The CIA and radiation experiments on humans

John Deutch, the current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a panel member on the Interagency Group on Human Radiation Experiments, which was created on January 15 1994, under President Clinton’s order, directing government agencies to look into unethical experiments conducted during the Cold War. John Deutch was also a panel members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Presenting the Final Report of their findings in October 1995, Chair Ruth R. Faden thanked Clinton ‘for his courage and leadership in appointing the Advisory Committee’.(1)

On January 4, 1994, before Clinton’s orders, James Woosley, then the Director of Central Intelligence, had issued an Agency-wide order to search for ‘possible CIA involvement in testing for the effects of radiation’. Following the Executive Order of January 17, 1994, the CIA established an in-house Human Radiation Experiments Steering Group composed of representatives from all the CIA directorates, the DCI’s office and from offices dealing with congressional, legal, public, and historical issues, to conduct a search. Woosley commissioned David Gries,(2) then director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), to oversee the search.(3)

In the course of their search the CIA did discover documents which clearly suggested the Agency’s involvement in human radiation testings. Despite this evidence, the Company claimed that these records did not prove concretely the CIA’s involvement in human radiation experiments – despite the CIA’s long history of involvement in unethical human experiments over several decades. In a carefully worded, classified memorandum of January 21, 1994, David Gries focused on the question of whether the CIA had ‘deliberately subjected human beings to ionised radiation, whether in tests to determine the effects of radiation on human beings or in efforts to discover operational uses for radioactive substances or their emissions’. By thus narrowing the scope of the search, Gries enabled the Agency to circumvent its involvement with private contractors, or laboratories which were commissioned to conduct such research for the Agency – damage limitation for any future implications and law suits that might follow.(4)(5)

Guided by the narrow focus of Gries’ memorandum, the CIA did not search specifically for information on the 1949 Green Run experiment and other intentional releases of radiation, or for foreign intelligence information and reports that may have influenced other agencies to conduct experiments. Subsequently, on April 13 1994, the CIA issued a statement to the Advisory Committee that, following an electronic review of approximately 34 million documents, a manual review of 480,300 pages, and nearly 50 interviews,(6) ‘no documents were found to date to suggest that CIA conducted experiments or operations using ionized radiation on human subjects.'(7) The CIA’s statement further claimed that if such experiments were conducted, they were done so by the CIA contractors, and that CIA had no interest in them. What was significant, however, elsewhere in that statement was the CIA’s own admission that based on its records of its MKULTRA program, it might have conducted such experiments.

The MKULTRA program was a group of projects ‘concerned with research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.'(8) (emphasis added) One of the CIA’s documents clearly states that ‘additional avenues to control the human behavior’ were to include ‘radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and material.'(9)

The CIA and human radiation experiments

With input from numerous independent sources and researchers, as well as victims, the staff of the Advisory Committee made thirty requests for information and records in pursuit of potential leads to the CIA. Despite the CIA’s involvement in the 1950s and 1960s in notorious human experimentation programs to control human behaviour, using techniques which, as the records show, included radiation, nothing could be found by the Agency. Yet documents from MKULTRA and several other projects clearly make references to the use of radiation as part of their research efforts. Additionally, at least one CIA officer attended the Department of Defense meetings in the early 1950s at which human radiation experiments were discussed in conjunction with atomic bomb testings.

The CIA’s human behaviour control program was chiefly motivated by perceived Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques. The CIA originated its first program in 1950 under the name of BLUEBIRD, which in 1951, after Canada and Britain had been included, was changed to ARTICHOKE. MKULTRA officially began in April 1953 as a clandestine funding mechanism for a large array of human behaviour research. Technically, MKULTRA was closed in 1964, but some of its programs remained active under project MKSEARCH well into the 1970s. MKULTRA was run by the Technical Services Staff (TSS), which is also known as Technical Services Division (TSD). The main purpose of these programs was their potential use in espionage and covert operations.

