"Reading these memos is like sitting in a confessional booth and having a string of former top CIA officials say 'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned', quipped Tom Blanton of the National Security Archives. Blanton, the director of an independent non-governmental research institute at The George Washington University, has been busy poring over 702 pages of recently declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Known as the "family jewels", these long-secret files provide evidence of what the New York Times calls "paranoia and occasional incompetence" at the same U.S. spy agency that failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union or 9/11. The revelations in the "family jewels" are disturbing, but what do they tell us about the operations of the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate?
Project MKULTRA
The CIA has many skeletons in its closet, but few are as frightening as the freak show called MKULTRA, a bizarre mind-control program that began during the 1950s. During testimony before the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977, the CIA's Deputy Director described an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which administered drugs to unwitting citizens in order to manipulate their mental states and alter their brain functions.
In some experiments, military personnel were given lysergic acid diethylamide, a hallucinogenic drug better known by as LSD. Other tests involved heroin, mescaline, marijuana, and sodium pentothal. Yet another technique involved putting a barbiturate IV into a person's left arm and an amphetamine IV into the right. At least one subject, Dr. Frank Olson of the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, died as a result of MKULTRA.
Scratching the Surface
In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress investigated the CIA for evidence of activities which violated the agency's charter. Although former CIA Director Richard Helms had already ordered the spy agency to destroy most MKULTRA records, some documents survived.
In a letter dated June 9, 1953, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb – the chemist and military psychiatrist who headed MKULTRA – approved a project involving LSD. Documents from 1955 described CIA efforts to use mind-altering drugs to produce conditions such as paralysis, illogical thinking, lethargy, emotional dependency, and resistance to brainwashing.
The 1977 Congressional testimony of the CIA's Deputy Director was equally damning. "The Agency itself," thundered Senator Edward Kennedy, "acknowledged that these tests made little scientific science."
The Family Jewels
Unfortunately, the "family jewels" tell us little more about MKULTRA and the CIA's weird science. There is but a single reference, a May 8, 1973 memorandum from Ben Evans to new CIA Director William Colby, which explains the actions of Carl Duckett, CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief.
"Carl Duckett brought this up and said he is very uncomfortable with what Sid Gottlieb is reporting and thinks that the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program. Duckett plans to scrub it down with Gottlieb but obviously cannot do it this afternoon."
Plausible deniability from a government official? That's one "family jewel" that fails to shine.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKULTRA
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27cia.html?pagewanted=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1183033695-Mbd72RwYGC38r03enNNPng
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/top04.pdf
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/Hearing01.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/the_archive.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/gottlieb.html
Steve Melito - The Y Files
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Re: The CIA's Weird Science
