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The Architects of MKUltra: Gottlieb, Nazi Science & the Midnight Climax
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
CIA mind control mastermind Sidney Gottlieb built MKUltra on Nazi science, dosed unwitting Americans with LSD, and ran a brothel surveillance operation in San Francisco — and walked away without consequence. This chapter traces the blueprint behind the program and the men who drew it.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What makes MK-Ultra matter isn't just that it happened. It's that the people who ran it knew exactly what they were doing, destroyed the evidence before anyone could stop them, and walked away without consequence.
Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist from New York who joined the CIA in the early nineteen fifties and eventually rose to lead what became MK-Ultra. He had a club foot, a stutter, and by most accounts a genuine belief that what he was doing served a necessary purpose.
After World War Two, the United States government faced a practical problem. German and Japanese scientists had conducted human experiments on a scale that Western science had never attempted and would never ethically permit.
The San Francisco operation ran for eight years, from nineteen fifty-five to nineteen sixty-three. It was called Operation Midnight Climax.
On November twenty-eighth, nineteen fifty-three, CIA scientist Frank Olson fell from a window on the thirteenth floor of a New York hotel and died on the pavement below. He was forty-three years old.
The program reached beyond American borders. At McGill University in Montreal, a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron was conducting his own experiments with CIA funding.
Here's one of the genuinely strange ironies embedded in this history. In nineteen fifty-nine, a young Stanford graduate student named Ken Kesey volunteered for a CIA-funded LSD study at a veterans' hospital in Menlo Park, California.
In nineteen seventy-three, Richard Helms was preparing to leave his position as CIA Director. Before he departed, he ordered the destruction of MK-Ultra files.
In twenty twenty-six, the House Oversight Committee, led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, reopened the question. Luna's task force had located forty boxes of MK-Ultra files that had survived the nineteen seventy-three destruction order, and the hearings examined what they contained, what they implied about the program's scope, and what accountability might look like five decades later.
Sidney Gottlieb ran MK-Ultra for years with minimal oversight and essentially unlimited operating latitude. He arranged for the purchase of the world's LSD supply.
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