CONSPIRACY UNWOUND
Season One: The Ones That Were True

Episode One — The Black Sorcerer: MKUltra and The CIA's Twenty-Year Program to Control the Human Mind

They didn't find out because someone confessed.

They found out because twenty thousand documents were misfiled in the wrong building.

When CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all records of Project MKUltra destroyed in 1973, the order was executed almost perfectly. Files documenting twenty years of illegal human experimentation — conducted on American citizens without their knowledge or consent — were shredded and gone. Almost.

Twenty thousand pages had been incorrectly filed as financial records in a separate storage facility. They survived. And when a Freedom of Information Act request turned them up in 1977, what they revealed changed everything Americans thought they knew about their own government.

MKUltra was not a fringe operation. It was authorized by the Director of Central Intelligence on April 13th, 1953. It ran for twenty years across eighty institutions — forty-four colleges and universities, fifteen research foundations, twelve hospitals and clinics, three prisons. One hundred and forty-nine separate subprojects. The CIA administered LSD to unwitting subjects, ran safehouses where men were secretly drugged and observed through one-way mirrors, and funded a respected Canadian psychiatrist who erased patients' personalities while they came to him for help with depression and anxiety.

The man who ran it was named Sidney Gottlieb. He testified before the United States Senate under a false name. He was never prosecuted. He died at eighty, growing goats on a farm in rural Virginia.

In this premiere episode of Conspiracy Unwound, Rachel and Harry examine the full documented story of MKUltra — what it was, how it operated, who it targeted, and what the twenty thousand surviving pages tell us about what the government was willing to do when it believed the ends justified the means.

This is Season One of Conspiracy Unwound: The Ones That Were True. Eight episodes. Eight confirmed conspiracies. Documented. Declassified. These aren't theories. They're history.

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