CIA Officials Sought Large Numbers of Bodies for Mind-Altering Drug Tests
By Eleanor Voss ·
Psychiatric patients and returning Korean War POWs were eyed as 'bodies' for mind-altering drug tests during a CIA effort to bypass official oversight and avoid public scrutiny.
On April 16, 1953, a group of CIA officials met to determine how to expand the scope of Project Artichoke. The public record identifies Artichoke as a CIA project focused on researching methods of interrogation, a precursor to the more infamous MKUltra. According to a catalogue entry from the National Security Archive for a memo dated May 11, 1953, the participants of this conference reached a stark consensus: "all hands agreed that a great deal of work was necessary and it was essential to find an area where large numbers of bodies would be used for research and experimentation."
April 16, 1953
The language used in the memo—specifically the word "bodies"—reflects a clinical detachment common in the early Cold War’s approach to behavioral science. The meeting was not an academic seminar but a strategic session aimed at finding a scalable environment for testing. The catalogue entry for the memo indicates that the participants sought maximum breadth in their trials, agreeing "that the wider the testing the better chances of success."
This search for a testing ground was not limited to government facilities. The record shows that the CIA was looking for ways to outsource its experimentation to the private sector and the medical community to avoid the constraints of official oversight.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
Psychiatrists and Foundations
One participant in the meeting, whose name remains redacted in the document, suggested that the agency could leverage existing medical practitioners. This individual stated that "in connection with the testing of drugs, he was quite certain a number of psychiatrists all over the United States would be willing to test new drugs, especially drugs that affect the mind."
This proposal suggests a willingness to utilize a patient population that was already under medical care, effectively turning private psychiatric practices into unwitting laboratories for the state. The catalogue entry further notes that other attendees pointed toward "foundations, laboratories, etc." as viable venues for the testing of these new substances. These suggestions align closely with the operational patterns that would later characterize MKUltra, where the agency funded research at universities and hospitals to maintain a layer of separation from the actual experiments.
Korean POWs
Beyond the use of civilian psychiatrists, the conference attendees discussed a more immediate and targeted group: United States prisoners of war returning from the Korean War. The file's catalogue entry records a discussion regarding the use of Artichoke techniques on these returnees, including a "detailed description of the problem to that point" and the specific efforts the project had already made to assist in their interrogation.
From the perspective of the CIA staff, the returning POWs were not merely subjects of concern but assets for research. The participants agreed that the "hard core" group among the returnees, as well as those who had been "successfully indoctrinated" by their captors, were "excellent subjects for ARTICHOKE work." The goal was to analyze the effects of enemy brainwashing and to test whether Artichoke’s own interrogation techniques could be applied to these men.
However, the record indicates that the agency’s ambitions were tempered by the realities of public relations. Despite the perceived value of the POWs as subjects, the "general opinion" among the meeting participants was that the techniques could likely not be applied to them "owing to publicity and poor handling."
This hesitation was not based on the ethics of experimenting on veterans, but on the risk of exposure. The "poor handling" mentioned suggests a failure in the operational security required to conduct such work without alerting the press or the public.
The May 11 memo serves as a bridge between the targeted interrogation research of Project Artichoke and the systemic, wide-scale experimentation of MKUltra, which began that same year. The appetite for "large numbers of bodies" expressed in April 1953 found its fulfillment in the subsequent decade of covert testing.
In October 1975, Senate investigators asked MKUltra chief Sidney Gottlieb about his participation in the April 16 meeting.