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1. Do your own research on the information provided and then come up with your own conclusions.

2. This article contains many names and other information that can be researched.

3. Trust your gut feeling on information provided as this post may contain slanted information.

The newspaper clipping is a United Press International report from early August 1977, published during Senate hearings on MKULTRA. It accurately reflects CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s testimony that newly discovered financial records revealed a much larger network of institutions than Congress previously knew about.

The most important correction is that many experiments requested here were not CIA operations. They belong to several overlapping histories:

1. CIA behavioral-control experiments—MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and related projects.

2. Army chemical and biological warfare research—Fort Detrick, Edgewood Arsenal and field releases.

3. Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission radiation experiments.

4. Public Health Service, military and university medical research.

5. Canadian and other foreign-government experiments.

Combining everything under “CIA experiments” would incorrectly attribute actions to the CIA that were actually sponsored by the Army, Atomic Energy Commission, Public Health Service, NIH, Canadian government or other organizations.

1. The 1977 article and MKULTRA revelations

The clipping reports testimony by CIA Director Stansfield Turner before a joint Senate hearing on August 3, 1977. Turner disclosed that approximately 20,000 pages of previously overlooked financial records identified:

• 149 MKULTRA
  subprojects.
• At least 80
  institutions where research occurred.
• Universities
  and colleges.
• Hospitals
  and medical schools.
• Pharmaceutical
  and chemical companies.
• Prisons or
  correctional institutions.
• Private
  research foundations.
• Individual
  physicians and scientists.

The records survived because they were stored as financial documents. Most operational MKULTRA files had been ordered destroyed in January 1973 by outgoing CIA Director Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb, the program’s principal administrator.

The clipping says as many as 185 nongovernment researchers may have been involved. That number appears in Turner’s prepared testimony, although many researchers apparently did not know that the CIA was the ultimate sponsor.

The Senate hearing established that MKULTRA research included:

• LSD and
  other hallucinogens.
• Drugs
  intended to cause confusion, amnesia or disorientation.
• Barbiturates
  and stimulants administered in combinations.
• Hypnosis.
• Sleep
  deprivation.
• Sensory
  deprivation.
• Electroshock.
• Psychological
  stress.
• Substances
  intended to increase suggestibility.
• Methods of
  covert drug administration.
• Research
  into incapacitating chemicals, toxins and biological agents.
• Sexual
  blackmail and clandestine observation at CIA safehouses.

Turner told the Senate that using people unknowingly as test subjects was abhorrent and said the CIA would attempt to locate and notify identifiable victims. The hearings nevertheless showed that incomplete records made a complete accounting impossible. The official transcript remains the essential source: Senate’s 1977 MKULTRA hearing.

Operation Midnight Climax

Beginning in the 1950s, CIA operative George Hunter White operated safehouses in San Francisco and later New York. Prostitutes recruited men and brought them to rooms where CIA personnel secretly administered LSD or observed drugged sexual encounters through one-way mirrors.

The CIA was interested in:

• Whether
  drugs could loosen a person’s inhibitions.
• Whether sex
  could be combined with drugs for interrogation or blackmail.
• How
  unwitting people behaved after receiving LSD.
• Whether
  substances could be administered without detection.

The subjects did not give informed consent and usually never learned they had participated. Sidney Gottlieb supervised the broader Technical Services Staff program.

Frank Olson and Fort Detrick

Dr. Frank Olson was an Army bacteriologist working in the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. The division cooperated closely with the CIA on chemical and biological agents.

In November 1953, Olson and other personnel attended a retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. Sidney Gottlieb placed LSD in a bottle of Cointreau that was served to the group. Olson experienced severe psychological distress afterward. Nine days later he fell from a tenth-floor New York hotel window and died.

The government initially concealed the LSD administration from Olson’s family. In 1975, the Ford administration publicly acknowledged it and paid the family a settlement. Persistent allegations that Olson was deliberately killed have been investigated and debated, but the documentary record conclusively proves the unwitting LSD exposure—not every later assassination allegation.

Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division supplied technical expertise and materials for CIA programs. Declassified CIA histories explicitly connect the MKULTRA chemical and biological testing program with the division: CIA history of the testing program.

