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The Shadow Dossier — The Program That Tried to Control Minds · The Shadow Dossier

• 0:00
  The Shadow Dossier. Act I, A Fear Born in Korea.
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  In the early 1950s, American intelligence officials
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  were alarmed by reports coming out of the Korean
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  War. Captured American soldiers were appearing
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  in propaganda broadcasts, confessing to crimes
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  they almost certainly hadn't committed and praising
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  their captors. The word brainwashing entered
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  the English language, and inside the Central
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  Intelligence Agency, a fear took hold. What if
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  the Soviet Union and China had found a way to
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  control the human mind, and the United States
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  had not? On April 13, 1953, CIA Director Alan
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  Dulles approved a secret program to find out.
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  Its codename was Mkultra. It was run out of the
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  agency's technical services staff under a chemist
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  named Sidney Gottlieb, and its purpose was to
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  research drugs, techniques, and devices that
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  could be used to control behavior, extract information
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  during interrogation, or break down a person's
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  resistance. Culture grew into a sprawling network.
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  It eventually included around 150 separate subprojects,
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  many of them funded through front organizations
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  so that the researchers themselves didn't always
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  know the CIA was paying. More than 80 institutions
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  took part, including universities, hospitals,
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  prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The drug
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  that fascinated the program most was LSD. than
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  a little understood substance that seemed to
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  produce dramatic changes in perception and thinking.
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  Researchers tested it on volunteers, but also
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  on people who had not agreed and did not know
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  they were being drugged. That included prisoners,
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  patients, and in some cases, members of the public.
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  In one of the most notorious sub -projects, later
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  known as Operation Midnight Climax, The CIA set
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  up safe houses in San Francisco and New York.
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  People were lured to these apartments and given
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  LSD without their knowledge, while agents observed
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  their behavior from behind a one -way mirror.
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  In Montreal, a psychiatrist named Donald Ewan
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  Cameron. who received funding through one of
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  the program's front organizations, subjected
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  psychiatric patients to extreme treatments, including
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  drug -induced sleep for weeks at a time, massive
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  electroshock, and endlessly repeated recorded
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  messages in an attempt to erase and rebuild their
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  personalities. Many patients suffered lasting
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  harm. Some came to him with conditions like anxiety
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  or postnatal depression, and left unable to remember
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  large parts of their lives. In November 1953,
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  only months into the program, a group of CIA
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  and Army scientists attended a retreat in Maryland.
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  Without warning them, Gottlieb's team spiked
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  their drinks with LSD. One of the scientists,
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  a biochemist named Frank Olson, who worked on
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  biological warfare research for the Army, became
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  deeply disturbed in the days that followed. He
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  was taken to New York to see a doctor. On November
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  28th, he fell to his death from a 10th floor
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  window of the Statler Hotel. For 22 years, his
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  family was told only that he had suffered a nervous
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  breakdown and taken his own life. They didn't
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  learn that he had been secretly drugged until
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  1975, when the truth emerged in a government
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  report. President Gerald Ford apologized to the
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  family in person, and the government paid them
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  a settlement. Questions about exactly how Frank
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  Olson died have continued to be raised by his
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  family ever since. MCULTRA was wound down over
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  the 1960s. In 1973, with scandal growing around
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  the intelligence agencies, CIA Director Richard
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  Helms ordered the program's files destroyed.
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  Most of them were. In 1975, as we covered in
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  the previous file, The church committee and a
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  separate presidential commission began exposing
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  the agency's abuses, and CULTRA was among them.
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  Then, in 1977, a Freedom of Information request
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  turned up around 20 ,000 documents that had survived
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  because they had been stored with financial records
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  rather than with the program's main files. Those
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  papers became the basis for a Senate hearing
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  that year. and for most of what the public knows
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  about Mkultra today. The program never produced
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  a reliable method of mind control. What it produced
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  instead was a long record of people who were
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  drugged, damaged, and deceived without consent
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  in the name of national security. Former patients
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  in Canada and their families spent decades seeking
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  compensation. Cultura remains one of the clearest
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  cases of an intelligence service crossing lines
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  that no emergency could justify. This concludes
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  declassified file number 0044 of the Shadow Dossier,
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  the program that tried to control minds. What
• 6:24
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  so you never miss an official declassification.
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  This is the Shadow Dossier. Thank you for listening.