MKUltra
Before it was a counterculture it was a weapons programme. MK-Ultra ran from 1953 under Sidney Gottlieb, dosing prisoners, patients, soldiers and unwitting members of the public; Operation Midnight Climax ran safe houses where prostitutes dosed clients while agents watched through glass. Frank Olson, an army scientist, was dosed without his knowledge in November 1953 and went out of a New York hotel window nine days later. Most of the files were destroyed in 1973; what is known survives largely because the financial records were misfiled.
Part of LSD
12 moments in this segment.
- - Effects on troops. American footage from 1958. Both militaries eventually concluded the drug was useless as a weapon: too unpredictable to aim.
- - MKUltra (1960). The CIA's covert Cold-War program that dosed unwitting subjects with LSD in search of mind control.
- - British Marines on LSD. UK military footage of troops dosed on exercise, losing the ability to hold a formation and laughing at their own radio. The British tested it as an incapacitating agent.
- - The Army explains itself. A press conference on the US Army's own LSD programme, separate from the CIA's, and larger in the number of soldiers involved.
- - Colby before the Senate. CIA Director William Colby testifying in 1975 as the Church Committee opened up the agency's domestic programmes.
- - Mission Mind Control. A 1979 network documentary broadcast two years after the Senate hearings, when the scale of what the CIA had done was still landing on the public.
- - MK-Ultra: The Cold War Experiments Hidden by the CIA (BBC Reel). ) (2019).
- - Poisoner in Chief. Stephen Kinzer on Gottlieb and the programme, and on how thoroughly the record was destroyed before anyone thought to ask for it.
- - Still being asked about. MK-Ultra back before lawmakers in 2026, one of the few Cold War programmes that has never stopped generating hearings.
- - Full MKUltra Hearing: CIA's MKUltra Program Probed by Lawmakers. (2025).
- - House Oversight Panel Probes the CIA's MKUltra Program (PBS NewsHour). ) (2025).
- - Tom O'Neill on the CIA's MKUltra Mind-Control Program (C-SPAN). ) (2019).
