Volunteers by Sentence Reduction: The CIA’s Prison-Based Plan for Drug Interrogation
In a 1951 internal memo stamped for ARTICHOKE review, a CIA technical officer laid out a research proposal with chilling simplicity: use U.S. military prisoners as human test subjects for high-risk psychological and pharmacological experiments. The proposal detailed...
The CIA Built a Secret Needleless Injector Then Abandoned it for Being Too Loud
It was supposed to be the perfect spy tool: a silent device capable of delivering drugs through clothing with no trace and no needle. Instead, it ended up in a folder stamped with failure-and a warning about what science can’t solve with gadgets alone. A 1950s-era...
The U.S. Government Wanted a Truth Drug And Got a Chemical Lie Instead
It started with a promise: a chemical that could make anyone talk, spilling secrets without resistance or deception. What the U.S. got instead was confusion, contradiction, and a costly pharmacological dead end. A declassified report titled Development of Truth Drug...
From Brainwashing to Bombproof Memory: Inside the CIA’s Psychological War
When the CIA planned out its psychological warfare strategy in the 1950s, it wasn’t just exploring exotic drugs and hypnosis. It was engineering an entire operational ecosystem-custom labs, human test subjects, field schools, and behavioral modification programs...
