Psychedelic Torture: The Dark Reality of the CIA's Project Bluebird
Psychedelic Torture: The Dark Reality of the CIA's Project Bluebird
Inside the projects that would later evolve into MK-ULTRA — the CIA’s decades-long investigation into drugs to control minds & enhance torture.
During WWII, newly formed secret intelligence agencies worked to keep tabs on foreign countries and their scientific and military advancements.
After the war finished, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) dissolved, but the spirit carried over a couple of years later into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Unlike the domestically-focused Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA would collect intelligence on foreign affairs.
From the beginning of its existence, the CIA's interest in drugs was palpable; within the first five years of its existence, Project Bluebird was approved. The goal was to research the use of drugs for interrogation, torture, mind control, and more.
Anxieties ran high around these topics, and many people believed the nations we were in conflict with had already succeeded in finding these elusive chemicals.
The CIA listed 5 objectives, simplified below as:
Experimentation of IV and oral drugs for “special interrogation” (SI) on willing subjects and unwilling subjects — particularly to induce speech for interrogative purposes.
Willing and unwilling participants to test a special device to inject drugs rapidly without breaking the skin — they call it by the name of a device in Star Trek, the “hypospray” — along with a polygraph.
Specifying and manufacturing the “drug ampules for use in hypospray.”
“Continued experimentation in basic SI techniques.”
Obtaining an expert hypnotist to “train the teams in the various techniques of hypnotism.”
Special interrogation techniques essentially amounted to torture — much like the “enhanced interrogations” of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
In Stephen Kinzer’s book Poisoner In Chief, he outlines the true horror of the operation. As legend has it, the codename came from the desire to “make prisoners ‘sing like a bird.’”
The idea is, if you could make someone act out of character in this small way, maybe you could “program” them to do whatever you wanted.
The CIA had 4 main goals in how they wanted to employ these new tactics:
Goal #1: Extract Information
“Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals?”
This is the question that drives interrogation, torture, and other attempts to extract information from people unwilling to provide it.
The CIA believed at the time that it could reasonably answer in the affirmative and believed they had figured out how to obtain confessions. However, it was quick to stress that the information it had so far gathered was incomplete and that they were “not fully satisfied” (emphasis theirs throughout).
This wasn't a new goal for the CIA, who previously believed they'd found the elusive "truth drug" in a potent THC extract. One report in 1946 claimed some success in getting people to talk about sensitive topics after discretely getting them to consume large amounts of cannabis.
In it, a "dope peddler" becomes friendly with his information after agents give him three cigarettes laced with the drug. Thus, the CIA discovered through hard scientific research and taxpayer money that weed makes people chatty.
While LSD is the drug most people associate with the CIA’s fixation on mind control, the truth is far darker.
Here’s how Kinzer describes the experiments typical of a so-called “black site” in Japan:
“Interrogation teams injected captured North Korean soldiers with drugs including sodium amytal, a depressant that can have hypnotic effects, and with three potent stimulants: Benzedrine, which affects the central nervous system; Coramine, which acts on the lungs; and Picrotoxin, a convulsant that can cause seizures and respiratory paralysis. While they were in the weakened state of transition between the effects of depressants and stimulants, CIA experimenters subjected them to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat.”
Kinzer would also add, “Their goal, according to one report, was ‘to induce violent cathartic reactions, alternately putting subjects to sleep, then waking them up until they were sufficiently confused.’”
Extorting information from the participants in these trials was less about reaching into the depths of their minds and more about putting them into such a discombobulated mental state that they’d say anything.
People are less likely to keep a secret if they can’t tell whether they’re awake or dreaming, right?
The rest of the goals, the report states, are far less certain than this first one.
Goal #2: Prevent Extraction
“Can Agency personnel… be conditioned to prevent any outside power from obtaining information from them by any known means?”
Drugs are less likely to feel disorienting if you've taken them before and know what to expect. Perhaps there was a way to ensure your agents wouldn't be caught off-guard by the experience and could retain classified information.
Conditioning of participants typically involved dosing them with LSD when they weren’t expecting it. Occasional reports exist of tests where the participants volunteer, but they are exceedingly rare.
Ultimately, the bulk of the research on this didn’t fall on CIA agents — witting or non — but, rather, revolved around pushing prisoners to the limits and documenting when you exceeded them.
