Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA

by John Lisle

"I am endlessly fascinated by this subject. Your book is amazing. I'm really excited you put in the time to write it. I feel like we could talk about this stuff for hours and hours and hours." —Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast

The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves.

Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods of mind control that could turn someone into a real-life “Manchurian candidate.”

In conjunction with MKULTRA, Gottlieb also plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA in 1973, he tossed his files into an incinerator. As a result, much of what happened under MKULTRA was thought to be lost—until now.

Historian John Lisle has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MKULTRA, straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time, Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally, Lisle highlights the dramatic story of MKULTRA’s victims, from their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice.

The consequences of MKULTRA still reverberate throughout American society. Project Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing of chapters in CIA history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Psychology, Audiobook, Science, True Crime

283 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 20, 2025

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came for Charles Manson, left with a magician and LSD (reports of)

Recently, Netflix released Chaos: The Manson Murders, and it mentioned that Charles Manson may have been part of MKULTRA, a government mind control program.

Although the evidence in the Netflix documentary was compelling, there wasn’t a smoking gun that definitively linked Manson to MKULTRA.

So I hoped that this book would provide that smoking gun.

Project Mind Control is unequivocally mind blowing with one jaw-dropping fact after another. For example, did you know that The CIA hired a magician to teach its agents slight of hand? And that The CIA conducted drug experiments on Americans without their consent?

Project Mind Control is meticulously well researched with over 600 footnotes, and it is jam-packed with astonishing facts—it doesn’t have a lot of filler.

Prepare to be non-stop shocked. This book is well worth more than one read, and it made me question what types of surreptitious experiments The CIA might have conducted on me……

*Thanks, NetGalley, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and unbiased opinion.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Electronic Text – Free/Nada/Zilch through publisher

Connect With Me!
Blog Threads BookTube Facebook Insta My Bookstore at Pango

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preread Notes:

I read Lisa of Troy's review for this book and knew immediately that I would love it. I also went and watched that Netflix special she recommends in preparation for my reading. Apparently this book reveals a lot of our government's secrets from the 60's and 70's and I'm pretty interested to see what's included here!

"The perpetrators of MKULTRA spent lots of time and effort hiding their actions inside a forest of euphemisms. Fortunately, a trail of breadcrumbs has since been found." p33

Final Review

⭐⭐⭐.5 rounded up

For me, this is a true crime book that sort of revels in the more salacious details. It was hard for me to read certain sections that describe the mistreatment of people like me, people with mental illness. In the era under scrutiny, they would have been an accessible population for subjects in secret government experiments.

This is a wild read because it's sort of what happens when conspiracy theory meets history. These projects invariably arise whenever new government material becomes available upon official request, such as through the freedom of information act.

I recommend this for fans of conspiracy theory and true crime books. So many triggers here, see my note below.

My 4 Favorite Things:

✔️ All through this one, Lisle discusses a little known and eye-opening history of the CIA. This is one powerful organization with no oversight, and that practically always invites misuse of funds at the very least. "Sidney Gottlieb was one of the few people who had known the full details of Blauer’s death back in the 1950s. During his depositions, attorney James Turner asked him, “After 108 hearing of that death, did you take any steps to protect the health and well-being of experimental subjects in MKULTRA?”“Not to my recollection,” Gottlieb said." p47

✔️ I'm impressed by the volume of source material this manuscript shares. It's immense and it must have taken a ridiculous amount of research to coordinate and organize all this information. Though a little repetitive in places, I'm disheartened to say it's because of the repetitious nature of the crimes, not because of an author's stylistic tic.

✔️ Short, pointed chapters, good organization, and a clean style help the reader chew on this very dense material.

✔️ ...[Dr Cameron] put his arm around her shoulders and sighed, “Don’t you want to get well?” As far as he was concerned, any attempt to avoid psychic driving was undeniable proof that a patient required more of it. p98 This might not be a horror book, but this is such a scary history, especially if you have to deal with the mental health industry on a regular basis.

Notes:

1. Trigger warnings: covert operations, terrorism, CIA, mind control and brain washing, forced medication, forced hospitalization, death from overdose, medical negligence, torture of disabled patients, violence against children, child SA, kidnapping, government corruption,

Thank you to the author John Lisle, publishers St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of PROJECT MIND CONTROL. All views are mine.

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a historical overview of the absolutely bonkers experimentation the CIA got up to in the midcentury, as they rushed to outpace and outwit the Soviets. If you try to tell your friends about some of these experiments (like remote-controlling living animals, which, even more unbelievably, sounded like it kind of worked!), you are going to sound like you’re the one on LSD.

But underneath the splashy, bizarre details is a more tragic story. There were people who took their own lives after being drugged by CIA employees without realizing it. Bold, haphazard experiments were conducted in psych wards, prisons, and rehab facilities on already vulnerable populations. This is a cautionary tale about what happens when a government agency thinks it is above the law.

I was absolutely riveted by this book, and if you’re into twentieth-century history, you will be too.

[Kristy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A deep dive into the CIA using American citizens to conduct testing on them using psychological and/or chemical warfare and how it was covered up and then exposed. A few other controversies involving Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA are also discussed. Unfortunately not surprising but hopefully making it more visible will help prevent similar things in the future.

I received an advanced copy through Netgalley in return for an honest review.

[Abdullah Khalefh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, disturbing, and deeply thoughtful.
This book dives into one of the darkest and most secretive chapters in American intelligence history. John Lisle does a great job piecing together the story of MKULTRA and Sidney Gottlieb with thorough research and a gripping narrative.

It’s both shocking and informative — a mix of history, ethics, and psychological horror. Some parts felt dense, but overall, it’s a compelling read for anyone interested in government secrets, Cold War experiments, and the psychology of control.

[Mary Vogelsong · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Lisle (author of The Dirty Tricks Department) has written a thoroughly researched book about the clandestine activities of the CIA, focusing particularly on mind control experiments dubbed MKULTRA.

Lisle doesn’t cover much new information, but backs up what he writes with meticulous attribution. Much of his book is based on the testimony of CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who told all (or nearly all) supposedly because he wanted to unburden his conscience.

I think Lisle has only scratched the surface in pulling back the curtain to reveal the immoral and deadly actions of the CIA. A similar book, CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys, by Patrick Nolan, goes into an equally detailed examination of MKULTRA. While Nolan credits MKULTRA for controlling Sirhan Sirhan to act as Bobby Kennedy’s assassin, Lisle stops short of attributing any success to the mind control experiments.

Favorite Quote: Within the CIA, there existed a group of personnel that plotted the assassination of foreign leaders. Insiders flippantly referred to this group as the “Health Alteration Committee.” Just as flippantly, they referred to its work as “wet affairs” because it concerned the liquidation of people.

I once was naïve, believing the United States Government was overall noble and good. I once was skeptical of conspiracy theories. Was I persuaded by propaganda, a form of mind control?

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advance reader copy of this book.

[Taylor J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book full of information already released in 1978 by Walter Bowart. Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart is the definitive MKULTRA book. He married Peggy Mellon Hitchcock. Peggy was born into one of the wealthiest families in America and Walter Bowart got to see firsthand the LSD/Mind Control experiment going on at Millbrook Estates. Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Marry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsburg , Alan Watts and the CIA . The CIA controlled Counterculture was created at Millbrook.

If you want to know the truth about Sidney Gotlieb, Jolly West, Manson, Koresh, Hells Angels and the creation of the Summer of Love read the 1200 page book by Walter Bowart before reading this. Richard Condom of The Manchurian Candidate wrote the foreword. This is a good book but a Limited Hangout and not as in depth.

