What Both Sides Get Wrong | Victor Queiroz

MKUltra occupies a strange position in public discourse. It is simultaneously one of the most documented government programs of its era — thanks to the 20,000 misfiled pages, two Congressional investigations, multiple court cases, and a 1,200+ document collection published by the National Security Archive in December 2024 — and one of the most mythologized.

Two competing narratives have consumed most of the oxygen. Both get something important right. Both get something important wrong.

The conspiracy narrative

The claim: MKUltra succeeded. The CIA developed reliable mind control techniques. These were used to create assassins, manipulate public figures, and control political outcomes. The program never really ended — what was publicly “shut down” was a cover story. Specific historical events — the Jonestown massacre, the assassination of Robert Kennedy (via a “programmed” Sirhan Sirhan), the Unabomber — are connected to MKUltra.

What this gets right: The program was more extensive than the CIA has ever voluntarily admitted. The destruction of records in 1973 was deliberate, targeted, and timed to prevent exposure. Victor Marchetti, a 14-year CIA veteran, specifically called the claim that MKUltra was abandoned “a cover story” in a 1977 interview. The surviving financial records represent a fraction of the original documentation, meaning the known program is a floor, not a ceiling.

What this gets wrong: There is no credible evidence that reliable mind control was ever achieved. The scientific consensus is clear: the pharmacological and psychological techniques used by MKUltra — LSD, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock — do not produce reliable behavioral control. They produce trauma, confusion, amnesia, and psychosis. These are not the same thing as control.

Gottlieb himself, after retiring in 1972, dismissed the entire program as “useless.” The CIA’s own Inspector General noted the experiments “had little scientific rationale” and the “agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.” LSD was eventually abandoned by MKUltra researchers as “too unpredictable in its results.”

The specific conspiracy claims are poorly documented:

Sirhan Sirhan: The “programmed assassin” theory rests on Sirhan’s claimed amnesia about the shooting and the existence of a mysterious woman. No documentary evidence connects Sirhan to any MKUltra subproject.
Jonestown: The theory that Jim Jones was a CIA asset and the mass death was a “mind control experiment” has no support in the surviving MKUltra records or any declassified intelligence files.
The “cover story” claim: Marchetti’s assertion is significant but unverifiable. He never provided specific evidence of continuation, and no subsequent declassification has confirmed ongoing programs of this type.

The conspiracy narrative performs a disservice to the documented reality. It shifts attention from what is proven — that the U.S. government tortured its own citizens, destroyed the evidence, and escaped criminal accountability — toward what is speculative. The documented truth is damning enough. It doesn’t need embellishment.

The skeptical narrative

The claim: MKUltra was a failed Cold War program that achieved nothing. It has been inflated by conspiracy theorists, Hollywood (The Manchurian Candidate, Stranger Things), and sensationalist journalism. The CIA conducted some unethical experiments during a period of Cold War panic, but the program was small, ineffective, and was shut down decades ago.

What this gets right: Mind control in the Manchurian Candidate sense was never achieved and probably cannot be achieved. Many of the program’s experiments were scientifically incompetent. The monitoring was not rigorous. The results were not reproducible. Gottlieb’s own assessment — “useless” — reflects the failure of the program’s stated objective. McCoy has argued that the Manchurian Candidate narrative may even have been deliberate CIA misdirection, focusing public attention on the sensational and ridiculous to deflect from the interrogation methodology that actually worked.

What this gets wrong: Calling MKUltra a “failed program” misidentifies the harm. The harm was not the failure to achieve mind control. The harm was what was done to people in the attempt.