In 1973, tipped-off about forthcoming investigations, Richard Helms, then Director of Central Intelligence, ordered the destruction of any MKULTRA records. In 1976, in testimony to the Church Committee, Helms confessed that ‘there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations’ and that ‘these would be sensitive in this kind of thing; but since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of the files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will.’ The Church Committee found some records during its investigation in 1976; but also noted that the practice of MKULTRA at the time was ‘to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs’.(10)

The focal point of MKULTRA was the use of humans as unwitting subjects. The CIA sponsored numerous experiments of this kind. After the death of Dr. Frank Olson in 1953 after he had been given LSD, an internal CIA investigation warned about the dangers of such experimentation, but the CIA persisted in this practice for at least another ten years. Despite another report, by the CIA’s Inspector General in 1963, recommending the termination of testing on unwitting subjects, Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Helms continued to advocate covert testing on the ground that ‘positive operational capability to use drugs is diminished, owing to lack of realistic testing……we are less capable of staying up with the Soviet advances in this field.'(11) On the subject of moral issues in connection with covert human experiments, Helms commented, ‘We have no answer to the moral issue’.(12)

In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by John Marks, in 1977 the CIA discovered additional MKULTRA records in financial files held by the Office of Technical Services which had not been indexed under the name MKULTRA. These documents became the subject of Senator Edward Kennedy’s hearings in 1977. The 1963 CIA Inspector General investigation report on MKULTRA states that the program was ‘concerned with research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior’, and that ‘radiation’ was one of the additional ‘avenues to control the human behavior’.(13) The CIA was unable to provide any logical or convincing explanation of this to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

The Advisory Committee members found a number of CIA documents on the 140 MKULTRA sub-projects with references to radiation. In sub-project 35, for example, the CIA secretly provided $375,000 for a new wing at Georgetown University Hospital in 1950s, to be used in chemical and biological programs. Dr. Charles F. Geschickter, a Georgetown doctor, provided cover for the CIA’s work, and with that money he funded the radioisotope lab and equipment.(14) In Sub-project 86, Dr. Wallace Chan received CIA funds for research on polygraph machines and other means of establishing the veracity of agents. In an undated Memorandum for the Record, Chan proposed ‘artificial means of establishing positive identification’ (known as covert marking) involving ionizing radiation: namely, radioisotopes, with predetermined half lives, selectively implanted and/or injected; and radiologically opaque foreign bodies selectively implanted and/or injected into predetermined sites in the human body.(15)

Dr.James Hamilton, a CIA consultant under MKULTRA sub-project 140 (which later became MKSEARCH sub-project 3), with funds provided by the CIA, was to set up and operate a so-called ‘sleeper laboratory’. Instead, Hamilton used the funds to set up a lab in the Vacaville California Prison Medical Facility and conducted tests on prisoners. A March 30 1965 letter from Hamilton to the Geschickter Foundation, which served as the funding ‘cut-out’, Hamilton stated: ‘we are now conducting a new series of experiments on 100 prisoner-subjects, in which radioactive iodine uptake of the thyroid and T-4 uptake of red cells, and several other measures which we have developed, are being related to previously studied variables.'(16) Today Hamilton claims to have no recollection of ever having done any experiments on the prisoners.(17)

BLUEBIRD-ARTICHOKE documents make several references to ionising radiation. One CIA History Staff Memo describes an undated outline of ARTICHOKE research which lists ‘radiation’ among many ‘other fields’ that ‘have been explored’, in addition to chemicals, hypnosis, and psychiatry. Another Card File from the ARTICHOKE records on ‘Radiant Energy’, discusses the possibility of a ‘sleep ray’, stating that ‘it is possible that some newer field of radiant energy, some atomic particles, could be aimed at sleep centers in the brain, or at brain centers that inhibit the waking state. Sudden sleeping might be produced in this way, with an unwitting subject if the apparatus were worked from another room.'(18) However, this proposal was rejected by Dr. Webb Haymaker, an expert from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, on the grounds that ‘he doubted that any such approach, as by ultrasonic or other radiant energy, would ever be possible’.(19)

