CIA Spymaster Sidney Gottlieb Admitted to Assassination Plots and LSD Tests

By June Hargrove · August 9, 2026

Unwitting subjects including friends and acquaintances were dosed in secret safehouses while redacted testimony hides who authorized the agency's assassination capabilities.

On October 18, 1975, Sidney Gottlieb sat before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. The resulting report of proceedings—a 195-page Top Secret document—captures the final day of Gottlieb's testimony. According to the file's catalogue entry, the session covered the perceived utility of LSD experiments, assassination plots, and the deaths of unwitting subjects.

Public record establishes Gottlieb as a chemist and spymaster who led the CIA’s mind-control program, MKUltra, and various assassination attempts during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1975 testimony, he faced investigators probing the gap between the agency's ambitions and its actual results.

"Exec Actions"

Senate investigators pressed Gottlieb on his appearance in a handwritten memo authored by CIA official William Harvey. The memo was titled "Exec Actions," a phrase the committee interpreted as a euphemism for assassinations. Within that same memo, the catalogue entry notes cryptic references such as "El Benefactor" and "three wrongs," which appeared to refer to the top three members of the Cuban leadership.

When asked about the authority for establishing an assassination capability project, Gottlieb stated, "My impression now … is that Bissell asked [deleted] to create such a capability, or discussed with him creating such a capability." The record contains a redaction here, leaving the identity of the individual Bissell approached unknown. Gottlieb further noted he had no knowledge of whether Bissell was acting with or without authority from the President or the Director of Central Intelligence.

Regarding the procurement of materials for these operations, Gottlieb admitted that in the course of implementing work at Camp Detrick, he "would have to have done that" for the purpose of developing materials for an operator in an assassination attempt, though he claimed not to remember specific conversations.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Fort Detrick

The testimony details the relationship between Gottlieb's staff at TSS and the Army’s Special Operations Division (SOD) located at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The SOD focused on the offensive and defensive uses of biological and chemical agents. Gottlieb testified that the materials kept on his behalf had "both an offensive connotation in the sense of preparing for a contingency either in a hot war or some special operation" and a defensive purpose for protecting U.S. installations from covert attacks abroad.

This cooperation extended to the procurement of "MKNAOMI products." The file's catalogue entry records testimony indicating that TSS would levy requirements on Fort Detrick regardless of whether an actual operation existed. This was done deliberately so that Fort Detrick would be unable to "pinpoint an actual operational requirement."

P-1 and A-2

Much of the hearing focused on the use of psychochemicals. Investigators cited memos regarding an "Ad Hoc Committee" that served as the approval mechanism for administering "P-1" as of July 1958. Gottlieb claimed not to remember the committee or the decision-making process from that period.

He did, however, admit it was "very likely" that his unit was involved in considering requests for the operational use of drugs. In one instance, documents showed Gottlieb agreed that a specific operation "warranted the use of A-2 and possibly P-1," a fact he conceded when presented with the relevant cable.

Despite these efforts, the results were often disappointing. The catalogue entry notes that Gottlieb's own 1960 memo concluded that experiments with psychochemicals had not produced the expected breakthroughs, finding the results "too unpredictable." This skepticism extended to a proposal for the mass use of LSD in Vietnam. Gottlieb argued against it, stating, "The results of the P-1 interrogations were uncertain. We had … as many failures as successes." He expressed concern that the military, being such a large organization, would be unable to discriminate between cases, making mass use a poor technique.

George White's Safehouses

The hearing also touched upon the mysterious 1953 death of Frank Olson, an Army Special Operations Division scientist, who died days after participating in one of Gottlieb's LSD experiments without his knowledge.

Finally, the committee questioned Gottlieb about a project involving federal narcotics agent George White. The CIA provided White with drugs and technical equipment to run secret safehouses in New York and San Francisco. According to the record, White used these locations to perform a variety of "experiments" that were described as highly unscientific. The subjects of these tests were unwitting, including individuals connected to narcotics investigations, friends, and acquaintances.