MKULTRA / CLASSROOM SUMMARY OF THE APRIL 1953 APPROVAL
SECRET
TO:Director of Central IntelligenceDATE:13 April 1953RE:Project MKULTRA

Approval is requested to fund research on drugs, hypnosis and behavior outside normal contracting procedures, so that the Agency's sponsorship remains concealed, including from some of the researchers themselves.

Records of planning and approval:                           . Subjects tested:                       .

Follow the Money

The CIA destroyed most of MKULTRA's files in 1973. The receipts survived. This is the program as the accounting paper tells it.

This memo is a classroom summary of what Allen Dulles approved on April 13, 1953, built from the 1977 Senate hearing. The real approval papers were part of what was lost.

WHAT AN UMBRELLA PROJECT IS

Your school probably has an activities account. Money goes in under one name, and then it pays for the robotics club, the yearbook, the field trip and the new scoreboard. If you only saw the account name, you'd have no idea what any of it bought.

MKULTRA worked like that. It wasn't a laboratory or one big experiment. It was a name on a funding line, and under it the CIA paid for separate projects at universities, hospitals, drug companies and prisons. Here's where the school example breaks. Your activities account has a public budget. MKULTRA was built so the people doing the work often couldn't tell who was paying them, and the paper that would explain what each project did was destroyed on purpose. So when someone says MKULTRA did something, the right question is which project, and what's the proof.

Photograph of Sidney Gottlieb

Sidney Gottlieb, 1918 to 1999

Why a government does this

A war for minds.

In September 1950 a journalist named Edward Hunter introduced Americans to a new word: brainwashing. It seemed to explain things that terrified Washington. A Hungarian cardinal confessed at a show trial in 1949 in a flat, rehearsed voice. Captured American airmen in Korea confessed on camera to germ warfare. When the war ended in 1953, 21 American prisoners chose to stay with the communists.

Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty seated between uniformed guards in a crowded Budapest courtroom, 1949
Cardinal Mindszenty on trial in Budapest, February 1949. His flat, rehearsed confession frightened Washington.

On April 10, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles warned in a speech that the Soviets were waging brain warfare. Three days later he approved MKULTRA and allowed it to skip the normal paperwork. A chemist named Sidney Gottlieb ran it from 1953 until it ended in 1964. The stated purpose was defensive: learn the enemy's method before it was used on Americans.

Allen W. Dulles's CIA identification card with his photograph
Declassified by the CIA

Allen W. Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961. He approved MKULTRA on April 13, 1953. The CIA itself later released his ID card to the public. It released almost nothing from the program he approved.

One project the 1977 hearing laid out

The gift that was not a gift.

The 1977 hearing described this project in detail. The CIA sent 375,000 dollars to a private medical institution's building fund. The agency's top management approved it, and its own lawyer wrote an opinion saying it was legal. Walk the money through the chain one step at a time. Then turn on the second layer and see who knew where it came from.

Step 1
The CIA
Knew. Approved by the Director of Central Intelligence and backed by the agency's General Counsel.
Step 2
An intermediary
Knew. A private fund acting as a cutout. Its only job was to make CIA money look like private money.
Step 3
A private hospital's building fund
Not told. The hearing says the institution did not know the true source of the gift.
Step 4
Federal matching funds
No sign it knew. Because the money looked private, the building qualified for a federal match. The hearing gives no evidence the matching agency knew it was matching CIA money.
$0
The money is still at CIA headquarters.
185 researchers, 80 institutions

Eighty doors.

The 1977 hearing counted 80 institutions that took MKULTRA money. Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA Director in 1977, called their names the most important new information in the recovered files, and then refused to release them. Many of the scientists, he said, never knew who was paying. Press a category to light it up. Then press the last button.

Pick a category.
Why the paper is so thin

Missing on purpose.

In 1963 the CIA's own Inspector General reviewed MKULTRA and wrote that present practice is to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs. The most important decisions were never written down. Then in January 1973, on the order of Director Richard Helms, the operational files were destroyed. The Rockefeller Commission later counted 152 files gone. What survived was mostly accounting paper stored somewhere else. Every claim this week stands on that paper, and every claim has to be measured against it.

Your card

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