CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program & LSD

Christopher Polk / Getty Images / WIRED

When rapper Cardi B unexpectedly stared into space during a red carpet interview at the 2018 Grammys, the internet didn’t blame it on exhaustion or nerves. No: according to some sections of the web, this lapse in concentration was a clear sign that she was the victim of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program; the bizarre blank expression on her face was evidence of a “glitch” in her programming.

MK-Ultra is a wild conspiracy theory that has infiltrated certain corners of the internet. Its believers are convinced that whenever a celebrity or politician acts strangely on camera, they aren’t just nervous or butchering their lines, but are victims of a top secret mind control division of the US government.

The conspiracy theory extends to more sinister acts as well, and is often referenced in combination with other conspiracy theories: there are dozens of Reddit threads suggesting the gunmen behind attacks including Sandy Hook and Columbine were not terrorists or fanatics but rather “MK-Ultra puppets” conducted by sinister forces to carry out these atrocities.

Perhaps one of the reasons the MK-Ultra conspiracy theory is so compelling to its believers is that its roots are surprisingly grounded in reality. If I were to tell you the CIA carried out brain surgery on six dogs, putting electric chips in their craniums so they could be controlled by remote controls that made them run, turn and stop, or that it experimented on American citizens with high doses of LSD in a bid to see if they could “de-pattern” their thoughts and turn them into “robot agents” triggered by key words – an experiment which was disproportionately carried out on mental health patients, prisoners, drug addicts and sex workers as they were "people who could not fight back," according to one government agent – you’d probably assume I’d been reading too much science fiction. But declassified CIA documents show these things really did happen under a program that was in fact called MK-Ultra, right up until the early 1970s when it was officially halted.

Founded in 1953, MK-Ultra was seen by CIA director Allen W. Dulles as a way to study mind control, which he wanted to weaponise against the Soviet Union to gain a critical edge in the Cold War. With communism at its height, the CIA was disturbed by reports that American prisoners had been turned into communist allies, and believed this was evidence they had been manipulated or even hypnotised under questioning. The agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining ways to influence and control the mind and to enhance its ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation. As part of this research, testing with psychedelic drugs such as LSD was common.

According to government scientist Dr Russell Monroe, who spoke to ABC news in 1979, the CIA was looking for “an incapacitating agent; an agent that would not harm permanently but incapacitate temporarily. [Mind control] was a humanistic way to wage a war.” But even if the CIA was convinced it was operating in the national interest, its methods were brutal. In one case, a mental health patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. In total, the agency conducted 149 separate mind control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects, according to the New York Times, which says documents show at least one participant died. Others suffered long-term health issues, including amnesia, as a result of these tests.

The government paid compensation to the family of Jean Steel, one of many MK-Ultra human guinea pigs that the infamous Dr. Ewen Cameron experimented on at the Allen Memorial Institute building at McGill University in Montreal, with a settlement of $100,000 in 2017. Her daughter, Alison, told the media: “My mother was never again able to really function as a healthy human being because of what they did to her.”

“MK-Ultra sounds so cartoonish, almost like the dastardly scheme of a Bond villain,” Michael Wood, a lecturer at the University of Winchester’s Department of Psychology, says, “but its origins are based on verifiable facts and that gives it an uncomfortable edge.”

Wood credits the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, which is about a soldier manipulated by mind control into killing a politician, for bringing MK-Ultra out of the shadows and into pop culture folklore. This, he says, has been further propagated by the internet and modern-day references in TV series such as Stranger Things (where it’s referenced by the scientists responsible for creating Eleven, a character with telekinetic abilities) and films such as the Jesse Eisenberg-starring American Ultra.

“MK-Ultra is now used in a particular rhetorical way when you're talking about something being an inside job,” says Wood. “It’s because MK-Ultra has shown the US government is not above committing horrible acts against its own people. Whenever something goes wrong, MK-Ultra is an easy thing to blame and an easy online buzzword to use.”