I’ve got to take off a star for the last chapter. The author literally trashes every known survivor of Monarch. He calls the Satanic Panic fake and says cults don’t exist. He defends Vincent Bugliosi and his orchestrated view of Manson. This guy is like Netflix and is paid to shape propaganda. Now I don’t trust the rest of the book.

[Erin Clemence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.

Expected publication date: May 20, 2025

Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist for the CIA who was tasked with overseeing the MKULTRA project, which was focused on dangerous and even deadly experiments that included; drugging psychiatric patients and prisoners with LSD to assess the user’s ability to be manipulated, examining new methods of torture in order to obtain information and trying to determine if human minds can be controlled and manipulated through the use of electrode implantation in animal brains. In “Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA”, by writer and historian John Lisle, the darker side of the CIA is examined through recently un-redacted files and documents.

“Control” takes place beginning in the 1950s, near the start of the elusive CIA itself and continues right on through past Gottlieb’s trial and imminent death, in 1997. Through previously unreleased documents and papers, Lisle examines not only Gottlieb’s personal role and influence, but those who supported, condoned and otherwise encouraged the deplorable and immoral human experiments, performed by Gottlieb and others.

It should not be surprising that the CIA (and the government itself) is not exactly always on the up-and-up, as history itself shows (e.x. Watergate), however Lisle shines a very bright light on an agency that participated in manipulative and evil acts, and used “national security” as an excuse to keep such secrets.

I was fascinated by the experiments, the people that created them, and the outcomes (as tragic as they were). There were a lot of CIA-led programs, many with multiple name changes over the years, and a lot of corrupt CIA agents, so “Control” keeps you on your toes, trying to keep track of all the details- but it’s a brave story that needs to be told and I respect Lisle for bringing it to the world.

“Control” is a story that will appeal to anyone with an interest in the inner workings of a government agency, although those who tend toward conspiracy theories should read with extreme caution, as there are many examples that could easily activate these beliefs. Speaking to that specificity, Lisle gives a relatively accurate list of questions at the end of the novel that will allow readers to understand their capacity to be swayed by what they see and hear around them, believing something to be true without proof. Pertinent, sharp and dangerous, “Control” reveals many of the deadly plots kept secret by the CIA- until now.

[Stacey (Bookalorian) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just finished Project Mind Control Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle.. I received the hardcover and an ALC.

Firstly the narrator was quite excellent. I did immersion reading for this one and it was a great experience.

I was really excited to read this book. I love a good conspiracy and MKULTRA is one I have researched a lot. WARNING! If you are someone who does your own research on these things.. This book isn’t for you. The author spends a lot of time minimizing the project and making it seem like a nothing burger. The book basically comes down to whether or not the CIA was to blame for the lives this project destroyed and honestly, he didn’t even answer that.

One of my favorite moments came at the end of the book. The author talks about the fact that they did congressional hearings on CIA oversight and how they released so much of it to obscure the rest for national security and then talks about how Cathy O’Brien talks about a project called project Monarch and how there is no information on it from the CIA so it must be false. Says the CIA lied and hid the things they did… Dismisses a project because he said it doesn’t exist. It actually made me laugh.

It is hard for me to trust what he had to say because of the lack of research done outside of Sidney Gottlieb but the information about the trials was where the magic was for me but again, there isn’t a lot of substance here.

What I will say is that you can tell the author was trying to be neutral and display the facts as he saw them and I can appreciate that but MKULTRA wasn’t just about the parts touched on in this book. It was a much larger and terrifying project and this book will lead you to believe that some naughty man hurt some people with LSD trials and the CIA funded it but didn’t sanction it. The takeaway is these experiments would have happened without their involvement. Like I said, nothing burger. This book will have you believing the project failed.. And yet… It started in the 50s and continued here in Canada in the 1980s… that's a long ass time for a project to run and yet be such a failure…. Food for thought!

The worst part is the writing wasn’t half bad but for me, this is a book to make the massives feel like this project failed when there are a lot of research papers, a lot declassified.. That contradicts this view.

3.5 stars

Thank you to @stmartinspress for my gifted copy of this book and honestly I hope people buy it and do more research.

[Luke Bishop · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview of Project MKULTRA, the overall name for the CIA's clandestine mind control, personality alteration, and brainwashing experiments that were conducted alongside experimentation with hallucinogenics like LSD that took place during the Cold War. The book helpfully contextualizes why the CIA was interested in mind control to begin with, which was largely a result of concerns over potential Soviet mind control progress. Descriptions and overviews of the different people and experiments involved are looked at as well, such as the seedy Operation Midnight Climax that was run amongst California's night life or Ewan Cameron's electroshock experiments in Canada. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the book provides an interesting overview of the attempt to destroy and cover up evidence, and the various committees to investigate the abuses. Of additional interest are the various excerpts from depositions with MKULTRA organizers, such as its head, Sidney Gottlieb. Overall, this book is an easily readable, deeply interesting look at a dark part of American history that sadly still has relevance today.

[Angie Boyter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and very informative
Project Mind Control explores the history of CIA efforts to develop techniques to control the behavior of and gain information from a wide spectrum of people. There were so many varied fascinating and surprising incidents in this book that it is hard to give examples, but they ranged from taking poisons to the Congo for the purpose of assassinating Patrice Lumumba to learning that Fidel Castro was a scuba diver to giving prisoners who participated as subjects in some MKULTRA projects their choice of either reduced sentences or heroin as payment (Most chose heroin!) to plans to use cats as mobile spy devices in order to listen in on a cat-loving Asian head of state. As you might guess from these examples, the book made me want to laugh and to cry.
As you probably can glean from the examples, the book covers much more CIA activity than merely MKULTRA. The title and book description may lead readers to expect a more narrowly focused book, but if you go in with an open mind, you will not be disappointed! CIA wanted to develop good methods to extract information from a subject as well as to prevent such extractions from our own people. They also wanted improved techniques for controlling a subject’s actions. Many of these were very science-based, using experts from other federal agencies as well as CIA, but low-tech techniques such as sex were also found to be successful.
Although the focus is on the research and the techniques tested, the book is more character-driven than I had expected, with interesting insights into the researchers and their targets. Indeed, many of these were definitely characters!
By the way, kudos to the author for the impressive research that produced this book. CIA and similar records are not exactly easy sources to acquire.
I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley and St. Martins Press.

[Sarah Richman Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this (I listened to it as an audiobook). I knew a little bit about how fucked up the CIA is but I definitely did not know the extent. Okay this review is clearly becoming very stream of consciousness and I had to go back and edit when I remembered other things that I wanted to say. I liked how at the end, the author notes that the ultimate goal of MKULTRA, mind control, was not achieved by the project but has been somewhat achieved through cults and he also discusses the similar tactics utilized by the political far-right. The author also outlines some of the means to combat some of these issues as well as the systemic issues in government, and these basically boil down to representatives actually focusing on representing their constituents as opposed to solely focusing on winning reelection. He specifically suggests eliminating gerrymanding, ranked choice voting, among others. I also appreciated that--yes, the book is about Sidney Gottlieb who headed up a very fucked up project and did a whole bunch of awful shit--the author was careful to point out how the secrecy and lack of oversight and accountability is endemic to the CIA and how MKULTRA is more or less just another example of the CIA's complete disregard for human life.

