Project Bluebird

In April 1950, less than three years after the Nuremberg Code made consent the first rule of human experimentation, the CIA approved a Top Secret program code-named BLUEBIRD. Its tools: drugs, hypnosis and the polygraph. Its ambition: control of a person against his own will. Within months, a team in occupied Japan was injecting subjects, probably suspected double agents, with barbiturates and stimulants, chasing amnesia. Built on declassified CIA documents and official investigations, Project Bluebird reveals the forgotten program that became ARTICHOKE, then MKULTRA, and shows how Cold War fear turned an intelligence agency against the human mind.