Marie D Jones, a US writer who co-authored the book Mind Wars: A History of Mind Control, Surveillance, and Social Engineering by the Government, Media, and Secret Societies, says she believes human beings have had a hunger for controlling the minds of others that dates back to the Ancient Egyptians, who were advocates of the use of coercive persuasion. Mind control, she says, is just a part of "human nature.”

When researching for the book, Jones spent months wading through declassified CIA documents around the MK-Ultra program. “At its core, MK-Ultra, particularly the LSD tests, were about mastering the art of erasing the subconscious of a victim and replacing this with a new way of thinking,” she says. However, Jones says the online conspiracies around MK-Ultra, particularly the ones based around video clips such as US weatherman Al Roker staring into space or Britney Spears stumbling during an interview, have become problematic.

“It’s important that the truth of MK-Ultra is known, but the way it’s become so well known in popular culture has also become a bit of a problem. We’ve gone from this intellectual probing of its origins to just believing in complete insanity such as it targeting celebrities and making them do weird things. It takes away from people seriously studying the history of MK-Ultra.”

What is it about MK-Ultra that makes it so appealing to online communities, particularly when trying to make sense of something weird or tragic? Scott Wark, a researcher in meme theory at the University of Warwick, says the internet has opened up a lot of alternative forms of information but at the same time it has introduced a lot of things into our lives that are hard to understand.

“We live through extremely complicated devices that shoot packets at one another at speeds we can barely comprehend,” he explains. “Not many of us know how these things work. There are so many systems around us that we can’t explain. The world is burning, finance makes no sense to the layperson, institutional politics are fucked. The proliferation of the inexplicable and the polarisation of politics are the perfect conditions for a rise in conspiratorial thinking—and MK-Ultra.”

Wark believes conspiracy theories like MK-Ultra help us come to terms with tragic events by providing a convenient, pre-formed narrative about institutional agency and its ability to be corrupt – something that’s far easier to understand because it’s an idea with so much cultural capital, especially in recent years. He gives the example of Sandy Hook deniers entering into the mainstream thanks to controversial pundits such as Alex Jones.

“MK-Ultra is packaged in a narrative that’s a part of our popular cultural heritage,” he says. “We still tell these stories, in movies and TV shows and comics and books. So long as governments commit injustices and atrocities, conspiracy theories like MK-Ultra will translate these onto an individual scale. So long as politics are polarised, it’ll be all too easy to identify ‘them’, the other side, as this agency. MK-Ultra endures because it tells us a story about institutional power that we’re already primed to hear: ‘it was a cover-up.’”

The MK-Ultra program was officially a failure, with the CIA, embarrassed by its lack of concrete findings, shutting it down in 1973. The fact we’re still talking about it in 2019, suggests Jones, is the same reason we still share outlandish stories about a UFO crashing at Roswell. “With the internet, you have this free flow of information that has taken this nugget of our history and made it into this huge, huge entity,” she says.

“It’s really similar to how legends and folklore and myths are cultivated, where they have a nugget of truth at the core, but are made into something a lot bigger.” She wouldn't be surprised if the 1950s mind control program continues to inspire future generations, likening it to enduring conspiracy theories such as the JFK assassination.

Yet Wark says the fact MK-Ultra has endured is something we should also be concerned about. “Conspiracies allow us to make sense of the inexplicable in a world that’s too complicated already,” he says. “MK-Ultra, with its themes of mind control, helps us to explain human-scale mystery. Otherwise, we have to grapple with abstract concepts—individuality, society, justice, whatever—that are always uncertain themselves. Mind control is easier to fathom.”

“However, MK-Ultra is also the canary for something all too apparent about the present: when it’s easier to blame a conspiracy about mind control than it is to face our political differences then something is very wrong.”

The sordid history of LSD, from the White House to Woodstock

In the late 1950s LSD exploded into mainstream culture. For a time employed as a psychiatric tool it was soon adopted as a recreational drug unlocking imaginations and inspiring some of the major artistic creations of the twentieth century.

