The Mind Hunters

Chapter 1

The confession

At the end of 1948 Hungary’s communist government arrested Cardinal József Mindszenty, the head of the country’s Catholic Church. In 1949, after a show trial, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. ^[1] The spectacle of a cardinal confessing in court stayed with American officials. Nearly thirty years later a senator questioning the CIA director named “the kinds of behavior that were seen in Cardinal Mindszenty’s trial” as part of what set the agency on its search. ^[2]

How do you make a cardinal confess? In September 1950 an American journalist named Edward Hunter offered an answer in a Miami newspaper. The Chinese Communists, he wrote, had a technique called xi-nao, wash-brain, that could “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot.” The word “brainwashing” entered English. ^[3][4] Historians later found that Hunter was working with the CIA’s propaganda wing. ^[4]

Then the Korean War made the fear personal. Colonel Frank Schwable, shot down and captured in 1952, was the highest-ranking American officer taken prisoner. By February 1953 he and other American prisoners had confessed, falsely, that the United States was dropping anthrax and plague on Korean civilians. ^[4] According to the Smithsonian’s account, 5,000 of the 7,200 American prisoners either petitioned Washington to end the war or signed confessions, and 21 refused to come home. ^[4] See the fear that started it.

Psychiatrists who later studied the returning prisoners came to a plainer conclusion: the men had been tortured. ^[4] But in 1950 and 1951 that was not yet the answer Washington believed.

Chapter 3

Approved

On 13 April 1953 the new Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, approved a program “along the lines proposed by ADDP Helms”: Richard Helms, the officer who would one day run the agency. ^[2] It was called MKULTRA. In 1977 Admiral Stansfield Turner, then director, read the founding rationale to the Senate: knowing “the enemy’s theoretical potential” would let the United States “defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are.” ^[2]

MKULTRA was less a single experiment than a way of paying for things. It let the agency’s Technical Services Staff fund sensitive research without the usual contracts and paperwork. ^[5] Turner later counted 149 numbered subprojects, in 15 broad areas: drugs, hypnosis, sleep research, “aspects of magicians’ art useful in covert operations,” even extrasensory perception. ^[2] See BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and the rest.

What did the agency want from all this? A CIA draft of 5 May 1955 lists it plainly. Researchers were to look for substances that would promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness, make hypnosis more useful, help a person resist torture and interrogation, produce amnesia, cause physical disablement, and knock a person out without his knowing. ^[8] It was a shopping list, not a set of results. Proving what any of it achieved would need methods and repeatable findings, and in 1963 the agency’s own inspector found the program’s records “afforded no such approach to inspection.” ^[9] See the wish list.

The work reached well beyond LSD. Of the 149 subprojects, Turner said, 8 were on hypnosis, 2 of them combined with drugs; 9 on sleep research and behavior change in psychotherapy; and 4 on the magicians’ art of slipping something to a person unnoticed. ^[2] BLUEBIRD had already proposed teams that would interrogate with drugs and hypnosis together, and ARTICHOKE reports describe exactly that. ^[6][7] See hypnosis, sleep and isolation.

The man who ran it day to day was Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist who had joined the CIA in 1951 and headed its chemical branch. ^[10][5] He would approve the testing of drugs on people who did not know they were being tested. In 1960 he carried poison to the Congo for a plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first prime minister; the Church Committee called him “Joseph Scheider.” ^[11] See the CIA’s chemist.

Chapter 5

Cointreau at Deep Creek Lake

Seven months after MKULTRA was approved, on 18 November 1953, ten scientists from the CIA and the Army’s Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick met for a review conference at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. ^[2] The Army men worked on defenses against biological attack, on offensive biological weapons and on research for the CIA. One of them was Frank Olson, a respected civilian biochemist. His superior, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, said he had noticed nothing before the meeting to suggest Olson was of unsound mind. ^[2]

After dinner on Thursday the 19th, Cointreau was served. Lashbrook had put LSD in the bottle, as part of an experiment he and Gottlieb were running. All but two of the Army scientists drank it: one did not drink, and the other had a heart condition. About twenty minutes after they finished, Gottlieb told them what they had taken. ^[2] Neither Gottlieb’s superior nor the head of covert operations had specifically approved the experiment. ^[2]

Olson came home disturbed. Within days Ruwet told Lashbrook that Olson “was in serious trouble and needed immediate professional attention.” ^[2] They did not take him to a psychiatrist. They took him to New York, to Dr. Harold Abramson, an allergist with no degree in psychiatry whose LSD research the CIA had funded indirectly. He was, the Church Committee wrote, the doctor closest to Washington “who was experienced with LSD and cleared by the CIA.” ^[2] See what can be stated firmly.

