The big, bad boys

 

These are just bit players in a drama starring the original gangsta of human experimentation projects in the United States—that bad mamajama, the Sultan of CIA psychedelics, the King of Cruel and Unusual—MKULTRA. MKULTRA was the ultimate secret torture playground of the CIA, with a toolbox that looked like a combination between an Abu Ghraib photo studio and Hunter S. Thompson’s car trunk.

You’ve probably heard of MKULTRA; it’s the program that dosed a bunch of soldiers with LSD in the fifties, hoping to discover a new method of brainwashing or mind control. The picture most of us have is of a CIA so totally out of touch with reality that it fixates on psychotropic drugs as a means of creating psychic super spies. We assume they must have been testing too much of their own product; they’d been blinded by mushroom-fueled dreams of unkillable telekinetic übermenschen; the walls at CIA headquarters were covered in black light posters of Hendrix; and that sloppily written briefs about chakras and third eyes passed from hand to hand along with a glass pipe and a bag of chronic.

The reality is, the CIA was established in 1947 with a single mandate—to rock the USSR’s face so hard it would melt completely off. This was the purpose and the prize. The CIA never once lost sight of it.

To the spook community, the Nazis had been a warm-up exercise. The Soviet Union was a true evil empire—a totalitarian monster superstate, determined to plunge the planet into an unending hell of repression, deprivation, and misery. Today, we remember the Soviet Union as a tottering framework—outmoded and outmaneuvered by the West, ready to collapse under its own weight at any moment, and only held together by the iron will of the psycho in charge. But back in the fifties, the USSR was an unbeatable world-conquering superpower. We stood against them when the rest of the world refused, risking life and limb to protect a planet that did not see the danger we did. The communists had stared us down in Europe, were fighting us to a standstill in Korea, and within the next couple of decades they would hold us off near Cuba and chase us out of Vietnam. The spread of communism was inevitable. To stop it, any price was worth paying.

To that end, the newly formed CIA became one of the prime beneficiaries of something called Project Paperclip. This program was intended to deny the expertise of German scientists to the Soviet Union by spiriting them away from the war tribunals at Nuremberg, erasing all evidence of crimes they’d committed, and putting them to work inventing nightmares for the United States.

The agency wasted no time. Starting in 1947, a whole litter of projects devoted to mind control, interrogation, and brainwashing was birthed. By 1953, the CIA was busily trying to discover a means of chemically brainwashing enemy agents. Thousands of citizens and soldiers were dosed unwittingly with drugs like mescaline, LSD, scopolamine, and morphine. People were beaten, starved, forcibly addicted to drugs, hypnotized, and deprived of sleep.

The programs were so numerous, ambitious, and wide ranging that managing all of them became difficult. MKULTRA was launched to give the CIA’s mind control programs a management infrastructure. Bringing these various programs under a single umbrella made diverting black-budget funds and acquiring test subjects much easier. Under MKULTRA, the programs continued to expand.

Counterintelligence researchers studied methods of torture and coercion used by Chinese and Soviet agencies, seeking to devise ways to either defeat them or improve them. Experimental whorehouses in San Francisco and New York dosed nonconsenting subjects with drugs, photographed sexual liaisons for the purposes of blackmail, and more. Subproject 68 induced months-long comas in mental patients, locked others in sensory isolation for weeks or months at a time, and subjected still more to days or weeks strapped into a blacked-out football helmet listening to a single repeated message. People from all walks of life—soldiers and civilians, adults and children, men and women—were subjected to dangerous drugs, sexual abuse, and physical and psychological torture. Drugs and torture methodologies perfected on American citizens were deployed against enemy agents around the world. Techniques developed by MKULTRA, including sleep deprivation and sensory assault, are still in use today.

For twenty-two years, MKULTRA continued its work. In 1973, the program was ended and the vast majority of its records destroyed. We know of the program because of a Congressional investigation and because a handful of documents were missed by the destruction order issued by then-director Richard Helms.

The demise of MKULTRA did not mean the end of human experimentation by the United States government. In 2005, Homeland Security released a “nontoxic gas” into the New York subway system to track how a chemical attack might disperse. Meticulous records have been kept of interrogation practices used at Guantanamo Bay. Physicians monitored waterboarding, offering suggestions for protecting the health of the subjects and maximizing their discomfort.

There is no reason to believe that the CIA or any other government agency is any less willing to experiment on civilians than they once were. Exceptions written into part of Title 50 in the U.S. Code allow the Department of Defense to engage in biological and chemical experimentation on American civilians. The law insists that each subject must give informed consent to the testing—which means that everyone involved has to be dumb enough to sign up for anthrax testing for it to be legal. Congress frowns on voters getting gassed.

These days, it’s corporations that do the testing, though generally on a much smaller scale. In 1998, Dow Chemical paid a bunch of college students $460 each to eat pills filled with the active ingredient in Raid. That’s the price of a top-notch smartphone and a nice dinner, in exchange for eating nerve gas. Nummers!

Earlier this decade, Lockheed Martin asked volunteers to eat rocket fuel for six months. For half a year of consuming a chemical that can impede thyroid function and cause infant retardation, volunteers got paid a whopping $1,000. That’s less than two months’ worth of groceries for a family of four. But then, the rocket fuel was provided free of charge, and I hear it’s quite filling.

Bizarre, unethical, potentially harmful tests on Americans continue, both in public and in secret. Feeling lightheaded? Suffering mood swings? Experiencing a sudden burning sensation? Hearing things? It might not be you. It might be something in the air.