Good evening. I worked for the Agency for 18 years. Started in 1971, Technical Services Staff, then moved to oversight roles. I had clearances most people will never know exist. I'm calling because there's a program everyone's heard about, but nobody really understands what it was. Project MK-ULTRA. The mind control program. The LSD experiments. That's what people know. What they don't know is the scale of it, the brutality of it, and how close we came to never knowing it existed at all. I came in after the worst of it was over. But I saw the files before they were destroyed. I saw what we did to people. And when the Church Committee started asking questions in 1975, I watched my colleagues scramble to hide evidence. Some of them succeeded. Most of it's gone. But I remember.
MK-ULTRA began April 13, 1953. Sidney Thornton ran it. He was a chemist, Technical Services Staff, brilliant mind, absolutely no conscience. The program was approved at the highest levels. We were terrified. The Korean War had just ended, POWs were coming home saying they'd been brainwashed by the Chinese. We believed the Soviets had cracked mind control. We thought we were behind in a race we couldn't afford to lose. The mission was simple. Develop methods to control human behavior. Interrogation, counterinterrogation, creating Manchurian candidates, erasing memories, implanting false ones. If it involved manipulating the human mind, MK-ULTRA studied it. The program was huge. Over 150 subprojects. Universities, hospitals, prisons, pharmaceutical companies. Most of them had no idea they were working for the CIA. hundred fifty separate research projects is extensive - Tom' Thornton had unlimited funding. Black budget, no oversight. He reported directly to the Director. The program was compartmentalized. Even people working on it didn't know what the others were doing. That was intentional. If one project got exposed, the rest stayed hidden.
The backbone of MK-ULTRA was LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide. We got it from Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company. Tons of it. Literally. We stockpiled it at field stations worldwide. Manila, Atsugi in Japan, locations I still can't name. The Technical Services Staff ran safehouses in New York and San Francisco where we dosed unwitting subjects and watched what happened through two-way mirrors. George Mitchell ran those operations. He was a federal narcotics agent we brought in as a consultant. His safehouses used prostitutes to lure targets. The subjects were drugged without their knowledge, their reactions observed and documented. Sexual blackmail material was collected. Mitchell kept a daily planner. You can find entries where he describes dosing people and recording their behavior. It was systematic, clinical, completely unethical. But LSD was just one tool. We tested mescaline, barbiturates, amphetamines, cannabis derivatives. We experimented with sensory deprivation, electroshock, hypnosis, and verbal conditioning. We studied how to induce amnesia, create split personalities, break someone's will entirely. And we didn't just test on volunteers. We used prisoners, mental patients, hospital patients who never consented. Some of them died.
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