CIA & MKULTRA: "The most intense search for mind control techniques that has ever been undertaken"

When the CIA secretly tested drugs on Americans: https://open.substack.com/pub/thememoryhole/p/the-cia-guide-to-ruining-someones

Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra.

On July 13, 1951, Gottlieb had his first day of work at the CIA. Then-Deputy Director for Plans Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. Baldwin had founded and run the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and had kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. Gottlieb, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. In the years after World War II, American paranoia about infiltrating Communist ideology whipped the country into a nationalistic fervor to protect American cultural and political dominance from a supposed impending Soviet takeover. This also contributed to the CIA rapidly expanding its experimental methods and tactics over the next two decades, in an effort to break down and rebuild the human mind to work in its favor, falsely believing the USSR and The People's Republic of China had already mastered brainwashing and were using it against their own citizens and prisoners. This belief drove the early OSS and CIA and their forays into mind control operations and led to justifications of countless horrific acts.

Project BLUEBIRD was already under way when Gottlieb was brought on board; it experimented with "Special Interrogation" techniques on captured prisoners overseas at black sites like Camp King, Fort Clayton, and Villa Schuster, using drugs to attempt to break their ego control and elicit information. But Bluebird lacked scientific knowledge and obedience; Dulles wanted Gottlieb to get it back on course. After proceeding through training, he was named chief of the newly formed Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). On August 20, 1951, Dulles ordered Bluebird to be expanded and centralized, and renamed the Project Artichoke, which quickly became a power base for Gottlieb. Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence days after intensifying Artichoke's scale. This assured protection and encouragement for all of Gottlieb's future mind-control projects from the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They also wanted a "truth serum", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS but never fully realized. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline before realizing LSD had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency. After trying LSD for the first time himself, Gottlieb accelerated LSD experiments at the agency, testing it on agents who agreed to be dosed under controlled environments and some who agreed to be dosed by surprise. LSD had been invented only a decade earlier, and few Americans knew it existed. After months of experimenting on agents and prisoners left Gottlieb unsatisfied, he sought help from the Special Operations Division at Detrick. With this agreement, the CIA acquired the knowledge and facilities of the Army to develop bioweapons suited for the CIA.

Gottlieb's first 18 months at the agency led to some frustrating discoveries. The drugs he was experimenting with were not the "truth serums" he wanted them to be, and often hindered interrogations rather than aiding them. He knew Dulles, now the Director of Central Intelligence under President Eisenhower, would approve anything he wanted to do, and this increased his ambitions. He hatched a new idea that consumed Artichoke and gave him authority over all CIA research into mind control, including the ability to test drugs on witting and unwitting Americans, which was not being done under Artichoke. Gottlieb and Richard Helms, then-Chief of Operations for Directorate of Plans, wrote a memorandum to send to Dulles.

Dulles formally approved Project MKUltra on April 13, 1953. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. On April 10, Dulles described the program and others like it in a speech to alumni at Princeton University, referencing the new battlefield of "brain warfare" and the battle for controlling the human mind. He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing rather than something he was pioneering himself. Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists, and ex-OSS members to work for him under MK-ULTRA "Subprojects." Those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. He sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in nonconsensual human experiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Gottlieb