What They Did to People | Victor Queiroz

The previous post described the documentary record — what survived the 1973 destruction of MKUltra files. This post describes what those surviving records, combined with testimony from Congressional investigations and court depositions, document about what was done to people.

Every fact below is sourced from declassified CIA documents, sworn testimony before the Church Committee or Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, court records from lawsuits brought by victims, the 1963 CIA Inspector General report, or the 2024 National Security Archive collection of 1,200+ documents. Where accounts conflict, I note the conflict.

The Lexington experiments: heroin as currency

Dr. Harris Isbell directed research at the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center at the Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, from 1945 to 1963. The hospital treated drug addiction; many patients were sentenced drug offenders.

Isbell tested approximately 800 psychoactive chemicals on his subjects. His test subjects were predominantly Black male prisoners addicted to heroin.

The coercion mechanism was simple. To induce inmates to participate in MKUltra drug experiments, they were offered the drug of their choice — which for most subjects was heroin. Addicts were given their drug of addiction as payment for submitting to experimental psychoactive substances they had never heard of.

A declassified July 14, 1954 letter from the Addiction Research Center to the CIA reads:

“Our experiments on tolerance to LSD-25 have been proceeding well, although I continue to be somewhat surprised by the results, which to me are the most amazing demonstration of drug tolerance I have ever seen. I have seven patients who have now been taking the drug for more than forty-two days. One of these patients receives 1 mcgm./kg. daily, four receive 1.5 mcgm/kg. daily, and two receive 2 mcgm/kg. daily. All seven are quite tolerant to both the physiological and mental effects of the drug. We have attempted to break through this tolerance by administering double, triple and quadruple doses…”

The experiment ultimately extended to 77 consecutive days of LSD at up to four times normal dosage for seven inmates. A separate case documented in other sources describes a mental patient in Kentucky receiving LSD for 174 consecutive days.

The subjects were described as “volunteers” in official documentation. They were incarcerated addicts offered heroin in exchange for participation. The racial composition — predominantly Black prisoners — and the exploitation of addiction rendered any notion of consent meaningless.

The CIA’s own Inspector General, reviewing the program in 1963, noted that “the agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.” Senator Ted Kennedy said on the Senate floor in 1977 that “the Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense.”

Operation Midnight Climax: the safe houses

In 1954, the CIA established safehouses — at least three: one at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, one in Mill Valley, California, and one in New York City — for a suboperation called Midnight Climax.

George Hunter White, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was recruited to run the San Francisco operation under the alias “Morgan Hall.” CIA-paid prostitutes lured men to the safehouses. The men were dosed with LSD in their drinks without their knowledge. The locations were equipped with one-way mirrors, microphones, and film cameras. White observed from behind the glass, reportedly taking notes while sitting on a portable toilet and drinking martinis. The encounters were filmed for later study.

On the walls of the safehouse, White had hung photographs of women being tortured.

Gottlieb flew from Washington to visit the 225 Chestnut Street safehouse several times a year. His deputy Robert Lashbrook and CIA psychologist John Gittinger also visited regularly.

The subjects were selected specifically because they would be too embarrassed to report what happened. They were men visiting prostitutes — members of the general public and the criminal underworld. No consent was obtained. No medical supervision was present. No judicial oversight existed.

Gottlieb later stated there were “about 40” unwitting tests conducted by White in the safehouses.

A December 17, 1963 “Eyes Only” memo from Richard Helms explicitly defended the continuation of unwitting testing:

“Most of our difficulty stems from the fact that the individuals subjected to testing must be unwitting… In the circumstances of potential operational use of this technique, it is virtually certain that the target will be unwitting. Any testing program which does not attempt to approximate this real situation will result in a false sense of accomplishment and readiness…”

The logic was operational: if the CIA planned to drug people without their knowledge in the field, the testing had to drug people without their knowledge in the lab. The San Francisco safehouses closed in 1965; the New York safehouse closed in 1966.

After the program ended, White wrote to Gottlieb:

“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

The Montreal experiments: Subproject 68

Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron was, at the time of his CIA-funded experiments, the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association and president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. He had been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946-1947 — the body that established the ethical code his own experiments would violate.

