Sidney Gottlieb pushed CIA to keep drugging unwitting Americans

By Miriam Adler · August 9, 2026

Unwitting Americans were cast as disposable assets by CIA leaders who argued that the only accurate data came from people who did not know they were being experimented upon.

On November 29, 1963, a group of high-ranking CIA officials sat in a room to discuss the boundaries of the agency's appetite for human suffering. The occasion was a meeting involving the CIA's Inspector General, John Earman, and several other top executives. The subject was the MKUltra program.

We know this because of a memorandum for the record written by Earman. While the full document is held in the archives, the file's catalogue entry records a chilling consensus on the utility of chemical agents and a sharp internal divide over who should be forced to ingest them. At the center of the friction was Sidney Gottlieb, the man who steered the agency's efforts to master the human mind through pharmacological assault.

"Controlled Testing Cannot Be Depended Upon"

According to the archive's description, Gottlieb provided a brief history of MKUltra during the meeting, one that aligned with an Inspector General report from August 1963. But the history was a prelude to a request for persistence. Gottlieb and another official—whose name remains redacted in the record—argued that the agency must continue the practice of "unwitting testing."

Their logic was as cold as it was clinically precise: they argued that "controlled testing cannot be depended upon for accurate results."

For a medical ethicist, this is the most honest and horrifying sentence in the record. It is an explicit admission that the only "accurate" data, in the eyes of the CIA, is data harvested from people who do not know they are being experimented upon. To Gottlieb, the presence of consent—the very foundation of modern medical ethics—was a contaminant. In his view, the subject's awareness of the experiment would skew the results, rendering the science useless. Therefore, the violation of the human being was not a side effect of the research; it was a requirement for it.

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

A Stable of Drugs

Not everyone in the room shared Gottlieb's zeal for the unwitting subject. The catalogue entry notes that John Earman, CIA deputy director Marshall Carter, and CIA executive director Lyman Kirkpatrick all disagreed with Gottlieb on the necessity of continuing tests on unsuspecting Americans.

However, this disagreement did not stem from a total rejection of the program's goals. The record is clear that these three top officials still accepted the "necessity for having a ‘stable of drugs’ on the shelf."

They viewed this stockpile not as a tool of torture, but as a strategic asset. The research was deemed necessary for "possible operational use" and to ensure the agency had insight into the "state of the art in this field." There was also the driving anxiety of the Cold War: the need to "alert us to what the opposition is or might be expected to do in the R&D and employment of drugs."

In this framing, the "stable of drugs" was a defensive shield, a way to avoid being blindsided by foreign adversaries. The morality of how those drugs were developed was secondary to the fear of being technologically outpaced. The disagreement was not over whether the CIA should possess the power to alter human behavior, but over whether the American public should be the laboratory for that power.

Facilities That Leave Much to Be Desired

As the group sought alternatives to testing on U.S. citizens, the conversation turned toward foreign nationals. The record indicates that the group discussed the possibility of moving the unwitting tests overseas.

This path was blocked not by an ethical epiphany, but by logistical caution. Senior station chiefs reportedly informed the group that such operations were "too dangerous" because of a "lack of controlled facilities" abroad.

Earman, the Inspector General, found this particular objection odd. In his own notes, he observed that the facilities already being used for unwitting testing within the United States "leave much to be desired."

It is a biting irony recorded in the margins of the agency's own history. The station chiefs feared the lack of control in foreign lands, yet the agency was already conducting its experiments in domestic settings that the Inspector General himself found substandard. The "controlled" environment Gottlieb craved was a fiction, yet it was a fiction used to justify the continued use of American citizens as disposable assets.

Ultimately, the meeting ended without a resolution on the most critical point. The group decided that the question of whether to resume "unwitting testing on American citizens" would have to be put before the CIA director, John McCone.