The Top Secret Testimony of CIA’s MKULTRA Chief, 50 Years Later
Washington, D.C., October 30, 2025 – The CIA experienced “as many failures as successes” in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency’s former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. “[T]he results of everything told us that the money expended, the effort expended, the security risk involved, when you add everything up … it was probably not a high pay-off program.”
The long-secret transcripts of Gottlieb’s testimony to the staff of the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”) were published today by the National Security Archive, 50 years after the historic intelligence oversight hearings, along with a selection of declassified CIA memos and other records concerning MKULTRA and related projects that Gottlieb was asked about during his Senate deposition. The Church Committee transcripts are among the highlights of the Digital National Security Archive collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, published in 2024 by ProQuest. Other documents were found among the recently declassified documents archived in the CIA’s FOIA Reading Room.
Among other things, the recently declassified transcripts from the closed-door hearings held on October 15-18, 1975, shed new light on the bizarre and abusive research projects associated with Gottlieb and the Agency’s Technical Services Staff (TSS), including the administration of mind-altering drugs in situations where, in Gottlieb’s words, “the unwitting and total lack of awareness on the part of somebody who was being interrogated that way might have been the key thing.”
At one point, Senate staffers asked Gottlieb about a document indicating that one interrogee had been secretly given a large dose of LSD that induced a “severe classic paranoid reaction” so extreme that he was declared mentally ill by an equally unwitting psychiatrist and was thus “discredited in the eyes of the group with which he had been working.” Gottlieb said that “it had been recognized that this kind of thing might be a need that P-1 [LSD] might help with, to make somebody behave erratically for the purpose of his colleagues losing faith in his ability to act responsibly.”
Other parts of the hearing focused on Gottlieb’s involvement in CIA assassination plots, especially those targeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and its support to the activities of other federal agencies through MHCHAOS, the subject of the earlier Rockefeller Commission report. The Committee also asked Gottlieb about his own experiences taking LSD, which he characterized as “disorienting” and “otherworldly.” Gottlieb said that LSD “gave you propioceptions,” which he said meant “perceiving feeling in yourself as opposed to feelings of things outside yourself, like seeing a door as opposed to feeling something inside your own body.”
Details about MKULTRA and related programs first emerged in the mid-1970s alongside revelations about CIA assassination plots and other misdeeds that were exposed in leaks to the media and in official investigations, most notably by the Church and Pike committees and the Rockefeller Commission. In the late-1970s, the CIA’s Victims Task Force reached out to presumed victims of the CIA’s experiments, some of whom later filed lawsuits after learning that the Agency had secretly drugged them or members of their families.
As author Stephen Kinzer wrote in Poisoner in Chief, his 2019 biography of Gottlieb, it was in 1975 that journalists writing about revelations from the Rockefeller Commission “pierced Gottlieb’s shroud of anonymity for the first time” after stories linked him to the death of Army scientist Frank Olson, drug tests on unwitting U.S. citizens, and the destruction of records related to these programs. “Gottlieb was an obvious target” according to Kinzer. His chief bureaucratic ally, Richard Helms, who had been named CIA director in 1966, had been fired two years earlier. MKULTRA “was no longer well regarded.” Perhaps worst of all, “he was tainted by the fact that his Technical Services Division had collaborated with the Watergate burglars.”
But while declassified records and other evidence show that U.S. research into human behavior control and efforts to operationalize these methods extended across multiple U.S. agencies and involved numerous officials, few, if any, were more central to these programs than Gottlieb, who was involved in nearly every aspect of the program, including research, field tests, and the use of these methods in intelligence operations. The declassified evidence also shows that Gottlieb was a key bureaucratic player who signed off on hundreds of MKULTRA subprojects and who developed clandestine relationships with universities, prisons, hospitals, private laboratories, and private foundations that made it difficult to trace the programs back to the Agency.
