MKUltra: the CIA's secret mind-control experiments

Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles approved MKULTRA, an umbrella project for covert research on drugs and behavior modification, as proposed by Assistant Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms. Normal contracting and audit procedures were waived for secrecy. Source: the Church Committee excerpt reprinted in the 1977 Senate hearing record.

At a meeting of Army and CIA scientists, a civilian Army employee was given LSD in a drink without his knowledge as part of a CIA experiment. He died in New York City on November 27, 1953. The CIA's role in his death became public in 1975, during the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations.

The CIA's Inspector General reviewed MKULTRA and questioned the propriety of testing drugs on people who did not know about it. The program had been testing on unsuspecting subjects in ordinary social settings, first on the West Coast and from 1961 on the East Coast. After the review, new testing criteria were adopted.

Records of the program were destroyed in January 1973 at the instruction of CIA Director Richard Helms. Investigators later had few documents to work from.

The presidential Commission on CIA Activities within the United States reported LSD tests on unsuspecting subjects between 1953 and 1963, including the 1953 death of an Army employee. It concluded that the testing was illegal and recommended that the CIA never test drugs on unsuspecting people again.

CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote to the Senate to report seven boxes of MKULTRA documents, mostly financial records, that had escaped the 1973 destruction. A CIA employee answering Freedom of Information Act requests found them in a retired-records center in late March 1977. They cover 149 subprojects.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research held a joint public hearing on the recovered records. The CIA confirmed 149 subprojects, about 80 institutions involved, and covert drug testing on unwitting U.S. citizens.

In a case that grew out of a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. Supreme Court described MKULTRA as a CIA-financed research project that ran from 1953 to 1966. The Court held that the CIA could withhold the names of the researchers as protected 'intelligence sources'.