The concept of brainwashing gained significant public attention in the 1950s, at the advent of the Cold War. As tensions heightened, governments and political groups across the world conducted mind control experiments, often without the knowledge or consent of test subjects.
Justified by claims of national security, ideological purity, or scientific advancement, these programs aimed to manipulate beliefs and erase identity. They subjected victims to forced LSD trips, electroshock, sleep deprivation, and mental torment.
These brainwashing campaigns didn’t just take place in prisons or war zones. They operated across hospitals, classrooms, cult compounds, and even CIA-run brothels. Declassified files, survivor testimonies, and government hearings exposed some of these operations. Other covert campaigns continue to fuel decades of conspiracy theories and public mistrust.
But mind control isn’t just a relic of Cold War paranoia. To this day, brainwashing campaigns help maintain political power, enforce religious dogma, and suppress dissent. Children, prisoners, soldiers, and civilians are all possible targets.
Despite decades of debate, researchers continue to study whether brainwashing techniques can rewire beliefs. Is it a form of psychological conditioning? A violation of free will? Or simply a myth fueled by fear? As our understanding of psychological manipulation and technology advances, the ethics of influence and coercion get even murkier. Let’s dive in and take a look at the most shocking brainwashing and mind control campaigns in modern history.
This article contains affiliate links. If you happen to purchase through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Project MK-ULTRA: The CIA’s Secret Mind Control Experiments
United States (1953–1973)
In the name of Cold War “research,” the U.S. government drugged and manipulated test subjects under Project MK-ULTRA. Officials revealed some details about the program in the 1970s, but they hid or destroyed many of the project’s records.
Initiated in 1953 under the direction of CIA chief chemist Sidney Gottlieb, the program subjected both civilians and military personnel to experiments. Officials utilized LSD, electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and other torture techniques. According to the Foundation for Economic Education, the CIA considered prisoners ideal test subjects as they were willing to comply for reduced sentences.
Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote for OZY, describing his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-ULTRA:
“Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”
Senator Ted Kennedy exposed the scale of CIA mind control experiments in official documents. Here, he stated that over 30 universities and institutions participated in classified testing. Some programs even involved slipping LSD to unsuspecting people in everyday social situations. The tests targeted individuals across all backgrounds: American and foreign, wealthy and working-class, psychiatric patients, students, government employees, and more.
MK-ULTRA Brainwashing May Have Created The Unabomber
Some researchers, including Michael Mello, author of The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski, link the Unabomber to early MK-ULTRA-related experiments. According to Mello, Ted Kaczynski participated in a controversial psychological study at Harvard under former World War II lieutenant Dr. Henry Murray. To put this into perspective, Murray was a colonel who worked with the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
According to The Washington Post, Kaczynski participated in Murray’s experiments for three years. These often included mock interrogations and disparaging participants’ core beliefs. Some, like author and professor Alston Chase—who wrote about Kaczynski—believe Murray’s likely MK-ULTRA experiments had a direct impact on turning Kaczynski into the Unabomber.
Though the CIA deliberately destroyed records of the operation in 1973 to cover its tracks, the true depth of MK-ULTRA’s experiments is unknown.
MK-ULTRA’s Operation Midnight Climax: The CIA’s LSD-Fueled Psychological Experiments
The reality of Operation Midnight Climax is just as unsettling as it sounds. In Acid Dreams, author Martin A. Lee claims the CIA hired “drug-addicted prostitutes” to “pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello” through this subproject of MK-ULTRA.
In 1955, the CIA transformed an ordinary apartment—located at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco—into a surveillance trap. George White, a former narcotics agent turned CIA operative, designed the space. He decorated the room with red curtains, Toulouse-Lautrec prints, and can-can dance posters. It was the first of such places, but not the last.
Between 1955 and 1963, CIA operatives allegedly lured men into brothels like the one they erected on Chestnut St. Here, they’d dosed victims with LSD and observe them in real time through two-way mirrors. It was the perfectly unethical way for researchers to study sex, drugs, and manipulation for mind control.
According to The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, CIA agent George White admitted that personal motives drove his involvement in the project. “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White said. He went on to describe the program as a rare chance to “lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage” with “the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest.”
The project remained hidden until Congressional “Church Committee” hearings in the ‘70s revealed how far the CIA had gone in the name of national security. These hearings uncovered serious human rights violations, though much of the evidence from Operation Midnight Climax was later redacted or destroyed.
The Canadian MK-ULTRA Experiments: Canada’s Forgotten Chapter in CIA Mind Control Research
Montreal, Canada (1957–1964)
While many associate MK-ULTRA with U.S. labs, some of the worst experiments occurred in Canada. At McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Dr. Ewen Cameron subjected patients to high-dose electroshock therapy and weeks-long chemically induced comas under CIA funding.
