About this Collection
This collection explores the Central Intelligence Agency’s foray into behavioral and mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Most commonly known as Project MKULTRA, which refers to the research carried out by the CIA and affiliated institutions between 1953-1963, this codename came to be used as an umbrella term for an array of scientific, psychological, and military endeavors that began well before the official start of MKULTRA in 1953 and that continued in the years after the project officially ended. In this collection, researchers will find many documents relating to MKULTRA as well as its predecessors, Project BLUEBIRD and Project ARTICHOKE,
and its various sister projects and successors, including MKNAOMI, MKDELTA and MKSEARCH. This collection also contains records relating to investigations into the CIA’s mind control program, both by the Agency itself and Congress, during the mid to late 1970s. The set has been carefully curated to highlight the clearest, most substantive documents available on MKULTRA and to focus on those records that provide insight into the scope and purpose of the Agency’s mind control program.
Most of the documents were donated to the National Security Archive by John Marks,
the author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a book widely considered to be the most authoritative recounting of the CIA’s involvement in behavior and mind control experiments. They consist primarily of CIA records Marks obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Another source for the collection are documents that the CIA released to the family of Frank Olson, an Army biochemist who died in 1953 after he was secretly administered LSD by a CIA employee and then fell from a 10th-story window. Congressional hearings and testimony and the CIA’s reading room were also researched to supplement the collection.
- Collection Bookmark:
Bookmark will be added when the collection is launched
