mk ultra experiments

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2018 | Original: June 16, 2017

MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture. Though Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.

The Cold War and Project MK-Ultra

In the 1950s and 1960s—the height of the Cold War —the United States government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.

In response, Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), approved Project MK-Ultra in 1953. The covert operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.

The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Sometimes the test subjects knew they were participating in a study—but at other times, they had no idea, even when the hallucinogens started taking effect.

Many of the tests were conducted at universities, hospitals or prisons in the United States and Canada. Most of these took place between 1953 and 1964, but it’s not clear how many people were involved in the tests—the agency kept notoriously poor records and destroyed most MK-Ultra documents when the program was officially halted in 1973.

LSD and Sidney Gottlieb

The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. He believed the agency could harness the drug’s mind-altering properties for brainwashing or psychological torture.

Under the auspices of Project MK-Ultra, the CIA began to fund studies at Columbia University, Stanford University and other colleges on the effects of the drug. After a series of tests, the drug was deemed too unpredictable for use in counterintelligence.

MK-Ultra also included experiments with MDMA (ecstasy), mescaline, heroin , barbiturates, methamphetamine and psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”).

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Operation Midnight Climax

Operation Midnight Climax was an MK-Ultra project in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA “safe houses” where drug experiments took place.

The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then—while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror—watched the drug’s effects on the men’s behavior. Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes’ rooms, disguised as electrical outlets.

Most of the Operation Midnight Climax experiments took place in San Francisco and Marin County, California , and in New York City. The program had little oversight and the CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling, party-like atmosphere prevailed.

An agent named George White wrote to Gottlieb in 1971: “Of course 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 and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

The Death of Frank Olson

Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA. At a 1953 CIA retreat, Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

A few days later, on November 28, 1953, Olson tumbled to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide.

The CIA's Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control

During the Cold War, the CIA explored the unchartered world of 'brain warfare,' using LSD.

The family of Frank Olson decided to have a second autopsy performed in 1994. A forensics team found injuries on the body that had likely occurred before the fall. The findings sparked conspiracy theories that Olson might have been assassinated by the CIA.

After prolonged legal proceedings, Olson’s family was awarded a settlement of $750,000, and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA Director William Colby.

Ken Kesey and Other MK-Ultra Participants

Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , volunteered for MK-Ultra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.

Kesey later went on to promote the drug, hosting LSD-fueled parties that he called “Acid Tests.”

Acid Tests combined drug use with musical performances by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights. These parties influenced the early development of hippie culture and kick-started the 1960s psychedelic drug scene.

Other notable people who reportedly volunteered for CIA-backed experiments with LSD include Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist; Ted Kaczynski , better known as the “Unabomber”; and James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger , the notorious Boston mobster.

Church Committee

In 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on U.S. citizens. His report started the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MK-Ultra to light.

The following year, President Ford—in the wake of the Watergate scandal and amid growing distrust of the U.S. government—set up the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States to investigate illegal CIA activities, including Project MK-Ultra and other experiments on unsuspecting citizens.

The Commission was led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.

The Church Committee—helmed by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church—was a larger investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies during and after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon .

The Church Committee delved into plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. It also uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra.

These revelations resulted in Ford’s 1976 Executive Order on Intelligence Activities that prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”

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What We Know About the CIA’s Midcentury Mind-Control Project

Project MKUltra began on this day in 1953 and continued for years

Kat Eschner

On this day in 1953, the then-Director of Central Intelligence officially approved project MKUltra.

The project, which continued for more than a decade, was originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology. It ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.  It wasn’t the first time that the American government “without permission or notice, secretly gathered information on its people,” writes Melissa Blevins for Today I Found Out . But MKUltra has gone down in history as a significant example of government abuse of human rights, and for good reason.

The intent of the project was to study “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,” according to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977. The project was conducted in extreme secrecy, Turner said, because of ethical and legal questions surrounding the program and the negative public response that the CIA anticipated if MKUltra should become public.

Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could: “promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;” “render the induction of hypnosis easier;” “enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;” produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients–"people who could not fight back,” in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.