The Church Committee faced considerable obstacles in reconstructing the story, especially since Gottlieb and CIA director Richard Helms destroyed most of the original project records in 1973. On top of that, Gottlieb’s attorney Terry Lenzner convinced the Senate to grant Gottlieb immunity in exchange for his testimony. But even with these protections, Gottlieb’s memory was suspiciously fuzzy for a man who had only been retired from the CIA for a couple of years. Gottlieb remembered so little that one wonders whether he might have been subjected to one of the memory-erasing techniques that the Agency tried to develop. But the far simpler explanation is that, even with congressional immunity, Gottlieb was concerned that his testimony on some subjects could expose him to civil lawsuits or worse down the road.
Gottlieb and Lenzner said as much during the deposition. During discussion of the Olson case, Lenzner asked “who has access to this transcript” and whether “a private party in a lawsuit” could obtain Gottlieb’s deposition through a subpoena. Committee staffer Elliot Maxwell said that while the rules did not address the issue specifically, he did not think it was possible to obtain executive session testimony in a lawsuit. “The Freedom of Information Act does not affect it?” asked Gottlieb. “It does not apply,” Maxwell replied.
Maxwell was wrong on both counts. The transcripts were first declassified and given to the estate of MKULTRA victim Stanley Glickman in 1995 during the course of a lawsuit against the CIA, Helms and Gottlieb, though it was not made available to the general public. The declassified transcripts were finally made public only recently in response to a 2017 FOIA request.
In their questioning of Gottlieb, Church Committee staffers relied heavily on CIA records obtained by the Committee, including two key reports by the CIA inspector general that took a critical look at programs linked to Gottlieb: a 1963 review of MKULTRA and related activities (published in a previous Electronic Briefing Book) and a 1967 investigation of the Agency’s involvement in assassination plots against foreign leaders (Document 19).
The transcripts of Gottlieb’s testimony before the members of the Church Committee earlier that month, from October 7-9, 1975, have not yet been declassified, but are referenced throughout the Committee’s interim report on “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” published in November 1975. Gottlieb appeared at this first series of secret hearings using the pseudonym “Joseph Scheider” and was asked about his role in assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, among other things.
ARTICHOKE and P-1 Interrogations
The conversation on the first day of Gottlieb’s testimony to Senate staff focused on the early years of CIA drug testing, his participation in interrogations where drugs were administered, and his own experiences as both witting and unwitting subject of LSD and other drug tests.
Gottlieb said “the first six months to a year” he was working at the CIA “were confusing indeed about what my job was and what was going on.” He recalled some “ARTICHOKE activity”—which he said referred to “barbiturates administered in the truth serum, quote, unquote, mode in a sort of medical setting,” and mentioned related operations that were “planned for and I think finally carried out in Europe.”
Although he claimed to never have been present at an ARTICHOKE interrogation, Gottlieb said they involved a substance called Nembutal, a powerful barbiturate, along with a “series” of what he called “hypnotics or sleep inducing materials … to catch a person on his way down to the sleep stage, and hope that he would be more open and vulnerable to interrogation.” The use of a “medical setting” was not necessarily done to protect the subject of the interrogation, according to Gottlieb, but was more like an elaborate ruse to make it so “the man was aware in some way of some reason for his being in this medical setting, with physicians around him, getting injections.”
The medical setting, even if artificial, was what differentiated the ARTICHOKE interrogations from those Gottlieb admitted to witnessing himself, mainly during the 1950s. These are referred to throughout the transcript as P-1 (LSD) and A-2 (Meratran) interrogations and are sometimes called “MKDELTA interrogations.” Gottlieb told the Committee that TSS wanted something “that was more covert than the ARTICHOKE technique”—something that did not require the subject to believe they were under medical care. “That was the general idea, or to get as close to that kind of capability as we could.”
Investigators also probed Gottlieb for information on how the drugs were tested and the distinction between testing—where they were trying to understand the properties of the substance—and operational use in support of “an approved operation of the Central Intelligence Agency,” which was the focus of MKDELTA. But Gottlieb said there was also “such a thing as operationally testing … where the two get combined.” On the one hand, “it is being potentially useful to an approved operation of the Agency, and the other is, it is providing what I would call research information in a testing sense.”
