Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me review this book. I’d heard of MKULTRA and knew a little bit about it; this book was very in-depth as to what happened when it first started along with the lengths to which they carried out the missions and other happenings in the CIA. It was interesting to read about the various gadgets that were used. It’s crazy to think there was really no oversight on MKULTRA and other projects happening in the CIA. If you’re into CIA history and the like, this book is right up your alley.

This book details the MKULTRA initiative from its infancy. It details the implications of a man given the power and control of mind and mood-altering drugs. This was fascinating, well-researched, and more than a little heartbreaking.

I’ve long been fascinated by the CIA’s secret MK-ULTRA experiments. PROJECT MIND CONTROL is the most current examination of this disturbing period of history. The repercussions of this federally-sanctioned criminal behavior continue to this day.

The research is meticulous and extensive, but we never get mired in dry details. The writing is accessible, easy to read, and thoroughly engaging.

*Thanks to St. Martin’s Press for the free eARC, provided via NetGalley.*

Project Mind Control is a book focused mainly on the CIA’s MKULTRA, which was a project to discredit individuals, elicit information and implant suggestions. Eventually came to encompass 149 sub projects and was simply a way to get people to talk or prevent them from talking.

A few things I learned: Lobotomy was considered by the CIA as a way to complete its goals. They developed LSD and then tried that as the first method of mind control. The CIA used universities to conduct research when the government wouldn’t - but many didn’t know the CIA was even involved. It was also interested in electroshock therapy because of the reported ability to induce amnesia. The CIA coordinated many assassination attempts or ways to debilitate people and get them out of power. This is just scratching the surface of the topics in this book.

Signs of the project’s demise soon became apparent around 1963 and how legal it was. Over its 10 year lifespan, MKULTRA spent $10 million at various institutions and didn’t really learn much related to its goal in the end. MKULTRA was not a fluke, but the norm in a system that lacks meaningful oversight and lets perpetrators of abuses avoid accountability for their actions. The pendulum swings between security and liberty.

This book was very interesting and informative overall. I did think the end portion went on for too long and I wished there had been more about the tests at universities. But in particular the world we live in today, understanding our history can hopefully help to right the track (at least one day).

MKUltra is a terrifying tragedy but true scope of it is deeply unknown by the general public and I’m sure he’s only breached the tip of the ice burg. While Lisle’s research and documentation is meticulous and fascinating, I can only imagine what deeply classified information will never see the light of day.

My first foray and interest came with The Manchurian Candidate and grew from there. The absolute brutality and abuse he documents is something of nightmares yet this was happening right under the noses of every American in secret and clandestine places. What’s especially interesting to me – and a huge topic of discussion amongst myself/friends/family is that Lisle doesn’t necessarily bring up anything ‘new’ but he provides proof that can’t be dismissed; uncovered documentation, verbal accounts, eyewitness details that exploit the most heinous of crimes, all done by our own government.

Everyone should read this.

5 out of 5 stars

When I picked up this book, I expected to get an informative story about the atrocities of the CIA. I did not expect, however, to get dragged into a gripping narrative that left me wanting more. John Lisle has a way with words that made it hard for me to put this book down; which is hard to do with nonfiction.

Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle provides a narrative telling of the top secret (which did not stay secret for long) work of Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA to find ways to accomplish mind control during the 1950s and the Cold War. Worried about Communism and the USSR, Gottlieb and the CIA worked to find ways to control minds before their enemies accomplished the same goal (even though the enemy did not actually share this goal). This ambitious goal had the CIA creating a new drug and using it on American citizens, then moving to torture in the form of psychic driving, depatterning, and other methods outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Even though the CIA did not accomplish their mind control goals, they caused real harm to numerous people, and they only faced consequence for their actions when leaked files made their way to mainstream media.

Even though Project Mind Control is jam packed with information, the organization of the book makes for a smooth read where information is delivered in a way that keeps the reader engaged. I particularly liked how Lisle included quotes from the transcripts of the CIA hearings, then further explored the topic at hand. This helped break the book up and prevented a dull, full narrative of the events of the 1950s. Of course, it helped that the subject involved espionage, drugging, and even real-life James Bond-like tools.

This book is so well-written and engaging that I do not have anything bad to say about it. If you are interested in the shady work of the American government during the Cold War, then this book is a must-read.

This book is a powerful reminder of a dark history: The CIA's MK Ultra program. It's a chilling account of government overreach and human experimentation. The author's research paints a harrowing picture. It's a tough but essential read that serves as a warning about the abuse of power. A great opportunity with St Martin's Press and NetGalley, thanks!

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!

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.”

[...]

A good overview of the CIA and it's handling of controversial programs like MKULTRA. The book delves into how programs like this came to be, who led the initiatives, who executed them, and who enabled it to continue despite the illegal and immoral basis of MKULTRA. I particularly found the last chapter to be reflective and meaningful to some of today's issues around misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and free will. I almost feel that the last chapter should have been the epilogue, which I found to kind of go in a different path than the premise of the book (i,e. cults). The book did a good job at chronicling the history of an otherwise secretive time in our history, but think it was more about Gottlieb and others at the CIA vs. the ins and outs of the many sub programs under MKULTRA. I felt we only got snippets of the many different experiments that happened under the CIA's directive. Overall, it is another example of how enabling the intelligence community to have no checks and balances ends up hurting this country, maybe more than any bad actor or adversary could.

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.

A blended biography and history of the work he carried out, Project Mind Control explores the unfortunately not completely knowable MKULTRA program and its head, Sidney Gottlieb. John Lisle had previously published the similarly structured The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lowvell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare. MKULTRA was a series of experiments conducted directly or sometimes funded circuitously by the CIA with the overall goal of developing methods or substances for mind control. It was a product of the Cold War, considered a resource arms race in opposition to the perceived mind control of American POWs in Korea or hinted capabilities of the Soviets.

