Operation artichoke

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The Project Artichoke was an extensive, secret research program of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about the possibilities of mind control from 20 August 1951 to 20 April 1953. previous project, the project was BLUEBIRD , successor to the project MKULTRA .

Goals and Methods

At the beginning of the Cold War , the CIA had secret prisons set up in the Federal Republic of Germany , Japan and at a naval base in the Panama Canal zone. They were used in particular to interrogate suspected double agents who were suspected of passing on secret information to the Soviet Union . In 1950, four alleged North Korean double agents in Japan and two Russian emigrants who had been brought from Germany to the Canal Zone were interrogated in the secret prisons while using drugs. They were considered to be the first subjects to be tested in Operation Artichoke. The pursuit of control of the human psyche, so the project goal, led at least between 1948 and 1952 to the use of mind-regulating drugs such as heroin , amphetamines , sleeping pills and the then only recently discovered LSD in secret prisons; a process of which CIA director Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner , head of the covert operations division , were fully informed in a report dated May 15, 1952.

Almost all of the project's documents were subsequently destroyed by senior CIA officials, including Richard Helms .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Unorthodox, unethical, illegal" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1984, pp. 161-167 ( online ).
  2. ↑ a b Tim Weiner: CIA. The whole story . 5th edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2009, ISBN 978-3-596-17865-0 , Chapter 7, pp. 103 .
  3. ↑ a b Tim Weiner: CIA. The whole story . 5th edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2009, ISBN 978-3-596-17865-0 , Chapter 7, pp. 104 .
  4. ↑ a b Tim Weiner: CIA. The whole story . 5th edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2009, ISBN 978-3-596-17865-0 , Chapter 7, pp. 105 .

literature

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