According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, Dr. Ewen Cameron used a method called “psychic driving,” where he forced sedated, immobilized patients to hear repeated audio messages on a loop in an attempt to program their personalities. Individual sessions could last for 16 hours a day for several days, with hundreds of thousands of repetitions. They often began with 10 days of harsh, negative messages. Afterward, patients heard 10 more days of positive affirmations. Breakdown and rebuild.
Funded covertly by the CIA through front organizations, these experiments initially sought to study mental illness. Allan Memorial Institute was a psychiatric hospital after all. However, as per The Guardian, patients often entered the clinic with mild anxiety or postpartum depression and left with cognitive impairment, memory loss, or complete personality erasure.
In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein argues that the focus of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s MK-ULTRA project wasn’t traditional mind control or brainwashing. Instead, it was fueled by creating “a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture.”
Survivors and families have since revealed that officials never obtained proper consent and never informed them they were part of an international mind control project. The Canadian government has never issued a formal apology. And while Authorities compensated some victims, they pressured many to stay silent.
Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Program of Human Experimentation and Brainwashing
Japan (1935–1945)
During World War II, Japan’s Imperial Army ran a horrific biological and psychological warfare program known as Unit 731. It was based in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and operated as a secret military facility. The program carried out brutal human experiments under the guise of scientific research. Designed to study disease, injury, and psychological stress, these experiments tortured and killed thousands of prisoners in the name of progress.
Many of the victims held by Unit 731 were Chinese civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, and even children. The army intentionally infected human test subjects, referred to as “marutas” (“logs”). According to PBS Frontline, researchers gave captives deadly pathogens such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax, and the plague to develop biological weapons.
Experiments also subjected victims to extreme psychological and physiological torture. In some cases, researchers dissected prisoners alive without anesthesia so they could examine the progression of disease inside the human body. According to EBSCO, many prisoners were intentionally driven to death so researchers could study the collapse of the human mind and body under extreme conditions.
The majority of experiments didn’t involve brainwashing in the traditional sense, but many experts believe it was a secondary outcome of the Unit 731 project. That said, it wasn’t usually the test subjects who required brainwashing, but rather the workers and military personnel who higher-ups asked to carry out the terrible deeds.
Many of Those Behind The Unit 731 Expirements Evaded Prosecution
Hideo Shimizu served in Unit 731 after being assigned as a teenage soldier. During his service, he witnessed a “specimen room” filled with jars of human body parts preserved in formalin. He also saw the brutal dissection and organ extraction of victims, including children.
Authorities later ordered him to help dispose of bodies to cover up evidence as the war drew to a close. “For the sake of the next generation, I had to speak out,” he told The Times.
After World War II, Allied forces allowed many of Unit 731’s leaders to evade prosecution for war crimes. As Friedrich Frischknecht revealed in The History of Biological Warfare, the United States allegedly granted immunity to key officials. In return, those officials provided experimental data gathered through human testing.
U.S. military and intelligence agencies viewed the research as too valuable to lose. During the Cold War, rising tensions heightened interest in biological warfare. This led to one of the most controversial postwar decisions involving Japanese military scientists.
Soviet Psychiatric Reprogramming: Inside the USSR’s Brainwashing System
USSR (1950s–1980s)
In a 1959 speech, Nikita Khrushchev claimed that crime was often the result of mental disorders and deviations from accepted social norms. This idea laid the foundation for the widespread use of “punitive psychiatry” within the Soviet Union as a tool for political repression. Dissidents were diagnosed with disorders and institutionalized to suppress opposition, according to the University of Cambridge.
One common, invented diagnosis was "sluggish schizophrenia," a vague and unprovable condition often assigned to political opponents. According to a hearing on the Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the Soviet government labeled Eduard Kuznetsov schizophrenic for stating that the Communist moral code lacked foundation.
Doctors in Soviet hospitals frequently utilized electroshock therapy, insulin-induced comas, and heavy sedatives like haloperidol to suppress beliefs that didn’t align with their platform. As scholar Robert van Voren explains in Political Abuse of Psychiatry, these abuses were systemic, as psychiatrists often acted under pressure from, or in direct cooperation with, the KGB and other Soviet authorities.
International outrage escalated during the 1970s and 1980s as firsthand accounts from survivors and whistleblowers began to surface in the West. The New York Times reported that the World Psychiatric Association formally condemned the Soviet Union’s abuses. As a result, the USSR temporarily withdrew from the organization in 1983 to avoid expulsion.
