Twisted Speech and Overreach: MK-ULTRA and the American Public

On June 6, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy outside the PIH Health Hospital in Los Angeles. Immediately after he fired his first shots, several nearby Los Angeles police officers tackled him to the ground, yet Sirhan, slight in stature at five foot five inches tall, maintained an extraordinary grip on the .22 caliber pistol, firing an additional five shots before the officers wrestled the gun from his hand. Remarkably, Sirhan remained incredibly calm in those chaotic moments; one police officer at the scene described Sirhan as having a “blank, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind,” a characteristic consistent with people under hypnosis, introducing the possibility that his mind could have been conditioned through hypnosis to force him to kill Kennedy. In later testimonies, Sirhan persistently claimed that he recalled all of the events from June 6, except for the moment when he actually shot Kennedy. While in prison, several tests proved that his mind could easily be hypnotized into committing acts that he would not usually do, such as climb the bars in his cell. The combination of the tests and his impaired recollection led many to the conclusion that he had acted under hypnosis, a conclusion that his defense team chose to use in his 1969 trial. The CIA pioneered this method of hypnosis during the Cold War in several of their MK-ULTRA projects, a program designed to control the behavior of a person through controlling their mind. Even if the CIA did not pull the actual trigger and shoot RFK, the CIA could have been involved in his death through their development of mind control techniques in MK-ULTRA. Similarly connected to MK-ULTRA, Theodore Kaczynski–better known as the Unabomber–unknowingly volunteered for a MK-ULTRA experiment whilst attending Harvard University. The project, headed by psychologist Henry A. Murray, involved berating the subjects about their political beliefs for hours on end. Murray then covertly reported the data to the CIA for use in MK-ULTRA. At the time, Kaczynski had been developing his ideas and beliefs on technological society, and the over 200 hours he spent in the program likely exacerbated some of his beliefs around technological society, leading to his bombing campaign involving the deaths of three Americans, the injury of twenty-three more, and the bombing of a passenger airliner. In both cases of the Unabomber and Sirhan Sirhan, the CIA may not have actually forced them to commit the atrocities, yet the Agency’s involvement through MK-ULTRA could not have helped the situation. Both of these high-profile cases took place during the Cold War, the peak of the CIA’s power and influence in America, the height of major political scandals in the twentieth century, and the apex of the ideological battle between communism and capitalism.

Between 1947 and 1991, the United States engaged in the Cold War with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). While neither country officially declared war on the other, this conflict involved immense military build ups from both countries, massive espionage efforts, and the use of proxy powers to fight proxy wars against each other. Above all else, the ideological battle between communism and capitalism rested at the heart of the Cold War. Domestically, the Cold War involved large amounts of government interference in labor unions, socialist political parties, and anything else that the government deemed communist and therefore anti-patriotic. The primary source of domestic interference from the government came from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and their various programs designed to eradicate the global spread of communism. The CIA created one of these programs, MK-ULTRA, to find ways to control the human brain, a response to Soviet advances in the field. It was one of the most classified and outlandish projects of the Cold War, revealed to the public in 1974 by the New York Times. However, upon the project’s release to the public, there was no major revelation, protests, or societal pushback. Despite the fact that scandals of similar scale had inflicted significant change on the American public’s perception and trust in government, MK-ULTRA instead caused only change in the government, and was discovered solely due to some investigative journalism. This is due to the other major breaches of trust the American government committed at the same time, namely the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. This overlook tragically undermines the CIA’s gross abuses of power and violations of globally recognized standards, along with the horrific mistreatment of patients in MK-ULTRA. During World War II, the United States government created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to conduct espionage projects for all branches of the military, often acting behind enemy lines to sabotage supply lines, support resistance movements, and launch counter-propaganda efforts. Shortly after the war, the National Security Act of 1947 converted the OSS into a new agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); this new agency now conducted its missions outside of the military, acting on its own. During the Cold War, the CIA became an essential component of America’s fight against communism, sending agents across the globe to conduct propaganda campaigns, meddle in foreign elections, and even attempt to assassinate global leaders. The Agency did not solely constitute espionage agents; they also had several departments with experts and experimenters that worked on programs like MK-ULTRA to aid the fight against the USSR and its dreaded communism.