[Gabriela Lingren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great book! I struggle finding nonfiction, especially history, books that are engaging and written in an accessible way. John Lisle did a great job sucking you in from the first chapter. The history of the MKULTRA project and the context it was borne out of is fascinating, albeit dark. If you enjoy reading about the history of science, I definitely recommed this one. I'll likely read his first book soon.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah I don’t think I can ever fully trust my government but it’s even more wild that this evil man goes on to become a speech therapist after being so terrible??? Omg??

Either way, this book is so well researched, interesting, and full of info I never even knew. If you know a little about MKULTRA, read this, it’s truly shocking!

Thanks Net galley for an advanced copy of this book.

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers the MKULTRA projects (there were more than 100) that included using drugs for mind control and including assassination strategies by the CIA. The so-called researchers were reckless resulting in the death of one candidate that was covered up, and administered drugs to public health clinic patients, jail inmates and had prostitutes drug their clients. Their behavior was in violation of the Nuremberg laws. Former president Gerald Ford passed legislation to provide more oversight of CIA activities but these protections were rolled back during the Bush administration. The US government was conducting surveillance of its citizens which was reported in 2013 by Edward Snowden. At the same time, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were being tortured. This book is a hard read as the information is disturbing,

[Cory Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative and direct, although a bit dry throughout.

[Noah Yoder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moral of the story is basically this: you don’t distrust the CIA enough. Also, may the process of a deposition live on forever.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

The figure of Sidney Gottlieb as part of the CIA MKULTRA program has always fascinated me. I was quite please to learn a book is available to take a deep dive into this man's actions. It might be hard for us to think back into the Cold War when parity w/USSR in weapons, like missiles and atomic bombs, was a foreign policy topic for the US. This went, apparently, into areas of mind control.

[Due to length limitations on this platform, my entire review is on my blog.]

Throughout his depositions, Gottlieb stressed that in order to understand his work, it was necessary to understand the context in which it was done. At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA had feared that Communist powers like the Soviet Union and China possessed methods of mind control powerful enough to manipulate a person’s beliefs and behaviors. One reason why the CIA feared such a thing was because Russian scientists had pioneered the field of behavioral conditioning. Back in 1897, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had shown that by ringing a bell every time that a dog ate, he could condition the dog to salivate at the sound of the bell alone. Surely the Soviets had since extended Pavlov’s work to include human subjects. Another reason was because in the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had held a series of show trials in Moscow to remove his political opponents from power. Strangely, many of the defendants begged to be found guilty of the false charges levied against them. Yuri Pyatakov even prostrated before Stalin and asked for the honor of shooting his fellow defendants. (Perhaps his plea fell on deaf ears because his ex-wife was among the group.) Why were the defendants behaving so bizarrely? Had they been drugged? Had they been hypnotized? Had they been subjected to some other form of mind control? Then, in 1948, Cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary and a vocal critic of the country’s new Communist regime, was arrested on charges of treason. Again, the charges were obviously false. The Communists were simply trying to silence one of their most influential critics. But at a show trial six weeks after his arrest, Mindszenty had somehow changed. He wasn’t his fearless, outspoken self. Instead, he appeared cold and unemotional. He didn’t even recognize his own mother when she came to visit him. Strangest of all, he confessed to the false charges. The image of this downtrodden priest, once so full of conviction, confessing to crimes that he didn’t commit caused many CIA personnel to wonder whether he had been subjected to mind control. “Somehow they took his soul apart,” said one intelligence officer.

This project evolved into dosing unsuspecting people and observing them. This included involving the over-enthusiastic George White.

Beginning in June 1953, he established a safe house in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he dosed his guests with drugs. It was “a small three-room apartment,” Gottlieb said, “and it was equipped with [a] one way mirror so that things going on in the one side of the mirror could be viewed from the other side.” Back in the OSS days, White had injected THC into cigarettes; now he injected LSD through the cork of a wine bottle. One of his first targets was gangster Eugene Giannini. Journalist Ed Reid, a close friend of White’s, witnessed the drugging and described what happened: “Giannini, glass in his hand, looked around and smiled. He leaned back and talked and talked and talked. He talked about the syndicate in Manhattan, about its friends in high places, in political clubs, in the halls of Justice, in the United States Attorney’s office in the Federal Building on Foley Square. He gave names, dates, places. . . . He talked.” Five months later, Giannini’s body was found sprawled in a gutter with two bullets in his head.

[...]

Using magician John Mulholland’s sleight-of-hand tricks, White occasionally slipped LSD to his unsuspecting friends and tried to seduce them into orgies.

[...]

On a separate occasion when Eliot was away, White drugged nineteen-year-old Barbara and her friend Clarice Stein with LSD, even though Barbara had brought along her baby daughter. White wrote in his diary that the women contracted the “Horrors” that night. Afterward, Barbara left Eliot and moved back in with her parents. When Eliot visited her, “She was cowering in a corner,” he said. “She thought the Mafia was out to get her. Her parents were unable to cope with the problem, so on our psychiatrist’s advice I admitted her to Stony Lodge Hospital in December 1958. Not long after that we got divorced, and Valerie,” their daughter, “went to live with my parents.” At the hospital, Barbara exhibited a paranoia eerily reminiscent of Frank Olson’s and insisted that her telephone was being tapped by an unidentified “they.”

[...]

MKULTRA was trying to determine whether such a thing was possible. Could drugs make someone talk during an interrogation? Could they make someone obey commands? “If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.” As Bureau of Narcotics agents, White and Feldman knew “the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs”...

Beside dosing people without their knowledge, some groups with limited knowledge of what they were consenting to, such as prison inmates, were used. The full extent of this may never be known.

Jolly West often treated the airmen at Lackland Air Force Base for their mental disorders. In one of his letters to Sidney Gottlieb, he suggested using the airmen, along with “prisoners in the local stockade,” as guinea pigs for MKULTRA experiments. Jimmy Shaver was known to have suffered from debilitating migraines. During West’s interrogation of him, Shaver had said, “I was already sick, Doc. I have headaches. Seven-eight hours at a time, Doc, you know? And they drive you to do anything to get away from them. I’ve ducked ’em in almost solid ice, and drank, and done everything.” At Shaver’s trial, his wife testified that he had often complained of headaches. Did West ever “treat” Shaver for his headaches prior to the murder of Chere Jo Horton? Was Shaver a guinea pig in an MKULTRA experiment? Curiously, all of West’s patient records from 1954, the year of the murder, survive except for a single file: last315 names “Sa” through “St.”

LSD appears to have been a gateway drug to the CIA as it sought anywhere some soft of Philosopher's Stone of pharmacology.

His files also indicate that he withdrew the spinal fluid of comatose patients in an attempt to identify the compounds that cause “maximum levels of physical and emotional stress in human beings.” When asked during a 1977 Senate investigation why the CIA was interested in such a grim topic, Geschickter said, “I can only give you the report that came to me from Allen Dulles, and I will quote it: ‘Thank God there is something decent coming out of our bag of dirty tricks. We are delighted.’”

It ends up, we weren't in an arms race with the Communists on this front. They found what has been long known -- Nothing magical is needed to break down the will of a human being.

The Communists weren’t controlling people through drugs, hypnotism, or “occult methods.” Instead, they were using the same methods that had been employed for centuries: hunger, beatings, isolation, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.

[...]

