Project Mind Control tells the lurid tale of the CIA’s attempts to discover the scientific principles that would allow people to control subjects’ thoughts and actions. The author, University of Texas historian John Lisle, relies largely on legal testimony from Sidney Gottlieb, who managed the notorious MKUltra program the agency operated from 1953 to 1973.
Lisle is careful not to speculate beyond the available evidence about what the program that launched a hundred conspiracy theories did, even granting that Gottlieb and the CIA destroyed a lot of that evidence. What is on the record is dire enough: The agency used powerful drugs such as LSD on fellow agents, on prisoners, on mental patients, and on people they sucked into prostitution honeypots in San Francisco. (Though yes, there also were some genuine volunteers.) Gottlieb mournfully concluded that LSD “was in fact not a reliable way to get information.”
What MKUltra and its proxies did do was abuse many unwilling or unwitting subjects. In addition to its LSD efforts, it funded such dangerously absurd psychology experiments as forcing patients to listen to constant negative statements continuously through headphones, severe weekslong sensory deprivation, and investigating the knockout potential of tick saliva.
In the end, neither the CIA nor the Communists were able to create “Manchurian candidate” assassination machines or unwitting sex slaves. Where they did have apparent success in “breaking” or “brainwashing” prisoners, it followed not from sophisticated psychological “mind control” but such old-fashioned abuses as hunger, beatings, and “prolonged, chronic loss of sleep.”
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