“The research and development program, and particularly the covert testing programs, resulted in massive abridgements of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences,” concluded a Senate hearing in 1975-76. “The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects.” While controlled testing of substances like LSD “might be defended,” the committee went on, “the nature of the tests, their scale and the fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the value of human life.”

MKUltra wasn’t one project, as the US Supreme Court wrote in a 1985 decision on a related case. It was 162 different secret projects that were indirectly financed by the CIA, but were “contracted out to various universities, research foundations and similar institutions.” In all, at least 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, but many didn’t know they were dealing with the CIA.

Many of MKUltra’s records were destroyed in a 1973 purge, and many had been destroyed throughout the program as a matter of course. But 8,000 pages of records–mostly financial documents that were mistakenly not destroyed in 1973–were found in 1977, launching a second round of inquiries into MKUltra.

Although the renewed inquiry resulted in public interest and even two lawsuits, Blevin writes, the 1977 documents “still leave an incomplete record of the program,” and nobody ever answered for MKUltra. Two lawsuits related to the program reached the Supreme Court in the 1980s, she writes, “but both protected the government over citizen’s rights.”

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Kat Eschner | | READ MORE

Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto.

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The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

Terry Gross

CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. Courtesy of the CIA hide caption

CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."

Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.

"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."

The Picture Show

Found in the archives: military lsd testing.

Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says.

Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.

Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.

Interview highlights

Poisoner in Chief

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On how the CIA brought LSD to America

As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.

In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.

Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey , the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg , the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that name.

So the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended.

On how MK-ULTRA experimented on prisoners, including crime boss Whitey Bulger

Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?

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Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me." And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him.

On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods

The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.

Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.

On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas

Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...

CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.

On how these experiments were unsupervised

[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important — mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.

On how Gottlieb destroyed evidence about his experiments when he left the CIA

The end of Gottlieb's career came in [1973], when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

Correction Oct. 27, 2019

In the audio of this interview, as in a previous Web version, Stephen Kinzer incorrectly says the end of Sidney Gottlieb's CIA career came in 1972. It actually ended in 1973. Previously posted Sept. 9: A previous photo caption incorrectly referred to the CIA's MK-ULTRA program as MS-ULTRA.

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• Copy story information for sharing Brainwashed: The echoes of MK-ULTRA: During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded mind control experiments on unwitting Canadians in a program codenamed MK Ultra. The experiments laid the groundwork for modern day torture techniques. And victims and their families are still seeking recognition and justice.

Brainwashed: The echoes of MK-ULTRA

During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded mind-control experiments on unwitting Canadians in a program codenamed MK-ULTRA. The experiments laid the groundwork for modern-day torture techniques. And victims and their families are still seeking recognition and justice.

By Michelle Shephard, Lisa Ellenwood and Chris Oke

October 21, 2020

The following story is based on material from the CBC podcast Brainwashed , a six-part series co-produced with The Fifth Estate that investigates the CIA's covert mind-control experiments — from the Cold War and MK-ULTRA to the so-called U.S. war on terror . The series is available on CBC Listen , Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts .

When Lloyd Schrier tells his story, it sounds more like a conspiracy than his family's tragic past.

But many of the details are laid out in a thick file of documents, correspondences and reports. He has news articles and pictures spanning decades, all describing what his family went through. And he has his mother's heartwrenching medical report that is still hard for him to comprehend.

"She had her 30th and last day of sleep on March 24th," Schrier said as he read from the 1960 hospital record.

"They gave her all the drugs … about four or five barbiturates and amphetamines at a time."

Esther Schrier received electroshock therapy, massive amounts of drugs and so-called psychiatric treatments that sound as if they were lifted from the pages of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

She was a patient at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute in the 1960s. She had gone to "the Allan," as the hospital is known, to seek treatment for what today would be considered anxiety or postpartum depression.

But once she walked through those hospital doors and into the care of a psychiatrist named Dr. Ewen Cameron, she became an unwitting experiment subject for a massive CIA brainwashing operation codenamed MK-ULTRA.

And Schrier was part of this clandestine program, too, because his mother was pregnant with him at the time.

"It's crazy," said Schrier. "I don't think it was fair to do that to a developing fetus."

