Retro Raunch Revisit

JUL 20, 1977: The CIA releases nearly 20,000 documents under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) revealing it had engaged in the illegal operations of mind-control experimentation in its Project MKUltra program. MK saw the administering of psychoactive drugs, amphetamines, heroin & mescaline used in interrogations often for forced confessions through brainwashing & psychological torture. The revelations were first revealed to the public in the 1975 Church Committee Senate hearings and President Gerld Ford's Rockefeller Commission of Inquiry into the practices of the Intelligence agencies. The exposures brought backlash & condemnation for the violations against individual rights and the CIA's abuse of power contrary to democratic principles. During this investigation, it was hampered by CIA director Richard Helms who scared from the Watergate scandal, had ordered files destroyed since 1973 from sworn testimony of direct participants speaking against him. MK had started in 1953 under its director Sidney Gottlieb and was halted in 1973 after 20yrs of especially using LSD alongside other methods such as hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshocking and sexual blackmail (such as Operation Midnight Climax's safehouse brothels equippied with one-way mirrors & prostitutes on the payroll). As well as co-ordination with the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (who had studied the captured records of Japan's infamous Unit 731 in WWII), the scope of activities extended into military institutions, hospitals, prisons, colleges & universities, and pharmaceutical companies all as front organizations. The 1977 cache exposed a long background including Nazi scientists in the early 1940's using barbituates, morphine & hallucinogens which the CIA's predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) followed suit in 1943 to develop their own experiments that saw the US Navy's Project CHATTER in 1947 use LSD in its interrogations and recruitment of agents. In Apr 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles (brother of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) used mind control drugs & the scopalomine truth serum in response to the alleged 'Manchurian Candidate' techniques used by the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War. In the early 1950's, the CIA avoided criminal conduct prosecutions by using blacksites (detention camps) in West Germany, Japan & the Philippines for its use of torture and in Jan 1957, MK had outsourced its research to Canada under the direction of psychiatrist Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron in Montreal. Unethically using the guise of attempting to treat schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and clinical depression, his manipulative treatments on mental patients left many suffering permanent damaging effects such as amnesia, forgetting how to talk and urinary incontinence. By the 1960's the CIA & Department of Defense were carrying out experiments on American citizens and devising schemes to drug Cuba's Fidel Castro. As well, MK had created its MKSEARCH continuation branch in a joint venture with the US Army Chemical Corps. In Mar 1971 there were some 26,000 potential MK agents awaiting future screening and in MK's last year of 1973, the CIA were funding over 150 research subprojects. Due to its sinister nature and the destruction of most of its records, MKUltra has long been tied to conspiracy theories such as the Aug 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning in France which was a foodborne illness incident that affected 250 people in the town, killing 7. [Ergot poisoning from contaminated rye flour in bread at a bakery was to blame but a controversial 2010 book claimed that American bacteriologist Frank Olson with the USBWL was involved in the event, and died in Nov 1953 after jumping out of a 10th-floor hotel window. In 1994, his body was exhumed & his death ruled a homicide with his family claiming he was murdered because of the moral crisis he underwent in questioning his work and that with his personal knowledge, he became a security risk with fears of him turning whistleblower]. Many famous subjects have been linked to MK including Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, assassin Sirhan Sirhan, Boston crime boss Joseph 'Whitey' Bulger, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, author Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter, and American tennis player Harold Blauer. In Jan 2025, 1200pgs of further declassified MK documents was released.