Mind control history

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments

Detrick is today one of the world’s cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and antitoxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Together, those sources reveal Detrick’s central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders.

In 1942, alarmed by reports that Japanese forces were waging germ warfare in China, the Army decided to launch a secret program to develop biological weapons. It hired a University of Wisconsin biochemist, Ira Baldwin, to run the program and asked him to find a site for a new bio-research complex. Baldwin chose a mostly abandoned National Guard base below Catoctin Mountain called Detrick Field. On March 9, 1943, the Army announced that it had renamed the field Camp Detrick, designated it as headquarters of the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and purchased several adjacent farms to provide extra room and privacy.