Project MKUltra

In January 1973, on the instruction of Director Richard Helms, the MKUltra files were destroyed. The programme would likely have vanished entirely had a clerk not misfiled roughly 20,000 pages of budget and expense records in a separate financial archive. Those records surfaced under a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977 and were the basis of a joint Senate hearing that August.

What they document is not exotic. It is bureaucratic: invoices, project renewals, memoranda approving payments for experiments in hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive therapy, and above all LSD. Subproject 42 funded a safe house in San Francisco where CIA-employed operatives dosed men with LSD without their knowledge and observed them through one-way glass — an operation its own director later described in writing as testing 'on the unwitting'. In Montreal, Dr Ewen Cameron's Allan Memorial Institute received MKUltra money for 'psychic driving', which combined drug-induced sleep lasting weeks with the endless replay of recorded phrases; patients who had entered treatment for anxiety and post-partum depression left with permanent amnesia.

The programme produced no usable mind-control technique. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee both concluded that the research had been scientifically worthless and legally indefensible. Frank Olson, an Army biological warfare researcher dosed with LSD without his knowledge at a 1953 retreat, fell from a New York hotel window nine days later; the government paid his family a settlement in 1976 after President Ford apologised to them in the Oval Office.