ISBN 978-1250338747, St. Martin’s Press, 2025, 304 pages, $30 (hardcover)
Reviewed by: David Hadley, National Defense University, Ft. McNair, Washington D.C., USA
MKULTRA, the Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous program that experimented with methods to control or alter human behavior, represents a significant challenge in intelligence studies. Its legacy looms large in the popular consciousness, but much of the documentation of the program was destroyed in 1973; in its wake there is a fragmentary documentary record and bizarre stories that make discerning the real from the sensational a daunting challenge for any researcher. Given the challenges involved, it is no surprise that MKULTRA has often not received the serious scholarly attention it merits, leaving the field to accounts of varying reliability and quality—which has only made discerning fact and fiction where the program is involved more difficult. As John Lisle notes in his new history, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA (2025), “Perhaps the most important consequence of MKULTRA was the inspiration that it gave to conspiracy theorists.”
Lisle, a professor of the history of science at the University of Texas and author of a previous work on the scientific programs of the American intelligence community, The Dirty Tricks Department (2023), has produced a highly readable, narratively focused, and generally well-grounded work that dispels some of the mysteries that have grown around MKULTRA. The “tragedy” of his subtitle reflects his core theme: as sinister as MKULTRA often was, it was the product of a particular bureaucratic culture in the period of the early Cold War, carried out by flawed individuals—most notably Sidney Gottlieb. A member of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, Gottlieb and other intelligence leaders “feared that the Soviets, Chinese, and potentially other Communist powers possessed methods of mind control. The United States therefore needed its own mind control project to compete in what could become the next arms race.” (203) As strange as the program seems in retrospect, the logic that set MKULTRA into motion was explicable within the larger Cold War logic of the 1950s that prioritized countering Communist expansion on all fronts. The program continued despite its readily apparent flaws, Lisle argues, because of three systemic challenges to oversight within the CIA: “compartmentalization, bad recordkeeping practices, and the impotence of the CIA inspector general.”
The grounding theme of an essentially unsupervised, bureaucratic process that grew with little forethought provides a useful structure as Lisle details the often confounding and unethical behavior that transpired over the course of MKULTRA. Many of these details Lisle provides have been covered at length in previous work. Particularly well-known is the story of Army researcher Frank Olson, who was unwittingly dosed with LSD prior to his apparent death by suicide. Lisle’s use of recently discovered court records, however, provides more insight into the role of the CIA—and Sidney Gottlieb in particular. While attempting to minimize his own culpability, Gottlieb was remarkably open about the logic and reasoning behind the program. As Lisle notes, “From the defense’s perspective, Gottlieb’s depositions were a disaster. From the historian’s perspective, they’re a gold mine.”
What emerges is that MKULTRA was fundamentally a failure; experiments conducted by the CIA’s Technical Services Division, subcontractors, and private institutions funded through CIA front organizations all demonstrated that while human subjects could suffer dramatic ill effects from efforts to change their behavior, there was no way to exercise “mind control.” The program was sustained by a combination of geopolitical fears, bureaucratic inertia, and profound medical arrogance.
Lisle’s overview of the work of Ewen Cameron of the Allen Memorial Institute of Montreal is especially instructive. Cameron’s efforts at “psychic driving,” intended to break down a patient’s psyche to rebuild it free of whatever psychological problems brought them to him, was capable of the breaking but not the rebuilding. Lisle’s inclusion of Gottlieb’s perspective on Cameron, which emerged in court documents, adds valuable context: the CIA essentially provided funding but no real oversight. As such, Lisle persuasively argues, “The CIA didn’t instigate every wicked act that occurred under the MKULTRA umbrella. It did, however, aid and abet the perpetrators.” Lisle also highlights that the damage done by MKULTRA is especially remarkable in light of the fact that the initial fears of Communist mind control—sparked by “confessions” produced by prisoners of Communist regimes—were understood fairly early on by experts to have been produced not by new methods but by “the same methods that had been employed for centuries: hunger, beatings, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.”
Lisle takes a journalistic approach, weaving his argument through an entertainingly told narrative. His work is relevant to scholars of intelligence in general, serving as a useful touchpoint to a well-known but poorly understood program. Project Mind Control will be of particular interest to those interested in the propagation and dissemination of conspiracy theories; MKULTRA and the many stories that have spread around it make an excellent case study for how real but outrageous events serve as support for even wilder and more far-reaching conspiratorial narratives. The transgressions of MKULTRA, as serious as they were, became the fodder for stories of mind-controlled assassins, mass control of American society by shadowy cabals, and other grand conspiracy theories. On a similar note, this work is also useful as an example for those studying the challenges of oversight in the conduct of covert activity. The flaws in oversight that Lisle identifies are not unique to MKULTRA. The program is another data point supporting the trend Loch K. Johnson has termed the “Shock Theory” of oversight of the intelligence community—little to no effective oversight existed until scandal stirred Congress to action.
Despite the overall sobriety of Lisle’s account, however, there are some areas in which he seems unable to avoid going beyond what the evidentiary record supports. Most notably, his inclusion of the story of Lackland Air Force Base psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West’s evaluation of USAF member Jimmy Shaver following Shaver’s assault and murder of a child does not convincingly connect the case to MKULTRA. What evidence does exist seems to come from secondary literature that is of questionable value, supported by Lisle’s speculations as to West’s motives in treating Shaver. Lisle’s use of some of that questionable literature for detail unsupported by the otherwise impressive primary sources he brings to bear risks reinforcing some of the very myths he aims to dispel. Detailed endnotes would have been useful, especially given the challenges of delving into MKULTRA’s tangled historiography.
Despite such reservations, however, Lisle’s work is a welcome contribution to the literature around MKULTRA. It is a necessary step in the consideration of an important and often misunderstood chapter in U.S. intelligence history. The narratives MKULTRA has spawned, and the lessons it has taught, remain relevant to both scholars and practitioners of intelligence and national security.