Other named MKULTRA victims

• Harold
  Blauer—A
  professional tennis player hospitalized for depression at the New York
  State Psychiatric Institute. In 1953 he received escalating injections of
  experimental mescaline derivatives under an Army-funded program. He died
  following an injection of EA-1298. The Army’s sponsorship was concealed
  from his family.
• Velma
  Orlikow, Jean Steel and other patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron—At
  Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, Cameron subjected psychiatric
  patients to prolonged drug-induced sleep, repeated high-intensity
  electroshock and endlessly repeated recorded statements called “psychic
  driving.” The CIA secretly financed part of this work through the Society
  for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Some patients lost memories and
  basic abilities.
• James
  “Whitey” Bulger and other federal prisoners—Bulger
  later said that he received LSD repeatedly while imprisoned in Atlanta and
  was told the research concerned schizophrenia. Prison experiments were
  among MKULTRA’s documented activities, although individual recollections
  should be distinguished from what surviving project records prove.
• Unnamed
  Lexington, Kentucky, patients—At the federal addiction hospital,
  Dr. Harris Isbell conducted CIA-supported drug studies on people with drug
  dependencies. Subjects received LSD and other substances, sometimes for
  extended periods, with compensation commonly offered in heroin. The coercive
  circumstances make meaningful consent highly questionable.

2. Elmer Allen and the 18 plutonium injections

This was not a CIA experiment. It was a Manhattan Project medical program continued during the transition to the Atomic Energy Commission.

Between 1945 and 1947, researchers injected 18 hospital patients with plutonium. Their primary purpose was to determine how plutonium was distributed, retained and excreted so authorities could establish exposure standards for nuclear-weapons workers.

It is inaccurate to say that plutonium was injected simply “to see how long they would live.” Researchers wanted metabolic and excretion data. Nevertheless, the subjects generally were not told that they were receiving plutonium, the injections offered them no medical benefit, and officials later monitored some people partly to obtain long-term retention data.

The experiments occurred through:

• Oak Ridge
  Hospital.
• University
  of Rochester/Strong Memorial Hospital.
• University
  of Chicago’s Billings Hospital.
• University
  of California Hospital in San Francisco.
• Los Alamos
  laboratory, which analyzed biological samples.

The federal Advisory Committee concluded that the experiments involved profound failures of disclosure and consent. Its full investigation is available through the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

Elmer Allen—CAL-3

Elmer Allen was an African American railroad porter associated with Italy, Texas. He was 36 when admitted to the University of California Hospital with pain in his left knee. Doctors believed he had bone cancer.

In July 1947:

1. Allen was injected with plutonium-239.

2. His urine and feces were collected for analysis.

3. His leg was amputated several days later.

4. Tissue and bone from the amputated limb were examined for plutonium distribution.

The later pathological evidence cast doubt on whether Allen actually had the cancer originally diagnosed. There is no convincing documentation that he was told about the plutonium before injection.

In 1973, Allen and his wife were offered a trip to Rochester for follow-up examinations. They reportedly were told researchers wanted to study his remarkable survival after bone cancer—not that the government had secretly injected him with plutonium. Researchers collected additional biological information, including measurements intended to determine the plutonium remaining in his body.

Allen died in 1991, approximately 44 years after the injection. Thus, the injection did not promptly kill him, and his longevity itself became scientifically useful to the researchers. The federal committee’s detailed account identifies him as CAL-3: ACHRE account of Elmer Allen.

Other identified plutonium subjects

The 18 subjects included men and women of different ages and medical conditions. Some were seriously ill, but researchers’ assumption that all would die soon proved false. The Manhattan Project also sponsored injections of uranium into six patients and polonium administration to five patients. The uranium experiment deliberately increased doses until evidence of kidney injury appeared. ACHRE’s Manhattan Project findings.

3. Vertus Hardiman and Hole in the Head

Vertus Hardiman’s case must be handled cautiously because it is principally documented through family history, community accounts and the documentary Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed, rather than the type of surviving federal experimental file available for MKULTRA or the plutonium injections.