For Andy Warhol, David Bowie and a generation of beatniks and hippies, LSD was the catalyst of choice, opening doors of perception hitherto unreachable in everyday consciousness.But the beginnings of LSD are not quite as peace, love and unity as they might seem. Developed by accident in a Swiss lab and commandeered by the CIA it was initially developed as a tool for brainwashing and coercion.

Dr Albert Hoffmann

Dr Albert Hoffmann first synthesized LSD in 1938, only discovering it’s mind-expanding properties when he intentionally ingested it five years later – on a bicycle. Hoffmann saw LSD’s future in medicine. Long before Allen Ginsberg and company ever got their hands on it, LSD was used to treat psychiatric patients. One of its greatest advocates whilst it was still legal was Hollywood’s most debonair and unruffled leading man Cary Grant.

"I learned many things in the quiet of that room ... I learned that everything is or becomes its own opposite ... You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream ... I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship." - Cary Grant

Already experimenting with hypnosis and mysticism, it was Grant’s third wife Betsy Drake who introduced him to LSD. Administered under controlled conditions at The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills to help him cope with unresolved psychological issues he had with his mother.

Meanwhile the CIA had also taken an interest in Hoffmann’s discovery and began conducting covert experiments on unwitting US, Canadian and foreign nationals as well as its own employees. Following reports in Korea of the use of truth serums to loosen the tongue of suspects and adversaries, LSD was recruited for the CIA’s own burgeoning mind control program MK-ULTRA.

The goal was to develop a substance with no taste and no smell which would disable the target, rendering them completely acquiescent, be that in the battlefield, the interrogation room or on the witness stand.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request in 1970 we now know the extent of the CIA’s covert operations under MK-ULTRA. $25 million of laundered funding was made available to the project between 1953 and 1963, funding covert and unethical tests on unwitting subjects.But there are still some loose ends. On one summer’s day in the early fifties a sleepy town in the south of France fell under a mysterious curse. Men threw themselves from windows, women removed their clothes and clucked like chickens and children murderously attacked their parents.

The official line put the incident down to ergotism – a freak fungal mutation of rye in the local bakery – but this verdict still has its skeptics. References to Pont St. Esprit in CIA documents and a sighting of Hoffmann himself in the town in subsequent days draw many to suspect a conspiracy of a much more deliberate nature. Four people died and 50 were interned in mental asylums as a result suggesting an operation gone wrong which the CIA is unlikely to admit to.

Dr. Harry Williams Squirts LSD into Dr. Carl Pfeiffer's Mouth, 1955

Although no effective brainwashing or confession-inducing procedures were discovered during their many operations, the CIA learnt much about coercion and interrogation. Out of this research the CIA’s counterintelligence manual was written, which remains the agency’s base document for interrogation and torture procedures to this day.

The public backlash to the dangers of taking LSD was huge. And by the mid-sixties the substance was becoming illegal across the US and Europe.

Relatively late to the party were The Beatles, whose introduction to the substance which would inspire so much of their output was equally unconsenting.

In 1965, George Harrison had invited his dentist along to a party who slipped LSD into his and John Lennon’s coffee, apparently out of curiosity. For decades, the perpetrator was known only as “the wicked dentist” from an interview with Harrison and has only recently been revealed as John Riley, a Chicago trained dentist to the stars. The band cut contact with Riley immediately after, considering themselves to be innocent victims despite its heavy influence on songs such as Help! And – although John Lennon insists it was a coincidence – perhaps even Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

John Lennon and Ringo Starr in New York City, 1979

Although LSD is illegal in most developed nations today it remains popular with young people around the world.

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and one of the CIA’s original LSD guinea pigs suggested that the authorities were afraid of LSD because “there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control”.

Given the revelations of MK-ULTRA and more recently Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning it might not only be mystical knowledge that the government is withholding from the public but also important information about its own interrogation procedures.

