The code name MK-Ultra is made up of MK, an arbitrary two-letter code, meaning the project was sponsored by the Agency's Technical Services Staff, followed by the word Ultra, which designates the most secret classification.

Dulles chose Sidney Ewen, the son of Hungarian, Jewish, immigrant parents, to head up the project. Ewen was born in the Bronx in 1926. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and joined the CIA in 1951. As a poison expert he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff, earning the nickname “The Sorcerer.”

In 1953, he was chosen by Director Dulles to head Project MK-Ultra. Over the next 20 years, Ewen would oversee more than 150 “experiments.” Under his supervision the program engaged in many illegal activities; in particular, it used unwitting US and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, many of whom died or suffered permanent brain damage.

Although he testified at numerous Senate hearings over the years, he was never convicted of a single crime.

He retired from the CIA in 1972, stating at the time that he did not believe his work had been effective.

I didn’t have a shred of doubt that these men had answers to many of my questions.

Allen Dulles died in 1989.

But according to everything I read, Sidney Ewen was still alive.

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I search for any sort of contact information for Sidney Ewen, but come up empty. I have no doubt he would want to stay off the radar, having inflicted so much pain on so many people. Someone might want to come after him. Someone might want some retribution.

Someone like me.

Many of the articles I skimmed online compared Ewen to Josef Mengele, the doctor responsible for many of the horrible experiments conducted during the holocaust. This was particularly objectionable, as Ewen, himself, was a Jew.

Now, he was far from Mengele — who I didn’t know much about until I read up on him — but he was still a monster.

And he created an even bigger monster.

My mother.

I look at the clock in the bottom right corner of the laptop screen.

3:56 a.m.

I open up my email to write Mike Lang at Advanced Surveillance and Tracking to inquire if he could track this Sidney Ewen down for me, when I stop.

Mike still hadn’t gotten back to me about my dad.

My dad.

Sidney Ewen is 89 years old and if he was anything like my dad, he was bored out of his mind. Sure, my dad had his hobbies, but when he wasn’t trying to invent “Rollerblades for the new millennium” or “get back into the best shape of his life” — said the Stairmaster that is holding five boxes of different sized hinges — or playing Cold Case Detective, he was trolling websites. Mostly he was on Facebook. He was either posting pictures of Murdock, or some stupid video, or his new favorite thing, something called Dubsmash.

I don’t want to even get into that.