After the end of the Korean war, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, American prisoners of war (POWs) returning home often acted in a way that directly contradicted their beliefs and patriotism before their capture. According to John Marks in his well known nonfiction The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, “by the end of the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190 U.S. prisoners held in China had either made confessions or signed petitions calling for an end to the American war effort in Asia,” suggesting that some major political and ideological change had taken place in the minds of these POWs, a change not unnoticed by the United States government and its new espionage agency. Some of these confessions professed that the United States had dropped bombs containing cholera, the black plague, and various other infectious diseases (these allegations have never since been proven by any global agency). While the US government regarded these confessions as forcibly exacted lies, they were extremely concerned about the method by which the North Koreans and other communists had proliferated these confessions from such able-bodied young men. When returning home, POWs spouted anti-American, anti-capitalist propaganda (using phrasing similar to Soviet officials at the time), and often found themselves unable to recall key events in their lives. These details led the US government and the CIA to believe that the Soviets had developed a method of controlling the human mind as part of their military build up. As a direct response to the possible Soviet advances, the CIA launched project MK-ULTRA in 1953 to develop their own mind control methods.

While the idea of controlling the mind was novel to the Agency, the idea of controlling the human mind was not entirely new to the US government. Late OSS projects used data taken from Nazi concentration camps like Dachau, and the discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman to work on the development of a drug that would force its taker to speak the truth. MK-ULTRA (a general term that referred to 159 specific sub projects) on the other hand, sought to totally control a person’s behavior through conditioning their mind. While, according to the Harvard Kennedy Policy Center, “dosing subjects with LSD appears to have been the main method designated for the purpose of mind control,” the Agency tried many different methods to control behavior. For example, subprojects investigated how to control the mind through hypnosis, the use of repeated tapes or records that played nonstop along the subjects bedside, and through drugs that could force the candidate to perform a specific action against their will. The specific goal of controlling the mind for the CIA was to create a perfect “Manchurian Candidate,” a term coined in 1959 by author Richard Condon in his book The Manchurian Candidate, where a well-known American is brainwashed by communists into becoming an assassin for a conspiracy. The CIA scoured every means available for ways to condition one’s mind into unwittingly or unwillingly performing specific actions, yet they also wanted the candidate to be untraceable back to them; subproject 7 was especially designed for this purpose, as it sought to discredit the actions or mental competence of a person through inducing memory loss and abnormal behaviors. Across all of the subprojects, the patient experience was frankly brutal, as many tests were conducted on already sick patients at mental institutions. CIA doctors told patients that the procedures would help their conditions, yet they failed to fully explain the tests, thus invalidating any consent the patients gave. Many of the experiments, especially the electroshock therapy, left patients with lifelong effects, predominantly post-traumatic stress disorder. Throughout the program’s operation, senior officials maintained the highest level of secrecy and informed very few people of its existence. Furthermore, almost nobody privy to the program knew about more than three to five sub projects, preventing them from exposing the larger program if they were to reveal parts to a news agency. Eventually, senior experimenters in the program terminated the program in 1964, fearful that the program could be discovered if the projects continued.

