1973 CIA Memo on MKULTRA Program
Image: This is a very brief declassified 1973 CIA memo from the chief of the CIA's Science and Technology Division. It recommends that the CIA Director deny any knowledge of LSD experiments carried out by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb as part of the larger CIA program to develop mind-altering drugs for use in interrogation.
This is a declassified 1973 memo from an official in the CIA Science and Technology Directorate to CIA Director William Colby. It was written in response to increasing questions in Congress and the media regarding the research of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who was responsible for the notorious LSD experiments of the 1960s as well as a number of other controversial CIA projects. The memo recommends that Colby deny all knowledge of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA program, a wide-ranging and top secret study of interrogation and “mind control” methodology that was directly responsible for some of the most unethical experiments ever conducted in the field of psychology.
This document is proof of the lengths to which US government officials will go to conceal their involvement in illegal and embarrassing activities. It also sheds light on the nature of the US national security mindset in the middle decades of the Cold War. This memo suggests that five decades of intensive espionage and covert operations on the battlefields of the Cold War had fostered a strain of paranoid elitism that felt scant obligation to account for its activities or submit to any form of oversight. Officials in the US intelligence community and foreign policy apparatus seem to have adopted the position that it was their role to do the dirty work of the nation and only they could judge whether they had gone too far in that pursuit.