Hardiman was born in 1922. In 1927, when he was five, he and nine other Black children from Lyles Station, Indiana, were taken to a county hospital for what their parents understood to be treatment for scalp ringworm.

According to Hardiman’s account and the documentary:

• The children
  received intense scalp irradiation.
• Their
  families did not understand the character or danger of the procedure.
• Children
  experienced burning, dizziness, headaches and permanent hair loss.
• Hardiman
  developed the worst injury—a chronic open lesion that destroyed scalp
  tissue and part of his skull.
• He concealed
  the injury beneath a wig or cap for approximately eight decades.
• The wound
  eventually became cancerous.

Hardiman lived until 2007. The documentary was written and produced by Wilbert Smith and directed by Brett Leonard. USC’s account describes ten Lyles Station children and says the procedure was misrepresented to parents as ringworm treatment: USC discussion of Hole in the Head.

Radiation was historically used to epilate the scalp during ringworm treatment. Therefore, it remains important to distinguish between an accepted but dangerous treatment, grossly excessive dosing and a deliberately designed government experiment. The documentary describes it as experimental abuse, but accessible primary documentation has not established a CIA connection.

4. Radioactive oatmeal at the Fernald School

From 1946 into the 1950s, researchers conducted nutrition experiments at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, an institution for children labeled intellectually disabled. Some children were placed in a “Science Club” and encouraged to participate through privileges such as outings and special meals.

MIT researchers studied mineral absorption by feeding children meals containing radioactive tracers. Certain experiments involved:

• Oatmeal
  containing radioactive iron.
• Calcium
  labeled with radioactive calcium.
• Measurements
  of how minerals were absorbed or blocked by components of cereal.
• Blood, urine
  and other specimen collection.

Quaker Oats helped finance research concerning the absorption of nutrients from cereal. MIT and Fernald were principal institutional participants; the Atomic Energy Commission supplied or regulated radioactive isotopes.

Parents received permission letters, but the letters did not adequately explain that radioactive materials would be administered. Children housed in an institution were particularly vulnerable to pressure and could not provide legally meaningful adult consent.

A lawsuit was settled in 1998 for approximately $1.85 million, funded primarily by MIT and to a lesser extent by Quaker Oats. MIT denied legal wrongdoing but expressed regret over the apparent absence of adequate informed consent: MIT’s Fernald settlement announcement.

The Advisory Committee examined 21 nontherapeutic radiation studies involving children and found that records concerning parental authorization were often inadequate or missing. ACHRE chapter on children.

5. People injected with live cancer cells

Chester Southam’s experiments

Beginning in the 1950s, Dr. Chester M. Southam of Sloan-Kettering injected live human cancer cells—often hela cells—into different groups to study immune rejection.

Subjects included:

• Patients who
  already had terminal cancer.
• Healthy
  prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary.
• Elderly,
  chronically ill patients without cancer at the Jewish Chronic Disease
  Hospital.

Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, 1963

Twenty-two debilitated patients without cancer were injected with live cancer cells. They were not clearly told that the injections contained cancer cells. Southam and cooperating physicians argued that saying “cancer” would frighten them and that their immune systems would reject the cells.

Three doctors refused to participate and objected that the patients were not giving informed consent. Their objections helped expose the experiment.

The research was supported by the U.S. Public Health Service and American Cancer Society—not the CIA. NIH historical ethics materials summarize the case as injections of live cancer cells into elderly patients without consent: NIH bioethics history.

Prisoners

Southam injected more than 100 volunteer prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary. Even where prisoners signed forms, historians question whether incarceration, institutional control, limited information and incentives allowed genuinely voluntary consent.

6. Veterans and military personnel

Edgewood Arsenal experiments

From approximately 1955 through 1975, the Army tested chemical agents on thousands of servicemen, principally at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. Substances included:

• Sarin and
  other nerve agents.
• Mustard
  agents.
• LSD.
• BZ, a
  powerful incapacitating anticholinergic.
• Marijuana
  derivatives.
• Stimulants,
  sedatives and hallucinogens.
• Tear gases
  and riot-control agents.
• Experimental
  antidotes.

