Spycraft - Melton [216]
Assessment programs developed by TSS and TSD in response would earn respect and commendation for their operational value from case officers to the most senior Agency officials.13 Yet it was precisely in the effort to understand, predict, and control the response and behavior of operational targets that the CIA has also drawn some of its harshest criticism. In the mid-1970s a series of revelations about secret CIA programs from the 1950s and 1960s created a public image of an organization flooded with research programs on mind control, behavior modification, brainwashing, hypnosis, and out-of-control drug experimentation. For five years, from 1972 to 1977, CIA Directors Helms, Schlesinger, Colby, Bush, and Turner were compelled to explain and defend programs and activities that management had begun closing down more than ten years earlier.
In April 1953 DCI Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, authorized the Technical Services Staff to conduct a supersecret behavioral research program under the code name MKULTRA. Because the research involved recently synthesized drugs and pharmaceuticals (including LSD), the program became the responsibility of TSS’s Chemistry Division, headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. In concept, MKULTRA descended from OSS’s World War II research and subsequent authorized CIA drug-testing programs Project BLUEBIRD (1950) and Project ARTICHOKE (1951).14
As chief of the OSS R&D organization Stanley Lovell had worked on chemical and biological weapons. After the war, the Army Chemical Corps investigated the effect of drugs on interrogation for both offensive and defensive use. At the same time, the CIA was receiving reports that the Soviets were experimenting with so-called mind-control techniques and drugs with some success. Fear that brainwashing techniques had been perfected by the Communist Chinese and the North Koreans added impetus to the mission to understand better the science of human behavior. Among the hallucinogenic drugs, LSD held a particular fascination, in part because of reports that the Soviets had shown an interest.
CIA Director Dulles had voiced public alarm over America’s limited understanding of how people’s thinking could be influenced. Speaking from a prepared text to alumni of his alma mater, Princeton University, at Hot Springs, Virginia, on April 10, 1953, Dulles asserted that the U.S. government had been “driven [by the tensions of the Cold War] to take positive steps to recognize psychological warfare and to play an active role in it.” Dulles described a “sinister battle for men’s minds” being waged by the Soviets and questioned whether America recognized the magnitude of the problem. He suggested the ongoing conflict be called “brain warfare.”
The speech accused the Soviets of attempts at mass indoctrination of the population of countries they attempted to control and the perversion of minds of selected individuals. Under the latter circumstances, Dulles commented, a person’s brain “becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.”15 Before the month ended, the DCI had followed up on his public description of the threat by approving the ultrasecret MKULTRA research program. Its intent would be to understand the human mind in order to counter Soviet capabilities for mind control and create tools that could be used by U.S. intelligence officers for agent recruitment and handling. The project would sponsor research and experimentation with any available chemical and biological materials and tap into expertise across the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, and hypnosis.
During its eleven-year existence (1953-1964), MKULTRA remained a tightly compartmentalized Agency program that eventually involved 149 individual subprojects.16 The Technical