Cryptonym: MK

Peter Grosse, Gentleman Spy (1994), p. 595.

"The digraph MK referred to an operation of CIA's Technical Services." https://www.maryferrell.org/search.html?q=%22digraph%20mk%22

John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979), p. 57.

"The MK digraph simply identified it as a TSS project." (Note: TSS refers to Technical Services Staff) https://books.google.com/books?id=GDWHAAAAMAAJ&dq=MK+DIGRAPH+%22TECHNICAL+SERVICES%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=MK+DIGRAPH

The CIA’s House of Horrors: the Abominable Dr. Gottlieb - Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn, 11/17/17 - https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/17/the-cias-house-of-horrors-the-abominable-dr-gottlieb/

"Within Technical Services MK-ULTRA projects came under the control of the Chemical Division, headed from 1951 to 1956 by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb...Gottlieb had powerful friends inside the Agency, notably Richard Helms, at that time deputy director for covert operations. MK-ULTRA was created on April 13, 1953, when CIA director Allen Dulles approved Helms’s proposal to develop the “covert use” of biological and chemical materials. The code-name ULTRA may have been an echo from Helms’s and Dulles’s OSS days, when ULTRA (the breaking of the primary German code) represented one of the biggest secrets of World War II. Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. He defined the mission as an investigation into how individual behavior could be “altered through covert means..The CIA had followed the trial of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in Budapest in 1949 and concluded that the Cardinal’s ultimate confession had been manipulated through “some unknown force.” Initially the belief was that Mindszenty had been hypnotized, and intrigued CIA officers conjectured that they might use the same techniques on people they were interrogating. The CIA’s Office of Security, headed at the time by Sheffield Edwards, developed a hypnosis project called Bluebird, whose object was to get an individual “to do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” The first Bluebird operations were conducted in Japan in October 1950 and were reportedly witnessed by Richard Helms. Twenty-five North Korean prisoners of war were given alternating doses of depressants and stimulants...