Another ARTICHOKE card file on ‘Tracer Techniques’, stated that Massachusetts General Hospital had developed a technique ‘for the tracing of radioactive material throughout the human body and particularly the brain’. It went on to say, ‘Along these lines, several of our most important consultants have constantly urged exploration of the tracer techniques as a method of advancing ARTICHOKE studies.'(20)

Although MKULTRA sub-projects 17 and 46 involved the use of radioisotope tracers on laboratory animals to study the the effects of LSD, and despite the fact that the CIA used LSD on humans with one fatal casualty, it is unclear whether similar radioactive tracers were used on humans in the course of CIA’s LSD experiments.

The CIA and the US Army drug tests

From 1950 until the 1970s, the CIA and the US Army closely collaborated in conducting LSD and other chemical tests on humans.(21) Most of the Army’s tests on humans were conducted at Fort Detrick and at the Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories (EARL), both in Maryland. The Army’s key contractor for this research was Dr. Albert Kligman, from the University of Pennsylvania. Some of Kligman’s research for EARL, including the use of radioisotopic material, was conducted on inmates from Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania.(22) In the mid-1960s, Dr. Kligman founded the Ivy Research Laboratories (IRL), the conduit for EARL to perform experiments which, despite the fact that EARL’s own records on human experimentations raised some serious ethical questions, would not have been possible to conduct at EARL. Records show that in 1971 the CIA provided EARL with $37,000 to test a classified glycolate compound, known only as EA3167. A potentially incapacitating psycho-chemical agent, EA3167 was tested on human subjects, including prisoners from Holmesburg Prison. One of the main objectives of the CIA in these tests were to synthesise radio-labeled EA3167. CIA’s contract with EARL was terminated in 1973.(23) A January 1975 memo from the CIA Office of Inspector General clearly shows that EA3167 was used on 20 human subjects, and that follow-up observations and examinations were conducted. Based on this document, the testing protocol was ‘analogous’ to that used by Ivy Research Laboratories.(24) Despite this irrefutable evidence, in the course of the Department of Energy’s recent investigations, the CIA officials categorically denied that EARL’s contract with the CIA ever used human subjects. In support of their claim, the CIA referred to their internal investigation in 1977 when Senator Kennedy’s Hearings were convened.(25)

The CIA, the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission radiation experiments

Records show that the Department of Defense (DoD) was extensively involved in planning and conducting human radiation experiments in the context of their nuclear weapons programs. DOD conducted most of this work in the late 1940s and early 1950s through DoD’s Research and Development Board, which included several panels and committees. For example, the Committee on Medical Sciences helped to formulate the policy which eventually led Secretary of Defense Wilson to issue the memorandum implementing the Nuremberg Code in 1953. The Code provided sufficient medical and ethical guidelines to safeguard the interest of volunteers in human experiments, but for several decades afterwards almost every US Government department and agency that was involved in human experiments ignored it. Based on the DoD and National Archives records, the CIA was represented in at least eight of the meetings of the Committee on Medical Sciences;(26) and even though Dr. Clark Yeager, Chief of the Medical Division of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, did attend a 1952 meeting in which the ethical issues pertinent to the use of humans in radiation experiments were discussed, Dr. Yeager later acted as one of the main advisors to the ARTICHOKE program on foreign brainwashing research.

From the records it is clear that the CIA did perform research on radiological warfare (RW), and collected intelligence on Soviet attempts at RW. Based on these records it is clear that the CIA, in collaboration with the DoD, attempted to develop and use high-altitude balloons as a weapon to disperse radiation over the Soviet Union in the mid 1950s. And yet, as early as 1953, the CIA concluded that the Soviet Union was not likely to develop radiological weapons. In the early 1950s, the CIA also proposed to the DoD and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) the development of a small scale radiological weapon to be used in unconventional warfare by guerrilla groups.(27) The CIA chaired the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, which was the principal organ responsible for monitoring the Soviet nuclear weapons programs.

