Detrick, still contains untold stories of the cruelty that began there.

The secret history of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s base for mind-control experiments

Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.

Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973.

Some of its secrets have been revealed declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations.

Together, those sources reveal Detrick’s central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders.

Detrick is today one of the world’s cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and anti-toxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret.

In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control.

In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division.

Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations

Division had to decide how to begin their research.

At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians.

CIA officers in Europe and Asia were regularly capturing suspected enemy agents and wanted to develop new ways

to draw prisoners in interrogation away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets and

perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will.

Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA’s covert-operations directorate and would soon be promoted to direct the Agency,

considered his mind control project —

first named Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA —

to be of supreme importance, the difference between the survival and extinction of the United States.

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-secret-history-of-fort-detrick-the-cias-base-for-mind-control-experiments/

“Do you know what a ‘self-contained, off-the-shelf operation’ means?” one of them asked years later.

“The CIA was running one in my lab. They were testing psycho-chemicals and running experiments in my labs, and weren’t telling me.”

Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place.

He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electro-shock or sensory deprivation.

In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta

and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.

In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb’s victims were prisoners in secret detention centers.

One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, may have been the first secret CIA prison.

While CIA scientists and their ex-Nazi comrades sat before the stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control,

prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments.

In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped and stuttered. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats.

Gottlieb wanted to use Detrick’s assets to propel his mind-control project to new heights. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. Under the arrangement’s provisions, according to a later report, “CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.”