Subscribers can listen to the audio version of today’s post here.
In the Vietnam War, the CIA raped people with eels because they thought it would . . . I have no fucking idea what they thought that would accomplish. But knowing they would do something so egregiously fucked up means the horrors of their MKUltra “mind control” experiments shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 20, 1977--
You know how all that waterboarding and blasting-death-metal torture the CIA did during the war on terror that they totally said got them useful intelligence but was shown to be utterly fucking useless? MKUltra was designed as a form of psychological torture using drugs to get information. And it didn’t fucking work either.
The program began in 1953 and lasted for 20 fucking years. We know it was bad and that people died, but just how many deaths and how many more lives were ruined is impossible to determine. That’s because in 1973, with Watergate blowing up and everyone freaking out, CIA Director Richard Helms decided it was CYA time and ordered all documents regarding MKUltra to be destroyed.
With the cold war running hot and tales of commies doing the same thing, the CIA used all sorts of drugs, namely massive doses of LSD, and torture to get “resistant” subjects to talk. The stuff about creating a Manchurian Candidate—turning a captive into an assassin against their own people—was probably bullshit spewed by the CIA to cover for what the program really was: torture designed to extract information. Although the organization was interested in the possibility of using mind control to assassinate Fidel Castro.
It wasn’t just a shit-ton of hallucinogens they used, but also paralytics, ecstasy, barbiturates, heroin, meth, and even electroshock “therapy.” Sometimes the test subjects knew they were part of a test, but many were unwitting and unwilling. Not just Americans, but also Canadians. The tests were conducted at universities, hospitals, and prisons. Crime boss Whitey Bulger was given LSD every day for over a year.
Due to cold war paranoia, agents were often given free rein to do whatever the fuck they wanted. Operation Midnight Climax had agents in New York and San Francisco hiring prostitutes to lure men to a CIA safe house and drugging them so agents could watch behind a two-way mirror. There was almost no oversight and agents admitted it was a big party. “It was fun, fun, fun” agent George White later wrote. “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” Big surprise—the agents weren’t qualified scientific observers.
Despite the 1973 purge of records relating to MKUltra, about 20,000 documents were misfiled as financial records. They were released on July 20, 1977, under the Freedom of Information Act and investigated during the Senate hearings that followed later that year. Not that anyone was punished.
Support keeping this daily column free and get access to subscriber only content:
Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.