The CIA
-Central Intelligence Agency-
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Table of contents
Rationale................................................................................................................3
Chapter one: The CIA and Its Beginnings.........................................................4
Chapter two: Organization and Responsibilities...............................................5
Chapter three: Project MKULTRA....................................................................6
Chapter four: Project STARGATE....................................................................9
Chapter five: CIA activities...............................................................................11
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Chapter one: The CIA and Its Beginnings
The United States was the last of the major powers to establish a civilian intelligence
agency responsible for the collection of secret information for policy makers. Indeed, prior to 1942
the country lacked any civilian intelligence agency. Information was collected in an unsystematic
way by the Office of Naval Intelligence, by U.S. Army intelligence, and by the FBI. The
information gathered was rarely shared with other government agencies and was sometimes not
even provided to senior policy makers. For example, because of rivalries between army and navy
intelligence offices, which did not want to jeopardize the “security” of their information, U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not given sensitive information about Japan in the months
before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
In June 1942 Roosevelt created the OSS to bring together the fragmented and
uncoordinated strands of U.S. foreign intelligence gathering in a single organization. A similar
office for this purpose, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, created in July 1941, had
floundered as the result of hostile pressure from the State Department, the military intelligence
services, and the FBI. William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, who had spurred Roosevelt into creating
an information agency, became head of the OSS upon its founding and was largely responsible for
building the organization and for improving its ability to perform economic and political
intelligence analysis for senior policy makers. (Roosevelt described Donovan as a man who had
100 new ideas a day, of which 95 were terrible—though he added that few men had 5 good ideas
in their lifetimes).
During World War II the OSS, with a staff of approximately 12,000, collected and analysed
information on areas of the world in which U.S. military forces were operating. It used agents
inside Nazi-occupied Europe, including Berlin; carried out counterpropaganda and disinformation
activities; produced analytical reports for policy makers; and staged “special operations” (e.g.,
sabotage and demolition) behind enemy lines to support guerrillas and resistance fighters. Before
the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, more than 500 OSS agents were working inside
occupied France. Its successes notwithstanding, the OSS was dismantled at the conclusion of the
war.
In 1946 Pres. Harry S. Truman, recognizing the need for a coordinated post-war
intelligence establishment, created by executive order a Central Intelligence Group and a National
Intelligence Authority, both of which recruited key former members of the OSS. As in the days of
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the OSS, there were problems of distrust and rivalry between the new civilian agencies and the
military intelligence services and the FBI.
In 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, which created the National Security
Council (NSC) and, under its direction, the CIA. Given extensive power to conduct foreign
intelligence operations, the CIA was charged with advising the NSC on intelligence matters,
correlating and evaluating the intelligence activities of other government agencies, and carrying
out other intelligence activities as the NSC might require. Although it did not end rivalries with
the military services and the FBI, the law established the CIA as the country’s preeminent
intelligence service. The agency was popularly thought of as the U.S. counterpart of the
Soviet KGB (which was dissolved in 1991), though, unlike the KGB, the CIA was forbidden by
law (the National Security Act) from conducting intelligence and counterintelligence operations
on domestic soil. In contrast, the majority of the KGB’s operations took place within the Soviet
Union and against Soviet citizens.
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Chapter two: Organization and Responsibilities
The CIA is headed by a director and a deputy director, only one of whom may be a military
officer. Until 2004 the director of central intelligence (DCI) was responsible for managing all U.S.
intelligence-gathering activities. (By the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of
2004, a director and a deputy director of national intelligence, responsible for coordinating the
activities of all U.S. agencies engaged in intelligence gathering, including the CIA, were first
appointed in 2005.) DCIs have been drawn from various fields, including not only intelligence but
also the military, politics, and business. The DCI serves as the chief intelligence adviser to
the president and is often the president’s close confidant.
The CIA is organized into four major directorates. The Intelligence Directorate analyzes
intelligence gathered by overt means from sources such as the news media and by covert means
from agents in the field, satellite photography, and the interception of telephone, mobile phone,
and other forms of communication. Those analyses attempt to incorporate intelligence from all
possible sources. During the Cold War most of that work was focused on the military and
the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union.
The Directorate of Operations is responsible for spying (i.e., espionage, or
the clandestine collection of intelligence) and special covert and often illegal operations, including
subversion. Clandestine activities are carried out under various covers, including the diplomatic
cloak used by virtually every intelligence service, as well as corporations and other “front”
companies that the CIA creates or acquires. Despite the elaborate nature of some covert operations,
such activities represent only a small fraction of the CIA’s overall budget.
