MKULTRA: the destroyed files and the misfiled boxes

Senate hearing · 1973 and 1977

MKULTRA was a closely held CIA project that ran from 1953 to 1964. CIA Director Stansfield Turner described it to the Senate as an “umbrella project” under which subprojects were funded for research on drugs and behavioral modification. At a joint Senate hearing on 3 August 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy said the records of these activities were destroyed in January 1973 at the instruction of then-CIA Director Richard Helms.

In 1977, Turner told the Senate that a CIA employee answering Freedom of Information Act requests had found seven boxes at the Retired Records Center. They were finance folders, filed by the Budget and Fiscal Section rather than under the project’s name, so they had escaped both the 1973 destruction and the 1975 searches. Turner said the reason for the departure from normal filing procedure was “simply not known”, and that he was personally persuaded there was no evidence of any attempt to conceal them.

The boxes listed 149 subprojects. In six, Turner said the new documentation was enough to substantiate unwitting testing; he described other cases as ambiguous. He told the Senate that the records name no test subjects and that the CIA had not identified the individuals to whom drugs were administered. This page names no victims and makes no claims beyond the hearing record.

Sources

1. [S] Joint hearing, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 3 Aug 1977: “Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification” (PDF)https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-hearings-95mkultra.pdf