The Declassified Files Project MKULTRA

In 1953, the CIA set out to learn whether the human mind could be controlled. It never found the answer. Along the way, it drugged, deceived, and damaged people who never knew they had been chosen.

On the night of November 28, 1953, a government scientist named Frank Olson fell ten stories from a Manhattan hotel window. His widow was told it was suicide. Not until 1975 did his family learn the truth: nine days earlier, a CIA chemist had secretly spiked his drink with LSD.

Olson’s death was the first thread of a much larger story. Afraid that the Soviet Union and China had mastered “brainwashing,” the CIA launched MKULTRA, a secret program of 149 subprojects run by the chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Its money flowed through front foundations to scientists who often did not know who was paying them.

Project MKULTRA follows the program from its Cold War origins to its exposure before Congress:

• The LSD experiments that began inside the CIA’s own offices


• Operation Midnight Climax, where men were drugged in a San Francisco safehouse


• The “psychic driving” experiments that wiped patients’ memories in Montreal


• Prisoners kept on LSD for seventy-seven straight days in Kentucky


• Gottlieb’s poisons for Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro


• The 1973 order to destroy the files, and the misfiled boxes that survived


• The Church Committee, the 1977 Senate hearings, and the Olson family’s long search for answers

The book is based on declassified CIA documents, congressional investigations, and court records. It tells you clearly what is proven, what is alleged, and what remains unknown.

Part of The Declassified Files, a series from Elsewhere Publishing House on the secret operations that shaped the twentieth century.

Pagine	67
Formato	[EU] Stampa bianco e nero - standard - 152x228 mm - Carta crema - Copertina opaca
Peso	101 gr.