As Lisle capable points out at many points, secrecy was the defining element of these projects that could involve drugging unsuspecting bar or brothel patrons or government employees with LSD, forced ad nauseam listening to commanding phrases, electroconvulsive therapy or other questionable methods or experiments. While extensive research was undertaken, one of the key documents were previously unknown depositions where Gottlieb himself explains much of what went on, despite his earlier destruction of much of the documentary records.

Chapters are short and typical tied to a specific experiment, or troubling result of one set of experiments. Lisle is clear that much that of the results were defined or expressed as unsuccessful or what not to do. The deepest condemnation however, is how highly illegal and unethical much of this work was. Despite the human rights ideals and UN declarations following the Nazi era world war II inhumane experiments, Gottlieb details the uses of humans as guinea pigs 'for the greater good.'

Only years later with leaks of documents or presidential slips of the tongue did the wider story start to leak out. Families suffering grievously losses sought justice for the institutional failures that come about from a lack of oversight or accountability. In the epilogue Lisle makes the apt comparison of how cults operate and how susceptible to persuasion or unspoken direction humans really are, without delving fully into conspiracy theories. (Though Lisle does discuss some directly tied to MKULTRA and the possibility some of these are purposeful CIA plants).

A troubling read that exposes some of the extremes gone to in the name of patriotism.

Recommended to readers or researchers of contemporary America, the Cold War or those who watch the watchmen.

4.5 🌟 (LSD-tinged stars, obviously)

Well. That was pretty crazy (/understatement).

Project Mind Control by John Lisle is a hell of a ride through the history of the CIA's mind control project dubbed MKULTRA. Lead chemist (and who I'm assuming was actually one of Satan's minions in disguise) Sidney Gottlieb and his role in MKULTRA is discussed at length. Incredibly frustrating transcripts from depositions are featured and showcase how the CIA tried to cover up information.

This is a very fascinating story. I knew a little about MKULTRA before this, but not the extent to which it was executed. Sidney Gottlieb would have done well in the Trump Administration, but fortunately, he's no longer around. Many shocking details about experiments done on unwitting human and animal participants are presented. It's pretty disturbing.

Pete Cross narrates the audiobook version. His voice is clear and strong throughout, making it easy to understand the information presented.

Recommended for: anyone with an interest in LSD or how terrible the CIA can be, anyone with too much trust in our government, anyone with a pulse, etc.


Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC.

Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle (book cover is in image) is a detailed account of the career of Sidney Gottlieb's career with the CIA, and the questionable history of the use of unconventional tactics to question and control individuals to fulfill their agenda.

In addition to reading the book, I was able to listen to the audio narration and able to smoothy transition between the two. The narration by Pete Cross is easy to follow and flows in such a natural language that it keeps the listener engaged throughout. I strongly recommend this for those who like to understand law enforcement history.

Thank you Macmillan Audio and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to listen to this ALC and read the ARC. All opinions are my own.

Rating: 5 Stars
Release Date: May 20 2025

#StMartinsPress
#MacmillanAudio
#ProjectMindControl
#JohnLisle
#PeteCrosss
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I adored John Lisle's The Dirty Tricks Department so I was thrilled to get the chance to read and review his newest title and it did not disappoint.

Before Project Mind Control, I had read about MK Ultra, namely in Chaos by Tom O'Neill but I loved the way that Lisle delved into Gottlieb as a driver of the narrative. Packed full of first hand accounts of the subject matter, Project Mind Control still manages to be concise, compelling, and intriguing to the last. Lisle deftly turns facts and interviews into a seamless narrative perfect for anyone who enjoys non-fiction.

This is an informative book about the MKUltra project. This is what happens when you give a department too much money and no oversight.
This is a must read!

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!

Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle
★★★★☆ | No spice | Truth more disturbing than fiction
Reading this felt like stumbling upon a hidden government file marked "CLASSIFIED" that I wasn't supposed to see. Lisle's meticulously researched account of the CIA's mind control experiments left me wide-eyed at 3 AM, unable to shake what I'd learned. Thanks to Gottlieb's own words finally coming to light, we see how normal people did terrible things by hiding behind fancy office talk and "just doing my part" thinking.
The part about unwitting Americans being dosed with LSD made my stomach turn—these weren't faceless victims but real people whose lives were upended. What haunts me most is how easily brilliant minds convinced themselves they were serving a greater purpose while destroying lives.
Not just a history lesson but a warning about unchecked power that feels disturbingly relevant today.
Vibes We Are Tracking:
🕵️‍♂️ Government conspiracy (actually real)
💊 Medical horror
📝 Buried testimony unearthed
🧠 Psychological manipulation
🤔 Ethical nightmares

A fascinating and horrifying tale of the abuses of an unchecked CIA in postwar America. I had a passing familiarity with MKULTRA, but it was mostly from cultural references. I had thought that it was largely just the whole LSD thing. And make no mistake, everything surrounding that was surreal too. But what this book opened my eyes to was all the abuse that occurred at the hands of completely untrained people taking the CIA's money to perform their sociopathic "experiments" on people. This is to say nothing of the various medical "studies" done by licensed professionals who, by all rights, should have known better.

Lisle does a fantastic job of presenting the story of Sidney Gottlieb and the horror show of the MKULTRA program in a manner which read more like a (well-sourced) novel than a simple dry recounting of facts and figures that some of these types of books fall prey to.

Came for Charles Manson, left with a magician and LSD

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 a 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……