MK-Ultra didn't end. It was privatized.

The mind-control techniques explored by the CIA were taken up by New Age cults like OneTaste

A favourite theory of conspiracy theorists is: what if the entire Sixties psychedelic counter-culture was one big CIA plot? What if Aldous Huxley, LSD, Esalen, the acid tests, the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, Woodstock, the Beatles, was all one big CIA mind-fuck?!

The reasons this conspiracy theory has survived for so long is that there is a big dollop of truth in it: the CIA was, in fact, the main funder of psychedelic research from the 1940s until the 1970s, funding 80 institutions, including many leading universities in the US, Canada and Australia to conduct secret research on psychedelics as a tool for interrogation and mind control, often on unwitting and unconsenting participants, especially black people confined in hospitals and prisons.

One excellent and non-paranoid exploration of the overlap between MK-Ultra and the human potential movement is Benjamin Breen’s Tripping On Utopia. The book looks at an early wave of psychedelic research in the US, from the 1940s to the 1960s, focusing especially on anthropologist Margaret Mead (who Breen says was at one point perhaps the most famous scientist in the US) and her friend and onetime lover, Esalen stalwart Gregory Bateson.

Breen traces how Mead and Bateson were part of a post-war movement of scientists connected to the Macy Conferences (1941-1960), who believed science could radically improve human life. One of the ways to do that would be by cultivating new forms of consciousness which would help humanity transcend prejudice and rigid thinking, achieve a more global mind-set, and thereby adapt to rapid social change. Not so far from what Rick Doblin or Christian Angermayer believe today.

Bateson, Mead and other members of the Macy Conferences were very interested in hypnosis, psychedelics, cybernetics, encounter groups and other means to help humanity achieve this higher consciousness and thereby expand their evolutionary potential.

But, as Breen expertly explores, there was a darker side to this utopian mission. The Macy Conferences also played a role in the CIA’s three-decade experiments into mind-control. Many of the humane and utopian scientists involved in the Macy Conferences also did research for the CIA on interrogation and mind control - and Breen thinks it’s very likely that Mead and Bateson were involved in it as well (Bateson’s daughter, Nora, denies her father was involved in MK-Ultra).

A group photo of one of the Macy Conferences on altered states. In the middle of the front row, Margaret Mead; on the front-left, Mount Sinai psychiatrist Harold Abramson, who carried out psychedelic experiments on non-consenting humans for the CIA

The reason that humane scientists got involved in interrogation research is basically because they were patriots, they wanted to serve their country during WW2, which was when the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA) started to explore using drugs for mind-control. After the war, the CIA continued to explore this topic, especially during the Korean War when they were very worried about communist brain-washing, and many scientists answered the CIA’s call. It probably helped that the CIA were so generous in their funding - if you wanted to get your research on psychedelic therapy or anything else funded, all you had to do was a bit of secret work for the CIA on some unwitting inmates in prison or mental hospital. And if some of your participants died or went mad, well, they were casualties of the Cold War and scientific progress.

As this vast secret multi-million-dollar project continued throughout the late 50s and into the 1960s, it became more and more problematic. Countless innocent civilians reported terrible after-effects after being given high doses of LSD in hospitals and prisons (law-suits are still occurring). One CIA officer, Frank Olson, committed suicide or was murdered after being spiked with LSD.

MK-Ultra spilled out into American culture in unpredictable and (I imagine) unplanned ways - Ken Kesey, for example, took part in one CIA-funded experiment, and liked LSD so much he set up the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests. Does that mean the Pranksters were part of a CIA plot? I doubt it.

MK-Ultra was ultimately exposed by journalists, and shut down in the 1970s. The CIA officially decided psychedelics weren’t very effective for mind-control and interrogation, though it was clear you could use psychedelics to destroy people’s minds or make them act strangely for a while, and thereby undermine their authority. This, I suspect, is what CIA-funded psychiatrist Louis ‘Jolly’ West may have done to Jack Ruby when he visited him in prison after the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald - West diagnosed him as suffering from acute psychosis and Ruby was transferred to a medical hospital, where he died three years later.

Louis Jolyon ‘Jolly’ West, whose career as an academic psychiatrist soared, partly thanks to the CIA funding and support he received in exhange for conducting psychedelic experiments on non-consenting humans

Since MK-Ultra was exposed, the CIA seems to have steered clear of psychedelic research. I can see one or two connections between the CIA and the present psychedelic renaissance - RFK’s daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox is a former CIA operative turned Burning Man psychonaut, for example - but not enough to join the dots.

Nonetheless, interest in hypnosis and psychedelics as tools of coercion continued after MK-Ultra, in some parts of the human potential movement, particularly in various high-control groups, or cults as they’re commonly known. When I consider the history of human potential cults like Scientology, Aum Shinryko, Osho’s sannyasins, or more recent examples like NXIVM, OneTaste, or Lighthouse, or smaller psychedelic cults today, it strikes me that they have a lot of similarity to the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments.