Schrier is now 60 years old, semi-retired, living in Toronto and still fighting to be recognized as an experiment victim.

Hundreds of relatives whose loved ones were experimented upon by Cameron are now demanding compensation for family members and an apology from the Canadian government.

Canada has never provided a list of the victims of the experiments that took place during Cameron's tenure from 1943 to 1964. In the decades since, no government has ever admitted liability, let alone apologized — despite the fact that part of the experiments in Montreal were funded not only by the CIA, but also by the Canadian government.

"I think eventually they should come out with the truth. I think after all this time I don't know what they're trying to prove, who they're trying to protect. I don't think it's right," said Schrier. "I think they should come out and just, you know, deal with it."

To "deal with it" means acknowledging the legacy of a dark period that still reverberates today.

The idea of mind control has been constantly revisited by governments in periods of fear and uncertainty.

For Schrier and other relatives who have launched two separate lawsuits against the Canadian government and others, their mission is personal. They say their lives were irrevocably damaged by what happened. Families split up. Children were placed in foster homes. The trauma has been generational.

But the story of MK-ULTRA isn't just relegated to Cold War history.

The idea of mind control — the theory that breaking a person down will make them do something against their will — has been constantly revisited by governments during other periods of fear and uncertainty, when the military and medicine collide.

What happened at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute laid the groundwork for torture spanning decades to follow.

• Listen to Episode 1 | Psychiatric patients treated as human guinea pigs:

Lloyd Schrier's mother, Esther, had a difficult childhood, losing both her parents at an early age. In 1936, when she was four years old, her father died. Slightly more than a year later, her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a lobotomy. Unable to look after her children, she was committed to a psychiatric institution.

Esther and her older brother were moved around from the care of relatives and to foster homes, and suffered wherever they went.

But she was resilient and smart. In her late teens, she trained as a nurse and got a job at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. She met her future husband, Haskell Schrier, on a blind date. After they married in 1955, the couple became a fixture in Montreal's Jewish social scene.

Three years later, after an uneventful pregnancy, she gave birth to their first child, a baby girl they named Lynn Carole. But the baby died of a staph infection when she was just three weeks old, and Esther struggled with her grief. Medical records show she felt she was responsible for her daughter's death.

When she was pregnant again, two years later, she was still struggling with this guilt. Part of her "condition" identified in her medical records when she was admitted to the Allan was her anxiety over possibly losing another baby.

Haskell Schrier had read an article about Cameron and was impressed by the Allan's reputation for offering cutting edge psychiatric care.

"Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say," said Lloyd Schrier. "I think he was head of the Canadian and the American psychiatric associations. And even the World Psychiatric Association."

Cameron, a Scottish-born American psychiatrist, did hold all those titles at various points in his career, and he was the first director of the Allan.

What wasn't known, until many years later, was that Cameron's reputation also came to the attention of the CIA. They were interested in his psychiatric research that involved extreme sensory deprivation, drugs, and an intense repetition of recorded messages.

Three years after the CIA launched MK-ULTRA, they approached Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation and one of their front organizations through which they funnelled money. They encouraged him to apply for a grant, which he did, and quickly received. From January 1957 to September 1960, the CIA gave Cameron $60,000 US, equivalent to slightly more than $500,000 today.

Esther Schrier entered the hospital in February 1960 to receive what her family thought was the best care money could buy.

But her medical notes show disregard for her well-being and that of her unborn child right from the start.

She spent 30 days in what was called the "sleep room," a place where patients were put in a drug-induced coma and roused only for three feedings and bathroom breaks per day. She lost 13 pounds that month. Her records show she couldn't stand up because she was too weak.

She also underwent a treatment called "depatterning."

Cameron believed that breaking down a patient's minds to a childlike state — through drugs and electroshock therapy — would allow him to work from a clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed "psychic driving," which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up to 20 hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake.

These voices were played through headphones, helmets or speakers, sometimes installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show some patients would hear these messages up to half a million times.

By March 12, 1960, Esther Schrier's medical records state that she was "considered completely depatterned." She was incontinent, mute and had trouble swallowing.