The Directorate of Science and Technology is responsible for keeping the agency abreast
of scientific and technological advances, for carrying out technical operations (e.g., coordinating
intelligence from reconnaissance satellites), and for supervising the monitoring of foreign media.
During the Cold War, material gathered from aerial reconnaissance produced detailed information
on issues as varied as the Soviet grain crop and the development of Soviet ballistic missiles.
Information obtained through those satellites was critical to the arms control process; indeed,
agreements reached during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in the 1970s specifically
mentioned the use of satellites to monitor the development of weapons. The Directorate of Science
and Technology has been instrumental in designing spy satellites and in intercepting the
communications of other countries.
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The Directorate of Administration is responsible for the CIA’s finances and personnel
matters. It also contains the Office of Security, which is responsible for the security of personnel,
facilities, and information as well as for uncovering spies within the CIA.
Chapter three: Project MKULTRA
The publication of post-Cold War memoirs by former agents and the release of declassified
documents by the United States and Russia have provided a fairly complete account of the CIA’s
activities, including both its successes and its failures. CIA data collection and analysis was
important for arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and for
determining U.S. strategy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when President John F.
Kennedy relied on information gathered by the CIA through Soviet double agent Colonel Oleg
Penkovsky. During the 1970s and ’80s, CIA agents in the Soviet military and the KGB provided
information on the Soviet military-industrial complex.
“If God himself was sitting in that chair, we would make him say what we wanted him to
say.” This sinister quote is attributed to a Communist interrogator based in Budapest in the late
1950s. This and other similar reports were perceived by American security services that the
Communist Bloc had developed innovative techniques to extort confessions from their adversaries.
Or even worse, to wipe out the personalities of unwilling subjects, and replace them with new
beliefs and convictions, to manipulate them as covert sleeper agents. As a result, in 1953 the CIA
Director Allen Dulles authorized the agency’s own mind control program, the notorious Project
MKULTRA.
The story begins in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when Western security services
developed a serious concern over the Communist Bloc’s capability for mind control. A turning
point in the development of such convictions was the trial of the Hungarian Cardinal Joszef
Mindszenty. A fierce opponent of the local communist government, Mindszenty, was arrested on
November 26th, 1948. In the ensuing trial, he was accused of treason. To the surprise of
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international observers, Mindszenty meekly confessed to stealing Hungary’s crown jewels, to
planning a Third World War, and to conspiring to take over the country. The same observers,
however, reported how the Cardinal displayed a zombie-like demeanour throughout the trial. His
gaze appeared particularly lost, which led to speculations of him being manipulated through
hypnosis or other mind-wiping techniques.
The creation of Project MKULTRA was formally authorized by Director Allen Dulles in
April 1953. The goal of MKULTRA was to identify ways to wipe out an individual’s personality,
before implanting a new set of beliefs, behaviours and directives. The final goal was to control
individuals to do someone else’s bidding, beyond their sense of self-preservation.
The department in charge was the Office of Scientific Intelligence, which experimented
with all possible means to achieve its objective: the use of drugs, medical devices, sensory
deprivation, hypnosis and so on. The program was, of course, top secret, most of its relating
documents had been destroyed in 1973, on orders of then Agency Director, Richard Helms. The
program was however investigated by the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, the Senate Church
Committee in 1976, and by Senator Kennedy in 1975 and 1977. The 1977 enquiry brought to light
documentation on the little-known predecessors of MKULTRA.
Apparently, the US military and security services had been experimenting with hypnosis and mindaltering substances long before the Communists were alleged to have done so. The term and
concept of “brainwashing” had appeared in a CIA nine months before Ed Hunter’s first article, the
journalist who first used the term, whose name came from the method the Chinese were calling
“to wash the brain”. Which may not be that surprising, considering that Hunter had been an agent
in the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS; later working as a propaganda specialist for the Agency itself.
On the 15th of August 1977, CIA Director of Security, Robert W. Gambino was informed
of the discovery of eighteen boxes within the Agency’s Archives, which related to the CIA’s drugrelated activities. It emerged that the OSS had already carried out experiments on psychoactive
drugs, especially those believed to “soften up” POWs (prisoner of war) during their interrogation.
