Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA

By Jeffrey Augustine on December 23, 2024 • ( Leave a comment )

December 23, 2024: The Digital National Security Archive today issued a press release concerning newly-declassified documentation on the CIA’s mind control research programs. Scroll down to read it. That this press release was issued during Christmas week means it will have minimal exposure.

Despite 70+ years of FOIA, there is no hard evidence of any CIA mind control programs conducted with L. Ron Hubbard’s knowing cooperation or knowledge. There is speculation but speculation is not evidence.

That Charles Manson did some jailhouse Scientology and was influenced by Scientology does not establish a CIA connection. The same applies to the CIA’s Remote Viewing Program. The leader and one of the team members of Project Stargate — Dr. Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann respectively — had been Scientologists, but were not Scientologists when the program began. Again, having been influenced by Scientology does not equate to a CIA connection. Indeed, the declassified 1993 CIA overview of the project contains no mention of Scientology. Scroll down to read this CIA document.

We have long refused to accept the CIA-Scientology theory as it lacks evidence. The impotent and histrionic anger directed at us for refusing to accept this unsupported theory that Hubbard was CIA, or CIA-connected, cannot make this theory factual. The anger is simply a petulant emotional reaction to a favored theory being rejected. The sunk cost fallacy applies here: That some people have spent decades promoting the CIA-Scientology theory as truth makes them furious to see it rejected for a lack of proof. A person can insanely scream and kick all they want but such behavior does make a belief a fact.

Because anyone can publish anything online or say anything on a video, there is no controlled opposition at work to try to suppress the theory that L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology are part of a CIA program. Promote it all you want. What exists, however, is a demand for actual documented evidence which supporters of the CIA-Scientology theory have never been able produce.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: The notion that L. Ron Hubbard would have ever been read into any secret CIA mind control program seems utterly absurd to us. Could Hubbard have been used by the CIA to some extent as a dupe or a useful idiot? Perhaps. But there is no evidence of this either.

Conversely, of course, the FBI and the CIA kept, and still keep, files on Scientology. So do other agencies in Europe, Japan, China, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and many other countries.

The most Scientology-like mention of CIA programs in today’s press release is contained in this description:

A DCI-approved plan in 1950 for the establishment of “interrogation teams” that would “utilize the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to attain the greatest results in interrogation techniques.”

L. Ron Hubbard used hypnosis and in his original Dianetics processing. Prior to Dianetics, Hubbard experimented on people using narcotics and hypnosis. Later, after Hubbard learned about the e-meter and auditing techniques from Volney Mathison, Hubbard launched Scientology and weaponized the e-meter to perform “metered sec checks.” These sec checks are brutal interrogations and remain central to Scientology to this day. Metered sec checks are used to obtain information suitable to exert control and use blackmail, if needed, on Scientologists who depart Scientology and speak out.

The press release below provides a link to newly-released CIA documents for researchers to look for L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology in the Company’s files:

Washington, D.C., December 23, 2024 – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs. The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.

Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.

Today’s announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh touched off probes that would bring MKULTRA abuses to light. The new collection also comes 70 years since U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA’s chief supplier of the newly discovered psychoactive chemical central to many of the Agency’s behavior control efforts.

Highlights of the new MKULTRA collection include:

A DCI-approved plan in 1950 for the establishment of “interrogation teams” that would “utilize the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to attain the greatest results in interrogation techniques.”
A 1951 memo that captures a meeting between CIA and foreign intelligence officials about mind control research and their shared interest in the concept of individual mind control.
A 1952 entry from the daily calendar of George White, a federal narcotics agent who ran a safehouse where the CIA tested drugs like LSD and performed other experiments on unwitting Americans.
A 1952 report on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods that combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and later amnesia on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.”
A 1956 memo in which MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb signs off a project that would “evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25” on federal prisoners in Atlanta.
The 1963 report from the CIA’s inspector general which led CIA leadership to reexamine the use of unwitting Americans in their covert drug testing program.
The 1983 deposition of MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb in a civil case brought by Velma “Val” Orlikow, a victim of CIA-sponsored projects conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

Click the link below for a detailed description of this new publication and to read the top 20 documents from this extraordinary and essential collection.

READ THE DOCUMENTS