"The Had Some Rather Remarkable Successes": CIA Narratives in the Wake of the MKULTRA Cover-Up
Schmidel, Henry
Schmidel, Henry
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Abstract
The CIA's MKULTRA Program, a behavioral modification research project that ran in various forms from 1953 to 1973, was first uncovered by Congress in 1975. Though all of the program's files had been ordered destroyed, in 1977 several boxes of documents were discovered in a Freedom of Information Act request, resulting in a Senate investigation and renewed public interest. When the press came calling, former CIA employees and contractors used the lack of available information to spread their own stories--occasionally false and often exonerating--about MKULTRA. This presentation examines the narratives put out by MKULTRA-affiliated researchers in the late 1970s, unearthing why and how they said what they did.
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1/1/2026
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Graduate Student
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Oral Presentation
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College of Arts and Sciences
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Arts and Humanities (Govt)