Helms and Gottlieb burned illegal human experiment records

By June Hargrove · August 9, 2026

Victims of illegal human experimentation were scrubbed from the record by CIA leadership in 1973, leaving the agency's behavior-modification research permanently buried.

In 1973, a significant portion of the Central Intelligence Agency's records regarding behavior-modification research was destroyed. These files did not vanish by accident or through routine administrative purging. They were eliminated by order.

The file's catalogue entry for a memorandum dated October 20, 1975, records that the CIA's Inspector General, Donald F. Chamberlain, was tasked with documenting the efforts to recover these lost materials. The memo, addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence, describes the attempt to piece together the history of two specific initiatives: MKULTRA and MKNAOMI.

October 20, 1975

By the time Chamberlain wrote this four-page memorandum, the Agency was under intense scrutiny. The public record establishes that MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program. Its goal was to develop procedures and identify drugs—most notably LSD—that could be used to alter human behavior. The program is noted in the public record for its disregard for consent and its violation of individual rights.

Chamberlain's memorandum arrives in the archive as a summary of a search for what was no longer there. The catalogue entry states that many of the records for MKULTRA and MKNAOMI were destroyed in 1973. This gap in the record creates a vacuum where the primary evidence of the programs' daily operations once lived. What remains is not the data of the experiments themselves, but the record of their erasure.

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

Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb

The catalogue entry identifies two men as the architects of the destruction: Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb. Helms, a former Director of Central Intelligence, and Gottlieb, the chemist who headed the MKULTRA project, issued the orders to destroy the files two years before Chamberlain began his recovery efforts.

This sequence of events suggests a concerted effort to scrub the operational history of the behavior-modification programs before they could be fully audited. The timing is particularly pointed. While the destruction happened in 1973, the efforts to recover those records—and the subsequent internal reporting by the Inspector General—took place in late 1975.

This period coincided with high-level government inquiries. The National Security Archive’s index lists testimony given by Sidney Gottlieb before the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities on October 15 and October 18, 1975. Chamberlain's memorandum was written just days after these hearings. It serves as a internal counterpoint to the public testimony, documenting the Agency's own struggle to find the papers that Helms and Gottlieb had ordered burned.

MKNAOMI

While MKULTRA is the better-known of the two programs mentioned in the memorandum, the catalogue entry explicitly links it to MKNAOMI. The record does not provide a detailed breakdown of MKNAOMI's specific objectives, but it groups the program with MKULTRA in terms of the records that were destroyed in 1973.

The archival trail suggests a pattern of documented instability in the Agency's record-keeping regarding drugs and toxins. Other files in the National Security Archive, such as a 1963 memorandum from Inspector General John Earman, indicate that the MKULTRA program was being monitored internally as early as the early sixties. However, the 1975 Chamberlain memo confirms that by the time the Inspector General's office was attempting a full recovery in the mid-seventies, the primary source material had been compromised.

There are further indications of the Agency's struggle with the transparency of these files. A 1978 internal memorandum from Herbert E. Hetu to George Cary of the Office of General Counsel discusses amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, though the specific nature of those amendments remains obscured by redactions in that record.

The Chamberlain memorandum is a brief document—four pages in total—but it confirms a fundamental loss. It does not list the specific experiments that were erased, nor does it name the subjects whose data vanished in 1973. It merely records the fact of the destruction and the subsequent, incomplete attempt to recover the evidence of what the Agency had done. The memo leaves the total volume of the destroyed records and the exact nature of the MKNAOMI files as unresolved questions.