Sidney Gottlieb Fought to Continue Testing Drugs on Unwitting Americans
By June Hargrove ·
Unwitting U.S. citizens were administered behavior-altering substances in 'slipshod' safehouses during an illegal program whose 1975 freeze may never have been lifted.
On November 29, 1963, five men met in the office of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence General Marshall Carter. The purpose of the meeting, according to a catalogue entry from the National Security Archive, was to settle a single point of disagreement among CIA officials regarding the recommendations of the inspector general. The point of contention was whether the agency should continue the testing of MKULTRA substances on unwitting U.S. citizens.
As established by the public record, MKULTRA was an illegal human experimentation program. Its goal was to identify and develop drugs and procedures that could be used to alter human behavior, a project that has since been widely condemned for its disregard for consent and its violation of individual rights.
"Argued for the continuation"
The participants in the meeting represented the upper tiers of the agency's operational and oversight wings. Present were General Carter, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms, and the CIA executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, who had previously served as inspector general. Joining them were the current inspector general, John Earman, and Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
The division in the room was sharp. The archive's description of the memorandum notes that both Gottlieb and Helms "argued for the continuation of unwitting testing." They were opposed by Carter, Earman, and Kirkpatrick.
In the hierarchy of the CIA during this era, Gottlieb’s TSD was the engine of MKULTRA's more clandestine biological and chemical efforts. Helms, as Deputy Director for Plans, oversaw the clandestine service. Their alignment suggests a push from the operational side of the house to maintain the program's momentum, despite the objections of the agency's top administrators and its own internal watchdog.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
Controlled facilities
During the discussion, the group explored alternatives to testing on American citizens. The catalogue entry records a debate on the possibility of conducting unwitting tests on foreign nationals instead. This option, however, had already been ruled out.
The reason provided for the rejection of foreign testing came from "senior chiefs of stations." These field officers argued that such operations were "too dangerous" because they lacked "controlled facilities."
It was this specific justification that caught the attention of the inspector general. John Earman found the claim that foreign operations were too dangerous to be "odd." His reasoning was based on the conditions he had observed within the United States. Earman emphasized the "slipshod nature" of some of the safehouses the CIA was already using to conduct unwitting tests on U.S. soil.
The record presents a stark contradiction: the agency felt that foreign environments were too unstable for controlled experimentation, yet it was simultaneously utilizing makeshift, poorly managed domestic sites to administer behavior-altering substances to people who did not know they were subjects.
November 29, 1963
By the end of the meeting, the officials had not reached a final resolution, but they did establish a path for escalation. The participants agreed that if the Directorate for Plans determined "that unwitting testing on American citizens must be continued to operationally prove out these drugs," the matter would have to be placed before the Director of Central Intelligence for a final decision.
For years, the outcome of that potential escalation remained unclear. However, a cover memo from 1975 provides a later glimpse into the DCI's response. According to the archive description, the DCI decided to defer a decision on the testing of U.S. citizens for one year. In the interim, the DCI requested that the agency "please continue the freeze on unwitting testing."
This 1975 documentation creates a window of uncertainty. While the DCI ordered a freeze, the authors of the cover memo noted that they found "no record … that this freeze was ever lifted."
While related files on human ecology and prisoners of war exist in the Internet Archive, and further court documents regarding these programs are held by the NSArchive, this specific memorandum captures a moment of internal friction. It shows an agency split between those who viewed the "operational proof" of drugs as a necessity and those who viewed the lack of controlled facilities—both abroad and in "slipshod" domestic safehouses—as a liability. Whether the freeze mentioned in the 1975 memo was strictly observed, or if the "slipshod" tests continued in the shadows, is a question the record does not answer.