MK-Ultra was the Central Intelligence Agency’s umbrella program of mind-control, behavioral-modification, and biological-warfare experimentation, conducted under various subprojects from 1952 to 1975. The program is described by John Kiriakou as the institutional response to a Chinese intelligence operation that successfully planted disinformation inside the CIA suggesting the Soviet KGB was developing mind-control techniques the United States needed to match.[1][2]
Origin
In Kiriakou’s account the originating impulse for MK-Ultra was disinformation: “The Chinese were successful in planting disinformation in the CIA that the Russians were developing the same technology. So we were like, ‘Oh my god, we recruited this Chinese intelligence guy and he said the KGB is already doing it. We have to catch up.’ The KGB wasn’t doing anything. They had never heard of this stuff.” The 1959 publication of the novel The Manchurian Candidate, and its 1962 film adaptation, then “freaked everybody out in the mid-50s” and accelerated the program.[1][2]
Subprojects
The program encompassed approximately six named subprojects, including MK-Chickwit and MK-Seesaw. Practices documented across these subprojects included:
- LSD experimentation on unwitting subjects. The agency rented brothels (so-called “safe houses”) in which prostitutes were instructed to dose clients with LSD and CIA officers observed the results through one-way mirrors — “see if we can control their minds. These are American citizens.”[3][4]
- Aerosol pathogen release in San Francisco. “We created a germ in a lab and we just blew it into the atmosphere in San Francisco just to see if anybody would get sick. And lots of people got sick. 11 of them were sick enough that they happened to need hospitalization.” The release was deliberately performed in San Francisco because the city’s heavy fog would keep the pathogen close to ground level where it would be inhaled.[5][4]
- Remote viewing and ESP research. “Astral projection and moving items with your mind” — investigated extensively in the 1950s within the same budgetary frame.[6]
Destruction of records
In 1975 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee), under Senator Frank Church, discovered MK-Ultra’s existence and ordered the CIA not to destroy program documentation. “And so they immediately destroyed the documents.” Approximately 20% of the documentation had been misplaced and was found later — the totality of present public knowledge about MK-Ultra is therefore derived from that 20%. “And then they were like, ‘Yeah, well, they’re destroyed. What are you going to do about it?’”[7][8]
Kiriakou’s frame: MK-Ultra and Vault 7
Kiriakou’s recurring framing of MK-Ultra is as a marker for the discontinuity between the agency’s twentieth-century capabilities and its contemporary technical reach as documented in the 2017 Vault 7 WikiLeaks disclosure: “Couple what the CIA was trying to do in the ’50s with MK-Ultra and its subcomponents compared to what it is technologically able to do today. And it is terrifying.”[9]