"That's crazy, to do that to a pregnant woman," said her son. "When she woke from the sleep room, she didn't know who my father was. She didn't know it was her husband. I guess she didn't know anything. You know, she used to tell me she had to relearn everything."

Lloyd Schrier remembers his mother telling him that among the many things she forgot was how to boil water.

Several times during her treatments, she developed gynecological symptoms. Her records indicate she started to bleed and they brought in an obstetrician to treat her.

They would let her rest for four or five days and then resume treatments. Cameron's notes say that on Aug. 17, 1960, six months after she entered the Allan, she had 29 electroshock treatments, with most of them of the extreme variety he was using. But because she was "now in her eighth month of pregnancy," the treatments stopped.

On Sept. 27, 1960, Lloyd was born, and Esther Schrier said she felt helpless. She couldn't remember basic life functions, let alone how to take care of a newborn.

Years later, in a 2004 BBC Scotland interview, Esther Schrier recalled how lost she had been.

"I had a new baby, and I didn't know what to do with the baby. I had help, a baby nurse, but she had to have a day off and she left me a book, and I'll just give you a little example [from the book]: 'When you hear the baby cry, go to the room. Pick up baby and step by step how to feed the baby,' and that was very frightening."

Esther and Haskell Schrier are now deceased. She died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 84 and despite all she went through and what she lost, her son said she managed to live a full life and they remained close.

And he feels he was fortunate despite having lived under the dark shadow of what happened to his mother and uncertainty of how it impacted his health.

Many patients of Cameron emerged from the Allan completely broken, unable to find their way back to the lives they once lived. Relatives from across Canada have reached out to the CBC, describing the ongoing trauma the experiments have caused. Families were ripped apart by divorce or children were taken to foster homes. The grief rippled outward and spanned generations.

"I think I was lucky. I think the only side-effects that I know of, I guess in school, I was a bit slow in the beginning," said Lloyd Schrier.

"But I ended up going through high school, and I went, we have in Montreal CEGEP, I did the two years, and then I went on to McGill, and I did a bachelor of commerce. So … I was able to get my degrees and everything." But, he said, "I will never know what I could have been."

• Listen to Episode 2 | Dr. Ewen Cameron's experiments.

While MK-ULTRA officially ended in 1963, the mind-control experiments continued to echo into the early years of the 21s century, reaching from one amorphously named war to another: the Cold War to the U.S. war on terror.

Hundreds of captives who were rounded up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ended up the U.S. offshore prison on the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But the CIA was also holding those they considered "high-value detainees" in a network of secret prisons around the world that were collectively known as black sites.

These men were considered prized captives and their interrogators believed they might have information about impending attacks. They wanted answers, and they wanted them fast.

In 2002, in a secret CIA prison in Thailand, the FBI interrogated a prisoner named Abu Zubaydah. He had been shot and captured during a raid in Pakistan. The FBI had used traditional interrogation techniques, including what they termed "rapport-building," to try to earn his trust.

But the CIA didn’t think they were getting the answers they needed from him, so the agency turned to two psychologist contractors they had paid more than $80 million US to develop a new interrogation regime. It had been euphemistically named "enhanced interrogation techniques" and Abu Zubaydah was the first test case.

• Listen to Episode 3| The shocking truth behind MK-ULTRA.

The "techniques" that psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen devised included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement boxes, shackling and exposing detainees to extreme temperatures, sounds and pain.

The details of what happened to Abu Zubaydah are contained in the 6,700-page U.S. Senate intelligence committee report on torture , which was released in 2014, although only a 549-page executive summary has been declassified.

An excerpt: "After Abu Zubaydah had been in complete isolation for 47 days, the most aggressive interrogation phase began.… Security personnel entered the cell, shackled and hooded Abu Zubaydah.… The interrogators then removed the hood, performed an attention grab, and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor."

• Listen to Episode 4 | How do you sue one of the most powerful agencies in the world?

The Senate report goes on to describe in detail how over 19 days of torture, on a "near 24-hour-per-day basis," he was waterboarded 83 times, placed in the coffin-like wooden box, held naked and his body contorted into stress positions.

