Declassified MKULTRA Files Reveal CIA Mind Control Experiments

For two decades, the CIA secretly conducted experiments on mind control and psychological manipulation.
Launched in 1953, the highly controversial program continued until 1973 and involved the use of mind-altering substances, extreme procedures, and invasive techniques to control and manipulate individuals—often without their knowledge or consent.
When the program’s details were revealed by The New York Times in the 1970s, the CIA faced widespread condemnation for abusing its power and violating basic human rights.
Now, 50 years later, the National Security Archive has released an extensive collection of documents and files related to MKULTRA and several other similar CIA programs.
“Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often US citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test,” the archive stated.
The newly released materials shed light on numerous disturbing practices, including the establishment of CIA “interrogation teams” that used “the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism” to brainwash individuals. Other documents detail experiments where federal prisoners were given extremely high doses of mind-altering substances to observe their effects.
“It is a story about secrecy—perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history,” the archive wrote.
“It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences.”
The full set of documents is now available for public viewing on the National Security Archive’s website.