MKUltra: What the CIA Admitted to the Senate in 1977
Seven forgotten boxes of financial records forced the CIA to explain its secret behavior-modification program to the Senate in 1977.
MKUltra was real: a CIA behavior-modification research program approved in 1953. At a 1977 Senate hearing the CIA director described 149 subprojects reaching 80 institutions, from drug testing to an analysis of extrasensory perception.
MKUltra was a CIA research program on behavior modification. CIA Director Allen Dulles approved it in 1953, and chemist Sidney Gottlieb ran it. The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission made its existence public in 1975, but most of the detail seemed to have been destroyed. As CIA Director Admiral Turner later told senators, it had been "believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the then DCI."
Then records turned up. "The material in question, some seven boxes, had been sent to our Retired Records Center outside of the Washington area." The find led to a joint hearing on August 3, 1977, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. Turner reported that "there are 149 MKULTRA subprojects, many of which appear to have some connection with research into behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously." The work reached 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, 12 hospitals and clinics, and 3 prisons.
Some of the entries are strange. Turner listed "Single subprojects in such areas as effects of electro-shock, harassment techniques for offensive use, analysis of extrasensory perception, gas propelled sprays and aerosols, and four subprojects involving crop and material sabotage." The hearing also covered the death of Army scientist Frank Olson, who had been given LSD without his knowledge. It also covered CIA safehouses in San Francisco and New York where drugs were tested on people who did not know they were being dosed.
Senator Daniel Inouye opened by noting that the committee was "focusing on events that happened over 12 or as long as 25 years ago." Researcher John Marks obtained the surviving documents, some 20,000 documents, mostly about how the projects were paid for, through a Freedom of Information Act request. The hearing record remains the core public source on the program.
Among 149 subprojects about drugs and behavior, the CIA director listed one on "analysis of extrasensory perception" and four on "crop and material sabotage."
There is no doubt the program existed: the CIA confirmed it in public testimony. What is uncertain is its full scope, because most operational files were destroyed in 1973 and the surviving records are largely financial.