Chapter 7

The safehouses

Olson’s death did not end the testing on people who did not know. In 1955 the agency began a program of covert testing on unwitting American citizens. ^[9] Its tester was a federal narcotics agent who had been working with Gottlieb for years. In June 1952 the agent, George Hunter White, had written in his appointment book: “Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant – I agree.” ^[17] Using the alias “Morgan Hall,” White ran CIA safehouses in New York and San Francisco, where people were given LSD without knowing it. ^[17][10] Helms later described the arrangement as using the Bureau of Narcotics as a “cutout.” ^[10]

The Church Committee described the method in one dry paragraph. The tester “might make initial contact with a prospective subject selected at random in a bar,” then invite him to a safehouse where the drug went into a drink or food. CIA staff watched “by using a one-way mirror and tape recorder in an adjoining room. Prior consent was obviously not obtained.” ^[5] Asked by Senator Kennedy in 1977 whether women he had interviewed at a safehouse were prostitutes, the CIA psychologist John Gittinger said, “Yes, sir.” ^[2]

Gottlieb signed off on the money. An August 1956 memo let spending be certified without the usual receipts because of the “unorthodox” nature of the work. ^[18] The San Francisco operation is remembered as Operation Midnight Climax. “There was not even the pretense of scientific experimentation,” Stephen Kinzer, Gottlieb’s biographer, told Congress in 2026. ^[19] Gottlieb estimated there had been about 40 tests on unwitting people; asked in 1975 for White’s files, he said, “They were all destroyed.” ^[17][10] See what happened in the safehouses.

Chapter 9

Montreal

The most damaging experiments happened in Canada. From 1948 to 1964 the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron ran the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Patients who came to him for anxiety or depression could be put into weeks of drug-induced sleep and given intensive electroshock, a treatment he called “depatterning,” then made to listen to recorded messages for hours a day, which he called “psychic driving.” ^[24] Canada’s 1986 Cooper report called the methods “highly intrusive and intensive.” ^[24]

Cameron acknowledged in two of his papers “the assistance of grants from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.” ^[24] The Society was a CIA front. “The Agency in effect provided the money,” Gittinger told the Senate, and many of the researchers who took it “had no knowledge that they were getting CIA money.” ^[2] Cameron’s patients did not know either. Depatterning left some patients in a childlike state; some adults forgot how to dress themselves or use the bathroom. ^[25][26] See Ewen Cameron and the patients.

Chapter 11

Abroad

What was done outside the United States is the darkest part of the record, and the thinnest. The Church Committee wrote that a project called MKDELTA “was established to govern the use of MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions.” Use abroad began in 1953, “and possibly as early as 1950,” mainly in interrogations, but also “for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.” Then came the sentence that explains why so little more can be said: “Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use.” ^[5] See the drugs abroad.

Gottlieb’s own closed testimony, published in 2025, gives one glimpse. He described an operation in which a dose of LSD induced “a severe classic paranoid reaction” in a person, with the aim of making his colleagues lose faith in him. ^[10] The same chemist had carried poison to the Congo in 1960. Lumumba was not killed with it; the Church Committee found the poison was never used. ^[11]

The search for hidden powers of the mind went stranger still. One MKULTRA subproject was an “analysis of extrasensory perception.” ^[2] The CIA says its own research into psychic phenomena began in the summer of 1972 and ended in 1977, after which the Defense Intelligence Agency carried it on under names including GRILL FLAME. When the agency commissioned an outside review in 1995, the verdict was that remote viewing was “too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes.” ^[28][29] See the psychic spies.

By then the officials had reached a quiet conclusion of their own. Gittinger testified that by 1961 or 1962 he was satisfied that brainwashing by drugs or esoteric means “did not exist.” It was “largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out of contact, putting him under long stress.” ^[2] Gottlieb told Senate investigators that the drug work produced “as many failures as successes” and was “probably not a high pay-off program.” ^[10]

Chapter 13

Revelations

The secret began to unravel on 22 December 1974, when Seymour Hersh reported on the front page of the New York Times that the CIA had spied on antiwar activists for more than a decade. ^[31][32] President Ford set up a commission under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and on 27 January 1975 the Senate created a select committee chaired by Frank Church. ^[33][31]

In June 1975 the Rockefeller report said the CIA had given LSD to people who did not know it, that this was “clearly illegal,” and that one man had died in 1953. ^[27] That was how Olson’s family learned what had happened to him. ^[16] Ford met them in July 1975, CIA director William Colby apologized, and in October 1976 Ford signed a private law paying the family $750,000. ^[16][12] See what each investigation found.

