The search for Mind Control: MK-NAOMI, Bluebird, Artichoke and MK-ULTRA
- John Zek
- May 20
- 10 min read
“The infusion of money, combined with the advances in medicine and science during World War II, spawned an orgy of human experimentation in almost every medical field in the postwar years."
-Eileene Welsome, The Plutonium Files
Paranoia and threat of war
As John Marks writes: The apprehensions of the Cold War do not provide a moral or legal shield for such acts, but they do help explain them.[i] Throughout the 50s and 60s the threat of a Third World War hung as an ever-present threat, and rightly so, brinkmanship had seen events almost spiral perilously out of control.
As the War crime trials of Nuremberg were held, which revealed to the world the extent of Nazi sadism both the Soviet Union and U.S franticly seized Nazi scientists to work in their departments. As seven of the accused in the Doctor’s trials were hanged for their unauthorised human experimentation, scientists in the U.S and U.K were being debriefed by doctors from those camps, testing captured Nazi nerve agents on their own soldiers and planning a whole battery of human experiments with similar callous regard. As the Nuremberg code which outlined permissible human experimentation was being created the ex-Nazi Dr Kurt Blome discussed the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on POWs at a CIA black site in West Germany.
The experiments that occurred across the world in both East and West (although much more has been declassified in the West than in former Soviet states) were done independently from one another
The early Cold War saw the military focus entirely on nuclear weapons, believing like many this was the future of warfare.
With the seizure of tons of Tabun, the secret nerve agent developed by the Nazis, scientists at Edgewood Arsenal tested the effects on troops at the base during the mid to late 1940s. Edgewood was the location of the U.S Army Chemical Corps and a short distance from Fort Detrick the centre of U.S BW production and testing, both instrumental in the work of the CIA. Paperclip scientists took part in these tests using documentation gained from concentration camp experiments to determine the lethal dose. [ii]
The work at Edgewood was utterly changed by a 1949 report by Wilson L. Greene who after observing the psychological effects of nuclear tests and the rediscovery of a powerful psychoactive drug called LSD wrote “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War”. Greene viewed psychoactive agents as weapons that could cause mass hysteria and destroy an enemies will to fight, ushering in a new era of more humane warfare, writing:
“Throughout recorded history, wars have been characterized by death, human misery, and the destruction of property, each major conflict being more catastrophic than the one preceding it, I am convinced that it is possible, by means of the techniques of psychochemical warfare, to conquer an enemy without wholesale killing of his people and the mass destruction of his property.”[iii]
This report galvanised the military into providing funding for research into psychoactive drugs, Admiral Hillenkoetter, the director of the newly formed CIA asked President Truman for funding, Truman agreed and had the CIA coordinate with the Special Operations Division chemists at Fort Detrick. It was a co-ordination between the two groups, the chemists at Fort Detrick creating new compounds for the CIA to test, this program was known as MK-NAOMI which is considered to be the forerunner to the sprawling MK-ULTRA, under NAOMI Fort Detrick scientists produced all manner of toxic agents for things like clandestine assassinations and suicide pills for the CIA and later they conducted the large-scale open-air BW tests designed to test the vulnerability of the U.S to BW attacks.
The CIA took part in the first test when in August 1949 they sprayed a bacteria Bacillus Globigli through the air ducts of the Pentagon, later they observed larger operations like Operation Sea-Spray.
But the CIA were more interested in psychoactive agents that could be used as truth serum or even mind control for interrogations.
They were convinced the Soviets had developed some form of mind control, spurred by footage of a Soviet show trial of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty in 1949, his confession and demeanour led the CIA to conclude he was controlled by "some unknown force”.[iv]
In 1950 they developed Project BLUEBIRD Agents under Bluebird travelled the first CIA ‘black site’, Villa Schuster, a German manor located in the village of Kronberg an hour north of Frankfurt. Chosen due to the proximity of Camp King, a former POW camp now run by the U.S army and known for ‘special interrogation’ of recalcitrant Nazi officers. It was there they tested a cocktail of drugs on prisoners such as heroin, mescaline, and amphetamines on ‘expendables’ such as captured Soviet agents and refugees deemed suspicious. An early 1951 memo shows the focus of their experiments:
Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals?Can Agency personnel (or persons of interest to this agency) be conditioned to prevent any outside power from obtaining information from them by any known means’...Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?Can we “alter” a person’s personality? How long will it hold?Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents? [v]
Two Nazi Paperclip doctors advised the CIA at Villa Schuster, Dr Kurt Blome, the head of the Nazi BW division and Walter Schreiber the chief physician of the German army, both had experience running human experiments in the camps dosing prisoners with mescaline and other psychoactive compounds. In 1951 Schreiber was asked to immigrate to the U.S and work with the department of health but the identification of his crimes by a survivor led to much bad publicity and the U.S helped him immigrate to Argentina.