Kinzer also points to correspondence indicating it would be “no problem” to get rid of bodies at the “safe houses” they would go on to establish. People the government deemed disposable would be the guinea pigs testing drugs before being given to more important members of the team.
Goal #3: Create “Sleeper Cells”
“Can we obtain control of the future activation … of any given individual, willing or unwilling?”
Here, we can see the full paranoia of the CIA. One of the incidents responsible for stoking the flames of Project Bluebird involved captured American pilots confessing to releasing germ bombs over Japan — an act for which there is no real proof.
While spurring interest in mind control, an element kept away from the public involved, the captured pilots briefly lost all memory and understanding of themselves as the plane passed over Manchuria.
While there wasn't any actual proof for this either, the CIA took it as a threat to national security. If they could harness that power, you could take a low-level pilot and "split" his worldview into two, delivering highly confidential information or actions from a seemingly innocuous source he would immediately forget after the mission was completed.
Goal #4: Prevent “Sleeper Cells”
“Can we prevent any outside power from gaining control of future activities… of agency personal by any known means?”
Finally, how can you prevent people from becoming this newfangled thing we’ve decided exists and have yet to prove or understand?
To find out, the CIA dosed, tortured, and killed many more people and still came up empty on a solution to the problem or a way to cause the problem itself.
The CIA’s Interest in Mind Control
Mind control was a major theme for the CIA and its predecessors, and there was an elevated fear that communists would figure it out first — or even that they already had.
A memo in 1973 laid out the various ways mind and/or behavior control was possible, including:
Brain surgery.
Utilizing drugs like “tranquilizers and energizers” along with psychological intervention to alter behavior.
Behavioral conditioning techniques through biofeedback including “control of cardiac arrhythmias or hypertension… within limits.”
Education through propaganda.
With Project Bluebird/Artichoke we don’t have to guess about the sketchy destinations they were hoping to reach through the journey of this research.
Through special interrogations (SI) and hallucinogenic states (H), the CIA was hoping to create a new tool for control and chaos. They were also hoping to do things like change personalities, prevent soldiers from feeling tired, and discover the fastest way to induce hallucinogenic and sleep states.
Perhaps the most troubling desire was to:
“Devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials.”
In other words, brainwash a combative soldier to turn him into a supportive one and then ensure you can move them around wherever you’d like to achieve any goal they might desire. Following the invention of the atomic bomb, the discovery of LSD, and the new emphasis on space travel, it seemed as though anything could be done through science — and that almost any research was justifiable.
Project Bluebird’s Delusional Origins & Initial Problems
On April 5th, 1950, the initial proposal was sent and approved two weeks later on the 20th. The "extremely important" purpose the proposal gave for the project's existence is the "immediate establishment of interrogation teams for operational support."
In Gordon Thomas’ Secrets and Lies, he outlines a slew of trials in 1930s Russia where defendants confess to crimes they haven’t committed.
Adding to this fear, in 1949, Cardinal Josef Mindszenty — Hungarian leader of the Catholic church — appeared and sounded robotic at a Soviet trial. In a monologue agents couldn’t find plausible or natural, he admitted to treasonable acts the CIA didn’t believe him guilty of.
Rather than assuming the torture prisoners took before appearing at a mock trial forced them into confessions they weren’t exactly enthusiastic about, the CIA clung to mind control.
Given the odd tone and nature of Mindszenty, the CIA assumed he was currently under the influence of some kind of drug, but this was just the beginning.
There was a lot of concern about finding researchers who would be willing to participate for moral and financial reasons.
One early document said, “Even the highest government salary would not begin to compare with his private income,” and “His ethics might be such that he might not care to cooperate in certain more revolutionary phases of our project.”
Luckily, there was one group of people who had already been conducting these inhumane experiments the CIA could tap into — the Nazis.
Nazis (Like, Actual Nazis) In American Government
Nazis became key players in the American government and scientific fields after the war through Operation Paperclip.
After WWII ended, American scientists found themselves in the position of working on the very “research” they denounced the Nazis for. To them, the understanding of killing, torturing, or coercing information through chemical means was something to covet.
