EXPERIMENTING WITH THE MIND

The CIA was eager to examine the use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs
to modify the behavior of targeted individuals, and so it asked
commercial drug manufacturers to pass along samples of medicines
rejected for commercial sale "because of unfavorable side effects,"
according to an undated memorandum included in dozens of CIA documents
released yesterday.

CIA scientists tested some of the drugs on monkeys and mice, the memo
said. Drugs that showed promise, it said, "were then tested at
Edgewood, using volunteer members of the Armed Forces." This appears
to be a reference to an Army laboratory north of Baltimore now called
the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center. The memo doesn't discuss the
reactions of those human subjects.

The three-paragraph memo reports that the late Carl Duckett, a senior
CIA technologist, had said the testing program was not intended to
find new techniques to be used offensively, but rather was an effort
to be able to be able to detect if such drugs were being employed by
others.

Duckett "emphasizes that the program was considered as defensive, in
the sense that we would be able to recognize certain behavior if
similar materials were used against Americans," it states. Duckett,
who was the CIA's deputy director for science and technology, retired
from the CIA in 1977 and died in 1992.

Another document, dated May 8, 1973, mentions the existence of a 1963
account of agency scientists administering mind-or
personality-altering drugs on "unwitting subjects" -- that is, testing
hallucinogens such as LSD on people without their knowledge. The
document doesn't provide details.

One of the most notorious such cases involved the death of Frank R.
Olson, a CIA germ-warfare expert who died in a fall from a hotel
window in 1953, nine days after a CIA doctor spiked Olson's
after-dinner drink with LSD. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford invited
Olson's family to the White House to apologize; the government also
paid the family $750,000.

Sidney Gottlieb, the chief of the CIA's technical services division,
who directed the mind-control experiments, retired from the government
in 1973 and died in 1999. The released documents shed little light on
the those experiments.