In their report, Wolff and Hinkle marvel at the dramatic effects that mere isolation can have on a person’s psyche: The profound boredom and complete loneliness of his situation gradually overwhelm the prisoner. There is literally nothing for him to do except ruminate and because he has so much to worry about, his ruminations are seldom pleasant. Frequently, they take the form of going over and over all the possible causes of his arrest. His mood becomes one of dejection. His sleep is disturbed by nightmares. . . . Some prisoners may become delirious and have hallucinations. God may appear to such a prisoner and tell him to cooperate with his interrogator. He may see his wife standing beside him, or a servant bringing him a large meal. In nearly all cases the prisoner’s need for human companionship and his desire to talk to anyone about anything becomes a gnawing appetite. If he is given an opportunity to talk, he may say anything which seems to be appropriate, or to be desired by the listener. . . . He may be unable to tell what is “actually true” from what “might be” or “should be” true. He may be highly suggestible. The similarities between the effects of isolation and LSD, down to the hallucinations, are striking. Although the Communists didn’t use LSD in their interrogations, it’s little wonder why the CIA thought that they might have. Ironically, Wolff and Hinkle headed the cutout organization— the SIHE— that would allow MKULTRA to flourish, even though they also wrote the report that debunked the claims that had led to the creation of MKULTRA in the first place.

(These tried-and-true techniques recalled to me the "rest cure" used in history to, really, control women. See The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever.)

Eventually, the CIA realized what it should have already known.

...document from 1961 summarizing a conversation between two anonymous CIA officers, sodium pentothal, the “pure gravy” drug that Artichoke teams had used to interrogate foreign spies, “should not be considered more effective for elicitation than getting a man drunk.” In fact, a CIA memo from February 1953— two months before MKULTRA was created— argues that there was “no428 reason for believing that drugs are reliable for obtaining truthful information.”

[...]

Gottlieb tried to put a positive spin on the negative results. When asked whether he had learned anything useful from the various MKULTRA experiments, he said, “Sure. Sure. I think [we] learned a lot of things. Most of the information was negative information, but you know, I think it established pretty clearly the limits of what you could do in surreptitiously altering a human’s behavior by covert means. It was damn little.”

This poorly managed drug experimentation drifted into melding with political assassination during the CIA's heyday with that activity.

Under the alias “Sid from Paris,” Gottlieb arranged to meet Lawrence Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville, inside a private room of a high-rise apartment building. Once the door behind them was locked, Gottlieb handed over the pouch and told Devlin what it was for. “Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin exclaimed. “Isn’t this unusual?” He asked Gottlieb who had authorized the assassination. “President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb said.

[...]

Years later, O’Donnell reflected on the episode: “All the people I knew acted in good faith,” even Bissell and Gottlieb. “I think they acted in light of— maybe not their consciences, but in light of their concept of patriotism.” They weren’t “evil people,” he said. They had simply abandoned their moral compass “because the boss says it is okay.”

[...]

Satisfied with Gottlieb’s explanation of his involvement in the attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, attorney Joseph Rauh moved on to another incident. “Could you tell us what you know about any CIA mailing of a handkerchief with poison to an Iraqi colonel?” “I have a remembrance of that operation taking place. I can’t pinpoint the time it was done, but it was not an assassination operation in any way.”

[...]

...the chief’s request to “incapacitate” Qasim eventually landed on the desk of Sidney Gottlieb. To carry out the “incapacitation” attempt, Gottlieb procured a handkerchief doused with tuberculosis from Fort Detrick, took it to what is only referred to as an “Asian country,” and mailed it to Qasim. Apparently the package never reached him.

[...]


...another involved lacing Castro’s famous Cuban cigars with LSD. Ike Feldman, the Bureau of Narcotics agent who had helped George White conduct Operation Midnight Climax, was put in charge of the operation. “One of my whores was this Cuban girl,” he later said, “and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.” But by the time that everything was ready, the CIA had become less interested in humiliating Castro and more interested in killing him.

MKULTRA, assassinations.... The CIA came to believe it could do what it wanted, including torture.

The CIA, in turn, awarded psychologist James Mitchell an $ 81 million contract to conduct these “enhanced interrogations.” Mitchell, who had never so much as witnessed an interrogation before, was a supervisor for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training in the military. The SERE program had been developed at the end of the Korean War to teach soldiers how to defend themselves against Communist interrogation methods. Armed with a knowledge of SERE, Mitchell reverse engineered those methods for the CIA. In his view, the key to a successful interrogation was to treat each detainee “like a dog in a cage.” When an FBI agent confronted Mitchell about the fact that the detainees weren’t dogs but human beings, he responded, “Science is science.” An undisclosed number of detainees died as a result.

[...]

...Mitchell’s “Clockwork Orange kind of approach,” as an insider described it, indeed got the detainees to talk. One of them confessed to knowing that his companions in the terrorist group al-Qaeda were plotting to blow up malls, banks, supermarkets, nuclear power plants, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. Of course, none of the plots were real. The detainee wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda.

I was amused to read of the CIA's Technical Services creations, including "skyhook" referenced in the 2008 film The Dark Knight mentioned by Lucius Fox as a means of re-boarding an aircraft without its landing.

Perhaps the most imaginative of the TSD’s inventions was the skyhook, designed to extract an agent from any location in a hurry. As part of the skyhook system, the agent would attach one end of a nylon line to a body harness and the other end to a helium balloon that he would release into the air. A capture plane equipped with thirty-foot “horns” protruding from its nose would snag the dangling line...

There was a connection to the headlines if not the marquee.

TSD ... gave the pilots a new suicide device in the form of a needle coated with sticky brown shellfish toxin. One finger prick from the needle would deliver enough toxin to kill a grown man. To prevent any accidental pricks, the needle was stored in a narrow hole drilled into the side of a silver dollar. The needle soon made international news when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to safety, but the Soviet military captured him and confiscated his suicide needle.

This, of course, led to the CIA merging its willingness to operate domestically and without conscience to meet at involvement with the Watergate scandal.

...TSD had supplied the perpetrators with disguises, false identification papers, and a voice-altering device. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gottlieb was driven out of the CIA.

During the Form administration, oversight, investigation, and sunlight were applied to the CIA, especially around The Family Jewels, a 693-page secret report commissioned by CIA Director Richard Helms to investigate allegations of illegal CIA activities, especially during the Vietnam War. The report was compiled by the CIA's own Inspector General's Office.

...In response to the directive, a surprising number of people submitted reports. The CIA’s Office of the Inspector General compiled all of them into a secret 693-page file nicknamed the “Family Jewels.” Ironically, Schlesinger had issued the directive to stay one step ahead of the press, but by forsaking compartmentalization and assembling the CIA’s most sensitive secrets into one file, he made it much easier for those secrets to leak out.

[...]

Colby didn’t have any luck silencing Hersh this time. On December 22, 1974, the front page of The New York Times proclaimed in bold letters, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The story revealed that the CIA had spied on thousands of antiwar protestors despite the fact that the CIA’s charter forbade it from operating within the United States.

[...]

Schorr taped a news segment for CBS that began, “President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA.” The cat was out of the bag. Ford now had no choice but to tell the Rockefeller Commission to add assassinations to its list of CIA activities to investigate, the very activity that the commission had been created to conceal.

[...]

During Colby’s testimony, Senator Church asked with a hint of excitement, “Have you brought with you some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA to use this [shellfish toxin] for killing people?” “We have, indeed.” In front of the awestruck audience, Colby unveiled a battery-powered dart gun fitted with a telescopic sight. It shot a frozen dart of shellfish toxin that would melt inside of the victim’s body, eliminating any trace of the crime.

[...]