The declassified memos also mention the OSS performed experiments on at least one unwitting
subject described as a “notorious New York gangster”. However, the OSS was not the only agency
dealing with interrogation techniques and mescaline trips. Shortly after World War II, a US Naval
Technical Mission found out about the experiments conducted by Dr Kurt Plotner at the Dachau
concentration camp over the course of 1942. Plotner was the head of the Third Reich’s Institute
for Military and Scientific Research and was seeking to develop the “perfect” interrogation
technique. His methods relied on a combination of hypnosis and mescaline which he tested on 30
prisoners.
The most substantial find in the stash uncovered by Gambino was the existence of a secret
Project initiated in the early 1950s codename BLUEBIRD. In August of 1951, it was renamed
ARTICHOKE. According to a declassified memo, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE sought to
address among others, the following questions:
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Can we condition by means of post-hypnotic suggestion, agency operatives so that they do
not divulge any secrets, nor commit acts on the behalf of an enemy?
Can we get an unwilling subject to perform an act for our benefit?
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Can we influence individuals by post-hypnotic control, so that they perform actions
contrary to their basic moral principles? For example, crashing a plane, or wrecking a train?
Can we extract details and intelligence from unwilling prisoners by using hypnosis or
chemical compounds?
And more in general: can we alter someone’s personality by the same means?
One of the key characteristics of MKULTRA was unwitting cooperation of medical
researchers, who received grants by the Human Ecology Fund, a covert front for the CIA.
We can easier define MKULTRA through a quote directly from the CIA Director Admiral
Stansfield Turner, from his testimony to the US Senate on the 21 st of September 1977:
“MKULTRA was an umbrella project under which a broad spectrum of sensitive activities was
financed. Some of these activities dealt with research into behavioural modification – primarily by
means of drugs and hypnosis – involving tests on human volunteers and, in some cases, on
unwitting subjects.”.
The project was officially sanctioned by CIA Director Allen Dulles in April of 1953, and
was shut down in 1964. When the Project came under the scrutiny of numerous American
committees in August of 1977, it was reconstructed that MKULTRA covered 149 sub-projects.
One of these sub-projects considered the weaponization of dolphins. The plan was to somehow
train or even control remotely these sea mammals. Once equipped with special needles, the
dolphins would be manipulated into assassinating their targets via violent injections of compressed
air. The chosen targets for such inventive assassination methods would have been scuba divers, of
course and the idea that was that the dolphins could be used to protect ships and port facilities from
saboteurs.
The mastermind behind the entire project, personally selected by Allen Dulles: the socalled “poisoner-in-chief", Dr Sidney Gottlieb, Chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical
Service Staff. In his quest to establish mind-control techniques, Dr Gottlieb has theorised the twostep process that seemed to be the most effective: first, you blast away the existing mind; then,
insert a new one into the void that had been created. Gottlieb initially theorised that mind-control
or brainwashing could be achieved via hypnosis. Interestingly, hypnotic suggestion has already
been proven unreliable from the early days of ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD. This is why the
MKULTRA chief quickly redirected his main efforts to the pharmacological field. He was a
chemist by trade after all, and one with a keen interest in LSD, since its discovery by Sandoz
Laboratories in April 1943.
Initial experiments championed by Gottlieb involved willing individuals, who knew what
to expect and took the drug in a safe and controlled environment. Participants included author Ken
Kesey, who would go on to write “One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest”; beat poet Allen Ginsberg;
and Robert Hunter, lyricist for The Grateful Dead. We could almost claim that the CIA gave birth
to the counterculture movement that would later cause them such headaches!
Gottlieb soon changed his approach however, preferring to conduct his tests on subjects
who weren’t aware that there was a test, as their responses would be more spontaneous. Gottlieb
authorised experimentation on “expendable” prisoners in US detention centres, located in Japan,
the Philippines and Germany. Alleged or confirmed communist spies, informants, defectors... they
were subjected to physical and psychological torture which involved the use of high doses of LSD,
sensory deprivation and electroshocks. All in the name of completing phase one of Gottlieb’s
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process to destroy the human ego. Sidney Gottlieb went even further though, sometimes personally
spiking his friends’ and colleagues' drinks during meetings or after work.