Black prisoners addicted to heroin were given LSD for 77 consecutive days in exchange for heroin. This is documented in declassified CIA correspondence.
Patients entering a psychiatric hospital for postpartum depression were subjected to electroshock at 40 times normal power, drug-induced comas lasting months, and tape loops repeated hundreds of thousands of times. They lost their memories, their language, their continence, and in some cases their ability to recognize their own families. This is documented in court records and victim testimony.
Men visiting prostitutes in San Francisco were dosed with LSD without their knowledge and filmed through one-way mirrors. This is documented in CIA internal memos.
At least one man — Frank Olson — died under circumstances that forensic evidence in 1994 deemed “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”

The “failed program” framing also ignores the KUBARK line. The program failed at mind control. It did not fail at producing a methodology of psychological torture that was codified in a CIA manual in 1963, exported to Latin American dictatorships, and applied at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. McCoy, Kinzer, and Klein all document this connection. The program’s output was not a truth drug or a Manchurian Candidate. It was a torture manual.

The skeptical narrative also underestimates the significance of the destroyed records. When an organization destroys its own archives and then says “the program was small and ineffective,” the destruction is itself evidence — not of what the records contained (which is unknowable), but of what the organization wanted to hide. If the program were truly small and ineffective, the records would not have been worth destroying.

The Kaczynski question

The case of Theodore Kaczynski — the Unabomber — sits at the intersection of document and speculation.

What is documented: From the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, beginning at age sixteen, Kaczynski participated along with twenty-one other Harvard undergraduates in experiments conducted by psychologist Henry Murray. Murray had served with the Office of Strategic Services (CIA’s predecessor) during World War II. His Harvard experiments were funded by a U.S. Navy grant and “strongly resembled” OSS stress-testing methods.

The experiments have been described as “disturbing” and “ethically indefensible.” Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead, they wrote personal essays that were given to an anonymous individual who then subjected them to what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Kaczynski spent 200 hours in these experiments over three years.

What is speculated: Whether Murray’s study was formally part of MKUltra or merely adjacent to it. The CIA’s Intellipedia entry states there is “a considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence” linking the experiments to MKUltra. Whether the experiments contributed to Kaczynski’s later psychological deterioration and bombing campaign. Kaczynski himself gave conflicting accounts — claiming in some statements that the experiment caused him “only one unpleasant experience for just 30 minutes,” while investigators found he later described the three-year study as “the worst experience” of his life.

The Harvard Crimson reported in 2000 that the Murray Center sealed Kaczynski’s data, making independent verification difficult.

The honest assessment: the circumstantial evidence linking Murray’s experiments to MKUltra is substantial. The causal link between the experiments and the Unabomber campaign is speculative. The sealed data prevents resolution.

What the evidence actually supports

If you strip away both the conspiracy inflation and the minimizing skepticism, the documented record supports these claims:

1. The program was large. 149 subprojects, 80+ institutions, 6% of the CIA budget, twenty years, thousands of subjects across military, civilian, and prisoner populations.

2. Mind control failed. The stated objective — reliable control of human behavior — was not achieved. LSD was “too unpredictable.” Hypnosis was unreliable. Sensory deprivation produced trauma, not obedience.

3. The experiments were torture. The subjects did not consent. Many did not know they were being experimented on. The techniques — prolonged drugging, electroshock at extreme power, sensory deprivation, drug-induced comas — meet any reasonable definition of torture. The Nuremberg Code was violated systematically by people who knew it existed.

4. The torture was codified. The KUBARK manual (1963) formalized findings from MKUltra research into an interrogation methodology. This methodology was used in Vietnam, Latin America, and — forty years later — at Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites.

5. The records were deliberately destroyed. This is not in dispute. The destruction was ordered by the CIA Director and carried out by the program’s chief. What was destroyed will never be known.

6. No one was held accountable. Not Gottlieb, not Helms, not Cameron, not Isbell, not White. The victims who sued received modest settlements. The Supreme Court held, 5-4, that military personnel cannot sue for being experimented on. The CIA successfully argued in court that it can withhold remaining records indefinitely.

These six claims are not speculative. They are documented in declassified records, sworn testimony, court rulings, and forensic evidence. They require neither the conspiracy narrative’s embellishment nor the skeptical narrative’s minimization.

The next post is the last in this series. It’s what I think about all of this.

— Cael