Various freelance gurus, grifters and con-artists are experimenting every day on human subjects, exploring how to control the mind, how to manipulate people to do what you want to do, using hypnosis, drugs, social dynamics and other techniques. They lure people in with the promise of liberation, then enslave them - just as the CIA tried to do.

The charismatic leaders of these cults are experts in the psychology of indoctrination, conformism, influence, social pressure and blackmail. They realize you can get people to do anything - even kill - as long as you control their thoughts, emotions, speech and environment. You can get people to surrender to you completely, if you tell them over and over that this is the path to total freedom.

I thought of this when reading Ellen Huet’s new book Empire of Orgasm, about the OneTaste cult - and all of this is a long pitch to come to our free event on Tuesday where I’ll interview her online.

Come to this free online event on November 25th at 1pm Eastern time to hear Ellen Huet talk about how she exposed OneTaste, the so-called orgasm cult, with her reporting

In Huet’s description, OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone is a high-level dark triad manipulator who could get her closest followers to do pretty much anything she told them to. She told smart, wealthy, educated San Franciscans that the way to achieve enlightenment was to have sex with whoever she told them to, have sex with wealthy donors, have sex with strangers, all to increase her money and power. And they obeyed her! Like Charles Manson, she was a pimp masquerading as a guru.

In one vivid passage, a wealthy male donor is thinking of leaving OneTaste, and Daedone says he should take LSD with her before he leaves. Then she tries to brain-wash him during his trip so that he will give all his money to OneTaste. The CIA would have been fascinated.

Luckily the psychedelic brainwashing doesn’t work, the target doesn’t give all his money to OneTaste, and he leaves the cult. But still, reading the book you can’t help but think, MK-Ultra didn’t really end, it just got privatized.

Louis Jolly West and the New Age movement

One wonders if any New Age cults, from the 1970s onwards, might have had CIA links - could the CIA have quietly funded them or just kept an eye on them, as interesting experiments in human manipulation?

One connection I came across between MK-Ultra and New Age cults is Louis Jolyon West, who worked for MK-Ultra secretly for many years, conducting experiments on unwitting and unconsenting subjects like implanting false memories using drugs and hypnosis. Check out his 1974 paper on ‘hallucinogenic drugs’ in which he describes how they can be used to control and manipulate others.

Tom O’Neill, in his book Chaos, notes that Louis Jolly West set up a CIA-funded clinic for hippies in Haight-Ashbury where Charles Manson used to hang out, and O’Neill thinks Manson may have been a CIA experiment participant who went rogue.

After MK-Ultra supposedly stopped in the 1970s, Jolly West became an expert in New Age cults, and spoke at many anti-cult conferences. He had studied cults at close-hand for decades, from the tiny psychedelic communes of the 1960s to more organized movements like Scientology in the 70s and 80s. This is what he has to say about psychedelic communes of the 1960s:

To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide great freedom for private drug use, are actually subsidized by the society: through parental remittances, welfare and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug-users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated, and out of the labor market with its millions of un-employed. The communards with their drugs are probably less trouble - and less expensive - to society if they are living apart, than if they were choosing one of the alternative modes of expressing their alienation such as those employed by the New Left.

He became a bitter enemy of the Scientology movement for many years (see his talk on The Scientology Wars here). It’s clear, watching videos of his talks, that he is absolutely fascinated by cults and con-men. He says in a talk at the International Cult Studies Association conference in 1998:

The cults I’ve been looking at for nearly 50 years have evolved, mutated, and new varieties have sprung up, taking advantage of the information age, modern marketing techniques, and the use of legal systems. The affluence of the target populations has also contributed to what is a multibillion dollar international growth industry…[there has been] a steady expansion of entrepreneurs who wanted wealth and potency by manipulating and controlling others, shaping their groups based on their resources.

And he adds:

The shaman, the curandero, the quack, and the cult healer all have at their disposal access to these forces within each individual which can be manipulated and controlled as part of their procedures…The history of quackery ties in very much to all kinds of cultic activities. Most cults get into healing or wellness or self-improvement one way or another…Our very nature as humans makes us vulnerable to the depredations of those who are not impeded by any ethical or professional constraint, and whose motives are essentially power, money, control and exploitation.

I wonder what he’d make of the psychedelic underground.

When he died in 1999, West was celebrated by the press as an anti-cult expert - none of the obituaries mentioned his decades of illegal experimentation on non-consenting humans for MK-Ultra. You have to wonder…was this MK-Ultra psychiatrist studying New Age cults out of intellectual curiosity, or compassion for cult victims? Or did he and the Agency remain genuinely fascinated by brain-washing techniques, and curious what new experiments on the human mind were being practiced in the free market?

After the paywall, a bumper-crop of interesting links: Was Aldous Huxley connected to MK-Ultra? Plus MAHA versus Susie Wiles; RFK on DMT; and a US church with 700,000 members says its members should go forth and advocate for psychedelic decrim.