publicly known, although hypnotized killers are alleged to have been used in the murders of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther Ling, John Lennon and Israeli premier Yitzchak Rabin, while Jonestown is frequently cited as an MK-ULTRA brainwashing factory.
Sometime in 1972 CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of the bulk of the MK-ULTRA files because of a “burgeoning paper problem”. Despite Helms’s timely action, there was enough of a paper trail left for the
One stone, however, was left unturned. Among those paid compensation by the US government was the family of Dr Frank Olson, who committed suicide in 1953 by jumping from the tenth floor of New York’s Hotel Statler after taking LSD at the behest of Gottlieb. Olson’s son, Eric, was not so easily bought off, and decided to investigate his father’s death. An examination of Olson’s exhumed body found marks to the skull consistent with repeated attack from behind. At this New York assistant attorney Steve Saracco took up the case and subpoenaed CIA director William Colby as a witness. Colby was found shortly afterwards floating dead in a river. Olson Jr believes his father’s death was murder, not suicide, the motive being the elimination of a researcher who had become opposed to Gottlieb’s gruesome experiments. Again the definitive answer lies in Richard Helms’s shredder.
Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain,
John Marks,
Gordon Thomas,
DOCUMENT:
From the Church Committee Report
94th Congress, 2nd Session Senate Report No. 94–755 Foreign and Military Intelligence Book I
Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities
Under its mandate, the Select Committee has studied the testing and use of chemical and biological agents by intelligence agencies. Detailed descriptions of the programs conducted by intelligence agencies involving chemical and biological agents will be included in a separately published appendix to the Senate Select Committee’s report. This section of the report will discuss the rationale for the programs, their monitoring and control, and what the Committee’s investigation has revealed [ab]out the relationships among the intelligence agencies and about their relations with other government agencies and private institutions and individuals.
Fears that countries hostile to the United States would use chemical and biological agents against Americans or America’s allies led to the development of a defensive program designed to discover techniques for American intelligence agencies to detect and counteract chemical and biological agents. The defensive orientation soon became secondary as the possible use of these agents to obtain information from, or gain control over, enemy agents became apparent.
Research and development programs to find materials which could be used to alter human behavior were initiated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These experimental programs originally included testing of drugs involving witting human subjects, and culminated in tests using unwitting, nonvolunteer human subjects. These tests were designed to determine the potential effects of chemical or biological agents when used operationally against individuals unaware that they had received a drug.
The testing programs were considered highly sensitive by the intelligence agencies administering them. Few people, even within the agencies, knew of the programs and there is no evidence that either the executive branch or Congress were ever informed of them. The highly compartmented nature of these programs may be explained in part by an observation made by the CIA Inspector General that, “the knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its missions.”
The research and development program, and particularly the covert testing programs, resulted in massive abridgments of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences. The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects. While some controlled testing of these substances might be defended, the nature of the tests, their scale, and the fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the value of human life.
The Select Committee’s investigation of the testing and use of chemical and biological agents also raises serious questions about the adequacy of command and control procedures within the Central Intelligence Agency and military intelligence, and about the relationships among the intelligence agencies, other governmental agencies, and private institutions and individuals. The CIA’s normal administrative controls were waived for programs involving chemical and biological agents to protect their security. According to the head of the Audit Branch of the CIA, these waivers produced “gross administrative failures.” They prevented the CIA’s internal review mechanisms (the Office of General Counsel, the Inspector General, and the Audit Staff) from adequately supervising the programs. In general, the waivers had the paradoxical effect of providing less restrictive administrative controls and less effective internal review for controversial and highly sensitive projects than those governing normal Agency activities.
The security of the programs was protected not only by waivers of normal administrative controls, but also by a high degree of compartmentation within the CIA. This compartmentation excluded the CIA’s Medical Staff from the principal research and testing program employing chemical and biological agents.
It also may have led to agency policymakers receiving differing and inconsistent responses when they posed questions to the CIA component involved.
Jurisdictional uncertainty within the CIA was matched by jurisdictional conflict among the various intelligence agencies. A spirit of cooperation and reciprocal exchanges of information which initially characterized the programs disappeared. Military testers withheld information from the CIA, ignoring suggestions for coordination from their superiors. The CIA similarly failed to provide information to the military on the CIA’s testing program. This failure to cooperate was conspicuously manifested in an attempt by the Army to conceal their overseas testing program, which included surreptitious administration of LSD, from the CIA. Learning of the Army’s program, the Agency surreptitiously attempted to obtain details of it.
The decision to institute one of the Army’s LSD field testing projects had been based, at least in part, on the finding that no long-term residual effects had ever resulted from the drug’s administration. The CIA’s failure to inform the Army of a death which resulted from the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting Americans, may well have resulted in the institution of an unnecessary and potentially lethal program.
The development, testing, and use of chemical and biological agents by intelligence agencies raises serious questions about the relationship between the intelligence community and foreign governments, other agencies of the Federal Government, and other institutions and individuals. The questions raised range from the legitimacy of American complicity in actions abroad which violate American and foreign laws to the possible compromise of the integrity of public and private institutions used as cover by intelligence agencies.
MKULTRA was the principal CIA program involving the research and development of chemical and biological agents. It was “concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials
