The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

Dulles reported that the Soviets were engaging in sick science, seeking to control human consciousness by “washing the brain clean of the thoughts and mental processes of the past” and creating automatons of the state who would speak and act against their own will. Dulles’s speech, which he made sure received wide media distribution, marked an ominous new phase in the Cold War, a militarization of science and psychology aimed not simply at changing popular opinion but at reengineering the human brain. What Dulles did not tell his audience in Hot Springs was that several days earlier, he had authorized a CIA mind control program code-named MKULTRA that would dwarf any similar efforts behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, at the same time that he was condemning Soviet “brainwashing,” Dulles knew that U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been working for several years on their own brain warfare programs. This secret experimentation would balloon under the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Launched by Dulles with a $300,000 budget, this “Manhattan Project of the Mind” would grow into a multimillion-dollar program, operating for a quarter of a century, and enlisting dozens of leading universities and hospitals as well as hundreds of prominent researchers in studies that often