MKULTRA: The Complete Field Guide. Twelve Chapters and the Full Film.

The MKULTRA Field Guide is twelve chapters and a film. It was built from the declassified record, it is free, and it keeps the documented layer and the claimed layer apart throughout. The film below runs two hours and seventeen minutes and contains all twelve chapters in order.

What the record documents

The question came before the cryptonym. In January 1952 the Central Intelligence Agency put it in writing: could it get control of an individual to the point where he would do its bidding against his will, and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation. MKULTRA was approved fifteen months later.

What followed ran twenty-three years, across at least six program names, through 149 documented subprojects and eighty participating institutions, including forty-four universities, fifteen research foundations, twelve hospitals and the federal prison system. In January 1973, with congressional scrutiny coming, Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb ordered the operational records destroyed at the agency repository in Warrenton, Virginia. Roughly twenty thousand financial vouchers survived in a separate building because they had been filed as accounting rather than as program paper. Almost everything known about MKULTRA today is reconstructed from those vouchers and from the 1975 and 1977 hearings.

The twelve chapters

Each chapter below links to the written investigation it was built from. The articles carry the citations, the document identifiers and the sourcing; the chapters carry the narrative.

1. Chapter 1. Project BLUEBIRD: The CIA Memo Written 15 Months Before MKULTRA
   Read the investigation: MKULTRA Was One Program in a Family. Here Is the Whole Family.
2. Chapter 2. Richard Helms Burned the MKULTRA Files. 20,000 Vouchers Survived.
   Read the investigation: The Church Committee Exposed Everything. Then America Moved On.
3. Chapter 3. Georgetown, Harvard, MIT: How the CIA Funded MKULTRA Through 80 Institutions
   Read the investigation: Sidney Gottlieb: The Architect Who Lived
4. Chapter 4. Kennedy, Turner and the 1977 Senate Hearing: 32 Months, No Prosecution
   Read the investigation: Congress Held Its First MKULTRA Hearing Since 1977. The Records Are Still Gone.
5. Chapter 5. Sidney Gottlieb: The CIA Chemist Who Bought the World’s LSD Supply
   Read the investigation: Sidney Gottlieb: The Architect Who Lived
6. Chapter 6. Ewen Cameron: Depatterning, Psychic Driving and MKULTRA Subproject 68
   Read the investigation: Ewen Cameron Wrote the Code at Nuremberg. Then He Violated It in Montreal.
7. Chapter 7. George Hunter White and Operation Midnight Climax: The CIA’s Safehouses
   Read the investigation: George Hunter White’s Brothels and the Killing of Frank Olson
8. Chapter 8. Louis Jolyon West: Jack Ruby, Tusko the Elephant and 297mg of LSD
   Read the investigation: Louis Jolyon West: The Credentialed Academic as Intelligence Asset
9. Chapter 9. Andrija Puharich: The Army Doctor Who Brought Uri Geller to SRI
   Read the investigation: Andrija Puharich: How MKULTRA Changed Addresses
10. Chapter 10. Project Stargate: Joe McMoneagle, Remote Viewing and the Soviet Submarine
    Read the investigation: Remote Viewing: The Stanford Research Institute Experiments, Stargate
11. Chapter 11. Harris Isbell: Seven Inmates, 77 Days of LSD at the Lexington Narcotic Farm
    Read the investigation: Harris Isbell and the Seventy-Seven Days at Lexington
12. Chapter 12. Havana Syndrome, Project PANDORA and the Frey Effect: MKULTRA’s Afterlife
    Read the investigation: Havana Syndrome: The Device Investigation

Watch, read, or both

The film is the twelve chapters in sequence. The articles are the underlying research, and several of them go further than the film had room for, particularly on sourcing and on where the documentary record stops.

Where the paper trail ends, this series says so rather than filling the gap. A claim that is corroborated only by testimony is described as corroborated only by testimony. That distinction is the whole method, and it is why the series raises questions it does not pretend to close.

Sources & Further Reading

• MKULTRA Was One Program in a Family. Here Is the Whole Family.
• The Church Committee Exposed Everything. Then America Moved On.
• Congress Held Its First MKULTRA Hearing Since 1977. The Records Are Still Gone.
• Sidney Gottlieb: The Architect Who Lived
• Ewen Cameron Wrote the Code at Nuremberg. Then He Violated It in Montreal.
• George Hunter White’s Brothels and the Killing of Frank Olson
• Louis Jolyon West: The Credentialed Academic as Intelligence Asset
• Andrija Puharich: How MKULTRA Changed Addresses
• Harris Isbell and the Seventy-Seven Days at Lexington
• Remote Viewing: The Stanford Research Institute Experiments, Stargate