CIA used Georgetown patients for secret biological warfare research
By Eleanor Voss ·
Human patients and volunteers were used for biological and chemical warfare experiments in a hospital wing masked by a philanthropic fund to protect the reputations of CIA scientists.
On November 15, 1954, the CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS) submitted a formal request to the Director of Central Intelligence. The objective was not a field operation or a recruitment drive, but the acquisition of a physical space. The TSS sought authorization for a project at Georgetown University Hospital that would serve as cover for research conducted under the Agency’s "biological and chemical warfare program."
According to the archive's curated description of the memorandum, the plan involved a sophisticated layering of funding and administration. The Agency did not intend to lease a room or rent a lab; it intended to help build a wing. By using a philanthropic organization as a "cut-out," the CIA proposed to partially fund a new research wing of the hospital, known as the Gorman Annex. The agreement was specific: the Agency would use one sixth of this new annex to conduct "Agency-sponsored research in these sensitive fields."
Dr. Charles Geschickter
The financial plumbing of the operation relied on the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. The file's catalogue entry records that the fund was named for Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University Hospital. Geschickter was not a passive figurehead; the record indicates he had been secretly working with the CIA since 1951.
The Fund served two primary purposes. First, it acted as a "cut-out for dealing with contractors in the fields of covert chemical and biological warfare." Second, it functioned as a "prime contractor for certain areas of biological research." This arrangement allowed the Agency to move money into the clinical environment without a direct paper trail leading back to Langley. While the operation was designed for maximum secrecy, it was not entirely solitary. The archive's description notes that at least two other board members of the Fund were aware that the organization was being used to conceal "sensitive research projects."
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
"Professional Reputations"
The memorandum includes an attachment that provides the rationale for choosing a university hospital as the site for these experiments. The logic was rooted in the professional anxieties of the scientific community. The Agency noted that "competent individuals in the field of physiological, psychiatric and other biological sciences are very reluctant to enter into signed agreements of any sort which would connect them with this activity."
The fear, as recorded in the text, was that such a connection "might seriously jeopardize their professional reputations." For the physicist or the biologist, the stigma of working for the intelligence community's warfare program was a risk too high to bear in the open. By embedding the research within the Gorman Annex and masking the funding through the Geschickter Fund, the Agency provided a shield.
This shield extended to the Agency's own staff. The description states that three "bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division of TSS" would be integrated into the hospital setting, providing them with "excellent professional cover." The result was a symbiotic deception: the scientists could maintain their standing in the academic world, and the CIA could conduct high-risk research under the guise of legitimate medical inquiry.
Patients and Volunteers
Beyond the cover for the staff, the university hospital offered a more critical resource: a steady stream of human subjects. The archive's description of the memo explicitly states that "human patients and volunteers for experimental use will be available under excellent clinical conditions" and with the benefit of hospital supervision.
This detail clarifies the operational utility of the Gorman Annex. It was not merely a laboratory for the synthesis of compounds; it was a site for human testing. The use of the term "excellent clinical conditions" suggests a preoccupation with the appearance of medical legitimacy, ensuring that the experiments were conducted in an environment that looked and felt like a standard hospital ward, thereby reducing the likelihood of suspicion from the patients themselves or the broader university staff.
The memorandum observes that while Project MKULTRA already provided funding "for highly sensitive projects in certain fields, including covert biological, chemical and radiological warfare," the existing authorizations did not specifically cover the establishment of this kind of institutional cover. The request for the Gorman Annex was, in effect, a request to institutionalize the deception.
The Agency believed the sponsorship was "completely deniable since no connection would exist between the University and the Agency."\ Whether that deniability held over the long term remains a question for the medical records of the hospital, which are not part of this specific file.
The document was not found in a government warehouse, but among the papers of James Srodes, the author of a biography of Allen Dulles. These papers are currently housed at the George C. Marshall Research Library of the Virginia Military Institute.