The significance of a forgotten CIA document: MKULTRA

The significance of a forgotten CIA document: MKULTRA

This June 27, 1994, document is stored at the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.

It was written by a CIA advisory committee, and forwarded to the Presidential Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which was preparing public hearings at the time.

The document has many interesting implications. In this article, I want to focus on two. The first point concerns the CIA mind control program, MKULTRA.

Here is a key quote:

“In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA engaged in an extensive program of human experimentation [MKULTRA], using drugs, psychological, and other means, in search of techniques to control human behavior for counterintelligence and covert action purposes… Most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by the order of then DCI Richard Helms, who waived the internal CIA regulation (CSI-7O-l0) governing retirement of inactive records… Helms testified that he agreed to destroy the records because ‘there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and that these would be sensitive in this kind of a thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will.’”

Helms was not only admitting he destroyed the records, he was stating that the MKULTRA program deployed, through contracts, “outsiders” to carry out mind control experiments. He was determined to protect them, to keep their identity and work secret. He was also dedicated to prevent these people from exposing the nature of their mind-control work. And finally, Helms knew that some of these outside researchers had no idea they were involved in MKULTRA—in other words, the CIA had tricked them into thinking their work was designed for other purposes.

Subsequently, some of these “outsiders” have been revealed. But no one really knows how deep, far, and wide the CIA penetrated into academic and research communities to enable MKULTRA.

The second point I want to cover is made clear by this quote from the 1994 CIA document: “The Church Committee [investigating the CIA] reports that one of the three principal functions of the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Army Biological Center at Camp Detrick, Maryland was to conduct ‘biological research for the CIA.’ Church Committee, Book I, at 395. In early 1952, SOD agreed ‘to assist CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems. By this agreement, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.’”

In other words, biowarfare research wasn’t limited to the Army and the Pentagon. The CIA actually became a second center for developing biological agents they could use for covert actions.

It’s important to note that the assumed termination point of MKULTRA, 1962, is false. In or around that year, the CIA shifted its entire mind control operation to its Office of Research and Development.

John Marks, who wrote the breakthrough book on MKULTRA, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, told me that his access to CIA documents was abruptly cut off after the publication of his book. A CIA employee told him he’d never see another document, from a cache of 100 boxes, that described MKULTRA projects when they went super-dark after 1962.

The 1994 document I’m quoting in this article was part of preparation for 1995 Presidential hearings on secret human radiation experiments. The CIA stated that, after extensive searching of its files, it found no evidence that radiation was used in MKULTRA projects.

However, at the 1995 hearings, two women, Claudia Mullin and Chris De Nicola, testified that, indeed radiation had been used on them (as torture), in a wide-ranging program of mind control to which they were subjected, starting when they were young children.