Despite this high level of secrecy, the New York Times caught wind of the program and published an article about the CIA’s furtive activities, leading to extensive congressional investigations into the CIA. The article alleged that the American government had conducted illegal spying on its citizens throughout the presidency of Richard Nixon. Unfortunately, due to the destruction of almost all of the files in 1973 (amid the chaos of the Watergate scandal, CIA director Richard Helms personally ordered the destruction of all records relating to MK-ULTRA programs), the investigation that followed used only files that had been discovered after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Times found 17,000 MK-ULTRA files that survived the purge due to being misordered into financial records. Before its publication, no other news source, government organization, or political figure had come this close to discovering the true depths of the CIA’s experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s. The article alleges that the CIA had conducted a series of highly classified programs that were “prohibited by law,” explaining the importance of spreading awareness around the violation of the congressional checks and balances. The article also goes on to mention that the president, Richard Nixon, had not been informed of the existence of any of the CIA’s classified projects, stating that a CIA official “who was [directly] involved in the initial C.I.A. inquiry last year,” alleged that the previous investigators “were unable to learn what Mr. Nixon knew, if anything,” which signalled the program’s illegitimacy to Congress. Upon its publication, this article prompted Congress to examine the CIA’s historic abuses of power throughout the Cold War, allowing the government to implement safeguards to ensure against programs like MK-ULTRA and ensure that the due persons and congressional bodies are informed of their existence.

Due to the concerning secrecy of the program when it was operational, MK-ULTRA forced the American government to hold intelligence agencies more accountable upon its revelation. Once the program had been discovered through the 17,000 misfiled records reported by the New York Times, two separate federal investigations were launched immediately, examining how the project was handled, and determining if they violated any laws. In opening remarks, the Church committee stated that the goal of the investigation was to examine “past events in order to better understand what statutes and other guidelines might be necessary to prevent the recurrence of such abuses in the future,” meaning that the primary objective of the investigation was to glean lessons from the CIA’s historic abuse of power so that the Agency could be effectively restrained in the future. After a thorough investigation of the remaining files and dozens of witness testimonies, the Church committee delivered the following statement:

There is no evidence that either the executive branch or Congress were ever informed of [the projects]. The highly compartmented nature of these programs may be explained in part by an observation made by the CIA Inspector General that, “the knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its missions.

The committee’s finding that neither the executive branch nor the legislature had been informed of the activities illuminates the true illegitimacy of the program’s secrecy from its very inception. Most importantly, however, the finding describes how the Central Intelligence Agency knew that the MK-ULTRA program was illegally executed and how it would be shut down if people or governments discovered the contents of the program, and despite the knowledge that it could harm political and diplomatic relationships if exposed, the program still operated until 1964. Once the Church committee reported their finding that the CIA had failed to inform the proper governmental bodies of their operations, president Gerald Ford issued an executive order that reminded all intelligence agencies– not only the CIA–in the United States that they had to properly inform other branches of the government of their work to ensure that no abuses of power occurred. In a section of the executive order titled “Congressional Oversight,” Ford reminds the directors of intelligence agencies of their duty to follow federal law:

The duties and responsibilities of the Director of Central Intelligence and the heads of other departments, agencies, and entities engaged in intelligence activities to cooperate with the Congress in the conduct of its responsibilities for oversight of intelligence activities shall be as provided in title 50, United States Code, section 413.

This section clarifies that all intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, must follow title 50, United States Code, section 413, which disallows federal agencies from interfering with regular political processes. This clarification was critical, as the MK-ULTRA program aimed to develop assassins that could kill anyone the CIA deemed a communist or threat to capitalism, including domestic politicians. Furthermore, the idea that the CIA must work in tandem with Congress, rather than behind its back, while seemingly obvious now, was a complete reversal of the Agency’s policy on secrecy, a policy that had lasted for the entirety of the CIA’s thirty years in operation. This change specifically emphasizes how drastically MK-ULTRA affected the government: it caused a multi-million dollar government agency with agents and experimenters across the globe to completely shift its policies to respect the existing law. However, while the MK-ULTRA projects helped push the federal government, most of the American public was too distracted to promote further reform.

