The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States has a muddy reputation at best and an entirely heinous one if we’re truly being honest. They have been behind handfuls of coup d’états in Latin America and Africa alone, not limited to Haiti (2004), Congo (1961 and a failed attempt in 2024), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Chile (1964), and Bolivia (1964 and a failed attempt in 2024). Following the events of September 11th, 2001, they exponentially expanded their network of “black sites,” detention centers designed to torture suspected enemy combatants with little to no governmental oversight. The locations of these centers are generally unknown to the public and have been accused of repeated human rights violations over the past two decades they’ve been in operation. Not to mention, the infamous yet entirely underdiscussed Operation Paperclip, in which the CIA made repeated attempts to recruit Nazi scientists to work for American intelligence during the beginning of the Cold War with moderate success. All in all, it should not seem crazy to say that the CIA conducted a series of projects exploring potential mind control methods using LSD and other hallucinatory substances. Or that they tested these methods on unknowing civilians. 

An agency memo from January of 1954 containing the question, “Can an individual of [redacted] descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?” was made viewable to the public after the CIA published a number of not entirely unredacted reports in 1978. “ARTICHOKE” was a stand in for “‘special’ interrogation methods and techniques,” which included “drugs and chemicals, hypnosis, and ‘total isolation,’ [as a] form of psychological harassment,” as detailed in a CIA memorandum on the project, which can be found in the NSA archive of George Washington University. Formally called Project Bluebird in earlier reports, Project ARTICHOKE began somewhere around 1949 and ended around 1957, after which time Project MKUltra was the Agency’s main focus. According to the same CIA memorandum, the Agency logged “numerous (probably several hundred) experiments with hypnotism” during 1951, 1952, and 1953. They also recorded some instances of “narco-hypnotism,” injecting mysterious “substances” into subjects during interrogation. No information could be found to understand why they began nor why they ended these experiments, and there was no reported operational usage for hypnotism in the field. While Project ARTICHOKE was assumed to have ended somewhere in the late 1950s, memos from 1954-1955 make mention of ARTICHOKE teams being dispatched to “an overseas area to handle a number of sensitive cases.” The nature and scope of their work is currently unknown.  

While much of the information surrounding Project ARTICHOKE is still classified, there is report from November of 1953 detailing one significant incident in which Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist working at the Fort Detrick facility developing germ and chemical warfare, was administered LSD by an Agency member, which was quickly becoming the CIA’s drug of choice. The day following his administration, Olson was reportedly acting in “a peculiar and erratic manner,” leading him to be placed under psychiatric care. Within a week he had died by apparent suicide. His official cause of death at the time was falling out of the window of his thirteenth story apartment, however, after the CIA revealed in 1975 to his family that he had been given LSD, his son had the body exhumed. An autopsy revealed Olson had actually died from blunt force trauma to the head, therefore changing his official cause of death from “suicide” to “unknown.” 

But Olson wasn’t the only civilian victim of the program. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, fittingly nicknamed the “Poisoner in Chief,” headed both Project ARTICHOKE and its subsequent offshoots, Project MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax. According to an interview with historian Stephen Kinzer in the Los Angeles Review of Books about his book on the matter (Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA’s Search for Mind Control), Gottlieb’s obsession with LSD began when he became convinced that the Soviet Union was stockpiling the substance for their own mind control experiments. Being that Gottlieb’s involvement with the CIA was in the early days of the Cold War, this suspicion was enough to convince the US government to buy up massive supplies of LSD from Switzerland, where the drug had first been synthesized. The primary goal of the Agency was to develop a drug that could at least work as a truth serum, while Gottlieb strove to understand how to conduct total mind control of an unwitting victim. Numerous CIA memorandums detailed that Gottlieb was prone to dosing his own colleagues with LSD, only telling them hours after the fact. During the course of Project MKUltra, Gottlieb’s habit of testing substances on non-consenting individuals ran out of control, fully at the behest of the US government and intelligence agencies. 

His first source of subjects in the early 1950s was the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Described as functioning “more like a prison” than a hospital for people with substance use disorders, the Addiction Research Center was also under the authority of both the Bureau of Prisons and the Public Health Service, making it easily accessible to Gottlieb. Its director of research, Harris Isbell, got into contact with Gottlieb and subsequently offered up his population of patients, many of whom were both poor and Black. When the research wasn’t to Gottlieb’s satisfaction, he moved on to working with Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychiatric Association. Cameron was funded and protected by the CIA while he performed his own experiments on patients seeking treatment, placing them in small cells where he would “put them in a drug-induced coma, and [subject] them to endless repetition of recorded phrases,” as according to the Jacobin. 

Operation Midnight Climax finally came into being during the mid 1950s. Working closely with agents in San Francisco, Gottlieb began setting up a series of “safe houses” in which to conduct his ongoing experiments. He enlisted the help of George Hunter White,  Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, to assemble what Kinzer described as “a group of prostitutes whose job it would be to bring their clients to the ‘pad’ and dose them with LSD while he watched and recorded their reactions.” A six-bedroom duplex covered in mirrors and prints from the French artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, served as their main base of operations, with each mirror actually being a two-way mirrored window through which CIA agents could observe the effects of large LSD doses paired with sex. Investigative journalist Tom O’Neill labeled the whole enterprise a “psychedelic honeypot experiment,” and over the course of its decade-long run, the CIA built out three total “safe houses” in San Francisco, as well as another in Greenwich Village, New York City. The total number of victims remains unknown, and no substantial findings were ever reported, much to the disappointment of Gottlieb. Years after the “safe houses” were shut down, a letter from White to Gottlieb revealed that White had participated in the project for no other reason than his own enjoyment, saying “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” 

However, none of the information discussed above would have ever seen the light of day without the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), first proposed by Congressman John Moss in 1955. The FOIA entitles anyone, civilian or otherwise, to request information from a governmental department or agency and expect a reply within 20 business days. There are nine exemptions including but not limited to issues of national security, confidential business information, and protecting personal privacy. When it was signed into law in 1966, the FOIA lacked certain requirements of the agencies it was meant to apply to, not being revised until after Watergate, in which it became clear that government agencies would refuse to comply if given the opportunity to stay silent. This 1974 amendment included sanctions, waiving fees, and putting into place a 10-day time limit. Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan attempted to veto amendments or place further restrictions on gaining access to information. Their limitations to the FOIA were slightly loosened later by President Bill Clinton after he signed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments in 1996, which extended the 10-day timeframe out to its current 20-day requirement. The presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama continued to be secretive despite efforts to reform the FOIA. What little we have on the inner machinations of governmental agencies can be found at FOIA.gov—where you can also make requests of governing bodies if what you seek isn’t available—allowing journalists and everyday citizens alike a small glance at what it is our government does when it thinks no one is looking