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s (LLL) history of using humans is extensive, and collaboration with Britain’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment, and Harwell Laboratory expanded from 1972 until 1990.(28) Based on a publicly available document, a Memorandum of Understanding, dated 1965, between the CIA and LLL, it is clear that the LLL conducted experiments for the CIA, as part of the CIA’s association with the AEC and DoE. In their response to the Advisory Committee, the CIA denied finding any evidence, after the search of their classified files, that LLL did any human experiments on behalf of the CIA. Nevertheless, publicly available information strongly suggests that several individuals who were actively involved in human radiation experiments for DoD and AEC may also have performed work for the CIA. Harold Hodge from the University of Rochester received funding from the CIA for LSD research.(29) Hodge also directed the Manhattan Project work at Rochester on the toxicology of uranium.(30) Another interesting example is Dr. Robley Evans. A CIA summary document to the Advisory Committee states that Evans ‘enjoyed a long history as a TSS/TSD consultant on radiation safety, radiation detection, and the use of trace radioactivity’.(31) Evans was a professor at MIT who was directly involved in human radiation experiments for the Atomic Energy Commission, DoD, as well as other agencies.

Advisory Committee Witnesses

At the March 1995 meeting, three witnesses testified to the members of the Advisory Committee that they had indeed been the subjects of CIA’s human radiation experiments under MKULTRA. Though the witnesses were unable to provide any documentation in support of their claims, they provided names of well-known individuals involved in the MKULTRA program. As almost all of the operational records and documents of MKULTRA program had been destroyed in 1973, the CIA was able to ignore the Advisory Committee’s direct request for a further search of their records, rejected the witnesses’ claims as unsubstantiated, and denied any involvement in human radiation tests. Furthermore, the CIA is not prepared to facilitate the identification or the retrieval of non-government records that may be associated with the government activities in human radiation experiments. Conclusion: Based on abundant documentary evidence in hand, as well as the testimony of witnesses, it is clear that the Agency has managed to cover-up yet another scandal in the catalogue of breaches of its code of conduct.

