The CIA attempted to practice mind-control on a huge crime boss by giving him LSD every day for a year

During its attempts to develop mind-control programmes the CIA developed something that has come to be known as MK-ULTRA, which was an attempt to turn mind-control into a weapon.

During the 1950s and 60s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran a number of experiments based on learning how to mind control a person through drugs, all of which were highly unethical.

CIA mind-control sounds like something out of a conspiracy theory, but the agency very much did attempt to make it a reality.

Stephen Kinzer, who spent years investigating MK-ULTRA, told NPR that he'd been looking into the work of a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb who subjected people to all manner of experiments designed to control their minds, from electroshock therapy to psychological torture and even dosing people with drugs.

"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realised it was a two-part process," Kinzer said.

"First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."

The crime boss was arrested in 2011 after being on the run for over 16 years, but long before that he was part of a dangerous experiment (United States Marshals Service)

The test subjects for MK-ULTRA were varied, as some of them were patients who had no idea they were being dosed with drugs that would alter their mind, while others were prisoners who were told they would be part of medical trials.

Of course the prisoners also didn't know exactly what they were getting in for either, and one of the volunteers was a crime boss called James Joseph Bulger Jr, better known as 'Whitey Bulger', who in 1956 was sent to prison for armed robbery and hijacking a truck.

Along with 18 other inmates, he volunteered for an experiment and was told it was an attempt to find a cure for schizophrenia and in return, they would be given reduced sentences.

However, given that he was being dosed with LSD every day he soon realised that what he was being subjected to was not done to find a cure for anything.

Instead, the experiments were to see what the long-term effects of LSD usage would be on people, and Bulger described the feeling of going insane from the experiments.

'Whitey' Bulger in the 50s, when he was one of the test subjects of CIA mind-control experiment MK-ULTRA (Federal Bureau of Prisons)

Bulger wrote that he ended up developing a 'morbid fear of LSD' and feared that taking any more of the drug 'would push me over the edge', saying that it was a 'nightmarish' experience which took him 'to the depths of insanity'.

Having signed up to the experiment in exchange for time off his sentence, he came to fear that he'd never leave incarceration if he discussed the full impact of what was being done with anyone.

He feared that if he 'mentioned hearing voices' or the various other tolls the drugs were taking on his mind then he'd be 'committed forever', and the crime boss compared the doctor running the LSD programme to 'a modern day Dr. Mengele'.

Once released from prison, Bulger would go on to become a notorious crime boss, turned informant for the FBI and later spent 16 years on the run before being arrested at the age of 81 in 2011 before being tried for 19 counts of murder along with racketeering, extortion, narcotics distribution and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Gottlieb, meanwhile, eventually concluded that mind-control was not possible and switched from secretly drugging people to break down their minds to working on poisons and gadgets that CIA agents could use.