During the Cold War, the CIA runs a classified research program testing biological and chemical agents on American soil, spraying bacteria over entire cities to gauge how germ warfare might spread through an unsuspecting population. The film's real focus is the agency's parallel effort to master mind control: psychiatrists at major academic institutions take secret contracts to test interrogation and behavior-modification techniques on psychiatric patients, prisoners, and members of the public who never consent to the experiments. Archival material and expert accounts walk through the specific methods used, including hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and drug cocktails designed to induce amnesia or erase and reprogram memory. The film traces how a national panic over Communism gave cover to research that would otherwise have been unthinkable, and how ordinary citizens became unwitting subjects in it. It stays close to the documented record of contaminated cities and psychiatric wards used as test sites, leaving the human cost of that record to speak for itself.