The 149 Subprojects

Universities, prisons, hospitals — 80 institutions dosed and tested, mostly unaware.

Imagine you are a researcher at Cornell, or Georgetown, or a hospital in Montreal, in the mid-1950s. A foundation with a respectable name writes you a check to study human behavior. You cash it. What you may not know is that the money started at the Central Intelligence Agency, and your work now carries a number: it is one of the subprojects of MKULTRA. DOCUMENTED: When MKULTRA's surviving records finally surfaced, they revealed that the program was not one experiment but a portfolio of 149 numbered subprojects. Here's the part most people don't know: the CIA rarely wrote the checks directly. It laundered the funding through cutout foundations so the Agency's fingerprints would not show. The most notorious was the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which Sidney Gottlieb himself later described in a 1983 deposition as a funding mechanism designed so that CIA involvement 'would not be apparent.' Another, the Geschickter Fund, routed money through Georgetown University Hospital. The reach was enormous and disturbingly ordinary. Documented subprojects ran through well-regarded universities including Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers, Illinois, and Oklahoma. They operated inside hospitals like Boston Psychopathic and the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, where Dr. Ewen Cameron's brutal 'depatterning' work would later spawn its own case file (see montreal-experiments). They reached into prisons, including the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky, where addicts were sometimes paid in the very drugs being studied. So here's where it gets strange. Almost none of this would be knowable today. Recall from mkultra that Director Richard Helms ordered the files destroyed in 1973. The reason we can name Cornell and Lexington and the Human Ecology Society at all comes down to one man's persistence. DOCUMENTED: John Marks, a former State Department officer, filed some of the first FOIA requests on MKULTRA and pried loose roughly 20,000 pages of surviving financial and administrative records. His 1979 book built the map the rest of us have been reading ever since, and he later donated his annotated documents to the National Security Archive. Now, the honest caveat. The surviving pages are financial folders: approvals, vouchers, accountings. They prove who was paid and roughly for what. SPECULATION/LEGEND: They do not confirm the wilder claims layered on top, that every subproject produced a perfected technique, that a hidden master project succeeded where the paper trail shows mostly failure and improvisation. Many subprojects were mundane; some were monstrous; the records let us tell those apart only imperfectly, because the operational files are ash. That is exactly why this node sits where it does on the map. subprojects is the connective tissue of the whole MKULTRA web: it links the hub at mkultra outward to the specific horror of the montreal-experiments, and it explains, in dollars and cover names, how a secret program threaded itself into the most trusted institutions in North America. Follow the money, and the legend and the record briefly stand in the same room.