WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?

 

The Nazis get a lot of credit for perfecting the modern evil experiment, and make no mistake, they did a lot to advance the cause of twentieth-century mad science. The Nazis excelled in cruelty, killing thousands in bizarre experiments in only a few years, and disfiguring thousands more. But they did not invent this kind of human experimentation. In fact, at the Nuremberg trials, some Nazi doctors cited early twentieth-century American work as an inspiration.

In the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for medical researchers to test theories on slaves. For hundreds of years before that, criminals were popular test subjects, and the sick or diseased were often considered mobile laboratories for even the most bizarre theories. Scientific curiosity and sociopathy have often traveled hand in hand.

MKULTRA was managed by a club-footed doctor named Sidney Gottleib. Gottleib was a chemist with a weird passion for poisons, and a finger in some of the strangest pies ever baked by the CIA. He devised plans to chemically attack Fidel Castro’s beard, occasionally spiked people’s drinks with LSD (even when he wasn’t experimenting on them), planted electrodes in people’s brains, and may have been part of a CIA program to find psychics and fortune tellers to use as spies.

Gottlieb’s boss was CIA director Allen Dulles. He was a career bureaucrat and lawyer from a family of public servants. His brother, after whom one of Washington’s airports is named, was Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Dulles was a straight-laced government operative who’d climbed the ranks of the bureaucracy like many others before him, serving as a diplomat, intelligence coordinator, and field agent. It was his vision and resolve that justified twenty years of organized torture by the CIA.

After Dulles retired, two other men held the reins of the CIA before Richard Helms took over in 1966, but it was Helms who would be most closely associated with MKULTRA. Helms was a born spy—tight-lipped, morally flexible, unafraid to pay the high prices Cold War intelligence work demanded. During World War II, he served as a field agent with the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he ran counterintelligence in several countries in Eastern and Central Europe, a job that must have been bloody as hell. He joined the CIA the year it was formed.

While serving as a CIA spook, and then its director, Helms enlisted mafia hit men and mutinous soldiers in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and Chile’s Salvador Allende; funded the destabilization of democratic governments; planned kidnappings; and supplied poison, money, and weapons to violent extremists around the globe. In 1973, with media scrutiny of the agency mounting and pressure from the president to use agency assets to cover up Nixon’s links to Watergate (which Helms refused to do), he ordered MKULTRA shut down and all evidence of it destroyed. Thousands of documents were shredded, leaving only spotty records of its legacy.