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Indoctrination: Mass Manipulation and Genocide
Cambodia (1975–1979)
Under Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia became a psychological prison. Ideology replaced identity, and fear governed every aspect of life. The systematic indoctrination of children was commonplace. From a young age, the regime brainwashed children to value loyalty to the ruling Angkar above their own families.
According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCC), the Khmer Rouge shut down schools and replaced them with labor sites and political indoctrination centers. Children spent their days chanting revolutionary slogans and absorbing the Khmer Rouge’s ideology through relentless repetition. They deliberately broke family bonds and taught kids to view emotional attachment as dangerous.
Officials told children it was their patriotic duty to report parents who spoke out or showed hesitation. The regime also forced children into militias and taught them that empathy was a punishable weakness.
Accounts from Survivors of the Cambodian Genocide
The regime separated Loung Ung, a child survivor of the Cambodian genocide and author of First They Killed My Father, from her family and sent her to a military training camp at a young age. Her memoir offers a powerful account of life under the Khmer Rouge. Ung writes, “The Angkar has taught me to hate so deeply that I now know I have the power to destroy and kill.”
Likewise, journalist Dith Pran, whose story inspired The Killing Fields, shared his trauma with the Los Angeles Times. “There is no doctor who can heal me,” he said. “...Pol Pot, he is even sicker than I am… He believed in starving children.”
The indoctrination was not only a tool of control but a vehicle for systematic genocide. During the Khmer Rouge regime, between 1.7 and 3 million people, roughly a quarter of Cambodia’s population, were killed through execution, starvation, and overwork during the reign of terror, according to the University of Minnesota. It remains one of the most devastating and calculated attempts at mass brainwashing and social engineering in modern history.
North Korea's Re-Education Camps: Indoctrination, Torture, and Control
North Korea (1950s–Present)
North Korea’s re-education camps, known as kwo-hwa-so, are among the most extreme and enduring examples of psychological control in the modern world. These facilities are fully operational to this day. The government has built intricate systems to dismantle and reprogram the human mind through forced labor, isolation, and relentless ideological indoctrination.
Prisoners range from defectors and religious practitioners to entire families condemned by association, according to Amnesty International. They face starvation, beatings, and relentless forced labor. But the regime’s most insidious tactic consists of daily “re-education” sessions held within North Korean prison-labor camps. Inmates confess to imaginary crimes and demonstrate loyalty through choreographed displays of obedience.
Those convicted are required to memorize the commandments of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. They also participate in self-criticism sessions, rituals where participants write statements of personal failure and express them in rehearsed, performative displays.
According to the 2022 White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, daily re-education is a central component of psychological control. The camps aim to annihilate not only resistance but also identity.
Shin Dong-hyuk survived 23 years inside one of North Korea’s notorious prison camps. Blaine Harden documents Shin’s story in Escape from Camp 14. Reflecting on the lasting toll, Shin writes:
“I am evolving from being an animal... [b]ut it is going very, very slowly. Sometime[s] I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.”
Despite growing evidence and international criticism, North Korea still denies the existence of political prison camps. Satellite imagery analyzed by NK News tells a different story, however. Images show that the regime expanded its largest political prison, Kwan-li-so No. 16, between 2022 and 2024.
Scientology’s Sea Org and Auditing: How Scientology Keeps Its Inner Circle in Line with Psychological Manipulation
United States and International (1950s–Present)
Former members and critics have accused the Church of Scientology of using psychological control, such as intense mental conditioning and isolation, to demand total loyalty from its members. Allegedly, such methods are especially evident in the Sea Organization, also known as the Sea Org, an “elite,” paramilitary-style group operating under strict discipline and secrecy.
Sea Org members sign so-called billion-year contracts as a pledge of eternal service. They live communally under near-constant surveillance. Organizational authorities often cut them off from their families and the outside world at large. Leaders then enforce strict schedules to control nearly every aspect of daily life.
“Auditing” is a form of spiritual interrogation, and it’s at the heart of Scientology’s control methodology. Organization officials conduct confession-style questioning while a member is connected to an E-meter, a device claimed to measure electro-psychological responses. As reported by The Guardian, sessions can become repetitive, emotionally invasive, and deeply manipulative. According to former members, church officials use personal trauma uncovered during sessions to enforce compliance.
The Church maintains that auditing is a path to spiritual clarity, but defectors describe it as a tool of psychological control.
Members can’t Question Leaders in Scientology
Church members who question the hierarchy risk being sent to an internal disciplinary program known as the Rehabilitation Project Force. The initiative is a controversial reconditioning regimen where leaders force deviant members into hard labor and ideological reprogramming, as explored in a University of Alberta analysis.
