Gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, a former organized crime boss, was used as a test subject in 1957 while an inmate at the Atlanta penitentiary. He explained he was one of eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state while in MKUltra. (Credit: Daily Mail)
Newly declassified bombshell records of an infamous CIA mind control program, MKUltra, reveal how Americans were drugged and tortured more than 60 years ago.
The collection of more than 1,200 pages detail how the CIA used induced sleep, electroshocks and ‘psychic driving’ on drugged subjects who were psychologically tortured for weeks or months to reprogram their minds.
The subjects included criminals, mental patients and drug addicts, but also Army soldiers and average citizens who were given drugs without their knowledge.
A total of 144 projects were conducted from 1953 to 1964, aimed at developing procedures and drugs that could be used during interrogations, weakening individuals and forcing confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
The newly declassified pages detail how the CIA used methods such as induced sleep, electroshocks, and ‘psychic driving,’ under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months to reprogram their minds.
While it has long been said that subjects only included prisoners, mental patients and drug addicts, one report showed that some CIA and Army officials and ‘subjects in normal life settings’ were ‘unwittingly’ given LSD over the decade-long experiment.
In a newly unsealed document from 1956, researchers were developing ‘an anti-interrogation drug’ by testing ‘materials capable of producing alterations in the human central nervous system which are reflected as alterations in human behavior.’
A memo about a classified meeting showed that the CIA contemplated the possibility of testing on foreign nationals,’ but decided that ‘unwitting testing on American citizens must be continued’ instead. (Read more: The Daily Mail, 1/6/2025) (Archive)