The Committee staff also asked Gottlieb about the extent of CIA-sponsored drug testing in prisons and psychiatric facilities in the U.S. Asked on the first day of testimony if he recalled “ARTICHOKE operations either in prisons, mental hospitals or other facilities that might hold either criminals or the criminally insane,” Gottlieb replied: “I don’t remember anything like that.” However, the next day, Gottlieb said he did remember that TSS conducted “general research” at hospitals with “psychochemicals,” although he took issue with the word “prison” to describe what he said were treatment facilities run by the Public Health Service for “people with criminal background.”
Gottlieb was similarly evasive in response to questions about whether experiments were done at universities, finally settling on this statement: “[T]here was some of the work involving such testing that went on at hospitals that were affiliated with universities, and might have used university students as a source of volunteers.” Asked again about these kinds of projects on the final day of testimony, Gottlieb admitted that the CIA had “an extensive research program in regard to human experimentation on psychochemicals” under MKULTRA, adding that “a lot of these things were done in hospitals and mental institutions. And when you say hospitalization, the people were already hospitalized.”
Senate staffers referred Gottlieb to memos from ARTICHOKE Committee meetings in 1953 in which CIA officials discussed the need for a “large numbers of bodies” to “be used for research and experimentation in regard to psychochemicals,” the “problem of the returning POW’s from Korea,” and the interrogation of “particular POW’s at Valley Forge and proposals to interrogate them.” In most cases, Gottlieb failed to remember details about specific meetings and operations.
But Gottlieb did recall working with the Army in certain MKDELTA interrogations. While the precise location of the operation is redacted from the transcript, the timeframe coincides with a reported trip by Gottlieb to East Asia in 1953 to assist with prisoner interrogations. He told the Committee he participated in six to 12 interrogations.
To the best of my recollection, I was approached by an individual from the headquarters desk involved that the approval of such a trip and such a series of technically assisted interrogations—and by technically assisted I mean using LSD—consisted of approval by the Branch Chief, the Division Chief, and the DDP… I discussed with [deleted] the nature of the assistance that LSD could provide in this interrogation. And there was [sic] some cables exchanged, I believe, although I can’t remember that in detail now… And I can’t recall the specific arrangement, whether I was looking through it, through a mirror or anything like that, I know that I saw the interrogations.
Committee staffers direct Gottlieb to another memo about a P-1 interrogation indicating that, “The Officer to give the P-1 was familiar with it use, and had worked with the technique in Europe.” While claiming to not remember the specific case, Gottlieb admitted that he himself “fit this description.”
On the third day of testimony, Gottlieb was asked about a little-known program called QKHILLTOP, about which he offers few details, although it has since been learned that it was a program through which the CIA sought to study what they believed were highly advanced brainwashing techniques in use by Communist China. One of the Church Committee staffers described a record they had seen about a HILLTOP interrogation in which an unwitting subject had been given a large dose of LSD in a scheme to have them declared mentally ill by a physician who was also unaware that the drug had been administered.
The cable I referred to indicated that 200 units of P-1 were given to subject number one, and that this precipitated ‘severe classic paranoid reaction’. The subject believed that light bulbs were emitting hot and cold rays to produce ‘scientific death’, and told the guard that someone was trying to read his mind and went into a schizophrenic reaction.
“[T]he doctor diagnosed the subject as mentally ill,” according to the document. “And it was apparently done in order to have the subject labeled as mentally ill, which would allow him to be discredited in the eyes of the group with which he had been working.” Gottlieb did not remember that particular case but said “it had been recognized that this kind of thing might be a need that P-1 might help with, to make somebody behave erratically for the purpose of his colleagues losing faith in his ability to act responsibly.”
Senate investigators later asked Gottlieb about a separate MKDELTA Interrogation that was reported as a “success” because “it induced a paranoid reaction in the presence of an unwitting psychiatrist” such that it was possible to have the subject “committed to an institution at will, thereby denying to the [deleted] forever a loyal follower.” Gottlieb said that using LSD guaranteed that “you are almost sure to get some peculiar behavior on the part of an individual. And to the extent that that was useful to in Agency operations, it is an effective use of P-1.”