Some soldiers volunteered but were not always informed of the precise substance, full risks or long-term uncertainties. Veterans later reported chronic physical and psychiatric problems and sued for medical care and notification.

Edgewood was primarily an Army program. Certain CIA interests overlapped, but it is incorrect to label every Edgewood exposure MKULTRA.

Atomic veterans

Military personnel were placed near atmospheric nuclear detonations or assigned to contaminated areas to observe equipment, practice maneuvers or collect data. Many were given limited information about radiation risk.

Affected groups included:

• Troops at
  Nevada Test Site exercises.
• Personnel
  involved in Pacific nuclear tests.
• Hiroshima
  and Nagasaki occupation forces.
• Crews and
  cleanup workers associated with test operations.

Mustard-gas tests

During World War II, the military exposed approximately 60,000 servicemen in chamber, field and patch tests. Race-based programs included separate groups described in records as Black, Japanese American and Puerto Rican personnel, sometimes to investigate supposed racial differences in susceptibility.

7. Women and pregnant patients

Radiation experimentation included women who were pregnant, cancer patients and hospital patients who did not understand that procedures were experimental.

Examples include:

• Vanderbilt
  University radioactive-iron study: Hundreds of pregnant women received
  drinks containing radioactive iron in the 1940s. The research concerned
  iron absorption during pregnancy. Many apparently were not adequately
  informed of the radioactive content.
• Radioactive
  iodine studies:
  Women and other hospital patients received iodine isotopes to measure
  thyroid uptake, sometimes with limited disclosure.
• Cervical and
  reproductive studies: Poor women and women of color were frequently
  recruited from public clinics where the boundary between treatment and
  research was unclear.
• Puerto Rico
  birth-control trials: Beginning in 1956, high-dose oral
  contraceptives were tested among Puerto Rican women. Participants
  generally knew they were taking a contraceptive but were not given the
  quality of risk information expected in modern trials. Significant side
  effects were reported, and safety complaints were sometimes discounted.
  This was not a CIA project.

ACHRE acknowledged that its own investigation could not comprehensively cover every experiment involving pregnant women, illustrating why no responsible report can honestly claim a complete list of every human experiment. ACHRE program overview.

8. Children and institutionalized people

Willowbrook State School

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, researchers at Willowbrook State School in New York deliberately exposed institutionalized children to hepatitis—sometimes by administering material prepared from infected feces—to study disease transmission and possible prevention.

Parents signed forms, but admission pressures and the institution’s overcrowding created a coercive situation. Some parents were reportedly told that admission to particular units where the research occurred offered their children earlier access to the institution.

Iowa “Monster Study”

In 1939, University of Iowa researchers conducted a speech experiment on orphaned children. Some were repeatedly told that their normal speech showed signs of stuttering. The study caused shame and anxiety and was concealed for decades. It was university research, not CIA-sponsored.

Holmesburg Prison

University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman used incarcerated men at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia for extensive pharmaceutical, chemical and dermatological experiments. Sponsors included pharmaceutical companies and government agencies.

Tests involved:

• Skin creams
  and drugs.
• Dioxin
  exposure.
• Psychoactive
  substances.
• Chemical-warfare-related
  compounds.
• Deliberately
  induced skin conditions.

The prison population was disproportionately poor and Black. Payments were powerful inducements in an environment where prisoners had few ways to earn money.

9. Indigenous adults and children

Canadian residential-school nutrition experiments

From 1942 through 1952, Canadian federal officials and researchers conducted nutrition research on at least 1,300 Indigenous people, including approximately 1,000 children in residential schools.

The studies involved communities and schools already suffering from government-created deprivation and chronic malnutrition. Researchers:

• Divided
  children into treatment and comparison groups.
• Supplied
  vitamins or supplements to some but not others.
• Tested
  fortified foods.
• Withheld
  improvements from control groups.
• Restricted
  dental services in some schools because dental treatment could interfere
  with nutritional measurements.
• Continued
  gathering data instead of first correcting inadequate diets.

Schools involved were located in several Canadian provinces, including Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia.

