Spycraft - Melton [218]
By 1962 it had become evident to CIA managers that MKULTRA had produced few operationally usable products or new capabilities. A critical 1963 Inspector General report on the value and administration of MKULTRA, combined with little support for the projects from the chiefs of the operational divisions, led to the decision to terminate the program. Before the end of the decade, all questionable subprojects had been closed, leaving only a residue of noncontroversial research contracts in place.30
At the ending of MKULTRA, Gottlieb wrote:
It has become increasingly obvious over the last several years that the general area [of biological and chemical control of human behavior] had less and less relevance to current complex operations. . . . On the scientific side . . . these materials and techniques are too unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings . . . to be operationally useful. [Operationally] the emerging group of new senior operations officers has shown a discerning and perhaps commendable distaste for utilizing these materials and techniques. They seem to realize that, in addition to moral and ethical considerations, the extreme sensitivity and security constraints of such operations effectively rule them out.31
MKULTRA had encompassed a research area that used new, untested drugs to produce unanticipated effects on humans. It had been launched in the interest of national security by a DCI with the assistance of a senior officer, Richard Helms, who would eventually become DCI. However, in the 1960s, at a time when priorities for national security began to shift and standards for conducting experiments involving human subjects were evolving, controls over the MKULTRA experiments that might have seemed appropriate in 1953 were judged inadequate.
Ultimately, the CIA was cited for a failure of “command and control” for only two MKULTRA drug experimentation projects, but both were dramatic and tainted every other activity associated with the project.32 For several years TSD retained eleven grams of shellfish toxin in CIA-classified storage despite a presidential order that all material of this type be destroyed. While the retention represented the inaction of a single officer to comply with the order rather than an organizational effort to defy policy, and although no harm to any individual occurred nor was any use ever made of the toxin, experimental or operational, the fact of its existence several years after the presidential directive reflected poorly on the CIA. In a second area of drug testing on unwitting human subjects, however, TSS’s failure to obtain required official approval before conducting an LSD experiment that went horribly bad resulted in decades of personal tragedy, legal entanglements, and official inquiries.
Dr. Frank Olson, a biochemist and researcher in biological warfare at the U.S. Army facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who worked on a MKULTRA subproject, died in New York City on November 25, 1953. He fell to his death from a hotel room window more than ten stories above the street below. Dr. Olson was likely suffering from delayed reactions caused by ingesting LSD several days earlier. The previous week, at a TSS-organized retreat at the Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland, Olson and several other “researchers” had shared a bottle of Cointreau. The liqueur had been laced with 70 micrograms of LSD without their knowledge.
Due to the political and operational sensitivities of the MKULTRA program, the CIA withheld details of the circumstances surrounding Dr. Olson’s death from Olson’s family until they partially surfaced in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigation of CIA activities. Subsequently, the 1976 U.S. Senate