But Gottlieb said that his opinion about the usefulness of LSD had changed with time.
[T]here was a continuum, if I can call it that, at one end of which was, if not an expectation, the possibility of this material being something you administered to somebody who later, when he is asked questions, simply gives answers where he wouldn’t before. That is one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum was that the material had no specific effect on interrogation, but what it did was to create a caricature of a person’s normal personality so that a skilled interrogator or psychologist can exploit the weaknesses that are now caricature.
Gottlieb was also asked about drug tests on unwitting “volunteers” in the early 1960s, including U.S. military operations designated DERBY HAT and THIRD CHANCE. While not recalling those specific operations, Gottlieb said that, during the Vietnam War, the military was “considering the use of LSD on a fairly large scale.”
[A]nd by fairly large scale I am talking about in an interrogation sense, interrogating a number of prisoners – and that we were asked to come on that. And I forget what the occasion was, and I forget who was there. But I do remember being there at least once with Mr. [Desmond] FitzGerald when he was DDP [Deputy Director for Plans].
Gottlieb said that the Agency had “as many failures as successes” with LSD. Asked why the Committee did not see evidence of P-1 interrogation cases that had been judged to be failures, Gottlieb suggested that the records of those operations in many cases reflected what the reporting officers wanted their bosses to hear. “[The reports of success] have to be seen with a grain of salt – not that people falsified anything, but that they were very close to the situation in their evaluation of how much the national interest was served by information that they got from their interrogation… [T]he results of everything told us that the money expended, the effort expended, the security risk involved, when you add everything up, it probably was not – and I am searching for the right expression here – it was probably not a high pay-off program.”
Drug Experiments at Domestic Safehouses
To further probe the subject of drug tests on unwitting subjects, the Committee peppered Gottlieb with questions about CIA-supplied safehouses in New York City and San Francisco that were staffed by federal narcotics agent George White—an arrangement his boss Richard Helms described as “using the Bureau of Narcotics as a ‘cutout.’” Gottlieb said that “cutout” meant “to remove the CIA by one or two steps from the activity itself.” In a December 1963 memo later cited by Committee staffers on day four of the testimony, Helms had called the project with White “eight years of close collaboration.”
Gottlieb described how they used the safehouses to conduct an array of experiments using drugs, hypnosis and other techniques:
We developed a liaison with the Bureau of Narcotics whereby we would share information on LSD or any other drugs… The mechanism for this was our funding of two safe houses at different times for the Bureau of Narcotics which the Bureau would use for meeting informants and pursuing their own business, and which premises we would occasionally use for our own meetings.
Gottlieb even suggested that he himself had taken LSD at one of the safehouses: “As I remember it, some of the experiments we did on self-administration of drugs took place in one of these apartments.” He later said again that he believed “that some of these meetings where we self-administered LSD early on were held there.”
Gottleib and White had a friendly relationship, according to various accounts, and White’s diary entries, some of which are published in the DNSA collection, record many instances of Gottlieb visiting the safehouses. Gottlieb told the committee he met with him “three to four times a year.” White “had some prior experience with OSS [Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA] during World War II in using marijuana-related material in interrogations,” Gottlieb said. “And that was during a period when I was looking for this kind of knowledgeable individual specialist in an operational sense.”
Gottlieb said he worked out “an arrangement” with White.
[H]e would get supplies of LSD from us, and use them in circumstances that he felt were of relevancy to his work of dealing with informants and working in the general field of narcotics enforcement, and that we would be made privy, at least in a general way, to the results and effectiveness of these activities, in return for which we would financially support the maintenance of these pads or safe houses which the Bureau of Narcotics, as I remember, badly needed for these operations, but had financial problems as to.
The Committee showed Gottlieb a memo from December 1953 on the status of the Agency’s LSD supply, noting that White had been provided with LSD by the CIA by then at the latest. The memo came as the Agency scrambled to account for its LSD research and testing program after Frank Olson’s death in late November.
