Central Intelligence Agency
Project MKUltra
The CIA's twenty-year program of research into drugs, hypnosis, and the modification of human behavior, organized as 149 numbered subprojects.
MKUltra ran from 1953 to 1973 under the CIA's Technical Services Staff, directed for most of its life by the chemist Sidney Gottlieb. It funded research at universities, hospitals, prisons, and private laboratories, much of it routed through front foundations so the institutions never knew the source of their money. The work covered LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and interrogation, and in some cases it was carried out on people who did not know they were subjects.
In 1973, on the order of CIA Director Richard Helms, Gottlieb destroyed the program's files. What survived did so by accident: a separate set of financial records had been misfiled in the Budget and Fiscal Section's retired holdings, and it surfaced during a 1977 Freedom of Information Act search. That financial residue, roughly 20,000 pages, is most of what the public record of MKUltra now is.
The pages below catalog the surviving subprojects. Each links to its source document at the CIA reading room. Because the substantive files were destroyed, many entries read as invoices and allotment memos. We summarize what each file actually shows, and note where it connects to the rest of the record.
Subprojects cataloged
148
Pages in collection
9,092
With editorial
147