The Church of Scientology has consistently denied allegations of abuse and control. Instead, they insist that their practices are voluntary and spiritual in nature. Yet, testimonies of former members contradict this.
Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of Scientology leader David Miscavige, grew up in the Church and was a member of Sea Org. In her memoir Beyond Belief, she recalls how the organization suppressed independent thought from childhood. “The problem is that Scientology is a system that makes it nearly impossible to think for yourself,” she writes.
Ramana Dienes-Browning, raised in Scientology, shared a similar account with ABC News. “My experience of the Sea Org was that of an obsessive and controlling military type of organization,” she wrote. She also described “grueling re-indoctrination programs.”
Aum Shinrikyo Brainwashing: Japan’s Cult of Hallucination, Isolation, and Death
Japan (1980s–1995)
Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult behind the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, used psychological and chemical control to dominate members. The group’s founder, Shoko Asahara, blended distorted Buddhism, doomsday prophecy, and rules of strict obedience into a powerful radicalization strategy. The cult attracted thousands of laymen and highly educated elites through promises of spiritual awakening and higher purpose.
According to the Senate Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee, Asahara routinely subjected members to sleep deprivation, isolation, ascetic discipline, and potent hallucinogens like LSD, presented as rituals. The end goal was to disorient followers and increase their belief in Asahara’s perceived divine authority.
Asahara’s control deepened into deadly fanaticism in March 1995, when Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas into Tokyo’s subway system during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring thousands. Follower Tomomasa Nakagawa later expressed remorse for his role in the attack. “I apologize to the victims from the bottom of my heart,” he said, as reported by Japan Wire.
In Destroying the World To Save It, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton analyzes the rationale and strategies used by the cult. Members came to see themselves as a chosen elite, destined to survive the coming apocalypse. This belief fostered a rigid “us versus them” mentality that suppressed empathy. Members stopped viewing outsiders as people.
Lifton explains that such belief systems enable violence to be reframed as morally compulsory acts of purification and salvation.
Decades later, the shadow of Aum Shinrikyo still lingers. Now operating under the name Aleph, the group claims to have renounced violence. But Japanese authorities say otherwise. Aleph remains under government surveillance, with over 1,500 members maintaining continued loyalty to Asahara’s teachings.
The Tavistock Institute: Think Tank Linked to Mass Influence and Conspiracy Theories
United Kingdom (1947–Present)
London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations is a legitimate center for studying group behavior, organizational psychology, and applied social science. Its teams have collaborated with government agencies, corporations, and nonprofits to study leadership, analyze organizational dynamics, and explore social systems. But beneath its academic veneer lies a history that continues to fuel conspiracy theories about mass psychological manipulation.
In The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, an alleged historical account of the Tavistock Institute, Dr. John Coleman claims Tavistock played a hidden role in developing propaganda and mind control techniques during the Cold War and beyond.
Some conspiracy theorists allege that in the postwar years, the Tavistock Institute collaborated not only with British military officials but also with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Supposedly, the Institute’s work extended beyond psychological assessment and into secret studies of propaganda, morale manipulation, and the psychological effects of combat. However, no credible academic sources or declassified government records have substantiated these claims.
In Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, investigative author and conspiracy theorist Daniel Estulin lays out a dark and sweeping theory. He believes the Tavistock Institute is more than just a research center. He claims the organization is the hidden engine behind mass psychological manipulation on a global scale. According to Estulin, Tavistock’s influence in social engineering is everywhere. While his claims veer into the speculative, the book makes for a provocative read.
CIA’s Operation Mockingbird: CIA Influence on American Media and Propaganda
United States (1948–1976)
“Operation Mockingbird” refers to a rumored CIA program aimed at influencing domestic and foreign media during the Cold War. According to ABC News, details surfaced during Senate investigations in the 1970s. Declassified materials even revealed that the CIA had ties to journalists and editors at major news outlets, some of whom knowingly spread biased pro-American messaging. Others may have participated without realizing the CIA’s involvement.
In 1976, a Senate Select Committee report revealed that the CIA maintained a global network of several hundred individuals. Some of these individuals were journalists who provided intelligence or assisted in spreading covert propaganda.
While aspects of media cooperation with the CIA are confirmed, details regarding the extent of the program are murky. Operation Mockingbird is just one element of the CIA’s mission to control news media. “Project Mockingbird” was an alleged wiretapping effort that targeted journalists, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Critics argue that this blurred the line between journalism and government influence. Skeptics believe the scope and purpose of these efforts are much exaggerated. Today, Operation Mockingbird remains a topic of discussion in conspiracy theories and political debates. Its legacy still fuels concerns about media trust and government transparency, and it likely will until clearer documents are declassified.