For the public and experts alike, the American military’s outlandish operations throughout the Cold War offered plenty of room for imagination, yet when the government revealed projects such as MK-ULTRA, the public instead focused on greater scandals at the time, namely the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. In an article published by the National Library of Medicine, psychiatrist Charlie Williams argues that the covert nature of mind control programs during the Cold War required less “dealing with scientific ‘facts,’” rather than the “diverse imaginary” that people engaged in when talking about government mind control projects. Yet, despite this paranoia that infected conversation nationwide, there was no major push for reform from the people, only in Congress. However, this lack in public reaction is largely due to the massive publicity given to the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. For example, the war in Vietnam dominated headlines from when the United States invaded Vietnam in 1955, to the total withdrawal of American soldiers in 1975; approval ratings of the war reached as low as 32% in 1968, and protests erupted across the country on a scale previously unheard of. This massive scale of public opinion against American involvement in Vietnam caused a significant erosion in the American public’s trust in the government once the people observed that the government was no longer a reflection of the will of the people. According to an opinion editorial published in the New York Times written by Karl Marlantes, a veteran from the war, “Vietnam changed us as a country,” he said, “it made us cynical and distrustful of our institutions, especially of government,” emphasizing the loss in trust caused by the government’s choice to not listen to its constituents. This distrust in government in the 1970s, along with MK-ULTRA’s seeming lack of publicity, can also be attributed to the Watergate scandal, the term used to refer to the scandal between 1972 and 1974 when the Republican party tried to cover up the fact that six masked, gloved men had broken into the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex to plant listening devices. The goal of the break-in was to aid the reelection of republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 election, yet the six men who tried to break in were apprehended, and once news of the story reached president Nixon, a massive cover up of the break-in ensued. However, news of the break-in eventually reached the press, and the story controlled headlines on newspapers like The New York Times, and The Washington Post for months until Nixon eventually resigned in 1974. Between the two major scandals, media coverage around MK-ULTRA was largely masked.

Throughout their existence, the MK-ULTRA projects had a significant impact on thousands of Americans nationwide, as many test subjects were not given the full understanding of what the testing entailed. Along with being morally ambiguous, the program violated the fourth Geneva convention, the Nuremberg code, and caused decades of trauma to patients. The CIA’s experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s directly violated rule 92 of the fourth Geneva convention, which states that “scientific experiments or any other medical procedure not indicated by the state of health of the person concerned and not consistent with generally accepted medical standards are prohibited,” this complete and utter disregard for the global standard of the treatment was one of many examples of the CIA’s drastic effort to expand its military capabilities with total disregard for all other preceding priorities, such as the treatment of civilians and test subjects. Along with the fourth Geneva convention, the MK-ULTRA experimentation also violated the Nuremberg code, which was written after the atrocities of the Holocaust and outlined that full, voluntary consent must be given for any human testing to be legal. The Nuremberg trials, of which all of the judges were American, convicted seven German scientists of crimes against humanity and sentenced them to death, and the code was written by several Americans and backed by the American government. Thus, according to John Marks, “the U.S. government put its full moral force behind the idea that there were limits on what scientists could do to human subjects, even when a country’s security was thought to hang in the balance.” This illuminates the revelation that the CIA truly had no moral excuse for these violations, no matter how important they believed mind control was to the national defense or Cold War competition.

However, the true heartbreak of MK-ULTRA rested not in the violation of code,but rather rested in the stories of people whose lives were forever shaken by the American government. Heartbreakingly so, one of the CIA’s longest running experiments took place at the Allan Memorial hospital in Montreal, Canada, where psychiatric patients were offered treatment by world-renowned psychiatrist Donald Cameron, only to find themselves subject to the whims of the Central Intelligence Agency and its twisted experimenters. In the hospital, patients like Velma Orlikow (who came to the hospital for help with her diagnosed postpartum depression) underwent electroshock therapy, LSD overdoses, and dozens of other tests to see how their minds could be contorted and controlled. The American government never tried to compensate her, recognize the injustice, or even recognize that she had been a part of MK-ULTRA. Despite a decade of testing, millions of dollars in funding, 159 subprojects, and thousands of human test subjects, the program never actually found a method of truly controlling the human mind. Instead, it left its test subjects feeling unrecognized by the government and the entire media for decades afterwards.