“Some of them apparently have been destroyed.” “Do you know who destroyed them?” “I do. I have a report that one set was destroyed by the Chief of the Division in question before his retirement.” “Do you know who that was?” “Mr. Gottlieb.” “Is that Mr. Sidney Gottlieb?” “Yes.” On live television, Colby and the Church Committee associated one name with the suspicious activities of the CIA’s past: Sidney Gottlieb. The public was eager to learn more about this mysterious figure whom newspapers quickly dubbed “Dr. Death.”

[...]

[James Horn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and fairly thorough accounting of the the CIA’s notorious mind control projects from the 50’s through the 70’s. Lisle has expertly organized the available information into a gripping and coherent narrative that alternates between testimony and well researched history.

My biggest take from this was that what happened during this time as detailed here is very much how we’ve gotten to the world we live in today with the omnipresence of conspiracy theory. I’d known generally about these operations, but this does a wonderful job of summing it all up. Highly recommended.

[Demetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Lisle’s “Project Mind Control” approaches one of the most magnetized phrases in American political folklore – “MKULTRA” – with an almost stubborn preference for paper trails, sworn testimony, and the unseductive mechanics of bureaucracy. That decision is not merely stylistic. It is the book’s argument. The closer Lisle stays to the record, the more grotesque the record becomes. Not because it confirms the omnipotent fantasies that have accreted around the CIA’s mind-control efforts, but because it shows something more plausible and, in its way, more frightening: a state apparatus that repeatedly mistook secrecy for justification, novelty for necessity, and “national security” for an ethical solvent capable of dissolving consent.

The book’s spine is Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who shepherded MKULTRA from an idea into a budget line item with subprojects, cutouts, contractors, and a capacity for harm that outlived the program’s own internal confidence in what it could achieve. Lisle’s Gottlieb is not presented as a gothic villain. He is a manager who knows how to make systems work. That normality is the point. When “mind control” fails to materialize as a reliable technology, what persists is a habit of improvisation and insulation: try something, hide the trail, move the money through a cutout, collect whatever fragments of learning you can, destroy what might later embarrass you. It is less a story of one man’s depravity than of one man’s competence in an institution that rewarded competence without insisting on moral accounting.

Lisle’s narrative method is at its most effective when it lets the institution speak in its own defensive tongue. Depositions recur like a refrain: lawyers objecting, witnesses suddenly unable to remember, euphemisms substituted for admissions. The CIA’s story, as presented here, is always half told. It arrives in phrases like “operational matters,” “overseas operations,” “materials,” “harassment,” “executive action.” The reader begins to understand that secrecy is not an afterthought layered onto action – it is a shaping force that determines what actions become thinkable. If a program can be broken into compartments, if funding can be laundered through respectable organizations, if the record can be minimized or later burned, then the moral risk of the endeavor begins to feel, to its participants, abstract.

“Project Mind Control” is at its strongest when it insists on the human body as the place where abstractions cash out. The early chapters, with LSD at their center, make vivid why a compound could seem like a key to the universe for the men hunting leverage over minds. Lisle captures the Cold War psychology that turned an unpredictable hallucinogen into a strategic asset: if a drug can shatter perception, maybe it can shatter resistance. If it can scramble a subject’s narrative, maybe it can be used to extract a desired narrative. Yet the book’s repeated lesson is that unpredictability is not a bug in these experiments – it is the feature that tempts their architects. A drug that cannot be controlled is attractive precisely because it appears to offer control over others while allowing the user to deny responsibility for outcomes.

The Deep Creek episode distills that moral rot into a single weekend. A gathering meant to share expertise becomes an occasion for clandestine dosing – framed as a prank, retroactively defended as research. The consequences, in Lisle’s telling, are not merely tragic but diagnostic. Frank Olson’s breakdown after being drugged without his knowledge, his visible distress, his hurried route through consultations, and his death after a fall from a New York hotel window becomes the book’s emotional and ethical fulcrum. Lisle is careful about what he claims. He does not write as a prosecutor with a single theory to prove. He returns to what can be supported: the dosing, the panic, the containment impulses, the internal CIA assessments that acknowledge a likely causal link, the later battles over what the fall “means.” That restraint makes the story hit harder. When a reader is denied the catharsis of certainty, the absence begins to feel like part of the crime: not knowing becomes an artifact of design.

From there, the book widens into the texture of a program that increasingly seems less interested in science than in operational play. “Operation Midnight Climax” has the lurid glare of a story the culture has already half digested – safe houses, sex workers, men dosed and observed. Lisle recounts it not as a freakish sideshow but as a demonstration of how quickly a system can convert vulnerable or disreputable subjects into convenient raw material. The details matter here: the apartment arranged as a surveillance stage set; the choice of targets whose credibility could be undermined; the boozy voyeurism of an operator who can convince himself he is serving the republic while watching strangers unravel. The episode is less about the sex than about the ethics of selection. The program repeatedly sought out people who could be dismissed if they complained. And in that dismissal is an implicit admission that the architects understood what they were doing was indefensible.

Lisle is similarly incisive when he follows MKULTRA into its institutional habitats: hospitals, prisons, rehabilitation centers that functioned as quasi-carceral laboratories. The chapters on psychiatric “innovations” – Ewen Cameron’s “psychic driving” and depatterning – are almost unbearable in their accumulation of procedure. Patients are reduced, regressed, emptied out under a theory that treats the mind like a switchboard that can be rewired after it’s been stripped. The horror is not only the shocks or the drugs, but the conceptual arrogance that imagines a person as a set of “patterns” to be erased. In these sections, the CIA’s interest feels less like a curious observer and more like a patron: a funder hunting techniques that can be repurposed, while maintaining distance through intermediaries. The use of cutouts is central to Lisle’s portrait of how harm scales. A secret program does not expand by creating more in-house expertise; it expands by creating plausible deniability, by purchasing the legitimacy of institutions that can make experimentation look like research.

The prison and addiction-center chapters complicate any easy moral geometry. The people subjected to MKULTRA-adjacent experimentation are not drawn as saints. They are prisoners, addicts, patients, people whose lives were already fractured – precisely the populations the state found easiest to exploit. Lisle is attentive to how “consent” can be engineered. A signature is not the same as voluntariness when incentives are coercive and information is asymmetrical. When a man signs because he wants parole, or because he wants heroin, or because he wants to be moved to a less brutal wing of a facility, the signature becomes a tool for laundering violence into paperwork. The reader watches a bureaucracy manufacture ethical cover while ensuring the subject bears the consequences.

As the narrative moves into overseas operations and assassination plots, Lisle’s tone remains notably controlled, which is both a strength and, at times, a limitation. The sections involving Patrice Lumumba, toxins, and “health alteration” schemes are chilling because they show the continuum between “behavioral modification” and lethal covert action. The same technical imagination that produced safe house surveillance produced poisoned devices, dart guns, and delivery mechanisms designed to mimic natural causes. Lisle is good at depicting the CIA’s obsession with attribution – not whether an act is wrong, but whether it can be traced. Again and again, the operational problem is framed as a public-relations problem: kill cleanly, humiliate invisibly, destabilize without fingerprints. The book’s title begins to feel almost ironic. Mind control in the science-fiction sense remains elusive, but outcome control, narrative control, and accountability control prove far more achievable.