Bluebird was expanded to Japan, where 25 captured North Korean soldiers were injected with mixtures of stimulants and depressants all the while the CIA experimented on them with hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat.
By early 1952 Bluebird was rechristened Artichoke[1] with it came a refreshed outlook, in one memo Dulles provides a laundry list of things he wanted investigated and reveals some specific aims the CIA wanted:
Specific research should be undertaken to develop new chemicals or drugs, or to improve known elements for use in Artichoke work.
An exhaustive study should be made of various gases and aerosols…In addition, the problem of permanent brain injury and amnesia following lack of oxygen or exposure to other gases should be studied…The effects of high and low pressures on individuals should be examined….
A considerable amount of research could profitably be expended in the field of sound…. the effect on human beings of various types of vibrations, monotonous sounds, concussion, ultra-high frequency, ultra-sonics, the effect of constantly repeated words, sounds, continuous suggestion, non-rhythmic sounds, whispering, etc….
Bacteria, plant cultures, fungi, poisons of various types ... are capable of producing illnesses which in turn would produce high fevers, delirium, etc…
The removal of certain basic food elements such as sugar, starch, calcium, vitamins, proteins, etc…. from the food of an individual over a certain period of time will produce psychological and physical reactions in an individual.
Whether an individual will reveal information as a result of electroshock, or while in an electroshock coma, has not yet been demonstrated ... Whether electroshock can produce controlled amnesias does not appear to be established.
If an electronically induced sleep could be obtained, and that sleep is used as a means for gaining hypnotic control of an individual, this apparatus might be of extreme value to the Artichoke work….[vi]
Much like the Nazi experiments this ‘Artichoke work’ involved little science. One account highlight this involving Professor Wendt of the University of Rochester, who was involved in both Artichoke and a similar Navy program. With Navy money and a clandestine supply from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Wendt had already liberally experimented on himself various drugs such as heroin, marijuana, amphetamines, and barbiturates before making a larger study at his university paying students to test heroin.
Wendt travelled with his boss Dr. Thompson to assist in interrogation in Germany of one known double agent, one suspected double, and the three defectors promising them he had found a concoction ‘so special’ that it could be a contender for a truth serum. At the meeting before the interrogation Dr. Thompson noted there was no physician present and asked what would happen if one of the prisoners died, a CIA officer replied: "Disposal of the body would be no problem."
As the interrogation went ahead, Subject #1 was given drugged coffee and pills several times over three days and played poker. Wendt was not successful and left the interrogation, the remaining officers thought to attempt ‘A work’ on the subject which involved injecting the subject with a depressant then reviving them 20 minutes later with a shot of Benzedrine, a stimulant, this was to produce a state between waking and asleep as Marks puts it “almost comatose and yet bug-eyed”. From there the used hypnotic tones translated by an interpreter to impersonate the subject’s wife Eva, the subject apparently was convinced and spoke to the agents unaware he was being interrogated, occasionally he fell asleep, and they re-injected him several times until he began violently weeping and they concluded the session. The experiments didn’t end there. They tried Wendt’s drug mixture on 3 other subjects, but apparently Wendt was more interested on flirting with his female assistant. [vii]
By April 1953 the CIA mind control experiments morphed into the most infamous set of experiments. Politics meant a series of victories for the CIA, Dwight Eisenhower was elected and appointed Allen Dulles as director of CIA, Dulles older brother John Foster Dulles, as secretary of State. Allen Dulles was a firm believer in mind control and had long been involved in Bluebird and Artichoke at a speech to Princeton Alumni in early 1953 he warned the crowd of mind control:
We might call it, in its new form, “brain warfare.” The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside...