“We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be,” Senator Kennedy said later. ^[2] Then John Marks, a writer researching the program, filed a Freedom of Information request. Answering it, a CIA officer named Frank Laubinger searched the agency’s Retired Records Center and, very late in March 1977, found seven boxes of financial records that had been filed separately and escaped the 1973 destruction. ^[2] Congress was not told until July. ^[2]

On 3 August 1977 Senators Daniel Inouye and Edward Kennedy held a joint hearing. “One individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not,” Kennedy said. ^[2] Turner put the new numbers on the record: 149 subprojects, safehouses in New York and San Francisco, testing on prisoners and “criminal sexual psychopaths” in a hospital. “It is totally abhorrent to me to think of using a human being as a guinea pig,” he said. ^[2] Marks published the first full history, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” in 1979. ^[34] See the 1977 discovery.

Chapter 15

The son who would not stop

For the Olson family, the 1975 apology was a beginning, not an end. President Ford had written that the secret dosing “would appear to have been a proximate cause of his death.” ^[12] The private law of 1976 paid $187,500 each to Olson’s widow and three children, $750,000 in all, in exchange for waiving further claims. Ford had backed $1.25 million. ^[16][12] But his son Eric came to doubt the official story, and he spent decades investigating it. ^[16][43]

In 1994 the family had Frank Olson’s body exhumed. The forensic scientist James Starrs reported that the head and neck showed no cuts from window glass, though the 1953 autopsy had described them, and he found a lump on the forehead that suggested a blow before the fall. He called the evidence “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” ^[44] He was also careful. “We didn’t find any smoking gun,” he said, and he could not disprove that Olson had jumped. ^[45]

In 2012 Eric and his brother Nils sued the CIA, alleging their father was murdered and the death covered up. Their complaint quoted a CIA assassination manual of the era: “the contrived accident is the most effective technique,” because it “causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.” ^[16] In July 2013 Judge James Boasberg dismissed the case: it was filed too late, it was barred by the 1976 settlement, and it fell outside what the government can be sued for. He did not rule on whether the claim was true, and he added an unusual line: “the skeptical reader may wish to know that the public record supports many of the allegations that follow, farfetched as they may sound.” ^[16] See the 2012 lawsuit.

In 2017 Errol Morris told the family’s story in Wormwood, a six-part Netflix series with Peter Sarsgaard as Frank Olson. ^[43] In 2026 Kinzer told Congress that “evidence suggests that his death may not have been a suicide.” At the same hearing Tom O’Neill drew the line where the evidence stops: “Exactly what the motivation was behind the decision about Frank Olson, if there was such a decision, is unknown.” ^[19] See was Frank Olson murdered?

Chapter 17

The theories grow in the gap

The fiction got there first. Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate imagined an American prisoner brainwashed in Korea into a sleeper assassin, and the 1962 film made the idea famous. ^[50][51] Gittinger told the Senate the film “really set us back a long time, because it made something impossible look plausible.” ^[2]

Once the CIA was proven to have drugged people in secret and burned the files, every unexplained crime of the era could be fitted to it. Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Robert Kennedy in 1968, has said he cannot remember the shooting. ^[52] Charles Manson’s followers killed seven people in 1969, and a psychiatrist with CIA-linked research, Louis Jolyon West, had studied hippies in the Haight in 1967. ^[53][54][55] Ted Kaczynski, who had entered Harvard at 16, was a subject in a Harvard psychology study begun in 1959 that “included deliberately abusive interrogations.” ^[56] See did MKULTRA create programmable assassins?

The record supports the frame of these theories and not the claims at their center. The CIA did want to make people act and forget; it did test on prisoners and patients; it did destroy the evidence. ^[8][20][30] But no released document ties Sirhan, Manson or Kaczynski to MKULTRA, and a CIA review notes there is no evidence that Manson and West ever met. ^[52][53][56] The theories section below gives each one its strongest form, and says exactly which parts turned out to be real.