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.
Open the PDF — 173 pages, 8.8 MB
Hosted here in full. Nothing has been re-compressed, re-OCR’d or altered.
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.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.
Note. Turner's statement says seven boxes. Secondary accounts sometimes say eight. The number in the transcript is seven.
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.
173 pages · 8.8 MB · PDF
Case files that cite it
MK-Ultra: The CIA's Twenty-Year Mind-Control Program
What the surviving documents prove, what was destroyed before disclosure, and what's still classified about the agency's experiments on civilians, soldiers, and prisoners from 1953 to 1973.
Project ARTICHOKE: The CIA Interrogation Program That Became MK-Ultra
A 1950-1953 CIA program of chemical, hypnotic, and physical interrogation research, run out of the Office of Security under Morse Allen and absorbed into MKULTRA in April 1953.
Operation Midnight Climax (1954-1965)
The CIA MK-Ultra subproject run out of safe houses in San Francisco and New York. George Hunter White's prostitute-procured operation; clients dosed with LSD; CIA officers observed through one-way mirrors.
Sidney Gottlieb: The CIA's Poisoner in Chief
The CIA chemist who directed MK-Ultra, dosed Frank Olson, built the poisons for Castro and Lumumba, and shredded the records in 1973 - and the federal court that held the destruction against him.