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. Kiriakou describes it as a very broad program encompassing ESP, astral projection, LSD experimentation, and mind reading, run out of offices staffed entirely by operational psychiatrists and psychologists — practitioners who put their findings directly into use on CIA operations, not academic researchers.[1][2][3]
Origin
Before the CIA itself existed, the Office of Strategic Services convinced President Truman to allow the recruitment of Nazi scientists to the United States. Kiriakou notes this program is popularly remembered only for the rocket scientists who went on to help create NASA, but it also brought over scientists who had experimented on concentration-camp prisoners in pursuit of mind control, based on a Nazi belief, developed in the early 1940s, that a person could be brainwashed into carrying out any instructed act with no capacity to resist and no memory of it afterward. When the CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947, it decided to continue this research — conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, a facility publicly known only for explosives research — just as LSD was being independently synthesized in Switzerland.[4][5]
In Kiriakou’s account the originating impulse for MK-Ultra proper was Chinese disinformation. In approximately 1951, the Chinese told the CIA that the Soviets were using LSD to develop a mind-control drug: “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 claim was false — it was in fact the Chinese, not the Russians, who had an LSD and remote-viewing program, but the CIA had no sources inside China at the time to check the story.[6][7][8][9] In a separate telling, Kiriakou frames the same episode not as Chinese disinformation reaching the CIA passively but as a recruited Soviet KGB officer directly telling the agency the Russians were developing the technology — a false claim, since the Chinese, not the Russians, actually had it. He adds context for why the deception worked: the CIA itself was only about five years old at the time, and China had only been Communist for three years, so the agency simply had no footing in China yet.[10] The CIA panicked, and by 1952 had launched MK-Ultra, beginning with LSD experiments. The 1959 publication of the novel The Manchurian Candidate, and its 1962 film adaptation, “freaked everybody out in the mid-50s” and accelerated the program.[6][7] Kiriakou dates the program’s run from roughly 1952 to 1975, and is emphatic that MK-Ultra itself ended that year even as successor operations, such as Operation Mockingbird Climax, continued; in one interview he gives a broader outer date range of 1945 to the 1975 Church Committee hearings.[11][12][13] He calls MK-Ultra “a dark, oily stain on the history of the country,” and dismisses claims that MK-Ultra-style mind control operations have continued past 1975 as simply not part of reality — while noting the public has, in the end, only the agency’s own word that they have not.[14][15][16]
A related sub-operation, Project Artichoke, ran from roughly 1951 to 1956 and focused on behavioral control, interrogation techniques, and psychological manipulation, including an attempt to develop a truth serum by breaking into a Swiss vaccine developer, stealing a formula, and trying to manipulate it into something that could be administered by injection to make a subject involuntarily tell the truth — intended for use on Russian and Chinese targets. As with the main MK-Ultra origin story, the CIA’s motivating fear here traced to a recruited Soviet intelligence officer who told the agency the Russians were developing this kind of technology; that was false, and the real developer was China. Project Artichoke’s own version of the San Francisco safe-house operation — recruiting prostitutes to bring clients back to a rented house to be dosed with LSD — closely mirrors what is elsewhere described as Operation Midnight Climax.[17][18]
Kiriakou has also cited MK-Ultra as proof that so-called “conspiracy theories” are sometimes accurate. He stated that the term itself was invented by a former CIA director as a deliberate tool to discredit people who raised uncomfortable truths by making them sound like “crazy people” — and presented MK-Ultra as a program that was real, documented, and exactly the kind the agency had dismissed as fantasy before it was exposed.[19]
LSD experimentation
Unwitting subjects and CIA-run brothels
The agency rented brothels — so-called “safe houses” — in which prostitutes were instructed to dose clients with LSD while CIA officers observed the results through one-way mirrors, in what Kiriakou described as an explicit effort to “see if we can control their minds. These are American citizens.” The San Francisco safe-house phase later became known as Operation Midnight Climax, run under CIA officer George Hunter White. Kiriakou has separately described this sub-operation as recruiting “an army of prostitutes” to bring men back to the safe house specifically to be dosed with LSD to see whether they would reveal their most deeply held secrets.[20][21][22][23][24] LSD itself, Kiriakou says, had been synthesized by chemist Albert Hofmann at the Swiss company Sandoz, whose research he believes was covertly funded by the CIA through the German conglomerate IG Farben — the same company, he notes, that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi concentration camps.[25] One of the program’s most notoriously cruel doctors, Ewen Cameron, ran experiments out of a Montreal hospital; Kiriakou notes the same Cameron had, earlier in his career, helped expose Josef Mengele’s experiments as one of the investigators at the Nuremberg trials.[26]
Employee dosing and suicides
The first phase of the LSD experiments targeted CIA employees themselves, dosed without their knowledge. Several committed suicide; Kiriakou described subjects jumping out of windows and off bridges — and, in a separate account, off balconies — including one who jumped from a hotel window. Alarmed by these deaths, the CIA shifted the dosing from its own employees to the unwitting public in San Francisco.[27][28][29] Kiriakou also cited the death of James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, as connected to the program by some accounts, though he presented this as a matter of historical debate rather than established fact.[28] In a separate telling, Kiriakou says the unwitting dosing of CIA employees killed a number of people outright, including several CIA officers and enlisted members of the U.S. military.[30]
The Pont-Saint-Esprit bakery incident