There is, inevitably, a strain of absurdity in some of the CIA’s schemes. Lisle does not shy away from the near-comic: gadgetry that reads like a rejected prop from a spy film, plans that collapse under practicality, animal surveillance programs that end in fiasco. But he handles the absurd without letting it soften the ethical core. A ridiculous method can still embody a violent intent. The laugh catches because the stakes remain human bodies and political realities. And, perhaps more important, absurdity itself can function as camouflage. When the program’s outputs seem silly, it becomes easier for participants – and later observers – to treat the whole affair as a prankish detour rather than an institutional pattern of treating persons as means.

The late chapters, which move through investigations, hearings, and lawsuits, are among the book’s most revealing, even when they slow the narrative momentum. Here Lisle demonstrates that a secret program’s afterlife can be as instructive as its operation. The “Family Jewels” compilation, the congressional inquiries, the discovery of financial records that survived destruction, and the creation of a victims task force all show an intelligence community attempting to survive exposure by converting wrongdoing into manageable scandal. The procedural details matter: immunity arrangements, redactions that shape blame, the selective revelation of names that makes MKULTRA appear like a rogue actor rather than an organizational failure. The same instinct that built compartments during the program’s life builds scapegoats during its reckoning.

This is where Lisle’s reliance on depositions and official documents is most double-edged. On one hand, it grants the book credibility. You are reading not what everyone has heard, but what people said when they were under oath and trying not to be caught in a lie. On the other hand, the record is built by the powerful. Victims appear, sometimes vividly, but often in fragments – a name surfaced in a diary, a life described through an investigator’s report, a testimony shaped by trauma and time. One occasionally wishes for more space given to the ordinary years after the extraordinary events: the marriages that fracture, the jobs that vanish, the long-term cognitive damage, the quiet self-destruction that does not make for clean narrative arcs. Lisle cannot invent what the record does not provide, and he is right not to. But the imbalance remains: the state’s language dominates because the state preserved, destroyed, and curated the archive.

There is also a structural challenge in writing a book about MKULTRA that is honest about MKULTRA’s incoherence. The program is a sprawl of subprojects, enthusiasms, and dead ends. Lisle tries to impose shape by anchoring the story in Gottlieb and a set of emblematic episodes. Most of the time this works, particularly when the episodes reveal a recurring logic: outsource, deny, compartmentalize, proceed. But the narrative can still feel episodic, as if the reader is being marched through a museum of outrages. That may be faithful to the program as it existed – a scattershot pursuit of leverage disguised as research – yet the effect can occasionally flatten the distinction between the bizarre and the central. The reader might finish certain sections thinking not “This is what MKULTRA was” but “This is what MKULTRA also touched.”

And yet, taken as a whole, “Project Mind Control” achieves something more valuable than a definitive mythology. It offers a portrait of how a democracy can create the conditions for abuse without requiring that most participants see themselves as monsters. The book is at its most haunting when it suggests that the men involved often believed they were acting in good faith – not because that belief excuses them, but because it demonstrates how elastic conscience becomes when fear is elevated into doctrine. “National security” appears here not as a goal but as a rhetoric that can be used to suspend ordinary moral language. The questions that should have been asked – Who consented? Who is harmed? Who is accountable? – are repeatedly replaced with questions that are operational: Can it be done? Can it be delivered? Can it be denied?

Lisle’s best passages return the reader to an uncomfortable distinction: between the fantasy of mind control and the reality of influence. The fantasy – the “Manchurian Candidate” dream of perfect programming – largely fails. Human beings do not behave like machines. LSD does not compel truth. Hypnosis does not reliably overwrite will. But influence, coercion, and environmental manipulation are real, and they do not require science-fiction breakthroughs. They require isolation, exhaustion, fear, incentives, and a system willing to treat persons as experimental media. In other words, the most successful “mind control” techniques are old. The innovation is not the method but the bureaucratic apparatus that lets the method be practiced at scale while remaining deniable.

If “Project Mind Control” occasionally frustrates, it is often because it refuses the satisfactions that readers of this subject are trained to want. It does not grant omnipotence to the CIA, and it does not resolve every mystery. It is suspicious of conspiratorial excess, and it is wary of claiming more than the evidence allows. That skepticism is one of its virtues. At the same time, the book’s final gestures toward broader lessons can feel more declarative than its earlier, more documentary confidence. The strength of Lisle’s writing is the way it lets the record implicate itself. When he steps away from the record and toward generalization, the tone shifts slightly, as if the book is trying to ensure its own interpretation is not misused. One can understand the impulse, even if the narrative does not always need the reinforcement.

Still, the prevailing impression is of a work that is disciplined, frequently gripping, and morally lucid without being melodramatic. It is also, in its own way, a book about paperwork: who writes it, who hides it, who burns it, who finds the boxes that survived. The archive becomes a battlefield, and the fight over what can be proven becomes part of the story’s meaning. That is the final, bitter irony Lisle leaves you with. A program that treated consent as optional ends by relying on procedural defenses. A government that experimented on unwitting people later hides behind the difficulty of identifying them. The harm is real; the record is partial; the accountability is negotiated.

“Project Mind Control” is not the last word on MKULTRA, and it does not pretend to be. But it is a bracing reminder that the most important question is not whether the CIA mastered the mind, but whether the CIA mastered the art of acting without being answerable. Lisle’s book shows how close the agency came, not to controlling human behavior with perfect predictability, but to controlling the narrative about its own behavior – until leaks, hearings, and victims forced fragments of truth into daylight. For its evidentiary rigor, its narrative propulsion, and its refusal to turn atrocity into entertainment, I’d place it at 74 out of 100.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow there is some truly awful stuff contained within this book! Very well put together highly engaging and as disturbing as it is always entertaining. I would definitely recommend for speculative minds especially. Almost 5 stars.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an Advance copy!

Alright, Project Mind Control is a wild, disturbing dive into the CIA’s MKULTRA program, where Sidney Gottlieb basically played mad scientist with real people. John Lisle lays out the experiments—LSD dosing, sensory deprivation, mind-control attempts—like a true-crime thriller, except it’s all horrifyingly real. The writing is sharp, well-researched, and packed with firsthand accounts that make the whole thing even more unsettling.