Other records, including White’s diary entries, show that he had been experimenting with CIA-supplied LSD for nearly a year at that point. White first spoke to Gottlieb about the project in May 1952 and while he did not get “final clearance” until the next year, his “experiments” dosing unwitting people with Gottlieb’s LSD were already underway in January 1953 and months before the relationship was formalized in the summer of 1953.
Gottlieb claimed to not remember much about how White reported back to him on the results of his drug experiments, but said that White “was trying to use this material as close to the manner in which we at that time thought we might find some use of operationally, namely to see whether we could elicit more information from informants and other people he was dealing with.” He later added that White’s experiments “were very useful operationally. It was practically the only information we had that was relevant to an operational situation or something near it.” (Gottlieb agreed with the Committee that this was excepting “the interrogations that were being performed overseas by the Agency”—presumably the P-1 and A-2 interrogations that they discussed at length previously.)
Asked again to reflect on the project with White, Gottlieb said: “I don’t think this corner of the ULTRA project was looked upon as a scientific experiment, it was more of an operational, simulated operational test. And I don’t think, as I remember it, that we were hoping to get what I would call scientific information from it.”
MKDELTA, Defensive Pharmacology, and the Death of Frank Olson
Having admitted to taking LSD “from six to 12 times,” the Committee asked Gottlieb if he could describe its effect:
I would say that by and large [it was] an effect that I would call disorienting, otherworldly, gave you propioceptions, which means perceiving feeling in yourself as opposed to feelings of things outside yourself, like seeing a door as opposed to feeling something inside your own body.
Gottlieb said that they “did administer the drug to CIA employees ” for “defensive pharmacology purposes” to familiarize them with the feeling of LSD in case it was ever surreptitiously given to them. Gottlieb remembered it as a program where they approached “people who were going to serve in the Soviet Union or in places that would be exposed” and said that Agency officials were told: “We have this capability of exposing you to this drug … because you might someday be covertly attacked by it.”
Underscoring his point, one Senate staffer then read to Gottlieb a portion of a January 1952 memo from the chief of the CIA Medical Staff, who cited “ample evidence in reports of innumerable interrogations that the Communists are utilizing drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and possibly hypnosis against their enemies.” It was “difficult not to keep from becoming rabid about our apparent laxity,” the memo said. “We are forced by this mountain of evidence to assume a more aggressive role in the development of these techniques, but must be cautious to maintain strict inviolable control because of the havoc that could be wrought by such techniques in unscrupulous hands.”
Referring to paragraph 22 of a July 15, 1953, CIA memo, one Senate staffer said it was “the first reference that I have seen to a program under carefully controlled conditions of testing techniques in chemicals on CIA officers.” The paragraph is almost completely redacted in the declassified version of the memo (Document 13), so it’s not clear what they are referring to, but Gottlieb said he did not think these were the same as the self-administered tests taken among TSS staff and others that he had previously mentioned.
The most controversial of these self-administered tests took place in November 1953, when Gottlieb organized a retreat for a group of scientists and other officials from the CIA and their partners at the Army’s Special Operations Division (SOD) at Deep Creep Lake in Western Maryland. The nature of the relationship between the two programs was especially important in light of the revelation that an Army scientist who worked on the project, Frank Olson, died mysteriously just ten days after participating in the Deep Creek Lake experiment.
Gottlieb said that the CIA’s relationship with SOD had “an offensive connotation in the sense of preparing for a contingency either in a hot war or some special operation that was levied on TSD [Technical Services Division, successor to TSS], and also as a defensive study of the potential of U.S. individuals or installations being covertly attacked by BW materials abroad.”
One Senate staffer reminded Gottlieb that he had said in his opening statement “that either sometime during the summer or fall you met with individuals from SOD, and that at the meeting it was discussed whether there should be a covert application of LSD to determine what the effects would be on a meeting of someone adding LSD to a drink or whatever.” Gottlieb strongly implied that Olson attended this meeting and thus would have known that he was among a group of CIA and SOD officials who had agreed at some unspecified time to be given the drug without their knowledge.
