Researchers studied perception, behavioral analysis, religious cults, personality conditioning, microwaves, sensory deprivation and - most notoriously - hallucinogenic drugs. To counterpunch, the CIA launched research into mind control methods that came to be known as MK-Ultra.įirst aimed at manipulating prisoners with the ultimate goal of influencing foreign leaders, MK-Ultra quickly ballooned into an umbrella project for approximately 150 subprojects. Moscow had also recently ended Washington’s monopoly on nuclear weapons, and CIA counterintelligence head James Jesus Angleton was increasingly convinced that a mole had penetrated the highest level of the agency. The stakes were incredibly high, given the Cold War hostility and global competition with Russia, the world’s other major nuclear power.Īmerican prisoners from the Korean War were returning home with horrific tales of brainwashing techniques used by their Soviet, Chinese and North Korean captors - techniques perfected in Stalin’s notorious gulag of prisons for political dissidents. To begin the inquiry, Kennedy told Stansfield Turner, President Carter’s pick to head the CIA in the wake of the Church Committee revelations, that he “hoped the hearings would close the book on this chapter of the CIA’s life.”Īs America’s Cold War anti-communism sentiment reached its zenith, CIA Director Allen Dulles created MK-Ultra in 1953 to succeed interrogation-related projects code-named Artichoke and Bluebird. Kennedy, whose reputation had been severely tainted by the Chappaquiddick scandal, also had a complex relationship with the CIA, given what the agency knew about the assassinations of his brothers Robert and John in the 1960s. The August 1977 MK-Ultra hearings specifically explored what seemed like an outlandish idea straight out of science fiction: the possibility of government mind control.

government’s covert assassination programs and surveillance of American citizens brought to light by the Church Committee’s 1975 investigations of the FBI, CIA and NSA. Triggered in part by the shock of the Watergate scandal, they also revealed the U.S. The 1977 MK-Ultra hearings first tilled similar suspicions and were considered a critical pivot in official and popular attitudes toward the nation’s intelligence community. Critics counter that revelations that the CIA and the National Security Agency can hack into phones, computers and even televisions connected to the internet show their powers are still too great and threaten essential personal liberties and constitutional protections. Security advocates argue that domestic intelligence-gathering is vital for the sake of homeland security. intelligence agencies’ ability and willingness to manipulate society through surveillance, disinformation, celebrity culture and strategic news leaks. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and aided by a timely dump of intelligence documents, touched some of the country’s rawest nerves: the assassination of Kennedy’s brothers, the possibility of mind-controlled “Manchurian candidates” and the increasing prominence of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs across Western culture.Īlthough the CIA program officially ran from 1953 to 1964, its dark and fertile legacy stretches to today, living on in modern conspiracy theories about U.S.

The blockbuster hearings that summer, chaired by Sen. Forty years later, the story still seems hard to credit: In the summer of 1977, Capitol Hill was gripped by revelations of the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra mind control research program, targeting unsuspecting American citizens, in some cases by luring them to brothels to be fed LSD-laced cocktails.

Cia inspector john earman