These experiments were sponsored through Canadian departments such as Indian Affairs and the Department of Pensions and National Health. They were not CIA projects. Historian Ian Mosby’s archival research brought the program to broad public attention. A peer-reviewed medical summary notes that nearly 1,000 malnourished students at six residential schools were used in experiments between 1948 and 1952: medical history of the residential-school studies.

First Nations communities

Before the school studies, researchers examined approximately 400 Cree residents in northern Manitoba communities such as Norway House, Cross Lake, God’s Lake Mine, Rossville and The Pas. Existing hunger was treated as an opportunity to collect experimental data instead of an emergency requiring immediate relief.

United States Indigenous populations

The United States has an extensive history of research and medical intervention involving Native peoples, including studies conducted through the Indian Health Service and universities. However, claims about particular intentional experiments must be evaluated study by study. The clearly documented Canadian residential-school nutrition program should not automatically be attributed to the CIA or transferred to U.S. institutions without evidence.

10. Foreign experiments

Guatemala sexually transmitted disease experiments

Between 1946 and 1948, U.S. Public Health Service researchers deliberately exposed Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and psychiatric patients to syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid.

Methods included:

• Arranging
  sexual contact with infected sex workers.
• Applying
  infectious material to genital abrasions.
• Direct
  inoculation.
• Spinal
  procedures and blood collection.
• Incomplete
  treatment and follow-up for some infected people.

Consent was not obtained. Dr. John Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee program, played a central role. This was a Public Health Service program, not CIA.

Tuskegee distinction

The Tuskegee study did not deliberately infect its Black male subjects. Researchers enrolled men who already had syphilis and then withheld adequate disclosure and effective treatment, including after penicillin became standard. The study lasted from 1932 to 1972. CDC’s official Tuskegee history.

Montreal, Canada

Ewen Cameron’s “depatterning” and “psychic driving” experiments are the clearest foreign example with direct CIA financing. Patients entered the Allan Memorial Institute seeking psychiatric treatment but received procedures far beyond ordinary care, including:

• Extremely
  intensive electroshock.
• Weeks of
  drug-induced sleep.
• Repetitive
  taped messages.
• LSD and
  other drugs.
• Sensory
  isolation.

Marshall Islands

After U.S. nuclear testing contaminated parts of the Marshall Islands—especially following the 1954 Castle Bravo explosion—American medical teams followed exposed Marshallese populations. Medical monitoring did provide treatment and important health information, but historians and residents have criticized the way people became long-term observational subjects after a disaster created by the United States. Some later received thyroid surgery following radiation-induced disease.

11. Universities and institutions that received funding

CIA financing was frequently concealed behind organizations such as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the Geschickter Fund and other foundations. This allowed researchers to receive grants without recognizing—or without publicly disclosing—the CIA as the source.

Funding alone does not prove that every university administrator or researcher knew of CIA involvement. The 1977 Senate record explicitly distinguishes knowing participants from researchers receiving money through intermediaries.

12. Overall conclusions

The surviving evidence establishes a broad pattern:

• Vulnerable
  groups were chosen because researchers had easy access to them.
• Consent
  forms were absent, misleading or incomplete.
• “Treatment”
  was sometimes used to disguise research.
• Researchers
  commonly assumed that sick, disabled, incarcerated, institutionalized,
  poor or minority subjects were less likely to object.
• Universities
  provided medical expertise and access to patients.
• Government
  secrecy protected agencies and institutions from embarrassment and
  liability.
• Racial
  discrimination and colonial control heavily influenced who bore the risks.
• Record
  destruction means the complete number of victims will probably never be
  known.

The CIA’s proven contribution was most significant in behavioral manipulation, drugs, interrogation methods and covert administration. Radiation injections, radioactive oatmeal, cancer-cell injections and Indigenous nutrition studies are equally serious, but generally belonged to different government programs.

The 1974 National Research Act, institutional review boards, modern informed-consent requirements and the 1979 Belmont Report emerged partly in response to these scandals. The Belmont principles are respect for persons, beneficence and justice—the three principles repeatedly violated in the cases above.