Additionally, there was a scientific interest in the findings coming out of studies that America (and other non-Nazi empires) would find incredibly inhumane. As such, there was a great deal of effort to bring several high-ranking Nazi scientists and researchers over covertly.
One such Nazi — a weapons engineer who created missiles “so fast that victims, most of whom were civilians, often heard nothing until after they struck” — would even help us land on the moon and ended up on the cover of TIME magazine for his role in the operation.
As H. P. Albarelli points out in the book A Terrible Mistake, one of the first acts of Project Bluebird was to go “through the Nuremberg Trials Papers” to investigate Nazi testimony for leads on potential drugs and techniques.
The purpose of these Nazi experiments was often, as John Marks states in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, to “eliminate the will of the person examined.” The CIA read through the testimony of acts against humanity with a pen and paper in hand.
Black Sites, Human Experimentation, & Psychedelic Torture
Six weeks after Allen Dulles came on as the director of the CIA, he sent a memo on the subject of “Special Interrogations” to the Deputy Director of Plans.
In it, he references a conversation from a few days prior where Dulles evidently “outlined…the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc.”
Before this moment, Bluebird had mostly been a defensive measure to understand the perceived or real tactics of nations the country was at war with.
Like a child worried about the boogeyman under the bed, the paranoid state of the government only intensified over time. Naturally, you can’t use “drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc.” on unsuspecting American citizens, so the CIA began looking for hidden sites in foreign countries (AKA “black sites.”)
The first one was Camp King — a Nazi camp the U.S. Army captured in 1946 that had become a go-to location for torturing prisoners. Here, Bluebird could operate outside the sanctions of the United States and perform experiments on prisoners, refugees, and others they perceived to be expendable.
They found the location successful enough to expand to several prisons in Germany and Japan.
Their cover, which even fellow American soldiers in the area were led to believe, was “extensive polygraph work.”
Within 6 months of creating Bluebird, the project was requesting an expansion from the CIA.
Bluebird → Artichoke → MK-ULTRA
Within a year and a half, Bluebird was absorbed into other complicated branches of the secret government system and became Project Artichoke. This was essentially the same project but with a lot more cash behind it.
The CIA "safe houses" became a vast network of black sites wherein "expendables" were mercilessly tested. Many of these people were prisoners of war, but a large percentage were refugees, unhoused members of society, or perceived enemies of America who had no military affiliation whatsoever.
Artichoke took on a more offensive approach, testing out new gases, poisons, chemicals, and drugs along with cocktails of various substances. Given the extent of the experimentation they would do on human prisoners, it’s highly unlikely any of them were ever permitted to leave.
In 1953, Artichoke, Bluebird, and others combined along with a vast amount of new projects under the umbrella of MK-ULTRA. Later that year, Frank Olson — a chemist responsible for many of the tools of torture he would later come to regret after seeing them in use — died under suspicious circumstances (to put it lightly).
The official cause of death was suicide, but Olsen allegedly jumped through his window in the dead of night while his roommate slept. Adding to the mystery, said roommate placed a call right after saying, "Well, he's dead," and hearing the reply, "Well, that's too bad."
The family later exhumed the body and discovered he suffered blunt-force trauma to the head and chest before supposedly running and jumping through the window to his death. The family was unable to sue the CIA, though a judge did agree the case had more to it than meets the eye.
Shortly before his death, Olson had been expressing doubts about his work and regrets over the tools of torture he was responsible for inventing. He had been dosed with LSD at a recent mixer with colleagues and found the experience frightening.
His son would later state he believed Olson had told off his bosses and put his career and maybe even life in jeopardy. Regardless of what happened after he was unwittingly dosed with LSD, however, it showed how wreckless the CIA — and Olson himself — had been with the substance.
Various reports have been declassified on Frank Olson, and you can see the CIA working diligently to ensure the narrative stays away from them. They would ultimately fail, and the public would become keenly aware of Olson's untimely death.
MK-ULTRA would chug along for ten more years with hundreds of “Subprojects” before dwindling to a stop and destroying much of the evidence it ever existed.
Further Reading & Sources
See the immense collection of MK-ULTRA information available on The Black Vault
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer (Book)
Secrets and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, Gordon Thomas (Book)
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, H. P. Alberrelli Jr. (Book)
The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences, John Marks (Book)
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