Mark Schafer/Netflix

Peter Sarsgaard as Frank Olson undergoing psychological tests in Errol Morris’s Wormwood, 2017

The Bitter Secret of ‘Wormwood’

Transparency and accountability are essential virtues in a democracy, but they’re clearly not as viscerally appealing or as thrilling as their opposites, secrecy and impunity. The intelligence operative—especially the rogue spy flouting the law, from James Bond to Jason Bourne—is one of the most glamorized figures in the fiction and movies of postwar America. In Errol Morris’s new series, Wormwood, which blends documentary with dramatic reconstructions, he sets out to explore an episode in the history of US intelligence that is irresistibly sensational, the CIA’s cold war “mind control” program of the 1950s and 1960s. Code-named MK-ULTRA, the program involved agents experimenting with methods for gaining full control of a person’s thoughts and behavior using LSD, hypnosis, electric shocks, and other bizarre means—the films The Ipcress File (1965) and The Parallax View (1974) show cool, stylized versions. The thesis offered by Wormwood’s principal subjects is that, during the same period, the CIA ran an authorized, extrajudicial execution program of dissenting agents who were active in the agency’s secret operations.

If Morris had simply recounted the facts, even in a way that emphasized the real suffering of the victims, that would have shocked nobody. They are the stuff of every spy movie, a genre that has successfully turned state surveillance and assassinations into seductive excitement. But unlike that genre, Wormwood—a word for a bitter poison, used by Hamlet to describe bitter truths—doesn’t produce dramatic tension by exploiting our desire to be in on the secret. It exposes us to the baser side of that desire: the narcissism, mean-spiritedness, and contempt that are so often the psychological realities of secrecy.

The six-part series focuses on the death of Frank Olson, an army scientist who worked on biological weapons research at Camp Detrick, a US army camp in Maryland, but who subsequently became a CIA operative involved in Project ARTICHOKE, a predecessor to MK-ULTRA that focused, with brutal rigor, on interrogation methods. When the Rockefeller Commission (established by President Gerald Ford in 1975 to investigate potentially illegal CIA programs, and led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) examined records of his death, which occurred in November 1953, it reported that Olson had been secretly dosed with LSD by the CIA several days beforehand. The existing CIA documents (many had been destroyed) created the impression that Olson had then sunk into a severe depression before jumping not just out of, but directly through, his New York hotel room’s thirteenth-floor window, smashing its glass pane.

After the commission’s report was released on June 6, 1975, the Olson family called the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, whose reporting on illegal CIA domestic spying had instigated the Rockefeller Commission’s investigations. Hersh walked into their home saying bluntly, “You must be the most goddamned incurious family in the United States. How you could have lived with this bullshit story for twenty-two years is beyond me.” He then published an account of what he took to be the true suicide story in The New York Times. The family held a press conference. President Ford apologized to them in person at the White House (Morris shows us black-and-white stills of the family members smiling gratefully in the Oval Office).

While the series contains noirish fictionalized recreations of the events (starring Peter Sarsgaard, whose affect as Frank Olson is pitched, with perfect ambiguity, between being mortally afraid, or tripping, or both), most of Morris’s footage is of interviews with Olson’s son Eric, an aggrieved and disappointed man. His life has been entirely consumed with trying to pry open the mystery of his father’s death; he has finally, painfully, concluded, by the time Morris interviews him, that it was an execution.

Surprisingly, though, the most jarring and psychologically revealing interviews are not with Olson’s son, but with Hersh. More than forty years after Hersh broke the story, Eric Olson confronted him in 2016 (the year before Morris made the documentary) with fresh evidence, including a new autopsy report that, he claimed, demonstrated the suicide story was false; it was a murder. Eric also insisted that Hersh had been taken in, by the CIA, that he had “swallowed the cover story” about LSD, when, in fact, his father was silenced because of his involvement in Project ARTICHOKE and in bioweapons research, about which he had loudly expressed serious moral qualms. After initially dismissing Olson’s theory, Hersh went back to a CIA source, someone he describes as a trusted friend, to investigate further.