Of course, no discussion of MKULTRA and Gottlieb is complete however without talking
about Frank Olsen. On the 18th and 19th of November 1953, Sidney Gottlieb attended an offsite
meeting with members of the Army’s Special Operations Division, a section specialised in
chemical and biological warfare. One of the attendees was bacteriologist Frank Olson, who had
witnessed first-hand the unethical technique applied by MKULTRA in its detention centres. Over
the meeting, Olsen and other delegates were served shots of Cointreau by Gottlieb himself, the
secret ingredient the liquor had that day was, of course, LSD. Over the next few days, Olson’s
health and mental stability deteriorated progressively, in a whirlwind of paranoia, anxiety and a
loss of cognitive function. Upon learning that he had been given LSD against his will, he resolved
to resign. On the 28th of November, however, this CIA sent him to New York for treatment with
one of their doctors, Robert Lashbrook at the Statler Hotel. That night, he jumped out the window
of the 13th floor. The night manager, who came out to check what had happened, discovered that
he was still alive, desperately trying to say something which, unfortunately, couldn’t be understood
as he was choking on blood, a few moments later, he was gone. When the police questioned Robert
Lashbrook, he told them he had been sleeping, heard a noise and woke up; the responding officers
figured this was an open and shut case. However, the night manager, Armand Pastore, wasn’t
convinced. He said that it didn’t make sense that someone would get up in the middle of the night,
run across a dark room, avoid two beds, and dive through a closed window that had the shade and
curtains closed. Pastore checked with the hotel operator to see if any calls had been made from
their room that night, and there had been one, just a few minutes ago and because it ran through a
switchboard, the operator heard the whole thing. Robert Lashbrook called Dr Harold Abramson,
telling him “Well, he’s gone” (referring to Olsen), to which Abramson replied “Well, that’s too
bad”.
Funding was shut down in 1964 for two good reasons. First, the then CIA Director John
McCone was concerned about the ethical implications of experiments conducted without informed
consent. And second, after almost 20 years of experiment under BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and
MKULTRA, they had produced little to no results.
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Chapter four: Project STARGATE
Up until surprisingly recently, the CIA believed in psychic abilities and that they could be
utilized to benefit the government. According to CIA intelligence, they also thought the Russians
believed the same. In fact, from 1969 to 1971, the CIA was concerned that the Soviet Union was
training its citizens with psychic powers in the area of intelligence collection. Evidence suggested
that the Soviet’s efforts were funded by a 60 million Ruble budget in 1970, which was later
increased to 300 million Ruble five years later. In alarm, the CIA concluded that efforts must have
been met with success to justify this additional expenditure, not to mention the large number of
suspected technicians and scientists involved. The CIA decided that for their country’s future
security they, too, needed to investigate psychic powers.
To this end, the CIA created several programs to study remote viewing, or the ability of an
individual with psychic abilities to perceive something that a normal person cannot because it’s
obscured from view, far away, or happened at a different point in time. In other words, something
understood using only their minds and without the use of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell and
in absence of being given any information via person or device or the use of simple logic.
According to declassified documents, the CIA believed that every person possessed this
ability to some extent as a means of self-preservation and that though this talent is generally
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underdeveloped in the general population, it can be strengthened and utilized successfully with the
correct training.
The use of remote viewing by the US government had three given benefits:
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It was a talent that required little action on behalf of the viewer
Had minimal associated costs
(And as far as the CIA knew) Could not be prevented or defended against
It first explored this concept in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute in California under
Program SCANATE. It began with just a couple of seemingly psychically gifted individuals,
including a New York artist known as Ingo Swann, who was also a Scientologist. In fact, many of
the other study subjects were Scientologists as well. All trainees were required to have a 65%
psychic accuracy rate, and those involved claimed to surpass this minimum over the course of their
training. In other words, things looked quite promising. The CIA also reached out to television
personality Uri Geller who had made himself famous by allegedly bending spoons with his mind.
They tested Geller’s abilities in 1973. To do this, the CIA placed him in a room shielded from
sight, sound, or electricity. They then picked a random word from a dictionary, illustrated its
meaning, and taped it to a wall outside of the room Geller was in. For the word “fuse”, the
experimenters drew a firecracker, and Geller sketched a drum, or as he described it, “a cylinder
object that made a sound”. For the word “bunch”, experimenters drew 24 grapes and so did Geller,
24 of them exactly. However, when a scientist later drew a picture of a rabbit, Geller was unable
to replicate anything similar. Though his initial experiments still convinced the CIA of his gift,
others later labelled him as a fraud.
Then came projects where this supposedly effective skill was applied in sensitive matters
of government security. Such as the proposed 1977 Gondola Wish Program, thought up to by the
Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. The given purpose for the program was to train
personnel to collect sensitive intelligence using psychic abilities and thereby determine potential
threats, weaknesses and methods for defence.