It’s a gripping but deeply messed-up read that’ll have you side-eyeing your tap water and questioning every government experiment ever. Proceed with caution—and maybe a tinfoil hat.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Major thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of John Lisle’s deeply researched book about a horrible hidden history in America’s intelligence agency Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA. I am fascinated by this period not only because it was classified for many years, but also because it is so shocking that the American government would allow indiscriminate human testing with drugs and other forms of psychological torture even after the Belmont Report. However, I think that Lisle recognizes how this kind of thinking and action are part of the continuous pendulum that swings back and forth across American history. He states this argument well in one of the last chapters that provides a kind of analysis and evaluation of MKULTRA and its impact on later clandestine actions of intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA:
“As the previous examples show, MKULTRA was not a fluke. Rather, it was the norm in a system that lacks meaningful external oversight and lets perpetrators of abuses avoid accountability for their actions, a system in which the vicious cycle of secrecy pushes the pendulum too far toward security at the expense of liberty.”
I really appreciated this insight, and I think it is something that is lacking in other books about MKULTRA and Gottlieb. I’ve read a few books about this topic, and Chaos by Tom O’Neill and Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer both explore similar grounds, yet also delved into specific areas, with Kinzer’s book providing an overview of Gottlieb’s career and various projects in the CIA. What separates Lisle’s book is the deposition transcripts that were used as much of the basis for each of the chapters. These provide some important insight into the various projects that Gottlieb was involved in, and also serve as launching points for Lisle to explore these projects and the individuals who were affected by them. At first, it was a little jarring to read through these transcripts and I wished that Lesle provided some insight into the organization of the book; however, about ¼ of the way through the book, I got used to this approach and actually appreciated how these transcripts helped to inform the other parts of the chapter. Furthermore, they also allowed Lisle to take a broader approach than Kinzer or O’Neill and examine many of the sub-projects that were included under the MKULTRA program. Readers also learn how the project initially developed in response to the belief that prisoners of war taken by North Korea and individuals in other Communist countries (especial Cardinal Mindszenty from Hungary) experienced a kind of through reform (or informally known as brainwashing). Not really aware that this kind of shift could be the result of coercive physical punishment like torture, the American government enlisted scientists and psychologists to explore the various questions related to mind control, wondering if it were possible to not only alter one’s belief system and values, but also to possibly alter their behavior. As Lisle notes in the final chapters and epilogue, this secretive collaboration between intelligence agencies, psychologists, especially behaviorists, and scientists was also what we later found out about in the war on terror and the 1980s war on Communism that brought about the Iran Contra Scandal. As Lisle notes, it’s this kind of fear of other ideologies that ends up deferring power to intelligence, which leads to secrecy, which invites further abuse. It’s a common thread we see in the fight against Communism, the fight against terrorism, and even now with the “belief” that America is under attack by immigrants, although it seems like the abuses are much more blatant, telegraphed and promoted online to send a message. One of the other interesting conclusions that Lisle draws in regards to programs like MKULTRA is the role of that conspiracy theories play in furthering these abuses. Lisle shows how the CIA has not really addressed this scandal, and the fact that Gottlieb and others destroyed the files leads to an absence of evidence. “All claims need some empirical support to have any credibility. Yet in the twisted world of conspiracy theories, an absence of evidence is itself evidence of a cover-up. Nothing is proven, nothing can be disproven.” Lisle explains that many have gone on to use these kinds of absences to connect dots and create their own theories and beliefs for various outcomes and events. One example is school shootings and the belief that these are used as a pretext to remove guns from people. Another is the various reasons for COVID closures and how this is a scheme by the “deep state” to engage in various actions that will take away liberty. Lisle goes on to write “Like McCarthyism during the Red Scare, these sensational claims generate fear, which generates coverage, which generates converts. Ironically, the conspiracy theorists have managed to manipulate more people than MKULTRA ever did,” providing an interesting current analogy to what is happening now with all of the disinformation and “flooding the zone” to not only manipulate people, but also as a means to call to action, using fear as a primal motivator. I really appreciated this insight and analysis that Lisle provides to link up that idea about how behaviorist techniques are often employed in our current political climate. Lisle also makes a note about how the political landscape in America also further allows this kind of approach where there is limited governance and more focus on appealing to emotion- winning the minds through the hearts—and how this also contributes to the limited oversight in intelligence abuse. It’s an interesting idea and throughline that I don’t recall was in some of these other books (or documentaries like Wormwood and Chaos, based on the O’Neill book).
Lisle reviews some of the other cases that were in Kinzer’s book, notably the Frank Olson tragedy (which was the basis for the Wormwood documentary series). Lisle also explores the roles that other agents and psychiatrists played in MKULTRA’s research. In particular, there is time spent on the abuse perpetrated by George White in Operation Midnight Climax, where he used safe houses in San Francisco and New York to drug people on the fringes of society. The unwitting drugging of these people was due to the belief that they were less likely to report the abuses or even question the drugging. Lisle also shares the attempted follow up that happened after President Ford’s inquiry into CIA misdeeds, and it was sad to see how these single drugging may have induced paranoia and mental illness in some of the victims. Similarly, Lisle also highlights the abuses perpetrated by Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychologist whose experiments in mind control were horrific. Kinzer also explored Cameron’s abuses in Poisoner in Chief, and Cameron was also the subject of CBC podcast. However, Lisle focuses more on the patients and what they endured, and also follows up on some of their lives and the consequences of Cameron’s abuse. One of his most notorious attempts to erase and reprogram individuals was through a process called “psychic driving” where patients were forced to listen to tape loops, often words or phrases they despised or were upsetting to them, while in a continued drug-induced state for weeks at a time. As Lisle notes, many times the effects were catastrophic, reducing adult subjects to infant like states where they were unable to care for themselves. In the end of the book, Lisle also follows a lawyer for some of these victims, Joseph Raugh, who sought compensation from the US and the Canadian governments for these wrongdoings. This examination of the pursuit of justice was also interesting to see, as Lisle documents the challenges that Raugh experienced in attempting to challenge the secretive agencies involved in these abuses.
I really enjoyed learning more about this topic through Lisle’s research and reporting. At first, I was a little concerned that this was going to be similar to Kinzer’s book, but Lisle approach is to go for more breadth while also taking some more depth with those projects and people who were involved in the peripheries of MKULTRA. Furthermore, I thought that the final chapters that detail the consequences of MKULTRA in fueling further conspiracies as well as other clandestine programs enacted under the guise of protecting and securing America were some of the strongest in the book. It was an apt and timely conclusion to draw as we continue to witness daily attempts at a form of mind control through disinformation (or censorship through noise), conspiracy theories, and the kind of methodologies employed by cults to manipulate and modify behavior (The BITE method-Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion). This section was especially important in becoming a more critical consumer of information, whether it is through the media, online, or in print. I’m glad that Lisle’s book adds some additional insight and ideas into the discussion about MKULTRA and the history of these kinds of clandestine operations in America. Furthermore, Lisle’s analysis presents important messages for the current climate of information, both real and fabricated, why it is important to be critical when consuming information. Highly recommended book!

[Allison Pavlock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well written book on MKULTRA and the CIA…….. this got me thinking a little too hard about the US government and I am now wearing my tin foil hat. These experiments were so f*ckedddddd
I am now a conspiracist with Matt 🫡

[Kathy Allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating was going to be 4.x stars but the author's ending made me so mad that I've lowered it. (I know, big deal.) Although I knew a fair amount of this material already, reading it all together was depressing and infuriating, a parade of evil men with no constraints on them. Ugh.

I understand and appreciate that the author only discusses incidents, projects, experiments, malfeasance, deaths, etc that are on the record. He assiduously avoids rumors. But this caused me to have questions, such as where is the Unabomber? I thought it was a fact, not a rumor, that Ted K took part in yet another immoral/illegal experimental project at Harvard, and another fact that it was part of MKULTRA. If so, why isn't it even mentioned in these pages? Or am I totally wrong about that? I see other reviews mention a new doc about Manson and how he was also an MKULTRA subject, yet no mention of him here -- guessing that story is not substantiated.

As for the last chapter, when the author does discuss rumors/conspiracy theories, slams them and then insinuates that I and every reader of the book may be a conspiracy theorist aka in his mind a lunatic and asks us to take a quiz to help determine if we are ... WTH dude? Are you saying only readers who are purely fact based like yourself are welcome to read this book and that anyone interested in conspiracies can get lost? I guess you didn't get the memo that every author should be pleased to have anybody reading their book for any reason. Plus way to go, insulting all your readers. So for me, the book concluded in a v unsatisfactory manner.

[bkm · Rating 4 out of 5]

delivers exactly what it promises and was a pretty quick read for history nonfiction

there were a lot of places where it felt like the story wasn't being fully explained but to be fair the CIA burned all the documents. can't pin that on john

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you netgalley for an arc of this amazing book.
curious in all things CIA, MKULTRA, FT Dettrick, etc. this is right up my alley with a hint of true cime that can't be left out.
truly feels like this book was written just for me.
far from a textbook style with complicated language it weaved an insane story.
forever thankful i got an arc for this bad boy!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advance copy of this book about the CIA's efforts to learn the secrets of the mind, and how scruples, ethics, moraliity and even basic humanity can be tossed aside, if one is given a reason to belive, like patriotism.

