C.I.A. spent huge sum on mind tests

Press, 4 August 1977, Page 8

C.I.A. spent huge sum on mind tests

NZPA Washington The American Central Intelligence Agency has released top secret documents showing that its mind and behaviour control experiments included attempts at “alteration of sex patterns” and drug tests on college students. Responding to Freedom of Information Act requests, the agency made available 415 heavily censored pages from a pile of documents on the experiments it conducted on willing and unwitting Americans in the 1950 s and 60s. The director of the C.LA. (Admiral Stansfield Turner) said the documents on the controversial projects, already investigated by Senate committees on the basis of incomplete evidence, were discovered recently in “retired archives filed under financial accounts.” Mr Turner and a panel of former C.LA. experts in the behaviour projects will testify today at Senate hearings on the subject. General outlines of the discontinued mind and behaviour control projects —run under the code names

M. K. Ultra, M. K. Deltfc Artichoke, and Bluebird —

came to light in earlier investigations. But the material just released gave the first indication of the scope and cost of the operation. It showed that costs may have run into the tens of millions of dollars, with sums of up to $lOO,OOO being paid to subcontracting institutions, hospitals, doctors, psychiatrists, hypnotists, and other experts assigned to carry out the mind-bending experiments.

The “New York Times’* Said that originally the programme, organised in 1949, tvas to combat the agency’s concern — later proved unfounded — that the Russians and the Chinese had developed mind-control devices.

But within a few years the programme took the offensive and the C.LA. sought to crack mental defences of enemy agents and to programme them and its own agents to carry out any mission against their will.

The methods used on mental patients, prisoners, and staff included brainwashing experiments and drugs, such as LSD.

Names of the institutions and individuals were blacked out in copies supplied to reporters. They were reported to include some prominent experts and prestigious hospitals, some of them perhaps unaware they were working in projects funded by C.1.A.controlled “front” organisations.

One uncensored name, however, was that of Dr Sidney Gottlieb, former chief of the agency’s chemical and scientific division, who ran M. K. Ultra and similar projects for many years. He was last reported in retir® ment abroad.