The CIA Crime That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist

The truth behind MK Ultra

If I had told you ten years ago that the CIA had been testing drugs on prisoners to try to make sleeper agents to operate in the world, you would have switched off and thought I was on the verge of a breakdown. Except, that is exactly what we are learning is the truth behind the MK-Ultra experiments.

There are crimes you expect to hear about on a true crime blog: mob hits, serial killers, unsolved disappearances. Then there are the crimes where the killer isn’t hiding in an alley or stalking his next victim. He’s sitting in an office in Washington with a government badge and a blank cheque.

Project MK-Ultra was that crime.

It’s the story of a government agency turning people into lab rats. It’s the story of drugging civilians without their consent, of breaking minds and erasing memories, of covering it all up for decades. And it’s the story they almost got away with.

At its core, MK-Ultra, particularly the LSD tests, was about mastering the art of erasing the subconscious of a victim and replacing it with a new way of thinking.

It Starts with the Holocaust

During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists working in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects.

Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and hallucinogens like mescaline were employed in experiments conducted on Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and other prisoners of war.

These experiments aimed to develop a truth serum which would, in the words of one laboratory assistant to Dachau scientist Kurt Plötner, “eliminate the will of the person examined”.

The worst perpetrators of these crimes escaped prosecution. They fled to South America through The Ratlines, a project organised by the CIA. Why? They had information governments felt would be useful, especially during the Cold War.

American historian Stephen Kinzer said that the CIA project was a continuation of these earlier Nazi experiments, as evidenced by MK-Ultra’s use of mescaline on unwitting subjects.

Fear Creates Monsters

On 13 April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles gave MK-Ultra the green light. Dulles wanted to close the “brainwashing gap” that arose after the United States learned American prisoners of war in Korea had been subjected to mind-control techniques.

Loath to be outdone by foreign enemies, the CIA sought to devise a truth serum to enhance the interrogations of POWs and captured spies.

They also wanted to develop techniques and drugs such as “amnesia pills” to create CIA superagents who would be immune to the mind-control efforts of adversaries. Targets included people like Fidel Castro, and the aim was to create a real-life ‘Manchurian Candidate’.

Money flowed through fake charities and academic grants so no one would trace it back to the CIA to fund these experiments.

MK-Ultra wasn’t a single lab buried in some basement. It covered over 130 subprojects at universities, hospitals, prisons and private research centres. Many “participants” had no clue they were part of a CIA programme. Fake organisations made the work look like harmless academic studies.

The methods were a mix of science and sadism:

• LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, barbiturates, amphetamines, heroin, scopolamine, sodium pentothal

• Hypnosis to implant suggestions

• Electroshock therapy turned up far beyond safe limits

• Weeks of sensory deprivation

• Verbal and sexual abuse

One of the worst methods, known as “psychic driving”, involved putting someone into a drug-induced coma and playing the same recorded message on a loop for days or even weeks.

In San Francisco and New York, the CIA ran safehouses disguised as brothels under a subproject dubbed Operation Midnight Climax. A federal drug agent working as a “consultant” hired prostitutes to slip LSD to unsuspecting clients, then watched through two-way mirrors as the clients tripped out.

He also reportedly slipped the drug to patrons at bars and restaurants. Eventually, the CIA concluded that LSD was too unpredictable for reliable research.

Montreal’s House of Horrors

From 1957 to 1964, psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron ran Subproject 68 at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Funded by the CIA through MK-Ultra, Cameron set out to “depattern” patients’ minds to supposedly rebuild them from scratch.

He used high-dose electroshock therapy, drug-induced comas lasting weeks, and endless psychic driving tapes. Many patients lost basic life skills, forgot their families and never fully recovered. Survivors later sued the Canadian government, with some winning $100,000 settlements.

The Bodies Left Behind

Frank Olson was a government scientist, not a spy or criminal. In November 1953, during a work retreat, his CIA colleagues slipped LSD into his drink without telling him. Within days, he was dead, officially by suicide after falling from a 13th-floor window at New York’s Hotel Statler.

The CIA said it was a bad reaction to the drug. In the 1970s, his family received $750,000 and an apology from President Ford. But a second autopsy decades later found head and chest injuries consistent with an assault before the fall.

Links have been made between the experiments and Charles Manson. When I first studied the case, I could never work out how Manson had so much control over the Family. It appears he was as controlled as the rest of his followers, having encountered the MK-Ultra experiments while in prison.

If Tom O’Neil’s book Chaos is to be believed, the CIA body count could include Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

It is hard to estimate how many people have been affected by the MK-Ultra experiments.

Burning the Evidence

By 1973, the CIA could see the walls closing in. Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra files destroyed. Most were, but about 20,000 pages survived thanks to a filing error. In 1977, a FOIA request unearthed them.

The Church Committee in 1975 and the Rockefeller Commission investigated. The 1977 Senate hearings confirmed everything the drugging, the abuse, the human rights violations.

Public outrage forced the government to act. In 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, banning drug experiments on humans without informed consent. Presidents Carter and Reagan later reinforced these rules.

The Paper Trail Keeps Growing

Even now, the file isn’t closed. In December 2024, the National Security Archive released over 1,200 newly declassified documents on CIA behaviour control experiments. You can read for yourself the horrific nature of the experiments and what the CIA never wanted us to learn.

MK-Ultra reminds us of what happens when fear meets absolute power. It’s proof that democratic governments can commit crimes that look more like something out of a dictatorship. It shows how far an agency will go when it believes the ends justify the means and how close it came to erasing the truth.

They didn’t just mess with people’s heads. They stole lives, erased identities, and left wreckage that can still be felt decades later.

And the scariest part? This wasn’t a rogue operation. It was policy.

---