Notes

1. Letter of October 1995, to the Members of the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group from Ruth R. Faden, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Human Experiments.
2. David Gries is a veteran both of operations and analysis, and a proponent of reform in the Agency. He has written several articles in the CIA’s in-house publication Studies in Intelligence. See, for example, ‘New Links Between Intelligence and Policy’, in vol. 34, no. 2, Summer 1990, and ‘Intelligence in the 1990s’, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring 1991.
3. After David Gries’ retirement in June 1994, John Pereira became the acting director of CSI, until Brian Lattel in September 1994 was appointed as the new director.
4. For several decades the CIA withheld from his family details of the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who died after being given LSD. After several legal actions, the CIA resolved the matter in an out-of-court settlement, while denying any liability. CIA settled in the same manner with several victims of Dr. Cameron’s ‘Psychic Drive’ experiments, of MKULTRA sub-project 68.
5. US departments continue a similar trend today. In response to a recent FOIA request for information on contracts for development of non-lethal weapons granted by the Department of Energy (DoE) to the University of California (UCLA), DOE advised me that such records are exempt from release on the grounds that they do not constitute agency (DoE) records – even though the contract has been granted by the DoE to UCLA. Application of the FOIA regulations in this area remains still unclear and controversial. In a similar case where documents were originated by a contractor for the US Army, the US Courts ruled for their release on the grounds that these were records created for a department, hence they constitute agency, not Army records. I have appealed against the DoE decision.
6. The CIA provided the Committee with a list of 22 people who were interviewed. The Agency withheld the identities of the remaining individuals from the investigating Committee.
7. ‘The Central Intelligence Agency’s Search for Records on Human Radiation Testing’, April 13 1994.
8. Ibid.
9. ‘CIA Inspector General Report of Inspection of MKULTRA’, August 14 1963.
10. Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book 1 – Foreign and Military Intelligence, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 26, 1976, Special Report No. 94-755 (Better known as the Church Committee Report). Also see Book 1, p. 406.
11. Ibid. Also see Church Committee Report, Book 1, p. 402.
12. Op. cit. 9
13. ‘Report of the Inspection of MKULTRA/TSD’, July 26 1963
14. The Geschickter Fund for Medical Research served as the principal cut-out source for the CIA’s secret funding of numerous MKULTRA projects. Additionally, CIA tried to enlist the Atomic Energy Commission to co-fund the project by appealing to its interest in Geschickter’s radiation research.
15. Wallace L. Chan, MD, ‘Memorandum for the Record: Establishing and substantiating the ‘bona fides’ of agent and/or staff personnel through techniques and methods other than interrogation’, undated.
16. James A. Hamilton, MD, to Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, March 30 1965 (‘This is a request for a grant….’).
17. Telephone conversation with the author, October 1996.
18. Advisory Committee on Human radiation Experiment [ACHRE], CIA record number CIA-071095-A.
19. Dr. James H. Huddleson to Chief, Technical Branch, Office of Security, ‘Conference with Dr. Webb Haymaker’, November 4 1953.
20. Op. cit. 17.
21. Church Committee Report, Book 1, p. 395, states that one of the three principal functions of the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the US Army Biological Center at Fort Detrick was to conduct ‘biological research for the CIA’. In early 1952, SOD agreed ‘to assist CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents delivery systems. By this agreement, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for the CIA use’ – Church Committee Report, Book 1, p. 389. Many of the early CIA LSD tests were conducted at Fort Detrick. In the late 1960s, much of work of MKSEARCH, at TSD (Technical Services Division) was transferred back to Fort Detrick. Dr. Christopher Green, and Major Edward Dames played significant roles in the CIA’s biological and chemical warfare development. For Green and Dames see Lobster 25.
22. The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 18 1977, cites a 1963 local news article describing an Army experiment at Holmesburg ‘in which prisoners were to have limited areas of their skin exposed to small amounts of radioactive isotopes.’
23. Memorandum for Deputy Director for Science and Technology, ‘OFTEN/CHICKWIT Revisited’, October 19 1978.
24. Scott Breckinridge, Memo to Inspector General, ‘RD Research and Development for Intelligence Applications of Drugs’, attachment on ‘Influencing Human Behavior’, pp. 2-3, January 31 1975.
25. Op. cit. 8, and ‘Memorandum for the Record: Trip Report/Edgewood Arsenal’, February 12 1975.
26. Names of the CIA representative were listed on the roster of the transcripts of the first, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and seventeenth meetings of the Committee on Medical Sciences.
27. CIA History Staff Memo, 1994, pp. 10-12.
28. ‘In Vivo Caliberation Studies Using Humans Administered Niobium-92 Barium-133, Palladium-103, Chromium-51, and Strontium-85. Human Radiation Experiments Associated with the US Department of Energy and Its Predecessors’, US DoE, Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety and Health, July 1995, p. 90.
29. John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books, New York, 1979, p.118. ‘Hodge’s group found a way to put a radioactive marker into LSD.’
30. See J. Newell Stannard, ‘Radioactivity and Health: A History’, DoE Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 1988.
31. ACHRE’s CIA-080994-A record, ‘CIA Interview Notes of Persons Contacted Regarding Human Radiation Experiments’, 1994. Although the CIA had formerly disclosed to the Committee information concerning Robley Evans, nevertheless, Brian Latell, Director CIA Center for Study of Intelligence, in August 4, 1995, sent a letter to Advisory Committee Chair, Dr. Ruth Faden, stating that ‘as a matter of policy, the Central Intelligence Agency can neither confirm nor deny the existence of contractual relations with either [Dr. Robley D. Evans, or Dr. Harold C. Hodge].