specific areas of the brain, a deeply unsettling prospect. Lastly, he suggests that they may have directed their funding toward secret research with a more fantastical focus, such as extra-sensory perception or other psychic abilities. This notion is certainly reflected in fiction like Stranger Things, which promotes the idea of secret government research in this area, and in Part Two, we’ll see to what extent this is, surprisingly, quite true.

Stranger Things Have Happened: MK-Ultra and CIA Mind Control

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