Declassified MKUltra Transcripts Have Been Released. They Paint a Dark Portrait of America.

There aren't many American Cold War villains as stone evil as Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who oversaw the crimes and depredations of the Company's MKUltra program.

In 1975, Gottlieb appeared before Senator Frank Church's committee that was looking into the various crimes and depredations of the CIA. (Church's committee remains one of the most important episodes in recent history of the many we've chosen to forget about.) The folks at the National Security Archive have released the transcripts of Gottlieb's testimony to the Church committee, and they are every bit as bad as the country has tried so hard not to recall.

Among other things, the recently declassified transcripts from the closed-door hearings held on October 15–18, 1975, shed new light on the bizarre and abusive research projects associated with Gottlieb and the Agency’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), including the administration of mind-altering drugs in situations where, in Gottlieb’s words, “the unwitting and total lack of awareness on the part of somebody who was being interrogated that way might have been the key thing.”At one point, Senate staffers asked Gottlieb about a document indicating that one interrogee had been secretly given a large dose of LSD that induced a “severe classic paranoid reaction” so extreme that he was declared mentally ill by an equally unwitting psychiatrist and was thus “discredited in the eyes of the group with which he had been working.” Gottlieb said that “it had been recognized that this kind of thing might be a need that P-1 [LSD] might help with, to make somebody behave erratically for the purpose of his colleagues losing faith in his ability to act responsibly."

Other parts of the hearing focused on Gottlieb’s involvement in CIA assassination plots, especially those targeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and its support to the activities of other federal agencies through MHCHAOS, the subject of the earlier Rockefeller Commission report.

The transcripts are a case study in how government secrecy can run amok as long as there are people like Gottlieb to run it. Much of the public knowledge of these activities came from lawsuits filed by Gottlieb's victims and their families. Once the Church committee began shaking his tree, Gottlieb had his horror stories dragged out of him.

The Committee staff also asked Gottlieb about the extent of CIA-sponsored drug testing in prisons and psychiatric facilities in the U.S. Asked on the first day of testimony if he recalled “ARTICHOKE operations either in prisons, mental hospitals or other facilities that might hold either criminals or the criminally insane,” Gottlieb replied: “I don’t remember anything like that.” However, the next day, Gottlieb said he did remember that TSS conducted “general research” at hospitals with “psychochemicals,” although he took issue with the word “prison” to describe what he said were treatment facilities run by the Public Health Service for “people with criminal background.”

(One of Gottlieb's acid guinea pigs reportedly was an inmate at the federal prison at Alcatraz from Boston named Whitey Bulger.)

Gottlieb was similarly evasive in response to questions about whether experiments were done at universities, finally settling on this statement: “[T]here was some of the work involving such testing that went on at hospitals that were affiliated with universities, and might have used university students as a source of volunteers.” Asked again about these kinds of project on the final day of testimony, Gottlieb admitted that the CIA had “an extensive research program in regard to human experimentation on psychochemicals” under MKULTRA, adding that “a lot of these things were done in hospitals and mental institutions. And when you say hospitalization, the people were already hospitalized.”

That's some cold-ass stuff right there. What the hell, dose these folks. They're in the hospital anyway!

Read the whole thing. This went on for years. One subject named Frank Olson who was surreptitiously dosed jumped out the window of a Manhattan hotel.

Two things we should have learned, but clearly didn't: One, we should be very careful about who we elect as our leaders. And two, we should demand to know what kind of people the people we elect are hiring, and what those people might be up to on our dime.

Glad we'd never let that kind of thing get completely out of hand.