The human mind is the most delicate of instruments. It is so finely adjusted, so susceptible to the impact of outside influences, that it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men.”[viii]
Whether Allen Dulles believed what he said was true or not, the CIA was about to begin the largest program of mind control as several days later he approved a proposed research project with a starting budget of $300,000 (roughly $3.5 million in USD today) had no financial controls and as well as
“permission to launch research and conduct experiments at will, ‘without the signing of the usual contracts or other written agreements’”.[ix]
At the helm was the unorthodox chemist Sidney Gottlieb, the program was dubbed MK-ULTRA due to its “ultra-sensitive nature.”
MK-ULTRA reads as vindication to any conspiracy theorist. It was a sprawling and messy program made up of subprojects. In 1977 a Senate Select Committee described the range of MKULTRA experiments by categorising the 149 subprojects writing:
1. Research into the effects of behavioral[sic] drugs and/or alcohol: 17 subprojects probably not involving human testing; 14 subprojects definitely involving tests on human volunteers; 19 subprojects probably including tests on human volunteers. While not known, some of these subprojects may have included tests on unwitting subjects as well; 6 subprojects involving tests on unwitting subjects.2. Research on hypnosis: 8 subprojects, including 2 involving hypnosis and drugs in combination.
3. Acquisition of chemicals or drugs: 7 subprojects.
4. Aspects of magicians’ art useful in covert operations: e.g. surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials: 4 subprojects.
6. Library searches and attendance at seminars and international conferences on behavioral[sic] modification: 6 subprojects.
7. Motivation studies, studies of defectors, assessment, and training techniques: 28 subprojects.
8. Polygraph research: 3 subprojects.
9. Funding mechanisms for MKULTRA external research activities: 3 subprojects.
10. Research on drugs, toxins, and biologicals in human tissues; provision of exotic pathogens and the capability to incorporate them in effective delivery systems: 6 subprojects.
11. Activities whose objectives cannot be determined from available documentation: 3 subprojects.
12. Subprojects involving funding support for unspecified activities connected with the Army’s Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick…..
13. Single subprojects in such areas as effects of electro-shock, harassment techniques for offensive use, analysis of extrasensory perception, gas propelled sprays and aerosol, and four subprojects involving crop and material sabotage….[x]
The document continues:
“We are now in possession of the names of 185 non-government researchers and assistants who are identified in the recovered material dealing with the 149 subprojects. The names of 80 institutions where work was done or with which these people were affiliated are also mentioned. The institutions include 44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities) and 3 penal institutions.”
The CIA were embedded in Edgewood Arsenal with many scientists on the CIA payroll, not every department agreed with their methods, especially as they conducted espionage at the labs as well, Dr. Seymour Silver was the scientific director at Edgewood, he recalled in an interview:
“Do you know what a ‘self-sustained, of-the-shelf operation’ means? Well, the CIA was running one in my lab. They were testing psychochemical and running experiments in my lab, using my people, and weren’t telling me. They were spying on us. I said, ‘You go spy on the enemy, not on us’.”[xi]
At Edgewood scientists tested thousands of soldiers with various CW between the years 1955 to 1975, across the ocean the similar tests were conducted in the secluded labs of Porton Down in the U.K. These tests used psychochemical drugs like LSD and deliriants like BZ, PCP or ‘angel dust’ which can cause psychosis and nerve gases like Tabun, the Nazi nerve agent, Sarin, CS and tear gas and a host of other blood agents and irritants which contained compounds like dioxin (commonly found in pesticides and Agent Orange). [xii]
[1] One explanation of the name is that this was Sydney Gottleib’s favourite vegetable.
[i] Marks, J. Page 27 The search for the “Manchurian candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. London: Allen Lane. 1979. https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/12/129E144131F2E093FB1E441C737ACF92_SearchForTheManchurianCandidate.rtf.pdf Page 27
[ii] Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Pages 160-161
[iii] Kinzer, Stephen. The Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019. Page 41
[iv] Marks, J. The search for the “Manchurian candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. London: Allen Lane. 1979. Page 22.
[v] Kinzer, Stephen. The Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019. Page 51
[vi] Ibid. page 60
[vii] Marks, J. The search for the “Manchurian candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. London: Allen Lane. 1979. Page 34-42
[viii] Kinzer, Stephen. The Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019. Page 76
[ix] Marks, J. The search for the “Manchurian candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. London: Allen Lane. 1979. page 57
[xi] Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Page 165.
[xii] Ibid Page 171-172
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