Let’s rewind for a moment: imagine suiting up for work each day, knowing your project goal is to discover if you can break, rebuild, and remotely steer the human mind. The cafeteria small talk alone must have been interesting. But as Reason’s recent podcast interview with historian John Lisle details, this idea wasn’t just sci-fi brainstorming—it was the driving question behind one of America’s most notorious “black” experiments: MKUltra.

How Paranoia, LSD, and Bureaucratic Tunnel Vision Built MKUltra

Sometimes when I read about Cold War intelligence history, it feels like a fever dream written by a roomful of anxious psychology undergrads. “Sure, Pavlov got dogs to drool on cue—so if the Soviets have been at it for half a century, should we assume they could brainwash a whole population?” That logic, as Lisle outlines, encapsulated the CIA’s mindset at the birth of MKUltra. The goal? To test if mind control was possible, preferably before the Communists could get there first.

It was a time of big fears, big budgets, and, apparently, almost nonexistent oversight. According to the Reason interview, compartmentalization kept even the few insiders mostly in the dark—possibly by design, certainly with some convenient side effects. Only a few handfuls of people inside the sprawling agency knew the outlines, let alone the details.

There’s a kind of tragic comedy in the CIA’s methods for exploring “influence”: dosings of LSD, truth-serum fantasies worthy of pulp novels, and experiments so loosely supervised they sometimes spilled over into real-world chaos. As outlined in Reason’s conversation and in referenced books and documentaries like Poisoner in Chief, it’s all a bit staggering: unknown volunteers, university students, even prisoners dosed or prodded—all apparently in the service of competitive paranoia.

Masters of the Mind…or Not So Much

Here’s where things spiral from dark curiosity into the genuinely absurd. The architect, Sidney Gottlieb, emerges from Lisle’s archival deep dives as an earnest, if not exactly warm, patriot-chemist—a man who, denied military service due to a limp and a stutter, found his battlefield behind a laboratory door. That his expertise was less in psychiatry and more in agricultural chemistry only adds to the sense of mismatched ambition.

And yet, for all the talk of “Manchurian Candidates,” the CIA’s track record reads less like a James Bond plot and more like, well, a doomed high school science project. According to depositions and internal reports cited in the Reason interview, by the late 1950s Gottlieb himself conceded that all LSD really accomplished was making people unpredictable, not programmable. (If you’ve attended a college music festival, you could probably have advised them on that outcome for a lot less government funding.)

Not to be outdone, sub-projects veered into the more macabre. Psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, for instance, hoped to cure mental illness by reducing patients’ identities to rubble—his methods included intensive electroshock, sensory deprivation, and recorded messages played on loop for days. As described in Reason’s reporting, at least one patient in his Montreal clinic regressed to a childlike state, unable to dress herself without help. The ethical boundaries here were not so much blurred as gleefully leapt over.

And let’s not forget Jolly West, who managed to kill an elephant named Tusko by administering a remarkable amount of LSD in the name of science. (Apparently, government-backed psychopharmacology was an equal-opportunity menace, regardless of species.)

The Secret’s Out—Eventually

For a secret project, MKUltra left plenty of breadcrumbs. Archival materials reviewed and documentation uncovered by historians—as well as revealed government archives that survived the notorious document-purges by CIA heads like Richard Helms—illuminate how much was preserved, often by accident. Add to that congressional probes (the Church and Rockefeller Committees), a few headline-making journalistic exposés, and lawsuits by survivors (or their families) in both the U.S. and Canada, and you get a picture jaw-dropping in both scope and ineptitude, as noted in the Reason interview.

The outcome? By the early 1970s, even internal watchdogs were calling the project “illegal and unethical.” Yet, as Lisle recounts, little changed until the passage of time, and mounting public scandal, finally forced a shutdown. The CIA quietly declared the experiment a wash.

Consequences—And The Conspiracy Afterlife

Here’s where things get even more classically American: the aftermath was less about institutional soul-searching and more about plausible deniability. As detailed in Reason’s conversation, Gottlieb walked away decorated and essentially immune, while public trust took the hit. For every “official” admission, an even wilder mythos flourished—Project Monarch, alien puppetmasters, you name it. When you try to erase all evidence, you don’t dampen conspiracy thinking; you supercharge it.

Lisle suggests an interesting paradox: programs built around secrecy and risk-taking beget embarrassment, which begets tighter secrecy—a vicious cycle that’s as endemic to intelligence work as the trench coat. Meanwhile, the reputational cost persists, long after the last dose of acid evaporated. Can you blame a generation for suspecting the worst, when the facts that have come out sound stranger than any fiction? If trust is the scaffolding of modern society, what happens when you spend decades running a sledgehammer through it?

Reflections from the Archive

Maybe the oddest legacy of MKUltra isn’t whether any of its sci-fi ambitions succeeded (spoiler: they didn’t, unless you count “helping” launch the hippie counterculture). It’s how its shadow lingers—on government credibility, medical ethics, and the American appetite for conspiracy. Is it any wonder that, as Reason notes, every new disclosure seems to fuel an equal measure of healthy skepticism and fantastical paranoia?

One can’t help but be quietly amazed by the irony laced through the record: a top-secret scheme to control minds instead inspires decades of folks refusing to trust their own government, let alone their neighbor. And what are we supposed to do with the knowledge that at the height of Cold War gravitas, a handful of scientists thought their plan to remake the world started with slipping unwitting people a tab of acid and hoping for the best?

Sometimes, the most far-fetched truths really do escape the archives. Are we any better today at guarding against the next experiment-gone-sideways—or at recognizing it, before we need a commission? The files may be thinner, but the questions haven’t changed.