While he claimed to not remember details, Gottlieb said that “unwitting administration was talked about as being the only way to determine” what effect it would have in real operations. “[U]nwitting in this sense obviously meant that they knew they might get it sometime,” he said. Gottlieb said he recalled “a mix of individuals being there. And my recollection, including Mr. Olson, is that they might not have been completely the ones that were at the Western Maryland meeting, but roughly the same mix.” Olson is one of just a few people that he specifically remembers attending the earlier meeting. “I had the impression,” Gottlieb said, “that we had the agreement of that group at some time in the future to participate in that kind of an experiment.” There was no formal agreement. “There certainly wasn’t anything in writing.”
One Committee staffer wondered why, if the object of the experiment was to determine the effect of LSD on the unwitting, they chose to administer the drug to “a group of people who knew that at some point they would be given LSD, and secondly, a group of people a number of whom had previously taken LSD?” Gottlieb said they hoped they would not remember the agreement and that “their reactions would be innocent ones.” For the ones who had taken LSD before, “there was an ancillary gain, would they recognize it or not.”
Regarding how the LSD was given to the attendees at Deep Creek Lake, Gottlieb remembered that it “was administered in Cointreau, and that Dr. Lashbrook had prepared that earlier, and that it had about 60 gammas [micrograms] per whatever was considered a drink-sized amount of Cointreau.” Asked if he had been given LSD that night, Gottlieb said, “As I remember it, yes. But my remembrance is hazy on this point.” Asked again whether he had taken LSD that night, Gottlieb said, “My recollection is that I did.” Asked if medical observers were present, Gottlieb said there were not.
Ten years later, in 1963, the CIA’s inspector general, John Earman, led a critical review of the MKULTRA program and related projects, finding, among other things, that “some of the testing of substances under simulated operational conditions was judged to involve excessive risk to the Agency.” The primary sticking point among top officials responsible for continuing the reformulated program under what would be its new designation, MKSEARCH, was whether the Agency should continue “the testing of certain drugs on unwitting U.S. citizens.” Could the Agency continue to test substances like LSD on Americans who were unaware that they were being drugged?
The issue ultimately landed on the desk of CIA director John McCone, a Kennedy appointee whose skepticism about the utility of the program had prompted the inspector general’s review. At a November 1963 meeting recorded in a memo by Earman, Gottlieb and another official (whose name is redacted) “argued for the continuation of unwitting testing, using as the principal point that controlled testing cannot be depended upon for accurate results.” Earman and CIA deputy director Marshall Carter disagreed. There was also discussion about the “possibility of unwitting tests on foreign nationals.” The issue was ultimately put before McCone, who, according to Gottlieb and others, never acted on it. “A very clear recollection I have is his being needled on the point several times, be reminded that he hadn’t made a decision,” Gottlieb told the Committee.
MHCHAOS
Another top concern of the Church Committee staff was any evidence of CIA involvement with operations inside the United States. As Archive analyst Jeff Richelson wrote in 2001:
TSD had become an object of concern in this period because of its technical assistance to the efforts of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to burgle the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist as well as to dig up derogatory information on Edward Kennedy. As part of an overall examination of the possible CIA activities outside its charter, known as the “Family Jewels,” [CIA director James] Schlesinger asked agency components to prepare relevant reports.
Senate investigators grilled the former TSD head about support that his staff had provided to the FBI, among other federal agencies, for domestic operations. Gottlieb denied any knowledge of surveillance operations targeting the Chilean Embassy, activist Jane Fonda and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, among others, but admitted that TSD “did have an on-going cooperative effort on the technical side” with the FBI “where we would talk to them about the devices we had, and where they would, as I remember it, buy devices or borrow devices we had when they thought it would help them.” Gottlieb said he could “see lots of places where one of those could have been used on whatever they wanted to” but denied knowing anything about who or what the targets were.
Senate staff member Burt Wides asked Gottlieb about a now-famous memo he prepared in response to Schlesinger’s request for “Family Jewels” information. Did Gottlieb recall “preparing a memorandum to the Deputy Director for Science and Technology in May of 1973 in the course of responding to Director Schlesinger’s request for a summary of possibly questionable activities?”
