The Ghost of MK Ultra: How to Control a Mind Without Touching It

There are few things more American than taking a wild rumour and weaponising it. During the Cold War, the CIA did exactly that. Panicked that the Soviets had cracked some mythical “brainwashing” formula, they launched Project MK Ultra, an operation so classified that even the people being tortured weren’t cleared to know about it.

Between 1953 and 1973, the agency poured money into mind control experiments that would make Frankenstein’s lab look like a mindfulness retreat. The goal was simple and insane: find ways of breaking people’s will, chemically, psychologically, spiritually, and rebuild it in the image of their handlers. They called it depatterning. Victims called it hell.

Under the project, LSD became the miracle drug of choice. Researchers believed it could turn spies into puppets or at least loosen their tongues long enough to confess. They were wrong, but that didn’t stop them. Some victims were slipped acid in their drinks; others were blasted with electroshock therapy so extreme that their memories and personalities were permanently erased.

Dr Donald Ewen Cameron, who led the infamous “psychic driving” experiments in Montreal, literally played messages on repeat to unconscious patients for days at a time, hoping to overwrite their minds like a cassette tape. Some woke up as shells of their former selves, unable to walk, talk, or remember who they were. It was all justified in the name of national security. Apparently, freedom was something worth torturing people for.

By the early 1970s, MK Ultra had achieved little except human suffering. Its leader, Sidney Gottlieb, called it “useless” before retiring into obscurity. Then CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all the files destroyed, which is a bit like setting fire to your hard drive and calling it data management.

When the Church Committee finally investigated, they found fragments, financial records, witness statements, and a few surviving reports. The results painted a clear picture: the United States government had used its own citizens as test subjects without consent, breaching the Nuremberg Code it had helped write after World War II. The experiments were officially shut down. Unofficially, the paper trail just changed names.

MK Ultra had successors: MKDELTA, MKSEARCH, and MKNAOMI, among others. The labels changed, but the mission didn’t, to find reliable ways of manipulating human behaviour. The CIA eventually replaced chemical coercion with subtler tools: data, psychology, and later, algorithms. Because when you can understand how a person thinks, you don’t need to drug them to control them. You just need to feed them the right information.

Today, the same psychological goals that birthed MK Ultra have gone digital. Where the CIA once relied on LSD and barbiturates, they now have AI and large language models capable of mapping our thoughts, predicting our behaviour, and quietly nudging us in certain directions. No one needs to strap electrodes to your head when your phone already does it metaphorically. Social media algorithms condition our dopamine responses with the same precision MK Ultra scientists tried to achieve with LSD. Even knowing you’re being analysed by AI can alter your decisions, a measurable shift known as the “AI assessment effect.”

Combine that with commercial neurotech, those wearable EEG headbands that track your mental state, and you’ve basically got a voluntary, crowdsourced version of MK Ultra. Except now, instead of secret labs, we call them “apps.”

The modern world likes to pretend we’ve learned our lesson. There are ethics boards, GDPR compliance forms, and privacy laws so long they could double as insulation. But all of them contain a small line that changes everything: exceptions for national security.

That’s the catch. The same state powers that once ran black-site mind control experiments are now legally exempt from most privacy protections. As the report notes, the loophole effectively allows intelligence agencies to do what corporations can’t, use harvested data for “national interests.” So while you’re ticking cookie boxes, the real game is happening elsewhere.

MK Ultra failed because chemistry couldn’t control the mind. But algorithms can get close enough to fake it. Influence has gone from syringes to screens, from LSD to LLMs, from interrogation rooms to recommendation feeds. The tools changed, the mission didn’t.

And that’s the part that makes people uneasy. You don’t need a conspiracy to believe in MK Ultra 2.0, you just need to look at your screen time report.