This is the heart of the matter of Morris’s interview with him in Wormwood. At this point in the documentary, the subdued tone of quiet confession we generally expect from Morris’s interviews—a style employed extremely effectively in his interviews with Robert McNamara in The Fog of War—and to which we’ve become accustomed in the lengthy interviews with Eric, is abruptly broken. Hersh is clearly annoyed at having been fooled in 1975. Morris has already shown us, in episode one, the young Hersh, in a 1975 interview, taking credit for instigating the investigations conducted by Rockefeller Commission by breaking the story of a “massive” domestic spying operation being conducted by the CIA. With a faint smirk, Hersh says he hopes the previously skeptical journalists in the Washington press corps are now “eating crow.” In the 2017 interview, a terse and impatient Hersh says of Olson’s death:

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If you have a dissident in the system you have a procedure. And maybe some of the people who wrote the reports were involved in the procedure. Maybe it was all one big frantic cover-up.

The Rockefeller Commission report had promulgated the CIA’s brilliantly distracting cover story about a drug-induced suicide occurring in the context of secret government research into LSD. But a defiant Hersh was not going to settle for being shut out from the secret knowledge.

His CIA friend had extraordinary access—by some means that Hersh can’t disclose—to highly classified materials. So, Hersh now claims to be in possession of the truth, at last. But he can’t publish it, he says, because it would “finger people”; it would “turn someone into a Snowden.” At first, he refused to tell even Eric, then he relented. When Eric asked why his CIA contact had told him, knowing that he couldn’t publish the story, Hersh replied bluntly, “Because I asked.” It’s hard not to share Eric’s outrage at the idea of CIA officials and journalists passing this secret around between themselves as if it were their personal property.

Hersh warns Morris, “Don’t make this a big deal about journalism.” But, by the end of the final episode, it seems like a big deal: the apparent symbiosis of the spies and the investigative journalists who are close to them, the way in which they each use state secrets as a form of power. Hersh boasts to Morris: “I do operate at a different level than other people because I can get information. People trust me.” Later, when Morris asks Hersh what Frank Olson did to deserve execution, Hersh responds with a faint trace of that smirk: “Guess what? I probably know, but I can’t tell you.” And he probably can’t, but we’re reminded of the younger man who took pleasure in the idea of his fellow journalists’ eating crow.

Even though Morris’s documentary does eventually recount the outlines of the story Hersh has purportedly discovered—the execution of internal dissidents by the CIA’s “Office of Security”—the feeling Morris leaves us with is not the familiar satisfaction of the spy movie in which we’re finally let in on the secret, but rather a queasiness at the way in which the whole business of state secrecy is exploited in American culture. We feel this partly through empathy for Eric’s point of view, as a son who can’t bear living with the secret now pointlessly disclosed to him.

But we also have to see it from our own point of view, as citizens of a democracy. Toward the end of Hersh’s interview, the journalist smiles at Morris and tells him:

The fact that you can’t get closure in this thing will be of great satisfaction to the CIA—the old-timers, they’ll love it. They’ll love it. The tradecraft won. They got away with one. Even though a few people may know what happened, so what? Nobody else does. It’s a victory for them. You can mark up one for them, zero for us on this one.

In reality, it’s nearly always zero for us. We may get glimpses of the truth, but for the most part, the secrets remain hidden. And the “old-timers” are gloating about it. What gives them the right? Without comprehensive congressional oversight, we can never be sure that we’re being duped for the sake of national security, only that we’re dupes.

All modern states have intelligence agencies, and all of them have to keep secrets. In democracies, foreign espionage and surveillance are broadly considered legitimate, within certain bounds, as are some secret activities necessary for defense purposes. But the United States has only had standing intelligence agencies since World War II, and has struggled to draw the lines clearly. Maintaining secrets often requires active deception. At a certain point, this deception can undermine democracy, so lines need to be drawn carefully and policed rigorously.

