Spycraft - Melton [219]
Following the CIA Inspector General’s internal report in 1963 and the 1976 Church Report, a third airing of the MKULTRA saga occurred in 1977. A few months after the Church Committee closed its investigation, some 8,000 pages of previously unidentified MKULTRA financial records were discovered in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiry on the project. The newly found documents had been filed with contract and financial records at the CIA’s Records Center rather than under the MKULTRA project title.
These records had escaped the shredder in 1973 following DCI Helms’s directive to Gottlieb to destroy all MKULTRA research and operational files, and then were inadvertently missed during the records search in response to the Church Committee.34 Helms described his thinking on ordering destruction of the MKULTRA records in a taped interview with journalist David Frost in May 1978:
It was a conscious decision [to destroy the records] that there were a whole series of things that involved Americans who had helped us with the various aspects of this testing, with whom we had a fiduciary relationship and whose participation we had agreed to keep secret. Since this was a time when both I and the fellow [presumably a reference to Dr. Gottlieb] who had been in charge of the program were going to retire there was no reason to have the stuff around anymore. We kept faith with the people who had helped us and I see nothing wrong with that. 35
The 1977 find was reported immediately to the White House and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and congressional interest was rekindled. That year, the SSCI convened a joint hearing with Senator Edward Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health and Science and called DCI Stansfield Turner as the primary witness. Appearing before the committees, Turner testified that the documents added little information to what was already known about MKULTRA’s methods, experiments, operations, and the breadth of the program. The SSCI agreed, and the joint hearings were concluded after one session.36 However, the redacted materials, subsequently released under FOIA, became the basis for John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a bestselling account of CIA research in the 1950s and 1960s into human behavior.37
The negative publicity surrounding MKULTRA far exceeded its modest contribution to intelligence and the negative aspects of the program acquired undeserved legendary status in the mind of the public as well as conspiracy theorists. Secret government-sponsored mind-control research, dangerous experiments on unwitting people, covert assassination tools, and white-coated chemists mixing unknown concoctions in hidden laboratories produced vivid images in the public’s imagination. Virtually none of this was a reality, but more than five decades after Allen Dulles and Richard Helms initiated the ultrasecret program to counter what they believed to be a grave threat to free thought, MKULTRA continues to generate public intrigue and controversy. The officer chosen to carry out the program, Sidney Gottlieb, did what he understood duty demanded, and paid a heavy personal price.
The breadth of Gottlieb’s life as a scientist, CIA official, builder of enduring intelligence capabilities, humanitarian, respected office director, and patriot was obscured even at his death on March 7, 1999. The Washington Post’s headline on Gottlieb’s obituary read CIA OFFICIAL SIDNEY GOTTLIEB, 80, DIES; DIRECTED TESTS WITH LSD IN ’50S, ’60S.38 Like the headline, the first sentence mischaracterized Gottlieb and his work by focusing exclusively on “mind control experiments and administration of drugs and LSD to unwitting human subjects.” In fact, LSD, drug testing, and the procedures adopted had been a small part of the authorized MKULTRA research program in the fifteen-person chemistry branch Gottlieb headed. Like many of their scientific contemporaries of the 1950s, TSS