The Sopranos’ Creator produces CIA Thriller ‘Project: MKUltra’
2 days later a National Security Document Dump announcement by the CIA
https://eurweb.com/david-chase-hbo-project-mkultra-limited-series/
Drawing from John Lisle’s book “Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra,” the series centers on Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA chemist and intelligence operative known as The Black Sorcerer. Gottlieb spearheaded the MKUltra program, which conducted secret experiments using psychedelics, hypnosis, and torture on both consenting and non-consenting subjects during the Cold War. His work inadvertently influenced the rise of the LSD counterculture.
Chase will serve as an executive producer for the series, joined by Nicole Lambert, who heads production and development at Riverain Pictures.
Initiated in the 1950s and extending into the 1960s, the MKUltra program was a CIA initiative aimed at countering perceived Soviet and Chinese progress in psychological manipulation techniques. Under the pretext of protecting national security, the agency conducted experiments involving hallucinogens, psychological tactics, and non-consensual human testing.
Running from 1953 to 1973, MKUltra explored various methods to influence or control human behavior. These included secretly administering high doses of psychoactive substances like LSD, alongside other chemicals, without participants’ knowledge. The program also employed electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, and forms of psychological and sexual abuse.
Chase’s television legacy includes seven Emmy Awards—five earned for “The Sopranos,” with two for Outstanding Drama Series. Since the series concluded in 2007, he has focused on film projects, including “Not Fade Away” in 2012 and “The Many Saints of Newark,” the 2021 prequel to “The Sopranos.”
2 DAYS LATER THIS HAPPENED
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a69208487/declassified-transcripts-gottlieb-mkultra/
Declassified MKUltra Transcripts Have Been Released.
The CIA was committing horrible acts against helpless people in the 1970s. How can we prevent that from ever happening again?
By Charles P. Pierce Published: Oct 30, 2025 6:55 PM EDT
There aren’t many American cold-war villains as stone evil as Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who oversaw the crimes and depredations of the Company’s MKUltra program.
In 1975, Gottlieb appeared before Senator Frank Church’s committee that was looking into the various crimes and depredations of the CIA. (Church’s committee remains one of the most important episodes in recent history of the many we’ve chosen to forget about.) The folks at the National Security Archive have released the transcripts of Gottlieb’s testimony to the Church committee, and they are every bit as bad as the country has tried so hard not to recall.
Among other things, the recently declassified transcripts from the closed-door hearings held on October 15–18, 1975, shed new light on the bizarre and abusive research projects associated with Gottlieb and the Agency’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), including the administration of mind-altering drugs in situations where, in Gottlieb’s words, “the unwitting and total lack of awareness on the part of somebody who was being interrogated that way might have been the key thing.” At one point, Senate staffers asked Gottlieb about a document indicating that one interrogee had been secretly given a large dose of LSD that induced a “severe classic paranoid reaction” so extreme that he was declared mentally ill by an equally unwitting psychiatrist and was thus “discredited in the eyes of the group with which he had been working.” Gottlieb said that “it had been recognized that this kind of thing might be a need that P-1 [LSD] might help with, to make somebody behave erratically for the purpose of his colleagues losing faith in his ability to act responsibly.”
Other parts of the hearing focused on Gottlieb’s involvement in CIA assassination plots, especially those targeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and its support to the activities of other federal agencies through MHCHAOS, the subject of the earlier Rockefeller Commission report.
The transcripts are a case study in how government secrecy can run amok so long as there are people like Gottlieb to run it. Much of the public knowledge of these activities came from lawsuits filed by Gottlieb’s victims and their families. Once the Church committee began shaking his tree, Gottlieb had his horror stories dragged out of him.
The Committee staff also asked Gottlieb about the extent of CIA-sponsored drug testing in prisons and psychiatric facilities in the U.S. Asked on the first day of testimony if he recalled “ARTICHOKE operations either in prisons, mental hospitals or other facilities that might hold either criminals or the criminally insane,” Gottlieb replied: “I don’t remember anything like that.” However, the next day, Gottlieb said he did remember that TSS conducted “general research” at hospitals with “psychochemicals,” although he took issue with the word “prison” to describe what he said were treatment facilities run by the Public Health Service for “people with criminal background.”
(One of Gottlieb’s acid guinea pigs reportedly was an inmate at the federal prison at Alcatraz from Boston named Whitey Bulger.)
Gottlieb was similarly evasive in response to questions about whether experiments were done at universities, finally settling on this statement: “[T]here was some of the work involving such testing that went on at hospitals that were affiliated with universities, and might have used university students as a source of volunteers.” Asked again about these kinds of projects on the final day of testimony, Gottlieb admitted that the CIA had “an extensive research program in regard to human experimentation on psychochemicals” under MKULTRA, adding that “a lot of these things were done in hospitals and mental institutions. And when you say hospitalization, the people were already hospitalized.”
That’s some cold-ass stuff right there. What the hell, dose these folks. They’re in the hospital anyway!
Read the whole thing. This went on for years. One subject named Frank Olson who was surreptitiously dosed jumped out the window of a Manhattan hotel.
Two things we should have learned but clearly didn’t: One, we should be very careful about whom we elect as our leaders. And two, we should demand to know what kind of people the people we elect are hiring and what those people might be up to on our dime.
Glad we’d never let that kind of thing get completely out of hand.
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tomdanielson
17 minutes ago
Hell reading about “The Administration” trying to gaslight us into believing our cities are aflame due to unrest trying to destroy the USA ain’t too far away from the jaw dropping effects of a good dose of LSD. At least the acid wears off mostly, it appears “The Administration” plans to stay.
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gmokery
39 minutes ago
There’s also this: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Brien and Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist reportedly involved in MKUltra mind-control experiments (specifically on brainwashing and the effects of LSD), who worked at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic ...
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xax3548
1 hour ago
You can be crazy these days if you’re not paranoid enough.
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silent
1 hour ago
“when you say hospitalization, the people were already hospitalized.” So good to know they were already helpless and at your mercy before you injected psychotropic substances into them.
And people wonder how their fellow citizens can harbour a deep-seated unquenchable hatred for their government. G...
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bud422
2 hours ago
I don’t know when we became a country that believes if rotten stuff isn’t being done to us directly, then we really can’t be bothered to care about it. Maybe we’ve always been that way.
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sid8373
4 hours ago
Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho), Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont), and opera impresario Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman) are seated at a banquet.
DUMONT: “Mr. Driftwood! I do not approve the company you’ve been keeping!”
GROUCHO: “You mean Gottlieb!?”
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rmd
9 hours ago
Nihilism is the unacknowledged religion
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kindness1
18 hours ago
Ken Kesey said he was involved in many of those experiments in the early 60’s. The Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests came out of all of that.
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cuzndupre
19 hours ago
As in so many things, “never” only means until now.
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jbh9431
19 hours ago
Totally on point. How many Sidney Gottliebs are slithering around within this regime is the first question to be answered after Trump is forced out. And his conniving successors are themselves forced to decamp.
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Thank you for all you do and for shining a light on this evil shit still ongoing.
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This goes with it. https://open.substack.com/pub/ellenatkin/p/nat-sec-doc-dump-on-mk-ultra-suspiciously?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=18k5fg