Founded in 1953, MK-Ultra was seen by CIA director Allen W. Dulles as a way to study mind control, which he wanted to weaponise against the Soviet Union to gain a critical edge in the Cold War. With communism at its height, the CIA was disturbed by reports that American prisoners had been turned into communist allies, and believed this was evidence they had been manipulated or even hypnotised under questioning. The agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining ways to influence and control the mind and to enhance its ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation. As part of this research, testing with psychedelic drugs such as LSD was common.