The San Francisco bacterium release
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The San Francisco bacterium release is one of the MK-ULTRA experiments John Kiriakou sets out when asked to explain the programme, and it sits between two better-known ones in his account: the dosing of unwitting men in a San Francisco safe house, and the dosing of a French village's bread.

The preceding experiment

Kiriakou first describes the safe house. Having decided that experimenting on their own people was unwise, one CIA contractor "actually jumped out of a hotel window and committed suicide because he thought he could fly", the agency turned to strangers: "Maybe we should just experiment on random citizens in San Francisco." Prostitutes were recruited to pick up dates and bring them to a rented safe house, where they were dosed with LSD without their knowledge.

The release

The second experiment used a different agent and a much larger population. "Another part of MKUltra, also in San Francisco, was they decided to to create um a virus or a bacterium, in this case it was a bacterium, that they could just push out into the air and see how many people they could infect."

The timing was chosen for the meteorology. "They waited until an unusually foggy day where the air is very heavy and sitting close to the ground."

The dispersal covered both the streets and the transport system: "And all around the city of San Francisco, as well as on the public transit system, they released this bacterium."

The measured result was small and specific. "And eight people came down with this very rare upper respiratory infection."

What it led to

The success of aerosol dispersal produced the obvious next question. "So then they tried to couple that and the release of the bacterium with the LSD. Can we release LSD into the air?"

The answer was sought in France. "They experimented in a small village in France by dosing the yeast in the village's only bakery with LSD. Everybody in the in the village ate bread from that bakery and everybody went nuts for a day or two. And so that was another, you know, successful operation."

The verdict on the programme

Kiriakou's overall assessment of MK-ULTRA is that it achieved nothing it set out to achieve. "In the end, um nobody's mind was taken over. We didn't bring down Chinese communism or Russian communism or anything else. It was a failure." What survived, in his argument, was the destruction of most of the records in 1975, and, through that, a lasting public assumption that the government is concealing everything.

See also

- MK-Ultra
- Operation Midnight Climax
- French village LSD bread experiment
- Richard Helms