Among the most-cited MK-Ultra–era pathogen and drug releases is the case of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, where in 1951 — per the long-circulating allegation — the CIA dosed the local bread supply with LSD, producing a village-wide outbreak of psychosis in which several people died. “We’ve all read the stories about this bakery in France where apparently we dosed the bread and everybody in the village went nuts.” Kiriakou describes the operation as putting the LSD into the flour supplied to the village’s only bakery, so that the entire village ate the tainted bread and, in his words, “went nuts” — an incident he notes has its own Wikipedia page. Kiriakou elsewhere cites this as the French village bread experiment, listing it alongside the theft of the LSD formula from Switzerland among the program’s sub-projects.[31][32][33] In a separate telling, Kiriakou puts the death toll at “a couple of people” with hundreds more sickened, and says the incident was only confirmed as CIA activity in the late 1990s, decades after it was originally blamed on mold in the rye.[34]
The Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and the Manson connection
A specific institutional outgrowth of MK-Ultra’s LSD-experimentation program was the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco, which — per Kiriakou’s reading of Tom O’Neill’s investigative book Chaos — was operated by the CIA as a covert experimental site. The clinic’s tenure ended approximately one month after the publication of Chaos in 2019.[35] Per the same source, the agency’s San Francisco LSD operations were “totally connected to Manson” — Charles Manson and his commune having been participants in, or subjects of, experimental dosing under MK-Ultra sub-projects. Kiriakou’s framing: “It’s so nuts. And they wouldn’t have even known about that until they found a stash of documents that connected it all together.”[35] Separately, Kiriakou has said MK-Ultra ran experiments at universities across the country, especially in California, and that there are unprovable rumors that Manson and Sirhan Sirhan may have been involved — unprovable because most of the records were destroyed.[36][37] One university participant is confirmed rather than rumored: Kiriakou says Ted Kaczynski, the future Unabomber, was a confirmed, contract-signing participant in MK-Ultra experiments conducted at Harvard University in the 1960s.[38]
Biological-warfare experiments
San Francisco aerosol test
The CIA waited for an unusually heavy fog day in San Francisco — chosen deliberately because the fog would keep a pathogen close to ground level, where it would be inhaled — and released a virus into the atmosphere to test whether it would cause illness: “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.” Kiriakou has separately described the germ as driven around town by pickup trucks fitted with pipes that released it directly into the fog. Eleven people went to emergency rooms with a rare respiratory infection serious enough to require hospitalization. Kiriakou described the internal reaction as high-fives: “Yeah, it works.”[39][21][40][41]
In a separate telling, Kiriakou dates this experiment to the late 1950s and specifies the illness as a rare urinary tract infection doctors had never seen before, floating internal speculation about weaponizing the same virus in Shanghai Harbor or Moscow. The safe-house prostitution operation, in this account, is tied directly to the work of CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, whose experiments supplied the LSD and other drugs — roughly six different medications — used in the attempt to develop a truth serum.[42][43] Kiriakou has given yet another location for a closely matching aerosol test: releasing a germ into the fog over New York Harbor, after which eleven people went to the doctor with the same rare urinary tract infection — an incident the CIA later confirmed it had caused, while noting the aerosol still had not achieved any mind-control effect.[44]
Cancer weapons and remote viewing
Kiriakou stated that discussions within MK-Ultra also included the development of cancer-inducing weapons.[45] The program’s ESP research extended to remote viewing — “astral projection and moving items with your mind” — investigated extensively in the 1950s within the same budgetary frame.[46]
Behavioral-control experiments and subprojects
The program encompassed approximately six named subprojects, including MK-Chickwit and MK-Seesaw.[20][47] Kiriakou described one documented experiment in which a subject was hypnotized and told to hold his arm in the air; the subject held the arm raised for two hours, and when brought out of the hypnotic state, immediately vomited. Kiriakou presented this as an example of the level of behavioral control the program was attempting to develop and document.[48]
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 explicitly ordered the CIA not to destroy program documentation. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MK-Ultra files that same day — on the afternoon after he had testified before the committee and been given that order. “And so they immediately destroyed the documents.” Kiriakou puts the resulting toll at 85% of the documents destroyed, leaving only 15% to survive and inform what is known about the program today.[49][50][51][52] Helms was held in contempt of Congress and fined approximately $150.[53]
Kiriakou has given varying estimates of how much documentation survived: approximately 20%, having been misplaced in a separate location rather than destroyed;[54] approximately 15%, misfiled in a financial-records warehouse and not found until a FOIA request decades later;[45][55][51] and, in a later account, that 80% of records were destroyed after Helms was ordered to preserve them, or that Manson/Sirhan rumors are unprovable because approximately 85% of the records were destroyed.[56][57][36] In all versions, the totality of present public knowledge about MK-Ultra derives from the surviving remnant; Kiriakou has described the widely known account as “a sanitized version.” “And then they were like, ‘Yeah, well, they’re destroyed. What are you going to do about it?’”[54][53]
Kiriakou explains the program’s name as follows: the “MK” digraph marked a scientific-experimentation operation, and “Ultra” was picked at random — by a computer, in one telling.[58][59]
Legacy and Kiriakou’s framing
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.”[60] Discussions inside MK-Ultra also extended to using spiritual and supernatural phenomena as a potential weapon between 1952 and 1975, but Kiriakou says the research got so far outside conventional science, without anything Congress could act on, that the agency simply walked away from it.[61]
Kiriakou draws a sharp line between the historical program and his own tenure: he says the CIA experimented with drugs roughly from 1952 until 1975, with the heaviest focus on LSD ending around 1975, and that when he himself started at the CIA in January 1990, he never once heard anything about any ongoing drug programs.[62] He has said a former colleague of his was arrested and served six and a half years in prison for giving people DMT without their knowledge — an isolated, individual crime rather than an agency program, in his telling.[63]