The report states: "After the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques ended, CIA personnel at the detention site concluded that Abu Zubaydah had been truthful and that he did not possess any new terrorist threat information."

At least 118 detainees were subjected to this type of tortured interrogation.

"I think it's important [to note] that Mitchell and Jessen really were not the wizards that designed and imagined the program," said retired U.S. army general and psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis. "I do think that they were used by authorities above them in the agency and probably the White House to come up with something like that."

Xenakis specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and has worked extensively with soldiers and veterans, as well as Guantanamo detainees and former captives from the CIA black sites.

"I think that essentially what they based their understanding on was bad science, completely not validated in any way," he said. "There’s no reason to think that it would have any positive effect to be useful."

And that "bad science" reaches all the way back to Cameron's work at the Allan.

WATCH | In 1980, The Fifth Estate interviewed two Canadians who went through the MK-ULTRA program :

As Kinzer notes in his book, even after MK-ULTRA was shut down, the CIA’s fascination about mind control continued. In the early 1960s, some of the experiments from MK-ULTRA were detailed in the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual.

Over 128 pages, the Kubark manual suggests interrogation methods, including "deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis and narcosis," and long sections devoted to sensory deprivation, which was drawn from "a number of experiments at McGill University."

Kubark relies directly on Cameron's work at McGill University, which the Allen is part of, and his theory that to make a mind malleable, you need to break it down to an infantile state.

By the 1980s, the CIA had devised the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (HRE), which was essentially an updated version of Kubark. As a Baltimore Sun investigation revealed in 1997, Honduran military forces accused of kidnapping, torture and murder had been trained by the CIA and were using the HRE.

Then came the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

"The idea that people were going to produce truthful information, valid information, in those states of mind had never, ever been established," said Xenakis.

"We knew from lots of records of PoWs – I, in fact in the '70s, interviewed a number of PoWs coming out of Vietnam – that they didn't produce good information when they were under high duress, when they were tortured. They just said what they needed to say to stop it."

• Listen to Episode 5 | The torturous experiments were supposed to end in the 1960s. They didn't.

Only twice in the years since Cameron experimented on psychiatric patients has their suffering been officially acknowledged. For the victims and their families, both times fell short of what they were seeking.

Nine patients of Cameron sued the CIA in the U.S. in the 1980s for their treatment as part of MK-ULTRA. It became a landmark case when it was settled out of court in 1988, and they received compensation, but the CIA did not accept any liability.

Esther Schrier could have been the 10th complainant but was too embarrassed to have people know about her mental health challenges.

WATCH | Bob Logie describes the experimental treatments he was given:

During the trial, it was exposed that the Canadian government had provided even more funding to Cameron, and for a longer period, than the CIA.

Eventually, in 1994, almost 20 years after the experiments were first publicly exposed, the Canadian government offered compensation for people who were experimented upon by Cameron from 1950 to 1965 (even though some believe Cameron started his experiments in the late 1940s). The patients had to prove they had experienced "full or substantial depatterning," to be eligible.

Seventy-seven former patients received $100,000 each. They were known as ex gratia payments, which essentially means giving compensation without the admission of liability.

Esther Schrier received a payment, but her son was rejected. Even after taking the case to the Federal Court of Canada in 1996, Lloyd Schrier was denied, with a judge upholding previous decisions saying that he was not a patient.

He received a letter from Allan Rock, who was the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada at the time.

"Payments under this plan are made on compassionate and humanitarian grounds to former patients," the letter said. "As the Government of Canada does not accept any liability or negligence for the treatment given to patients of Dr. Cameron, we have limited this payment to former patients. The government can only do so much and, therefore, limiting payments was necessary."

WATCH | How experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute affected a family:

Lloyd Schrier can’t see why he wouldn’t be eligible.

"When you look at the order it says they’re giving it on humanitarian grounds and I cannot see why I wouldn’t be included in that," he said.

"No one's taking any responsibility and I think they should."

