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  67. 3:46 a.m.

When Ingrid moved in several months earlier, I’d helped her unpack — only for about ten minutes, but still — and I was in charge of unloading her many, many pairs of shoes.

She’d stuffed all her boots with newspaper, which she explained kept them from getting wrinkles in the leather.

I’d been too preoccupied with the prospect of what might be in the next box to notice that my mother did the same thing with her boots.

I rifle through the box and grab the boots my mom was wearing the last time I saw her. I stick my hand into each boot and extract a thick cylinder of crumpled newspaper. I do the same with the other three pairs of boots until I have a small pile of newspaper in front of me.

I unfold the pages.

The pages are from two different copies of the Washington Post: one from 1980 and one from 1984.

If my mom left in early 1985, why would she stuff her boots with a newspaper from almost five years earlier?

She must have been holding onto the paper.

Saving it.

I find all the pages from the 1980 edition, then begin scouring the articles. It isn’t until I find the front page of the paper that I realize why she kept it. The top headline reads, “CIA’s Top Secret Project MK-Ultra Uncovered.”

I sit down on the dusty floor and skim the article:

…Project MK-Ultra was a top secret program created by the Central Intelligence Agency to examine methods of influencing and controlling the mind, and of enhancing their ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation . . . they used numerous methods to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (most notably LSD), hypnosis, sensory deprivation, sleep amplification, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

“Sleep Amplification,” I hear myself say.

Looks like I found my mother’s missing years.

:05

I didn’t see my dad the next day. Or the one after that. He remained asleep while I logged nearly every one of my sixty minutes on the computer finding out as much as I possibly could about Project MK-Ultra.

Basically, Project MK-Ultra was the code name given to an illegal program of experiments on human subjects, designed and undertaken by the CIA. Experiments on humans that were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control.

The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and officially halted in 1973.

It was difficult to piece together all of Project MK-Ultra’s past and players because they destroyed nearly every file, but one surviving document from 1955 was beyond frightening. It listed a number of different subprojects, CIA speak for experiments, and what they were trying to accomplish: