U.S. Senate
August 3, 1977
JOINT HEARING BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OF THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
UNITED STATES SENATE
NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS, FIRST SESSION
AUGUST 3, 1977
Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Human Resources
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON: 1977
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402
Stock No. 052-070-04357-1
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
(Established by S. Res. 400, 94th Cong., 2d sess.)
DANIEL K. INOUYE, Hawaii, Chairman
BARRY GOLDWATER, Arizona, Vice Chairman
BIRCH BAYH, Indiana
ADLAI E. STEVENSON, Illinois
WILLIAM D. HATHAWAY, Maine
WALTER D. HUDDLESTON, Kentucky
JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware
ROBERT MORGAN, North Carolina
GARY HART, Colorado
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, New York
CLIFFORD P. CASE, New Jersey
JAKE GARN, Utah
CHARLES McC. MATHIAS, JR., Maryland
JAMES B. PEARSON, Kansas
JOHN H. CHAFE, Rhode Island
RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana
MALCOLM WALLOP, Wyoming
ROBERT C. BYRD, West Virginia, Ex Officio Member
HOWARD H. BAKER, JR., Tennessee, Ex Officio Member
WILLIAM G. MILLER, Staff Director
EARL D. EISENHOWER, Minority Staff Director
AUDREY H. HATRY, Chief Clerk
COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
HARRISON A. WILLIAMS, JR., New Jersey, Chairman
JENNINGS RANDOLPH, West Virginia
CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
GAYLORD NELSON, Wisconsin
THOMAS F. EAGLETON, Missouri
ALAN CRANSTON, California
WILLIAM D. HATHAWAY, Maine
DONALD W. RIEGLE, JR., Michigan
JACOB K. JAVITS, New York
RICHARD S. SCHWEIKER, Pennsylvania
ROBERT T. STAFFORD, Vermont
ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah
JOHN H. CHAFEE, Rhode Island
S.I. HAYAKAWA, California
STEPHEN J. PARADISE, General Counsel and Staff Director
MARJORIE M. WHITTAKER, Chief Clerk
DON A. ZIMMERMAN, Minority Counsel
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island
GAYLORD NELSON, Wisconsin
WILLIAM D. HATHAWAY, Maine
HARRISON A. WILLIAMS, JR., New Jersey (ex officio)
RICHARD S. SCHWEIKER, Pennsylvania
JACOB K. JAVITS, New York
JOHN H. CHAFEE, Rhode Island
LAWRENCE HOROWITZ, Professional Staff Member
DAVID WINSTON, Minority Counsel
PROJECT MKULTRA, THE CIA'S PROGRAM OF RESEARCH IN BEHAVIORAL MODIFICATION
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 1977
U.S. SENATE,SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, AND SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OF THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
Washington, D.C.
The committees met, pursuant to notice, at 9:07 a.m. in room 1202, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Daniel K. Inouye (chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence) presiding.
Present: Senators Inouye (presiding), Kennedy, Goldwater, Bayh, Hathaway, Huddleston, Hart, Schweiker, Case, Garn, Chafee, Lugar and Wallop.
Also present: William G. Miller, staff director, Select Committee on Intelligence; Dr. Lawrence Horowitz, staff director, Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research; and professional staff members of both committees.
Senator INOUYE. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is meeting today and is joined by the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. Senator Hathaway and Senator Chafee are members of both committees. We are to hear testimony from the Director of Central Intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner, and from other Agency witnesses on issues concerning new documents supplied to the committee in the last week on drug testing conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
It should be made clear from the outset that in general, we are focusing on events that happened over 12 or as long as 25 years ago. It should be emphasized that the programs that are of greatest concern have stopped and that we are reviewing these past events in order to better understand what statutes and other guidelines might be necessary to prevent the recurrence of such abuses in the future. We also need to know and understand what is now being done by the CIA in the field of behavioral research to be certain that no current abuses are occurring.
I want to commend Admiral Turner for his full cooperation with this committee and with the Subcommittee on Health in recognizing that this issue needed our attention. The CIA has assisted our committees and staffs in their investigative efforts and in arriving at remedies which will serve the best interests of our country.
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The reappearance of reports of the abuses of the drug testing program and reports of other previously unknown drug programs and projects for behavioral control underline the necessity for effective oversight procedures both in the executive branch and in the Congress. The Select Committee on Intelligence has been working very closely with President Carter, the Vice President, and Admiral Turner and his associates in developing basic concepts for statutory guidelines which will govern all activities of the intelligence agencies of the United States.
In fact, it is my expectation that the President will soon announce his decisions on how he has decided the intelligence agencies of the United States shall be organized. This committee will be working closely with the President and Admiral Turner in placing this new structure under the law and to develop effective oversight procedures.
It is clear that effective oversight requires that information must be full and forthcoming. Full and timely information is obviously necessary if the committee and the public is to be confident that any transgressions can be dealt with quickly and forcefully.
One purpose of this hearing is to give the committee and the public an understanding of what new information has been discovered that adds to the knowledge already available from previous Church and Kennedy inquiries, and to hear the reasons why these documents were not available to the Church and Kennedy committees. It is also the purpose of this hearing to address the issues raised by any additional illegal or improper activities that have emerged from the files and to develop remedies to prevent such improper activities from occurring again.
Finally, there is an obligation on the part of both this committee and the CIA to make every effort to help those individuals or institutions that may have been harmed by any of these improper or illegal activities. I am certain that Admiral Turner will work with this committee to see that this will be done.
I would now like to welcome the most distinguished Senator from Massachusetts, the chairman of the Health Subcommittee, Senator Kennedy.
Senator KENNEDY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. We are delighted to join together in this very important area of public inquiry and public interest.
Some 2 years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations."
At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers. The tests subjects were seldom accessible beyond the first hours of the test. In a number of instances, the test subject became ill for hours or days, and effective followup was impossible.
Other experiments were equally offensive. For example, heroin addicts were enticed into participating in LSD experiments in order to get a reward -- heroin.
Perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of experimentation on human subjects was unknown. The records of all these activities were destroyed in January 1973, at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms. In spite of persistent inquiries by both the Health Subcommittee and the Intelligence Committee, no additional records or information were forthcoming. And no one -- no single individual -- could be found who remembered the details, not the Director of the CIA, who ordered the documents destroyed, not the official responsible for the program, nor any of his associates.
We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records pertaining to the CIA's program of experimentation with human subjects. These new records were discovered by the agency in March. Their existence was not made known to the Congress until July.
The records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had previously been thought. Eighty-six universities or institutions were involved. New instances of unethical behavior were revealed.
The intelligence community of this Nation, which requires a shroud of secrecy in order to operate, has a very sacred trust from the American people. The CIA's program of human experimentation of the fifties and sixties violated that trust. It was violated again on the day the bulk of the agency's records were destroyed in 1973. It is violated each time a responsible official refuses to recollect the details of the program. The best safeguard against abuses in the future is a complete public accounting of the abuses of the past.
I think this is illustrated, as Chairman Inouye pointed out. These are issues, are questions that happened in the fifties and sixties, and go back some 15, 20 years ago, but they are front page news today, as we see in the major newspapers and on the television and in the media of this country; and the reason they are, I think, is because it just continuously begins to trickle out, sort of, month after month, and the best way to put this period behind us, obviously, is to have the full information, and I think that is the desire of Admiral Turner and of the members of this committee.
The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge.
These institutes, these individuals, have a right to know who they are and how and when they were used. As of today, the Agency itself refuses to declassify the names of those institutions and individuals, quite appropriately, I might say, with regard to the individuals under the Privacy Act. It seems to me to be a fundamental responsibility to notify those individuals or institutions, rather. I think many of them were caught up in an unwitting manner to do research for the Agency. Many researchers, distinguished researchers, some of our most outstanding members of our scientific community, involved in this network, now really do not know whether they were involved or not, and it seems to me that the whole health and climate in terms of our university and our scientific and health facilities are entitled to that response.
So, I intend to do all I can to persuade the Agency to, at the very least, officially inform those institutions and individuals involved.
Two years ago, when these abuses were first revealed, I introduced legislation, with Senator Schweiker and Senator Javits, designed to minimize the potential for any similar abuses in the future. That legislation expanded the jurisdiction of the National Commission on Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to cover all federally funded research involving human subjects. The research initially was just directed toward HEW activities, but this legislation covered DOD as well as the CIA.
This Nation has a biomedical and behavioral research capability second to none. It has had for subjects of HEW funded research for the past 3 years a system for the protection of human subjects of biomedical research second to none, and the Human Experimentation Commission has proven its value. Today's hearings and the record already established underscore the need to expand its jurisdiction.
The CIA supported that legislation in 1975, and it passed the Senate unanimously last year. I believe it is needed in order to assure all our people that they will have the degree of protection in human experimentation that they deserve and have every right to expect.
Senator INOUYE. Thank you very much. Now we will proceed with the hearings. Admiral Turner?
