Sopranos creator David Chase is developing series based on MKUltra, CIA’s secret mind control experiments

Frank Olson was a biological warfare scientist who worked for the US Army during World War II on secret projects including how to use aerosolised anthrax.

His job was risky. It put him in contact with deadly toxins, he assisted in cruel experimentation of animals, and witnessed torture sessions involving POWs.

On November 19, 1953, Olson attended a meeting in rural Maryland with 11 other men. When he returned home the next morning, his family later reported he had changed. He wouldn’t eat, he was distant, and said to his wife, “I’ve made a terrible mistake”.

A week later on November 28, at 2am, Olson seemingly leapt to his death from the Statler Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He was 43 years old.

Olson’s death was initially ruled a suicide and then a misadventure. It wasn’t until 1975 before his family discovered Olson had been involved with the CIA’s MKUltra project, a covert brainwashing program that ran for two decades and was dismantled in 1973.

He had been unwittingly dosed with LSD at that Maryland meeting, and the man who did it to him was Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and the head of MKUltra, which performed dangerous experiments on human test subjects. Like, Olson, many of them didn’t consent.

Gottlieb is about to be the subject of a TV series from prestigious network HBO, but even more impressive is the writer who’s going to tell it: David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos.

The project will be the first time Chase has returned to serialised storytelling since The Sopranos wrapped in 2007. He has written two movies since then – theatrical film Not Fade Away, and The Many Saints of Newark, a Sopranos prequel feature.

Chase optioned the book, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the Tragedy of MKUltra by historian John Lisle as the backbone of his series, which is in development now.

The MKUltra program has been a fascinating subject for dramatists for decade because of how extreme and secretive its work was, inspiring the likes of the Bourne movies and even Stranger Things.

The Manchurian Candidate, first adapted in 1962 with Frank Sinatra and then again in 2004 with Denzel Washington, from Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, was born out of the same Cold War paranoia (or perhaps not paranoia but reality) as MKUltra itself.

In The Manchurian Candidate, a returned POW is brainwashed into becoming an unwilling assassin, activated by a codeword, for the enemy, which in the original scenario was the Communists.

Four days after the start of action on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, an American soldier who had been captured two days earlier broadcast a radio speech that was full of North Korean propaganda. It kept happening and by the end of the conflict, it was estimated that one out of every 10 American POWs had worked with the opposition.

The fear was that the North Korean and Chinese forces had developed brainwashing techniques and indoctrinated American soldiers. Cold War paranoia was running rampant and it spurred the CIA to establish its own program as both counter and as an offensive tool.

MKUltra wasn’t the first time the US government had waded into experimenting with drugs to manipulate and control human behaviour. It stretched back to World War II programs in search of a truth serum.

Gottlieb had even been involved with some of MKUltra’s predecessors including Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke, but there was little argument MKUltra would be its most pernicious.

Gottlieb’s background as a chemist led to the use of cocaine, heroin, mescaline and THC in the program’s experiments, but LSD was his favourite weapon.

Some of the experiments involved consenting CIA agents, who were both dosed in controlled environments and without warning. But it was its use against unsuspecting and unconsenting people in the field that drew the most condemnations when it was uncovered decades later.

LSD was used on men in brothels (this one was codenamed Operation Midnight Climax), doctors, military personnel, drug addicts, prisoners and sex workers. “Enemy agents” captured offshore were secreted to CIA black sites for experiments.

They dosed patients in hospitals and institutions, including at Allen Memorial at McGill University in Canada, where Dr Donald Ewen Cameron experimented with people using drugs and electroshock therapy.

One man who went in for asthma treatment and left Cameron’s care forever changed.

MKUltra’s experiments and tactics violated the Nuremberg Code, which explicitly banned giving drugs to people without informed consent, which the US signed after World War II.

By 1973, public trust in the US government had cratered in the fallout of Watergate, and CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Most were, but 20,000 incorrectly stored pages survived.

When much of its came to light in the following years, the details were shocking. More than 30 universities and other institutions were involved in some way, or had received MKUltra funding for their psychology projects.

In 1975, Frank Olson’s family was compensated $750,000 for his death. Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973 and indulged in folk dancing and goat herding, as well as getting a degree in speech pathology. He died in 1999.

Like Chase will with his series, generations of storytellers have tried to reckon with MKUltra’s legacy through various portrayals inspired by its experiments, ranging from The Men Who Stare at Goats and The X-Files to Strangers Things’ Eleven, who was subjected to abusive experiments to surface and harness psychic powers.