Through MK Ultra’s experiments, often performed on unwitting test subjects, the CIA hoped to make ‘brainwashing’ real
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In the small hours of the morning, on 28 November 1953, a research scientist plunged to his death from the 13th floor of a Manhattan hotel. As far as his family was aware, Dr Frank Olson had been working for the US army and the official line was that he had committed suicide because of job-related stress.
Twenty-two years later, the CIA confessed that its agents had given Olson the hallucinogen LSD, without his consent or knowledge, and that his subsequent death was probably caused by the effects of the drug. US President Gerald Ford even issued an official apology Tis was an extraordinary sequence of events, but it transpired that the real story was much deeper, and a whole lot darker. If the US government thought it had drawn a line under the affair by admitting limited culpability for one man’s death and saying sorry it was gravely mistaken.