Apart from being the name of a vegetable, Artichoke or the Artichoke Project also is the name of a former CIA Mind Control Program. The name was only used for two years. Till 1951, it was called Project Bluebird. In 1953 it was succeeded by Project MkUltra
Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence.
[1] A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953.
[2][not in citation given]
The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.
ARTICHOKE was an offensive program of mind control that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?.
Project Artichoke, far worse than MKULTRA?
In a recent article H. P. Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, and Jeffrey Kaye have reminded us of the sordid past of CIA behavioral science research in the CIA’s Project Artichoke. They make a case that the CIA deliberately exposed their much better-known MKULTRA program as a way of distracting attention from the much more pernicious, and operational, Project Artichoke:
Contemporary torture’s earliest, deepest, and most influential roots are found in the CIA’s Artichoke Project. Indeed, it is Project Artichoke that encapsulates the CIA’s real traveling roadshow of horrors and atrocities, not MK/ULTRA which, although responsible for its own acts of mindless cruelty, pales in comparison.
That MK/ULTRA received and continues to receive, the lion’s share of the media’s attention and public outrage over CIA mind control programs was a deliberately planned outcome on the part of the Agency. This outcome was the central objective of a never before revealed covert operation launched in 1975 and informally code-named Dormouse.
Dormouse, operated out of the CIA’s Security Research branch, had its genesis in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report and in the subsequent Congressional hearings into CIA illegal activities chaired by Senators Frank Church and Teddy Kennedy. Following the initial revelation of Frank Olson’s alleged “suicide” by the Rockefeller Commission, a number of high-level meetings occurred between President Gerald Ford’s White House and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston.
English: Yearbook picture of Donald Rumsfeld from Bric-a-Brac, 1954 edition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years, secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would lead to opening a Pandora’s box of legal, institutional, international, and public relations problems that could destroy the CIA.
Houston explained that the Agency’s MK/ULTRA program was far less problematic for the CIA because it had been a research-based program that initiated 153 contracts to colleges, universities and research institutions nationwide. These contractors, all stalwart and prestigious institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Tulane Universities, could serve as viable buffers to any harsh outside attacks.
Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the multi-faceted Artichoke Project.
Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.
Explained the Agency’s General Counsel, since early 1954, following the death of Army biochemist Frank Olson, a secret agreement between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice had been put in place whereby the violation of “criminal statutes” by CIA personnel would not result in Department of Justice prosecutions, if “highly classified and complex covert operations” were threatened with exposure. The agreement had been struck between Houston and Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers in February 1954, not long after Frank Olson’s death, and still remained solidly in place.
Lastly, and worth noting here, was a brief adjunct discussion between Houston, Rumsfeld, and Cheney regarding related concerns about records on former Nazi scientists who had been secretly imported into the United States in the early Fifties by the State Department and Army, as part of Project Paperclip. These German scientists performed highly-classified research at the Army’s Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, some of which involved field operations in Europe.
Without doubt, as the extant record clearly reveals, the CIA’s Dormouse Operation, as expressed by Houston, was remarkably effective. Information released on the Agency’s MK/ULTRA program more than sated the media’s curiosity for mind control details, and even a few random Artichoke Program citations in a couple released documents failed to draw any concerted examination by anyone in the press. For example, documents revealing that Dr. Frank Olson had been part of the CIA’s ongoing “Artichoke Conference” were near completely overlooked. Within a few short months, Artichoke was widely believed by the media and public to be but a small, innocuous project that had been replaced by the MK/ULTRA behemoth. Still today, numerous publications state that Artichoke was absorbed and replaced by MK/ULTRA when actually Artichoke operated independently for nearly 17 years beyond the dawn of MK/ULTRA.
They then go on to discuss Project Artichoke in detail, with evidence that its fanciful plans were frequently implemented in operations. The article is long but it is well worth a careful read.
CIA Operation that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD in 1951.