I am not sure how I started reading books on conspiracy. I know it was before The X-Files premired as much of what they talked about was old hat to me. Maybe it was after I discovered the Prisoner a show even after 50 years still holds up in the current surveillance state we live in. More likely I probably grabbed a book at a book sale thinking it was fiction, and down the rabbit hole I went. I must confess to a certain amount of naivety when I first starting looking at these books. Who, I thought could keep a secret this long. And why? As I read more history I began to find out the many of the things I doubted were true. Lost nuclear bombs, biological agents set free on subways, all sorts of things that put humans at risk in the name of protecting us. A chance comment by my Dad made this much clearer. I don't know who we were discussing, maybe someone in the family, maybe in the neighborhood. My Dad said, "People can be awfully stupid and awfully evil if they think they are doing the right thing." This comment ran through my head quite a lot while reading this book. For that's what these people were doing, all for the American Way. Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle, is a book about a man, a plan, the Cold War, paranoia, and the sureness that everything they were doing was for the benefit of the American people, even if they broke laws, killed people, and made the people they were protecting question everything they knew.

The book is both a histoy of MKULTRA, a plan to determine if one could control spies, soldiers, diplomats and anyone, with drugs or other means, and a biography on the man at the center of it Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was a man of many interests, dance, chemistry, acting in theater, even though he had both a limp and a stutter. Gottlieb was also a man with little in the way of medical ethics, a man who desperately wanted to fit in with others, and would go to great lengths to do so. At the start of the Cold War, people in intelligence began to fear that the red menace had a way of breaking people, making them do things they wouldn't do ordinairily. Drugs, medical procedures, no one was sure. But brain washing was a fear. And when people are afraid, and have lots of money and power, act rashly. Gottlieb was put in charge of a program to find a miracle drug, and figure out how to tell if a human had been corrupted. One idea was LSD, which was having some marvelous effects with alcholoism and deprssion. The CIA arranged to buy a lot of LSD from its manufactuers, and this is were things get trippy. Tests were done on agents, coworkers, prisioners, and soon unknowing people, who were observed, taped and in many cases forgotten. Until the enivitible happened, and the highs crashed to the ground.

Much of the writing is from transcripts of a trial held in the 80's trying to get restitution from the CIA for damages done, so the words actually come from Gottlieb himself. I have read other books about MKULTRA, but this gives a clearer view of Gottlieb, who is usually portrayed as a distant character, since much in the way of records were destroyed. I reall enjoyed this book, well enjoyed because I learned much, but still with that feeling of disgust that people have not changed at all. Give them a bit of authoriry or a belief and they will break laws, hurt others, and still say they are protecting people. Lisle is a very good writer, and makes everything clear and flow well. I really liked the way the book was laid out and told, and learned quite a bit.

There have been a lot of books about the CIA, and its actions during the Cold War. This book really looks at the human factor. The humans who were hurt, the humans who did the hurting and why they did so. Belief is a heck of a drug, one I think many strive for, and does explain why certain things are being allowed, even as I type. Lisle does a very good job presenting that also. A very well done history that asks a lot of questions, whose answers tells us much of what we are as a nation.

[Sydney Scarbrough · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Dread the day when the press sings nothing but the praises of those in power, and Congress claims that there are no abuses to investigate. At that point, when the pendulum appears still, both security and liberty will have been lost.”

i was so pumped for this book. as much as i have read about LSD, i didn't know much about MK Ultra. Project Mind Control elucidates upon the "methods" and undeniable madness that this endeavor was, and the absurdity that one of the highest and most trusted institutions in america—the CIA—perpetuated it. the inhumane and downright disregard for life by the scientists that administered LSD to unknowing victims, humans and animals (including an elephant), is apparent in this book. it nearly brought me to tears multiple times. lives were forever altered, and not in a positive manner, and some were taken either by involuntary manslaughter, suicide or downright murder in the name of national security and a potential for mind control. the human cost of this project is not to be understated or ignored, and it's baffling that not that long ago, CIA employees operated in a wild west fashion — ungovernable and un-reprimandable.

a revelation i had while reading this is how it makes sense that LSD, which in my opinion has extraordinary powers to heal and transform people, got a horrible reputation because of the intentions initially behind it in this context. if you put negative energy into something, i.e. a mind-altering substance, the outcomes are bound to follow suit. i am thankful society is starting to open its mind to the positive and life-changing effects LSD and other substances can have if properly administered and honored.

i devoured this. i greatly enjoyed learning more about Sidney Gottlieb and his cohorts, the empathy for and understanding of their little project varying greatly amongst them. that said, between the scientists, CIA agents, victims, and other players in this book, it became confusing trying to distinguish between who is important and will be revisited, and who is simply being mentioned once to provide additional background. the crux of this book and the title were also a bit misleading as this book touches on many questionable projects that the CIA is or was behind. from assassination attempts to biological warfare to hypnotism and reprogramming, a lot is covered here. i think this could've been 5 stars if the book was longer, but as it stands, it jumped around a little too much to be at that 5-star level for me. that's not to say i didn't love learning about all of these historical events, but i think either they needed to be given more explanation or the book should've just stuck to MK Ultra.

if you're looking for a book that discusses the beneficial qualities of LSD, i can't recommend How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics enough.

[Susan Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historical writer John Lisle examines and analyzes the multiple avenues of mind control that the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency in the United States) experimented with through the 1950's and '60s in his book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA. He delves into the work of the CIA while Allen Dulles had been the Director of the CIA under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Lisle focuses his research and documentary on several CIA scientists and scientists across the globe, who looked into methods of torture, hypnosis, chemical cocktails/hallucinogenic drugs, and technological gadgets that made mind control possible. Mainly, he looks at the testimonials and depositions of Mr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been investigated during the Year of Intelligence in 1975.

Lisle identifies 1975 as the year Congress opened the Church Committee in the House of Representatives, the Pike Committee in the Senate, and the Rockefeller Commission in the Executive Branch under then President Gerald Ford. All commissioned to investigate the CIA's unconventional activities, covert operations, and findings.

The information that Lisle exposes, provided by declassified records of the CIA, is revealing, enlightening, shocking, disturbing, and most importantly explains the madness witnessed in society today, demonstrated by activities seen by the BLM riots, antifa protests, queer marxist violence, and pro-palestine occupation of university campuses. These protestors actions exhibit the same exact behavior of a psychological operation described in reports that Lisle excavated and cited in his book, conducted by the CIA.

Contrary to Lisle's assumption that Cathy O'Brien, one of the loudest victims of the CIA mind control experiments under the umbrella of MKULTRA, the documents Lisle uncovered validate O'Brien's own experiences. If anything Lisle's book proves that O'Brien had been used in CIA experiments into mind control methods.

One quote Lisle recounts, which will likely standout to the reader, is by American psychologist B.F. Skinner, who claimed, "Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything." Indeed that explains a great deal of the violence and conflict, which people are witnessing today.

Lisle's book demands the reader to invest a large amount of time to comprehend the research and findings he uncovers and exposes. The writing is not in chronological order as the the author skips back and forth between the 1950's, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and present day. Lisle creates a gripping read. His research is insightful and his analysis is well-thought out.