Long before MKULTRA was a public word, people who claimed the government had experimented on their minds were dismissed as paranoid. The BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE records prove the agency wanted exactly the powers those people described: to make a person talk, to make them forget, and to see whether someone could be made to act against their will. [1][2][3]
The strongest version of this theory
The CIA wanted to erase memories and make people obey.
The sources
- CIA — Project BLUEBIRD, April 5, 1950 ↗
Contemporary federal record. It documents the author’s statements and institutional actions; objectives and reported results must still be evaluated separately.
- CIA — Report of narco-hypnotic ARTICHOKE interrogation, July 14, 1952 ↗
Contemporary federal record. It documents the author’s statements and institutional actions; objectives and reported results must still be evaluated separately.
- Church Committee: Final Report, Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence (1976), section on testing and use of chemical and biological agents ↗
The committee’s 1976 account of BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI, MKSEARCH, the Olson case, the 1973 destruction and the Army’s overseas LSD interrogations. Written before the 1977 discovery of the financial files.
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