What did the CIA do?

Here are some articles from the Washington Post that describe a few things in the CIA document dump:

• CIA Releases Files On Past Misdeeds
• Fighting War Protesters
• Keeping an Eye on Communism
• The Keeper of Secrets Earned His reputation
• Trying to Kill Fidel Castro
• Experimenting with the Mind

Then from The Australian as they dug through the same documents:

EASILY lost, on page 425, in the mass of the CIA's notorious "Family Jewels" files is a short paragraph outlining "potentially embarrassing Agency activities".

"Experiments in influencing human behaviour through the administration of mind- or personality-altering drugs to unwitting subjects."

Of all the heinous acts committed by the CIA in the name of national security, these experiments, done on the agency's behalf by prominent psychiatrists on innocent victims - including children as young as four - may be the darkest. [Snip]

The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with uranium.

"The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her experiences.

"Over the next 12 years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. Electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other types of trauma were used to make me complain and split my personality (to create multiple personalities for specific tasks). Each alter or personality was created to respond to a post-hypnotic trigger, then perform an act and (I would) not remember it later.

"This Manchurian Candidate program was just one of the operational uses of the mind-control scenario by the CIA. [Snip]

Some conspiratorial theorists believe the CIA completed its goal, initially outlined in the early 1950s, of altering a personality and having someone "perform an action contrary to an individual's basic moral principles".

The attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, Lawrence Teeter, has said his client was programmed to assassinate Robert Kennedy in 1968.

Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, volunteered to take part in CIA mind-control experiments when he was a student at Harvard University in the late 50s.

I have never seen in the press any explanation for what motivated Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy. Nor am I saying that a CIA program caused it. I don't rule it out, however.

Similarly, I was unaware that Ted Kaczynski had been part of the CIA mind-control experiment.

If there ever was any real evidence, it was certainly weeded out before these documents were released.