Project MK Ultra

“That’s crazy to do that to a pregnant woman”, says Lloyd Schrier as he recalls what his mother went through when she was pregnant with him. “They gave her all the drugs… about four or five barbiturates and amphetamines at a time.”

Esther Schrier was just one of the many victims of the CIA’s covert operation code-named as ‘Project MK Ultra’.

During the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States feared that the Soviet countries were working on mind control techniques to brainwash the US Prisoners in Korea. Not wanting to fall behind, Allen Dulles, the then director of CIA, approved this appalling undercover operation in 1953.

The aim of the project was to test various behavior altering techniques and their psychological effects on humans. LSDs, barbiturates, heroin and several other drugs were administered to not only the volunteered test subjects but also to many members of the unwitting general public who had no idea even when the drugs started taking effect. Numerous patients and prisoners were subject to mind control therapies without consent. The CIA would even employ prostitutes to lure naive men to CIA safe houses and spike their drinks with LSD to monitor its effect on their behaviour. This operation was called ‘The Midnight Climax’.

Esther Schrier’s story, as Lloyd recalls, is rather heartbreaking. After an uneventful first pregnancy, Esther was anxious about losing another baby when she was pregnant with Lloyd. So she visited Cameron, a Scottish-born American psychiatrist. Little did she know that she was going to be used for a horrid experiment.Esther was made to stay in a “sleep room” where the patients were put to drug-induced sleep and would wake up only for food and bathroom breaks. When she came out of the sleep room, she had lost 13 pounds and was too weak to even stand. Part of Cameron’s treatment involved repeatedly playing recorded messages to the patients for about 20 hours a day. This was done to depattern the patient’s brain.Within a month, Esther was completely ‘depatterned’. She had forgotten to speak or swallow and couldn’t recognize anyone, not even her husband. Even when she developed gynecological symptoms, Cameron continued treating her with electric shocks. When she was finally let go in the eighth month of her pregnancy, she was completely helpless and incapable of even basic life functions.

This gruesome project came to an anticlimactic end in 1963 when John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff, learnt about the non-volunteering human test subjects. The Inspector-General insisted that the agency bring all the programs on non-consenting volunteers to an end.

Most of the MKUltra’s records were destroyed in a 1973 purge initiated by CIA Director Richard Helms. Many other files had been destroyed throughout the program to avoid any investigation in the future. But an 8,000 pages record–mostly financial documents that were mistakenly not destroyed in 1973–were found in 1977, launching a second round of inquiries into MKUltra. However, the more horrific truths of the project still remain untold and might always remain so.