Sidney Gottlieb admitted CIA used mental hospitals for behavioral experiments
By Eleanor Voss ·
Prisoners and the criminally insane were subjected to LSD and hypnotics in a bid to manipulate the mind, though the full scope of the Agency's experimental sites remains a gap.
The record of Sidney Gottlieb’s testimony before the Church Committee staff on October 15, 1975, begins with the mechanics of surveillance and ends with a pivot on the use of mental hospitals. The file's catalogue entry records a 98-page report of proceedings in which Gottlieb, a central figure in the CIA's technical services, was questioned about the Agency's efforts to manipulate the human mind and monitor American citizens.
"Generic Awareness"
Much of the initial inquiry focused on MHCHAOS, the CIA program tasked with surveilling U.S. citizens. The committee pressed Gottlieb on whether he knew if any specific Americans had been targets of overseas audio operations. Gottlieb’s response was a study in bureaucratic distance. He testified that he had an "awareness generically" that such operations existed and were likely targeted against Americans abroad, given the mission of the program. However, he maintained that he was never aware of a specific individual, on a specific day, in a specific country.
This distance extended to domestic operations. According to the catalogue entry, Gottlieb agreed with the committee that any support provided by the Technical Services Division (TSD) for audio or surreptitious entry operations within the United States was limited to foreign targets. When the investigators presented a list of high-profile names—including former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, presidential candidate George McGovern, activist Jane Fonda, and journalist Jack Anderson—Gottlieb denied that the TSD had been involved in their surveillance.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
P-1 and A-2
As the questioning shifted from where the CIA was looking to how it was interrogating, the record introduces Project ARTICHOKE. Public records establish that Artichoke was a CIA project developed to research interrogation methods, eventually succeeded by MKUltra in 1953. In his testimony, Gottlieb described Artichoke as involving a "whole series of what I call hypnotics or sleep inducing materials."
The goal was precise: to catch a subject "on his way down to the sleep stage" in the hope that the person would become more open and vulnerable to interrogation. Gottlieb noted a specific procedural detail: these interrogations were conducted in a "sort of a medical setting."
However, the catalogue entry notes that Gottlieb drew a sharp line between Artichoke and other agency experiments coded as "P-1" and "A-2." These were not hypnotics but chemical agents. P-1 referred to LSD, and A-2 referred to Meratran, a stimulant that Gottlieb compared to amphetamines. Unlike the Artichoke experiments, the P-1 and A-2 interrogations did not mimic a medical environment. Gottlieb explained that the objective of this research was to find a technique that was "more covert than the ARTICHOKE technique."
Prisons and Mental Hospitals
The most precarious moment of the testimony recorded in the description involves the location of these experiments. The committee asked Gottlieb directly whether any of these behavioral experiments had taken place in prisons, mental hospitals, or other facilities used to hold criminals or the "criminally insane."
Gottlieb initially answered that they had not. But the record indicates that he changed his answer the following day. He claimed that he had not properly understood the question when he first denied the use of such facilities.
The catalogue entry does not detail the specifics of the corrected answer or provide the list of facilities Gottlieb may have then admitted to using. It simply records the contradiction and the subsequent claim of misunderstanding.
While this 1975 testimony provides a window into the Agency's methodology, other archival fragments hint at a broader operational scale. Related files from the National Security Archive include a 1963 memorandum from Inspector General John S. Earman regarding the MKULTRA program and a 1956 memo from Gottlieb himself regarding expenditures under MKULTRA Subproject 42. These documents exist in the record, but they remain separate from the transcript of the Church Committee hearing.
Gottlieb’s revised testimony regarding the use of prisons and mental hospitals remains a critical gap in the narrative provided by the catalogue entry, leaving the actual scope of the CIA's experimental sites unresolved.