Recently declassified CIA documents have confirmed what investigative journalist John Marks first reported in 1979: Korean War prisoners of war held in American custody were subjected to early MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. The National Security Archive’s release of over 1,200 documents between December 2024 and April 2025 provides the first official confirmation of these tests on unwitting subjects.
Project Bluebird: The Genesis of Mind Control
The experiments began under Project Bluebird, MK-ULTRA’s predecessor program launched in 1950. An April 5, 1950 office memorandum to CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter outlined the project’s ambitious goals: achieving “personality control” through interrogation techniques that could “control an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”
According to the declassified records, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were selected in October 1950 as the first test subjects for these “advanced” interrogation techniques. The prisoners underwent polygraph testing and other psychological experiments while in U.S. custody, with plans for more invasive procedures.
Sophisticated Arsenal of Control Methods
The CIA documents reveal a comprehensive approach to mind manipulation. Project Bluebird teams consisted of three specialists: a doctor (preferably a psychiatrist), a hypnotist, and a polygraph technician. The program’s $65,515 budget allocated funds for specialized equipment including syringes, film cameras, and experimental “hypospray” devices designed for covert injection of sedatives through the skin.
A February 2, 1951 memo details inquiries into acquiring six hypospray devices and investigations into modifying “tear gas pencils” and other “devices of unestablished action,” including what was described as a German “appearance of death” pistol. The documents show the CIA was exploring methods to induce “complete hypnotic trance” states in subjects.
Offshore Operations and Broader Objectives
While specific locations remain redacted in the budget documents, a CIA meeting summary from 1951 explicitly references “a project in Japan and Korea in which the Army had used a polygraph operator along with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists on Korean POWs.” The $18,000 transportation allocation in the budget suggests extensive overseas operations.
The declassified materials reveal that mind control was only one objective. CIA officials also sought to research “psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs” and develop means for “combatting communism” and “selling democracy” while preventing communist infiltration of trade unions.
A Pattern of Abuse Emerges
The Korean POW experiments fit within a broader pattern of CIA behavioral manipulation programs. The National Security Archive collection documents how the agency used Georgetown University Hospital as a “cut-out” for MK-ULTRA experiments, developing substances to “promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness” and create “physical disablement.”
CIA Inspector General John Earman later acknowledged that “real progress has been made in the use of drugs in support of interrogation.” Documents show approximately 40 unwitting LSD tests were conducted in CIA safehouses for “interrogation purposes” and to “provoke erratic behavior.”
The revelation of experiments on Korean War POWs adds another disturbing chapter to the documented history of CIA mind control programs. Despite the agency’s efforts to destroy records – what the National Security Archive calls a “purge” of secretive documents – the surviving materials present what researchers describe as “a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind.”
This article draws on reporting from The Intercept and documents from the National Security Archive.