When it became operational the following year it as given the name Project Grill Frame
and its research was conducted at Fort Meade in the state of Maryland. Eventually, journalist Jack
Anderson got ahold of information about these CIA-endorsed psychic experiments and wrote
about them in April of 1984. That same year, the National Academy of Sciences National Research
Council gave its opinion, and it was not a flattering one. Unsurprisingly, the army’s funding was
cut. However, that didn’t stop the experiments which were renamed and transferred elsewhere. By
1991, the latest program was code-named STARGATE.
STARGATE and its supporting research cost the US government $20 million and included
40 personnel, 23 of which were remote viewers. Three of these psychics worked at Fort Meade for
years and were consulted by different government agencies on a need-by-need basis. During its
run, STARGATE claimed to have many unbelievable or “eight martinis” successes after which
those involved downed eight such beverages in order to calm down. Among other promising finds,
one remote viewer was able to narrow down where Soviet bomber had crashed in Africa, only
missing the exact mark by a few miles.
On the 22nd of May 1984 a sub-project of STARGATE named Mars Exploration took place.
The goal of the project was to remote view the planet Mars, the time of interest being
“approximately 1 million years B.C.”. In the declassified files, the remote viewer is being directed
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to certain coordinates by the monitor. At first, the RV describes pyramidal megalithic objects, then,
after being redirected to a certain unspecified time, he talks about a geologic problem. Sometime
after, he describes some type of “people” as being “thin and tall, but very large [...] wearing some
kind of strange clothes”. Hours after the start of the session, after travelling to multiple locations,
the remote viewer describes the pyramid-shaped structures are designed to be storm shelters; 37
minutes in real time after being encouraged by the monitor to enter one, he gives a description of
their interior “stripped of any kind of furnishing [...] strictly functional for hibernations and
sleeping though storms”. He then begins to communicate with the beings there, describing them
as “ancient people” who seem to know it’s past their time, waiting for an inevitable death. The
remote viewer talks about how they (the ancient people) sent a search party to look for a new place
to live but to no avail; the cause of the geological problems the RV was talking about earlier seems
to be a “corruption of their environment”. Just before being brough back by the monitor, the remote
viewer “goes along with them on their journey” (the ancient people’s), where he describes a planet
“with volcanos and gas pockets and strange plants [...] a lot of vegetation”.
A statistician found that psychics working for the government had given correct
information just 15% of the time and incorrect details the remaining 85. Similarly, a psychologist
asked to evaluate their findings had little favourable to say. As a result, the American Institutes for
Research recommended termination of the program in November of 1995.
Chapter five: CIA activities
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CIA changed both its institutional
structure and its mission. Whereas more than half its resources before 1990 had been devoted to
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activities aimed at the Soviet Union, in the post-Cold War era it increasingly targeted nonstate
actors such as terrorists and international criminal organizations. It also made significant efforts to
collect and analyse information about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Spy satellites that had
been used exclusively for military purposes were sometimes used for other tasks, such as collecting
evidence of ecological disasters and human rights abuses.
Following the 2001 September 11 attacks, in which terrorists affiliated with alQaeda destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City and part of the Pentagon near
Washington, D.C., CIA paramilitary officers in Afghanistan (whose Taliban government had been
harbouring al-Qaeda’s leaders) aided the U.S. attack on that country by collecting information and
identifying military targets.
The agency also undertook a large-scale “kill or capture” campaign against operatives of
al-Qaeda. Although the CIA had been prohibited by Pres. Gerald R. Ford in 1976 from carrying
out assassinations, the George W. Bush administration (2001–09) argued that the assassination
ban did not apply in wartime (i.e., during the so-called “war on terror”) and thus did not prevent
the agency from killing al-Qaeda terrorists who were threatening the United States. The
administration of Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, adopted the same view.
The readiness of the CIA to use lethal force was showcased in 2011 with the assassination
of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader and the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, by a team
of special operations soldiers (Navy SEALs acting under CIA command). In most cases, however,
the CIA used missile strikes fired by drones to kill al-Qaeda members. Such drone attacks
eventually became frequent.
The CIA often has been portrayed by its critics as an agency run amok
that implements covert operations without the approval of the executive branch of the U.S.
government. Contrary to that assertion, however, all covert operations must be officially
sanctioned by the executive branch. Once approved by the National Security Council, plans for
covert action are presented to the Senate and House committees that oversee CIA operations.
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