Aletho News

A dark page from the CIA’s history: What was Project Artichoke, launched 74 years ago?

By Erkin Oncan | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 22, 2025

One of the most useful instruments hidden behind the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of “freedom and democracy” was the Central Intelligence Agency, founded on September 18, 1947, as the successor of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Since its creation, the CIA has carried out countless inhumane operations: assassinations, coups, drug trafficking, support for terrorism, conspiracies. The list of its crimes is endless. But among the darkest and most inhumane chapters of its record lie the notorious “mind control” experiments.

The “Scientific Intelligence Office”

The CIA’s so-called “scientific branches,” which were in fact used for these experiments, are infamous for their scandals. These activities, always cloaked under the veil of “national security” and secrecy, began with the Scientific Branch within the Office of Reports and Estimates. On December 31, 1948—barely a year after the CIA’s founding—this branch was merged with the Nuclear Energy Group of the Office of Special Operations to form the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI).

Of course, these units never pursued “scientific discovery” or any purpose for the benefit of humanity. Their main objective was to develop special interrogation techniques and to transform individuals into instruments who could act against their own will, under CIA command.

Between 1949 and 1950, a program code-named Bluebird was initiated for this purpose. Soon after, it evolved into what became known as Artichoke.

CIA code names often had little apparent connection to the projects’ real purpose, but they frequently carried subtle allusions. The transition from “Bluebird”—a symbol of happiness and hope in English—to “Artichoke,” a vegetable with tightly layered leaves, can be read as a metaphor for gradually peeling away the layers of the human mind.

On August 20, 1951, Project Artichoke was officially launched. It would later evolve into MKUltra, the infamous mind control program that remains one of the CIA’s most sinister undertakings.

The project’s core goal was to test whether a human being could be forced to act against their own will—even against their instinct for self-preservation—in order to serve the CIA’s interests. One CIA document framed the mission with chilling clarity:

“Can an individual be made to perform an act of attempted assassination against a prominent political leader, against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”

This single sentence demonstrates how the United States treated the human mind as nothing more than a laboratory specimen.

Experiments on subjects involved hypnosis, LSD, morphine addiction and withdrawal, isolation, and electroshock. Some of these methods were even tested directly within the agency itself.

The Frank Olson Case

At this point, one must recall the case of Frank Olson, an American scientist working on biological warfare who died under suspicious circumstances.

In the 1950s, Olson was stationed at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army facility, and was closely connected to the CIA’s secret projects such as Artichoke.

In November 1953, at a CIA retreat in Maryland, Olson was secretly dosed with LSD. Following this, he suffered severe psychological distress and began questioning the morality of his research, expressing unease over the CIA’s clandestine biological and chemical experiments.

His superiors, alarmed by Olson’s state of mind, quickly decided he had become a liability.

On November 24, 1953, Olson was taken to New York’s Statler Hotel under the supervision of CIA officer Robert Lashbrook. In the early hours of November 28, Olson fell to his death from the 13th-floor window of his hotel room. The official explanation: suicide.

Years later, in 1975, the Rockefeller Commission report revealed that the CIA had conducted LSD experiments on humans, identifying Olson as one of the victims. Public pressure forced a new investigation. In the 1990s, an independent autopsy concluded that Olson had suffered blunt-force trauma to the head before his fall—suggesting he may have been pushed.

Beyond Drugs: Biological Warfare

Project Artichoke extended far beyond the use of drugs. The CIA also explored diseases such as dengue fever and experimented with viruses as potential biological weapons—not to kill, but to incapacitate and disable.

The agency focused its inhumane experiments on the most vulnerable groups within the imperial system: “weaker peoples, the uneducated, refugees, prisoners of war, and defectors.”

Other reports revealed even darker ambitions: creating assassins capable of eliminating political figures—or even U.S. officials themselves—under the program’s methods. This chilling fact showed that the imperial machine was willing to turn against its own citizens if necessary.

Although much about the project remains secret, evidence indicates that these experiments were carried out not only on U.S. soil, but also in Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines—mostly targeting “foreigners.”

The populations of countries under U.S. hegemony were turned into guinea pigs for American laboratories.

The Road to MKUltra

The “results” gathered from Artichoke fed directly into the CIA’s later and far more infamous MKUltra program, launched in 1953.

In 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner admitted before a joint U.S. Senate committee that the project’s aim was to study “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior.”

American journalist Stephen Kinzer, who investigated these secret CIA projects, documented that mescaline—later used by the CIA in its experiments—was first tested on humans at Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau.

In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court revealed that the CIA had indirectly funded 162 different secret projects through contracts with universities, research foundations, and similar institutions. At least 80 organizations and 185 researchers were involved—many of them unaware they were working for the CIA.

A Legacy of Inhumanity

Project Artichoke is just one example of the inhumane operations carried out by the United States against the peoples of the world—and even against its own citizens. While U.S. politicians preached “peace” and “democracy” abroad, their intelligence services were busy developing technologies to enslave, control, and even weaponize human beings as assassins.

August 22, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Human rights, United States