Schrier is just one of hundreds of relatives who say they bear the emotional scars of those who were unwitting human experiment subjects of Cameron. They’ve recently found each other and came together after a 2017 story by the CBC's The Fifth Estate . Through two lawsuits against multiple defendants, including McGill University Health Centre, Royal Victoria Hospital and the attorney general of Canada, they are hoping to force the Canadian government into apologizing for its support of the experiments at the Allan.

But the Canadian government appears to have not changed its position. A spokesperson from the Department of Justice responded to an email from CBC, saying that Canada has already "taken action to provide assistance to those affected."

And McGill University seems to be trying to erase this history from its past. In the Allan Memorial Institute, a portrait of Cameron, who was the hospital's first director and leader for 21 years, still hangs in the halls alongside other past directors. But his name has been removed.

There is also no mention of this history on the university's official website. CBC asked the university why, and while a spokesperson did not answer the question directly, they wrote that they are "truly empathetic to those who were impacted."

• Listen to Episode 6 | How MK-ULTRA entered mainstream pop culture.

WATCH | The 2017 Fifth Estate documentary about MK-ULTRA:

Related stories

MKUltra: Inside the CIA's Cold War mind control experiments

Thousands of Americans were unknowing test subjects for psychological warfare research

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Forty years ago, a Freedom of Information request revealed the terrifying scope of Project MKUltra, a CIA programme which used human subjects to experiment with mind control for more than ten years.

Although the majority of documentation relating to the project had been destroyed by 1977, enough remained that - along with witness testimony - two congressional investigations were able to build an eye-opening picture of the programme.

Over eleven years, thousands of Americans were subjects of unethical and often illegal experiments to test mind control techniques, from subliminal messaging to sensory deprivation to the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

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What was it for?

Project MKUltra, launched at the height of the Cold War, was intended to give the US the edge over the Soviet Union in psychological warfare - by any means necessary.

In 1977, CIA director Stansfield Turner testified that MKUltra was set up to investigate "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior".

This included experiments designed to "render the induction of hypnosis easier", "enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion" and "produce amnesia, shock and confusion", says Smithsonian Magazine .

The mass destruction of documents relating to MKUltra means that we may never know the full extent of the project, making it a rich source of conspiracy theories and speculation.

Who were the test subjects?

According to the hearing report , 86 institutions - including universities, mental hospitals and prisons - participated in CIA-sponsored experiments on human subjects.

Vulnerable people were among the unwitting subjects of the top-secret experiments, many of them conducted by doctors, scientists and academics secretly under contract to the intelligence agency.

Chemical tests were even conducted on terminal cancer patients, "presumably because the experiments were anticipated to have long-lasting detrimental, if not lethal, effects," says Gizmodo .

Ethical standards and medical safeguarding were often non-existent. One of MKUltra's subprojects was to "observe the behaviour of unwitting persons being questioned after having been given a drug", according to the 1977 congressional hearing.

One such unwitting test subject, military scientist Dr Frank Olson, fell to his death from a New York hotel window nine days after CIA agents spiked his drink with LSD, provoking a nervous breakdown.

Among the most high profile suspected victims was Ted Kaczynski, who would become infamous as the Unabomber.

In his second year as a student at Harvard University, 17-year-old maths prodigy Kaczynski volunteered for a psychological study run by Dr Henry Murray, a Harvard professor who was secretly employed by the CIA.

For three years, the volunteers were subjected to aggressive, traumatising sessions in which their most cherished beliefs were torn apart, as part of research into emotional responses to extreme stress under interrogation.

Following the experiment, Kaczynski became increasingly withdrawn and eventually dropped out of society altogether. From a remote backwoods cabin in Montana, he developed a nihilistic, anti-capitalist, anti-technology political philosophy.

Eventually, he would turn to violence to further his agenda, justifying his deadly letter bomb campaign in a rambling manifesto which, according to expert witnesses for the defence at his murder trial, showed the influences of the traumatic Harvard experiment.

The mass destruction of records means that we may never know for sure whether or not the Murray experiment was an official part of MKUltra, Kaczynski's brother, David, wrote in 2010.

Either way, Kaczynski was one of thousands of victims of "a scientific culture that failed to learn and recoil from the grotesquely unethical conduct of Nazi scientists who treated human subjects with no more empathy than they would have treated an inanimate object".

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