Gottlieb’s response, “I don’t think I was head of TSD then,” was at least partly right. TSD was abolished in early May 1973, and Gottlieb was set to retire the next month. The document they were asking about, as he surely knew, was essentially his exit memo—a laundry list of secret services TSD had provided in support of the domestic operations of other U.S. agencies. (Document 20) Months earlier, Gottlieb and his longtime protector at the Agency, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, had destroyed the vast majority of Agency records on the MKULTRA program just days before Helms himself was fired for refusing to help the Nixon White House concoct a cover story for the Watergate break-in. For whatever reason, Gottlieb’s reply to Wides’ question about the May 8, 1973, memo prompted Church Committee investigators to take the rest of the discussion off the record.
But Gottlieb faced additional questions about the memo a few days later, near the end of his fourth day of testimony. What did Gottlieb make of a separate memo directed to the new DCI, William Colby, indicating that his boss, the deputy director for science and technology, Carl Duckett, was “very uncomfortable with what Sid Gottlieb is reporting” in the May 8 memo “and thinks the Director [of the CIA] will be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program”? Gottlieb told the Committee that he didn’t “understand what Duckett says when he says Colby will be ill-advised to say he was acquainted with this program,” adding, “I would only interpret that by saying that Carl Duckett was trying in some way to protect the Director here… I was simply trying to come up with the information that Duckett apparently asked me for.”
The Health Alteration Committee
Church Committee investigators spent considerable time asking Gottlieb about his role in CIA assassination plots, especially those targeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which were the subject of a May 23, 1967, report by the CIA’s inspector general (Document 19) that was based, in part, on interviews with Gottlieb and others. Investigators cited the report numerous times in probing Gottlieb for information about his involvement in the so-called Health Alteration Committee and plots involving poison cigars, a wetsuit tainted with botulin toxin, exploding seashells, and a depilatory made from radioactive thallium salts. Of particular interest to the Church Committee was a scheme to release an aerosolized form of LSD inside a radio station when Castro was inside broadcasting. Regarding poison cigars, Gottlieb claimed to remember little beyond having “a recollection of the events having happened that cigars were prepared” for use against the Cuban leader.
Gottlieb admitted that he talked to Richard Bissell, the CIA official in charge of covert operations, about techniques that, as one Church Committee staffer said, “could either produce death or disorientation of a foreign leader.” Asked again if they had discussed “various technical means of killing a foreign leader,” Gottlieb said, “Yes,” but did not remember the specific topic of cigars nor any other methods or devices coming up in those discussions. He said remembered hearing about plots to poison cigars with botulinum, a deadly toxin, but that he himself “certainly didn’t have that mission.” He agreed with the characterization by one Committee staff member that it was “a scheme calculated to produce the death of whoever smoked these cigars” or even someone who merely “put those cigars in his mouth.” Asked whether he knew that the cigars were being prepared for Castro, Gottlieb said, “I think so.”
Much time is spent on the fourth and final day of Gottlieb’s testimony trying to pinpoint the precise date of handwritten notes taken by CIA covert operations specialist William Harvey, who was at the center of many of the plots against Castro, about a meeting where he claimed to have discussed assassination plots with Gottlieb. [Harvey’s notes are attached to the October 17, 1975, transcript. (Document 3)] While Gottlieb was unable to recall anything about the meeting, Committee investigators tell him they believe the meeting took place on January 25, 1961, just five days after the inauguration of President Kennedy, and included cryptic references to “executive action” and what they suggest are references to Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Che Guevara (“El Benefactor,” “three wrongs”).
Asked “what can you tell us about the source of authority for discussing assassination capabilities or establishing an assassination capability project,” Gottlieb says, “My impression now … is that Bissell asked [deleted] to create such a capability, or discussed with him creating such a capability,” but that he had no knowledge whether Bissell was acting with our without authority from either the DCI or the President. Asked whether he had discussions with unnamed individuals for the “purpose of developing materials that could be supply [sic] to an operator for an assassination attempt,” Gottlieb said, “I would have to have done that. I don’t remember specific conversations, but in the course of implementing the Camp Detrick work, we would have to have done that.”
