ARTICHOKE

Opening

Project Bluebird first. Then, on 20 August 1951, Project Artichoke under the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Morse Allen sits in the paper. The question written down in January 1952: 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. The shop tried the tools of its decade: polygraph, hypnosis, isolation, then a short list of drugs with LSD as the bottle they thought promising. A 1951 note asked about delivery gadgets. Korean POWs sit in at least one 1951 meeting note. Artichoke teams were meant to work with Army, Navy, Air Force and FBI intelligence.

MKUltra took the shop in 1953. Artichoke is the harder twin because the sentence is operational, not academic. Morse Allen also wrote that hypnotic product could not always be regarded as accurate. That limit sat in the same drawer as the ambition. Church and the later dumps are how the caption left the building.

Timeline

Bluebird first. 20 August 1951 Artichoke is captioned. January 1952 the control question is written down.

1951-53 meetings, including a Korean POW noteTeams meant to work across services.

1953 MKUltra absorbs the workArtichoke as a name recedes.

Bluebird to Artichoke is a caption change, not a rumour starting in 1953. The January 1952 question is operational on its face. Teams meant to work with the services and the Bureau are why this is not a lone desk with a theory. MKUltra absorbing the shop in 1953 is the handoff, not the invention.

Allen writing that hypnotic product could not always be regarded as accurate is the limit in the same drawer. Church and the dumps are how the public met the sentence. They are not how the sentence was first written.

Key figures

Morse Allen owns the paper and the limit on hypnosis as product.

OSI owns the 1951 caption.

The later MKUltra shop owns the absorption.

Church staff own the public table. The people run through the shop own an absence of consent on most pages.

Physical and documentary trail

The record:

One: the 20 August 1951 Artichoke caption.

Two: the January 1952 control question.

Three: Allen's limit that hypnotic product was not always accurate.

Four: the 1953 handoff into MKUltra.

There is no full public roster of every session. There is no page that makes the question a joke. There is no pre-Church admission that matches the dump.

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?

Things you might not know

• The test was assassination. A central question was whether a person could be made to attempt a killing against their will.
• The first subjects were prisoners of war. The earliest tests, under the programme that became Artichoke, used North Korean POWs in October 1950.
• Morphine was used as a lever. Some subjects were made dependent on morphine and then withdrawn, to study whether it left them more pliable.
• LSD won out over other drugs. Cocaine, marijuana, heroin, peyote and mescaline were tried before LSD was seen as the most promising.
• Agents were dosed too. In 1952 CIA officers were secretly drugged, and one record describes an agent kept on LSD for 77 days.
• It ran far from Washington. Operations took place in Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Philippines, under the Office of Scientific Intelligence.

Competing explanations

An operational control shop. This is the memo's own question. It has a caption. It has a 1953 successor.

A paper exercise that never left the building. Weak against teams and meeting notes.

A small dead end swallowed by MKUltra. Possible in scale. The question still sits.

Later life of the case

Artichoke's control question became one of the most quoted lines in the history of CIA mind-control research once the Church Committee hearings and the 1977 release of surviving MKUltra papers put it in public. It sits in the record as the bridge between the first programme and the best-known one. For what came before, see Project Bluebird; for what came after, MKUltra.

Finding

Artichoke was captioned in August 1951 and by January 1952 an agency page asked whether a person could be made to act against will and self-preservation.

What still will not resolve: a full session roster, or a page that shows the question was never tried.