Cameron commuted weekly from Albany, New York, to the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital affiliated with McGill University in Montreal. The CIA approved funding for his experiments as MKUltra Subproject 68 from March 18, 1957 to June 30, 1960. Cameron was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964. The Canadian government, which was aware of the arrangement, later provided an additional $500,000 to continue the experiments.

Cameron believed schizophrenia could be cured by erasing existing memories and rebuilding the personality from scratch. He called the erasure phase “de-patterning” and the rebuilding phase “psychic driving.”

De-patterning involved:

Electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times normal power, administered far more frequently than standard practice
Drug-induced comas lasting weeks to months — one case reportedly lasted 86 days — using Thorazine and other sedatives
Large doses of LSD and other psychotropic drugs
Sensory deprivation
Paralytic drugs that immobilized subjects during treatment

Psychic driving involved:

Tape loops of simple repetitive statements played continuously for 4 to 6 hours at a time while patients were in drug-induced comas
Some tapes were negative (“You are a bad mother, you are a bad wife”); others were supposedly positive messages intended to rebuild identity
Messages were repeated between 250,000 and 500,000 times

Cameron’s experiments were not conducted on suspected spies, enemy agents, or military subjects. They were conducted on ordinary patients who had entered the Allan Memorial Institute for common problems — anxiety disorders, postpartum depression, and similar conditions. Many had no idea what would be done to them.

Documented effects on victims:

Permanent amnesia — inability to recall memories from before treatment
Incontinence requiring retraining
Forgetting how to talk
Forgetting their parents
Thinking their interrogators were their parents
Regression to a childlike state requiring toilet training

Many suffered these effects permanently for the rest of their lives.

Velma Orlikow checked herself into the Allan Memorial Institute in 1956 seeking treatment for postpartum depression. She was the wife of David Orlikow, a Canadian Member of Parliament. She was given LSD 14 times over two years without her knowledge, and subjected to psychic driving.

In 1980, Orlikow and eight other former patients filed suit against the U.S. government. Gottlieb was deposed in May 1983. In 1988, the case settled out of court — each plaintiff received approximately $67,000 to $80,000. Velma Orlikow died in 1990.

The Canadian government eventually settled separately with 127 identified victims for $100,000 each, paid “for compassionate and humanitarian reasons” without admitting legal liability.

Cameron’s personal records were destroyed by his family after he died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967.

In July 2025, a Quebec Superior Court authorized a class-action lawsuit on behalf of victims, allowing two survivors to represent all persons who underwent de-patterning at the Allan Memorial Institute between 1948 and 1964.

Inside the CIA: the surprise acid trips

Before MKUltra expanded to external institutions, it began inside the CIA itself. Everyone in Technical Services tried LSD. A typical early experiment involved two people in a room observing each other for hours and taking notes.

As the experimentation progressed, “surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.” In one documented case, an operative received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic, and ran across Washington, D.C., seeing a monster in every car that passed him.

The experiments continued even after Frank Olson died. Frank Olson’s story is the next post.

The scope we can’t measure

The 1994 U.S. General Accounting Office report found that between 1940 and 1974, the Department of Defense and other national security agencies tested hazardous substances on hundreds of thousands of human subjects:

“Working with the CIA, the Department of Defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of ‘volunteer’ soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named BZ.”

The Army’s Inspector General found that the “mandated requirements of Wilson’s 1953 memorandum” — which required, in accord with Nuremberg Code protocols, that only volunteers be used — “had been only partially adhered to” and that “volunteers were not fully informed, as required, prior to their participation; and the methods of procuring their services, in many cases, appeared not to have been in accord with the intent of Department of the Army policies governing use of volunteers in research.”

The number of people affected across MKUltra and all related military programs will never be known. The records are destroyed. The subjects were selected for their inability or unwillingness to report what happened to them. The monitoring was done by people who were not qualified scientific observers. The program operated for twenty years with 6% of the CIA’s budget and no oversight.

What remains is what the surviving financial records reveal, what witnesses swore to under oath, and what the bodies of the victims showed when examined.

— Cael