Documents

Project MKULTRA, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification

U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 95th Congress, 1st Session · 3 August 1977

Almost everything publicly known about MKULTRA runs through this one day. It is the hearing at which the CIA, having said the records were destroyed, produced the ones that were not. The transcript is fully searchable in this copy.

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What is on which page

p.5

The chairman opens by explaining why the hearing was convened at all: testimony is to be heard “on issues concerning new documents supplied to the committee in the last week on drug testing conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

p.6

Senator Kennedy's opening statement, and the sentence most often quoted from the day: the programme included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.”

p.8

Admiral Stansfield Turner's prepared statement — the disclosure itself. “In my letter to you of July 15, 1977, I reported our recent discovery of seven boxes of documents related to Project MKULTRA.” The same page records that the files were believed destroyed in 1973 on Helms's order, and describes Frank Olson's death: he “leaped to his death from a hotel room window in New York City about a week after having unwittingly consumed LSD.”

p.9

The sentence that explains the gap better than the shredder does. Turner quotes the CIA's own 1963 Inspector General report at its page 14: “Present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.” The same page explains how the surviving material escaped the 1973 destruction — it had been sent to the Retired Records Center in 1970 by the Budget and Fiscal Section, a departure from normal procedure for which “the reason… is not known,” and so was missed by both the 1973 purge and the 1975 Church Committee searches.

p.10

Turner on what the recovered material actually adds — “additional detail, for the most part: e.g., the names of previously unidentified researchers and institutions.” A useful corrective to the assumption that the 1977 release reopened the science; it largely reopened the accounting. The same page carries the CIA's own sort of the 149 subprojects into fifteen categories, including the breakdown that is hardest to find anywhere else: 17 subprojects probably involving no human testing, 14 definitely on volunteers, 19 probably on volunteers, and 6 involving tests on unwitting subjects — plus three whose “objectives cannot be determined from available documentation.”

p.11

The counts the agency could reach: 185 non-government researchers and assistants named across the 149 subprojects, and 80 institutions — 44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical and pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal institutions. Also the “possibly improper contribution”: $375,000 to the building fund of a private medical institution.

p.43

Drugs produced under Project MKSEARCH “through July 1967 at Georgetown” — one of the few places the successor programme is pinned to a named institution and a date.

p.171

Material for the Record: the official definition of MKSEARCH, and the answer to the question this document is most often searched for. “MKSEARCH was the name given to the continuation of the MKULTRA program. Funding commenced in FY 1966, and ended in FY 1972.” Its stated purpose covers “biological, chemical, and radioactive material systems.” The same page dates Projects OFTEN and CHICKWIT to a 1967 programme run with the Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories, and records that DOD and CIA gave contradictory testimony about who financed the June 1973 human testing at Edgewood: both agreed it happened; neither claimed it.

Note. Turner's statement says seven boxes. Secondary accounts sometimes say eight. The number in the transcript is seven.

Note. This one volume contains two official date ranges that do not join up. Turner's prepared statement (p.8) calls MKULTRA “a closely held CIA project conducted from 1953-1964”; the Material for the Record (p.171) funds MKSEARCH from FY1966 to FY1972. Neither matches the 1953–1973 span under which the programme is universally filed — 1973 being the year of the destruction order and Gottlieb's retirement, which is a date about the records rather than about the work.

Provenance and licence

Released by: U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 95th Congress, 1st Session.

Original copy: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 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: The title page was extracted and read: title, both committees, 95th Congress, first session, August 3, 1977. All 173 pages carry a searchable text layer, and each passage quoted above was located by page in that layer, and every pin above was re-verified against the text layer on September 6, 2026.

173 pages · 8.8 MB · PDF

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