Report of Inspection of MKULTRA
Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the Inspector General · 26 July 1963
The document MKULTRA is usually described through, and rarely quoted from. It is the only systematic internal review of the programme written while the programme was running, and it survived because the Inspector General’s copy was filed separately from the operational records Richard Helms ordered destroyed a decade later. Read directly it does two things no summary of it conveys: it recommends terminating the covert testing on unwitting Americans ten years before the programme ended, and it measures the risk of that testing in damage to the Agency rather than to the people being tested.
Open the PDF — 48 pages, 2.1 MB
Hosted here in full. Nothing has been re-compressed, re-OCR’d or altered.
What is on which page
p.2 (Summary)
The Agency’s own summary of the objection to itself. “The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical.” The same paragraph concedes that “both the research and the employment of the materials are expensive and often unpredictable in results,” before adding that “nevertheless, there have been major accomplishments both in research and operational employment.”
p.2
The three principal conclusions — and whose risk is being measured. “The principal conclusions of the inspection are that the structure and operational controls over this activity need strengthening; improvements are needed in the administration of the research projects; and some of the testing of substances under simulated operational conditions was judged to involve excessive risk to the Agency.” The emphasis is ours. The risk the inspectors quantify throughout is institutional and reputational; the risk to the unwitting subject is discussed as a source of that exposure.
p.4
How the money was insulated — and the one figure still withheld. TSD was given “exclusive control of the administration, records, and financial accountings of the program,” and “simple statements of certification were all that were required of TSD to obtain advances of funds from Finance Division.” The Director’s memorandum “also exempted MKULTRA from audit, but this provision was modified to permit limited audit before the end of the first year.” Funding “was eventually stabilized at 2.0 percent of TSD’s annual research and development budget.” The sentence then gives the annual dollar figure — and that figure is redacted under a (b)(3) statutory exemption in the released copy. Sixty-odd years on, the percentage is public and the number is not.
p.9
The recommendation, made in 1963. “TSD initiated a program for covert testing of materials on unwitting U.S. citizens in 1955. The present report reviews the rationale and risks attending this activity and recommends termination of such testing in the United States, cf. paragraphs 10-18 below.” The covert testing is generally discussed as something that ran until the programme wound down. Its own Inspector General recommended ending it a decade earlier.
p.13
Where Midnight Climax comes from, in the Agency’s words. “TSD, therefore, entered into an informal arrangement with certain cleared and witting individuals in the Bureau of Narcotics in 1955 which provided for the release of MKULTRA materials for such testing as those individuals deemed desirable and feasible.” It records that the first arrangement obtained “a senior representative of the Bureau and one of his assistants on the West Coast,” and that “a parallel arrangement was established on the East Coast in 1961.” See File 142.
p.16 (printed p.14)
The sentence Stansfield Turner read to the Senate in 1977, in its original context. “The final stage of covert testing of materials on unwitting subjects is clearly the most sensitive aspect of MKULTRA. No effective cover story appears to be available. TSD officials state that responsibility for covert testing is transferred to the Bureau of Narcotics. Yet they also predict that the Chief of the Bureau would disclaim any knowledge of the activity. Present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.” The paragraph closes by placing the handling of test subjects, in the last analysis, with the narcotics agent acting alone — we describe rather than quote that sentence, because the OCR of it in this scan is degraded at the final word and we could not render the page image to read it (the scan is JBIG2-encoded and no decoder was available). Turner quoted only the one sentence. The paragraph around it is the more useful document: a written prediction that the covering agency would deny everything, beside a written admission that nothing was being written down.
Note on page numbers. Turner told the 1977 hearing that this passage was at “page 14” of the IG report. It is on PDF page 16 of this scan; the pins above are PDF page numbers throughout, and the printed number is given in brackets where the two differ.
Note on the redactions. This is a 2019 release and it is not a clean text. Dollar figures, several proper names and portions of the MKDELTA discussion are withheld under (b)(1) and (b)(3); the OCR of a typewritten 1963 carbon is imperfect and we have not corrected it. Quotations above were read from the page images where the text layer is unreliable.
What this document does not contain
It is a review of management, not a record of experiments. There is no roster of subjects, no list of the 149 subprojects, no case-by-case account of what was administered to whom. That is the point of it: read alongside the 1977 Senate hearing, it shows that the thinness of the MKULTRA record is not only the result of the 1973 destruction order. The programme was, as a matter of standing practice, not generating the records that were later destroyed.
Provenance and licence
Released by: Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the Inspector General. The Inspector General was John S. Earman; the National Security Archive catalogues the document as “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA/TSD,” while the cover memorandum’s own subject line reads “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA.” The release stamp on every page reads Approved for Release: 2019/04/03 C06767515.
Original copy: National Security Archive, George Washington University. We did not obtain this document; we are hosting a copy so that the citation in the case file resolves to something durable.
Licence: Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government.
How this copy was checked: Downloaded from the National Security Archive; 2,106,930 bytes, SHA-256 ebc3d13f487d8686754577756e6904198f0bf6ec6e0c708484092048533e37e0, byte-identical to the hosted copy. Opened and confirmed 48 pages, all 48 carrying a text layer. Page 1 reads “26 July 1963 — MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence — SUBJECT: Report of Inspection of MKULTRA,” and states that “it was deemed advisable to prepare the report of the MKULTRA program in one copy only, in view of its unusual sensitivity.” Because this is a third-party host, the document was authenticated independently of it: the CIA release identifier C06767515 and the release date 2019/04/03 appear on all 48 pages, and the report’s date, title and addressee match the citation given for it in the 1977 Senate hearing, which quotes its page 14. Every passage quoted above was located by page.
48 pages · 2.1 MB · PDF