To date, the Senate’s Church Committee reports and the White House’s Rockefeller Commission report on the US intelligence agencies have been by far the most comprehensive studies holding these agencies to account that have yet been made public; they came out now more than forty years ago. The House Committee that investigated the same affairs, chaired by the Long Island Democrat Otis Pike, didn’t release its report because of congressional opposition. The published reports contained lurid and shocking information, including CIA drug experiments and assassination plots, FBI harassment of dissidents, the deliberate incitement of violence (including murder) in the black community, and the manipulation of elections in democratic countries. These were dark times for the agencies. The story of Frank Olson’s supposedly LSD-induced suicide was one of the episodes that dominated coverage, shedding light on the sinister mind-control program, which captured the public imagination. But if Wormwood’s claims are true, this public reckoning was itself tainted by lies, elaborately concocted cover stories, and forged documents.

The forces that had been set in motion after the war by the new Central Intelligence Agency (established in 1947) could not entirely be reined in. Nelson Rockefeller already had some experience of this independent momentum. He had been an early proponent of psychological operations, targeting Latin American populations that were subjected to Nazi propaganda during World War II. Serving under Eisenhower as Special Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs, he tried to establish institutions for coordinating security policies—and this was broadly understood to mean psychological operations—from the White House, by creating boards that included representatives from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. But Rockefeller couldn’t secure the cooperation of either John Foster Dulles, then secretary of state, or Allen Dulles, the CIA director.

It is unsurprising that such coordination was difficult given the widely differing rules concerning popular deception established for these bodies after the war. In 1948, under Truman, the Smith-Mundt Act permitted the State Department to disseminate pro-American (and therefore anti-communist) propaganda abroad, but prohibited it from subjecting US citizens to propaganda. In doing so, the act established a norm that, even in the midst of the intense information wars of the cold war, the American people should not be deceived by their own government. That same year, though, Truman published a National Security Committee paper that essentially legitimized the doctrine of “plausible deniability” for the CIA, specifying their role in covert operations with effect that “any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” This gave the CIA (and any other parties involved in such covert operations) broad license to deceive Americans.

Allen Dulles was unrestrained in his cultivation of behavioral science initiatives that would assist in the manipulation of individuals and societies. The dramatic term “brainwashing” became popular in describing this attempt to discover fundamental mechanisms through which human thought and behavior could be controlled. Many of America’s most distinguished behavioral scientists, who had served in the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) during the war, competing with the Nazis to develop techniques of manipulation, then transitioned seamlessly into this new cold war effort. (The Americans prosecuted Dachau’s doctors at Nuremberg—but not before they had plundered Dachau for the results of the Nazis’ studies on the use of mescaline and other drugs for mind control.)

In a 1949 study for the US Air Force, Yale’s Irving Janis claimed that the Soviets were using hypnosis, drugs, electroshock, and other means to extract false confessions. He thereby helped to lay out the program followed in the CIA’s mind-control research. This program was funded primarily via the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation, and, under various pretexts, the most prominent social psychologists at America’s Ivy League universities experimented very freely with those methods.

Social psychologists also studied mind control on a societal scale. During the war, Janis and MIT’s Ithiel de Sola Pool had already begun comparing Nazi and Soviet propaganda and conducting systematic content analysis of Soviet publications. Propaganda researchers naturally continued to receive lavish CIA funding afterwards. Hadley Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research at Princeton, for example, received at least $1 million from the CIA via the Rockefeller Foundation (Cantril’s reports on the social psychology of the Soviets were sent directly to Eisenhower). Harvard’s Herbert Kelman described his work as part of a social-psychological effort to develop “general principles of social influence and socially induced behavior change,” inspired, in his own case, by Chinese Communist methods of “thought reform.”

John Springer Collection/Corbis via Getty Images

Laurence Harvey as a brainwashed soldier commanded, under hypnosis, to strangle a comrade, in The Manchurian Candidate, 1962

But mind-control research was not confined to the attempted manufacture of “Manchurian candidate” obedient spies and the spread of propaganda in Communist countries. The cold war, it was thought, could be won abroad through the capturing of hearts and minds, but it could equally be lost at home if the American people lacked commitment or resilience. There was a great deal of concern within the national security community that Americans were not as psychologically resilient as the Soviets and would therefore be less able to cope with the threat of a nuclear strike, or to absorb a first strike by the USSR. Janis authored an important RAND report on this topic, entitled Air War and Emotional Stress: Psychological Studies of Bombing and Civilian Defense, in which he used data collected from interviews conducted after air attacks during World War II in order to outline research proposals addressing “the problem of providing adequate psychological preparation for the American population so as to prevent inappropriate and disruptive behavior.” The study of large-scale psychological manipulation was intended to find ways of producing conformity to norms of “appropriate” behavior during a thermonuclear war.

The precise extent to which active deception was necessary to acclimate the American public to the horrifying absurdities of the cold war is still unknown. In Wormwood, we are told that Frank Olson came to believe that the American public was being elaborately deceived about the US use of biological weapons in the Korean War. Morris shows footage of articulate but apparently “brainwashed” prisoners making “false confessions” to using germ warfare. Eric Olson feels certain that his father, who had worked in the bioweapons program at Camp Detrick, discovered that these weapons actually were being used in Korea and that this discovery instigated his outspoken dissent. In his view, the CIA claims of brainwashing were part of a cover story invented to discredit what were, in fact, true confessions. No evidence has been found that the American prisoners of war were subjected to any special methods of psychological manipulation, such as hypnosis, drugs, or shocks. Equally, though, no evidence that is not circumstantial has been found to corroborate the Korean claims about air-drops of infected insects used to spread deadly pathogens.

We do know that the cold war bequeathed a branch of behavioral science built around the desire to discover universal psychological mechanisms through which human beings could be manipulated. The most famous experiments of mind-control research from the era are the shock experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in 1961–1962. (Peter Sarsgaard, as it happens, played Milgram in a 2015 movie about these tests called Experimenter.) Milgram led his subjects to believe that they were administering electric shocks to a man in an adjacent room whenever he got an answer wrong on a quiz, but the man apparently screaming in pain was a hired actor. In one study, 65 percent of the subjects were prepared to turn the shocks up to the maximum level, labeled “Danger. Severe Shock.” Both the Office of Naval Research and the National Science foundation were interested in funding this research into “action conformity” in which Milgram aimed to compel people to act “in violation of deeply rooted standards of behavior.” His research proposal claimed that he would shed light on the techniques used by “the red Chinese in trying to extract compliance from our troops in POW camps” (later, in the press, he would represent the experiments to the public as attempts to understand obedience to the Nazis).

In Experimenter, and in Milgram’s own films of the experiments, we can watch in horror and fascination as the duped subjects, anxious and perspiring, obey. Sarsgaard’s Milgram keeps a very straight face (Milgram himself confessed to being inspired in his experimental designs by the TV show Candid Camera), but we can smirk as we watch. The real secret Milgram hid, though, was that his work was intended to confer on America’s intelligence community superior knowledge of how to control people’s minds. He was part of a profession that claimed to know us better than we know ourselves.

Even so, we keep indulging the fantasy of being in on the secret, and experiencing vicariously the sense of superiority that secrets confer. Most of us are, apparently, bored by transparency and accountability, and demand very little of the elected representatives appointed to oversight committees. Errol Morris’s documentary might go a little way toward persuading its audience that secrecy and impunity, in the real world, have a bitter taste.

Wormwood | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

MK Ultra: CIA mind control program in Canada (1980) - The Fifth Estate\

Mind control experiments on human subjects at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute were investigated by The Fifth Estate. Starting in the late 1980s, both the CIA and the Canadian government became embroiled in lawsuits related to the programs and reached compensation settlements with many of the victims.