Behind bars in Atlanta for bank robbery in the 1950s, Whitey Bulger became depressed and pondered thoughts of suicide.
The infamous crime boss began seeing things that weren’t there and hearing voices when no one was around. He thought he saw blood coming out of walls and humans transform into skeletons. For someone with an obsessive need to control and intimidate, Bulger thought he was going insane.
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That wasn’t what happened to Bulger at all. In reality, as part of a clinical trial in which Bulger agreed to participate under false pretenses, Bulger received doses of LSD for more than a year.
The effects left Bulger vowing to kill the doctor.
“I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me,” said Bulger, who died in 2018.
What Was MK-ULTRA?
Investigative Journalist Tom O'Neill on CIA's MKUltra Mind-Control Program
The psychedelic drugs that Bulger took were part of a secret CIA program, MK-ULTRA. During the Cold War, the United States’ top foreign intelligence agency fervently (and erroneously) believed communist countries possessed drugs to control the mind. Shortly after becoming the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles said as much during a speech at Princeton in 1953. He also said that practice was beneath the United States.
“We in the West have somewhat limited possibilities for brain warfare,” Dulles said. “Such experiments without consent, even on enemies, contradict not only American, but also universal human values.”
Less than a week later, Dulles authorized MK-ULTRA. He placed Sidney Gottlieb in charge of the highly secretive program. By outward appearances, Gottlieb looked like a mild-mannered chemist. Underneath, he had a diabolical side, author Stephen Kinzer noted in the book “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.”
Kinzer referred to Gottlieb as a “gentle-hearted torturer,” and his subjects suffered terribly under MK-ULTRA. Through extreme measures, the program attempted to break down one’s mind, then fill the gaps with other thoughts. How the CIA did this was through not only drugs, but also electroshock therapy, hypnosis, and radiation. It also employed sensory isolation and deprivation. Sometimes, it resorted to verbal and sexual violence on their drugged subjects.
The CIA was so invested in MK-ULTRA that it authorized Gottlieb to spend $240,000 (more than $3 million in today’s dollars) to buy the world’s supply of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
“A License to Kill”
The spy agency used its abundant supply of acid liberally, Kinzer reported.
It gave LSD to mental patients, prisoners, and drug addicts without their consent. The CIA dispensed it for taxpayer-funded experiments at universities, hospitals, research facilities, and drug companies. Soldiers, doctors, and civil servants received some.
Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” volunteered for the MK-ULTRA program. So did Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead and Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, according to Kinzer.
The CIA’s experiments extended far beyond American borders. They took place in detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. Overseas, detainees received doses of LSD and other drugs, including heroin and morphine. Sometimes, program representatives gave subjects barbiturates intravenously in one arm and amphetamines in the other, Babel—a Ukraine-based media outlet—reported in 2023.
Gottlieb was at the center of it all.
“This guy had a license to kill,” Kinzer told National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” program in 2019.
Because of the covert nature of MK-ULTRA, no one can say with certainty how many people died because of the illicit program. Some definitely were pushed to their limits and beyond. Gottlieb and others even gave psychedelic drugs to some of the CIA’s own operatives; one of them, under the influence, fell out of a 13th-floor window on November 28, 1953.
The circumstances of whether Frank Olson killed himself or was pushed remain unresolved. His family received a $750,000 settlement from the federal government, plus an apology from President Gerald Ford.
Testifying Before the Senate
When it began, MK-ULTRA aimed to eventually create a truth serum that it could use against the United States’ Cold War adversaries. Once the CIA determined it couldn’t produce one to control the mind, the agency began to curtail the program.
MK-ULTRA completely shut down in 1973. When it did, then-CIA chief Richard Helms and Gottlieb attempted to destroy any evidence it ever existed. Some files escaped the shredder, however.
The following year, media reports describing illegal CIA experiments emerged. In 1975, Gottlieb appeared before the Church Committee, which Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) chaired. That panel sought answers regarding alleged illegal practices from several U.S. government agencies, including the CIA. Then in 1977, Gottlieb testified with immunity before senators during hearings about MK-ULTRA.
“He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal—yet nobody looked over his shoulder,” Kinzer told NPR’s “Fresh Air.” “He never had to file serious reports to anybody. The mentality must have been [that] this project is so important—mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.”
Gottlieb died in 1999, but interest in the MK-ULTRA program remains high today. In June, Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) began House Oversight Committee task force hearings on MK-ULTRA.
