Scientists secretly wired dogs’ brains to steer their behavior, revealing just how far the agency was willing to push its Cold War ambitions.
THANKS TO A CACHE OF DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, the public is now well aware of the Central Intelligent Agency’s misadventures in mind control throughout the 1950s and 1960s. MKUltra—the agency’s top-secret and wide-ranging human experimentation program—involved 149 subprojects that made test subjects out of thousands of unsuspecting Americans, jolting them with high-voltage shocks, zapping them with radio waves, and dosing them with psychedelic drugs in a bid to develop brainwashing techniques for use on Soviet adversaries.
But humans weren’t MKUltra’s only non-consenting participants. Animal subjects also played a starring role in research designed to enhance espionage efforts during the Cold War. Surgeons implanted microphones into cats’ ears. An elephant was allegedly injected with a massive amount of LSD. And, in one particularly grisly endeavor, scientists implanted electrodes into the brains of six dogs in an attempt to control their movement and turn them into remote-controlled assassins.
The goal of that last initiative, Subproject 94, which took place in 1961 and 1962, “was to examine the feasibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggered electrical stimulation of the brain,” according to heavily redacted documents declassified in 2002.
Perhaps more remarkably, the experiments were largely successful. “You could, in fact, remotely control the behavior of these animals, especially using positive feedback,” says John Lisle, a historian and author of the bookProject Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MK Ultra.
The project did face some setbacks. Dogs developed infections and researchers struggled to find a suitable secluded space to test out their mutant puppies. The agency cancelled Subproject 94 before the technique was ever used in a real operation. Yet by the end of the program, Lisle says, the CIA was weighing the creation of even bigger, braver remote-controlled mercenaries: bears, yaks, and even man himself.
THE WILD SIDE OF SPY CRAFT
Employing animals to aid and abet espionage was nothing new for the country’s intelligence agencies, according to Lisle.
During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, looked to wildlife for help in defeating the Japanese. In one explosive project, scientists in the agency’s research and development branch attached incendiary devices to bats they planned to set loose in the Axis nation—where they would roost in buildings before detonating—essentially transforming the flying mammals into tiny, guided missiles.
During Operation Fantasia, in an effort to scare the Japanese into surrender, OSS scientists painted foxes with radioactive paint that glowed in the dark, hoping to recreate a Shinto portent of doom: the kitsune, a shapeshifting, supernatural fox spirit with the ability to possess humans. The plan was eventually scrapped, but not before a trial run in which the OSS released 30 glowing foxes into Washington D.C.’s Rock Creek Park.
Under the banner of MKUltra, the CIA continued tapping the animal kingdom for accomplices, training red-tailed hawks to transport cameras over enemy territory and ravens to deposit recording devices on windowsills. Eventually, though, these animal experiments took a Frankenstein-like turn when researchers decided to transform a house cat into a clandestine recording device—by implanting an audio transmitter into the base of its skull and braiding the long antenna into the fur down its back. Operation Acoustic Kitty met a quick and tragic end when its eponymous kitty was taken out for its first training run—and promptly run over by a taxi.
But Acoustic Kitty may have signaled MKUltra researchers’ willingness “to take it to the extreme,” says Lisle. “Previous experiments were just to train animals. Now they are specifically going to control them,” the thinking went.
OLD DOGS, GRUESOME TRICKS
The 1961 budget for Subproject 94 covered about $55,000 in expenses (about $600,000 today), including $1,000 for “animal food & veterinary services” and $2,000 in “experimental organisms,” which encompassed six dogs of “several different breeds,” according to the experiment’s declassified final report.
To run the experiment, the researchers attached electrodes onto the pleasure centers of the dog’s brain and then unleashed the animal in an open field. When the dog moved in the desired direction, it would receive up to 50 volts of electrical stimulation directly to that pleasure center to reinforce the behavior. If the dog stopped or deviated from the desired route, the researcher would end the stimulation.
“Then it would turn its head to look for that pleasure feeling,” Lisle explains. “Once its head turned to the direction you desired, you would stimulate it again.”
Regardless, the research seems to have inspired even wilder ideas, as the anonymous author of the report imagines the “interesting possibility […] of an automated control procedure, i.e., instead of guiding the animal continuously by hand from point A to point B, the animal is guided by means of an automatic direction system,” and future experiments “on a range of species.”
Based on documents he’s reviewed, Lisle explains the CIA had bigger, hairier species in mind—bears and yaks—who would be “capable of carrying heavy payloads over great distances under adverse climatic conditions,” he writes in his book.
In other words, the agency hoped the animals might carry chemical and biological weapons into the Soviet Union, making them, “essentially assassination drones.” The ultimate goal, however, was even more audacious.
“Ultimately it was to apply this [technique] to humans, to have Manchurian candidates out there,” Lisle says. “Not that that ever happened, but that was the thinking.”
WHAT WAS MKULTRA
Ref: Popular Mechanics, Daily Mail
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/MKULTRA%20SUBPROJECT%2094%20%20%284%5B8145580%5D.pdf
- https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/behavioral/C00021825.pdf
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