For about two decades, if you cornered somebody at a party and told them the United States government had run a secret program to dose ordinary American citizens with LSD — without their knowledge, without their consent, in apartments wired with cameras — you would have gotten the polite smile. The one that means: this fellow listens to too much late-night radio. Mind control. Brainwashing. Government chemists trying to build a robot agent. Come on, now.
So here is the thing about that. In the summer of 1977, a filing clerk doing routine work for a Freedom of Information request walked into a building full of old financial records and pulled open a drawer. Inside were roughly 20,000 documents. And every single one of them said the crackpots had been right.
Let me back up, because this one is going to take a minute.
It starts with a fear, and it’s important to understand the fear, because the fear is the reason any of the rest of it happened. When American prisoners of war came home from Korea in the early 1950s, some of them stood in front of cameras and read out flat, monotone confessions to crimes nobody believed they’d committed — germ warfare, atrocities, the works. They sounded rehearsed. They sounded hollowed out. And the American intelligence community looked at that and came to a genuine, panicked conclusion: the Communists had cracked it. They had figured out how to reach into a human skull and rewrite what was in there. The Soviets had a word for what they were doing. The CIA started using one too. They called it “brain warfare.”
On April 13, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles signed off on a program to catch up. They gave it a deliberately boring name — Project MKUltra — and they handed it to a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb had a clubfoot, a stutter, a small farm in Virginia where he raised goats and grew Christmas trees, and a job description that, when you finally read it out loud, does not sound real. He was the man the CIA put in charge of finding a drug that could break a human mind open. His own colleagues, years later, would call him the “Poisoner in Chief.” He was, by every account, a polite and gentle man. That is the part that should bother you.
What MKUltra actually did, across 149 separate subprojects funded through dozens of universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies, was test every method anyone could think of for controlling a person — hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and above all drugs. Gottlieb became convinced LSD was the key, and at one point the CIA quietly bought up what was nearly the entire world’s supply of it. The acid got administered to mental patients, to prisoners, to drug addicts, to prostitutes, and — this is the line that does the damage — to “unwitting” American citizens who had no idea they had been drugged at all. In one stretch of it, an operation cheerfully code-named Midnight Climax, the CIA paid prostitutes to bring men back to wired safehouses in San Francisco and New York, slipped LSD into their drinks, and watched the results through one-way glass. In a federal prison in Atlanta, a young Boston inmate named James Bulger — the man who would later become the gangster “Whitey” Bulger — volunteered for what he was told was research and got dosed with LSD more than fifty times. He wrote later that the program left him with nightmares for the rest of his life.
And then there is Frank Olson, and Frank Olson is the reason this stops being a story you can shrug off.
Olson was a bacteriologist, an Army biological-warfare scientist, a husband, a father of three. In November of 1953, he attended a work retreat at a lodge in rural Maryland. After dinner one evening, Gottlieb’s deputy spiked a bottle of Cointreau with LSD and poured it for the group. Olson drank it. He had not been asked, and he had not been told. Over the next several days he came apart — anxious, sleepless, telling his wife he had made a terrible mistake and wanted to leave his job. The CIA took him to New York to see a doctor. And at roughly two o’clock in the morning on November 28, 1953, Frank Olson went through a closed window on the tenth floor of the Hotel Statler and died on the sidewalk below. The government called it a suicide. For twenty-two years, that is all his family was told.
Here is the turn. By 1973, the men who ran MKUltra could feel the ground shifting — Watergate was tearing the lid off Washington, and CIA Director Richard Helms gave an order: destroy the files. Burn it all. And they very nearly did. But MKUltra had been run as a budget item, and someone, somewhere, had filed a fat stack of the program’s financial paperwork in the wrong building — in with the dull retired money records, not the operational files. The shredders missed it. So when investigative reporter Seymour Hersh first dragged MKUltra into the light in a 1974 New York Times story, and President Ford’s 1975 Rockefeller Commission confirmed the CIA had been running drug experiments on its own people, the Agency could honestly say the records were gone. Then, in 1977, that FOIA clerk opened that drawer. Twenty thousand pages. And Senator Ted Kennedy gaveled open a hearing that summer where the sitting CIA Director, Stansfield Turner, sat under oath and confirmed it — the universities, the prisons, the unwitting citizens, all of it. The crazy theory had a paper trail now, and the paper trail had names on it.
Nobody ever went to prison. Sidney Gottlieb retired in 1973, shredded what files he could, and spent the rest of his life raising goats and doing volunteer work, insisting to the end that he had served his country. He died in 1999. The Olson family fought for decades; they got a settlement and a personal apology from President Ford in the Oval Office, but they never got the one thing they wanted, which was to know for certain whether Frank jumped or whether somebody helped him through that window. In 1994 they had his body exhumed, and a forensic scientist examined the skull and called the death “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” The case remains officially closed and quietly unresolved.
In 1995, President Clinton declassified another wave of these documents and stood at the White House and apologized for Cold War experiments done on Americans who never agreed to be experiments. So we know how MKUltra started, and we know roughly what it did. What we will never fully know is everything it did — because most of the file went into the fire in 1973, and the only reason we have any of it at all is that one box got shelved in the wrong room. I am not telling you what to make of that. I’m just telling you what the documents say. The ones they forgot to burn.
Conspiracy Confirmed
