MKSEARCH

MKSEARCH was the CIA program that succeeded MKULTRA in June 1964, when Richard Helms agreed to a new charter on the condition that it be almost the same as the old one. He kept the approval process within his control and made sure files would remain inside TSS. Sid Gottlieb regrouped the most sensitive behavioral activities under the MKSEARCH umbrella, pruning away programs of insufficient sensitivity and turning exotic research over to the Science Directorate. He chose to continue seven projects, emphasizing chemical and biological substances valued for their ability to disorient, discredit, injure, or kill.¹

The Seven Subprojects

First was the safehouse program for drug testing run by George White and others in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Even in 1964, Gottlieb and Helms had not given up hope that unwitting experiments could be resumed, paying $30,000 that year to keep the safehouses open. The San Francisco operation stayed active until June 1965, and the New York safehouse until the following year. Second was a $150,000-a-year contract with a Baltimore biological laboratory that gave TSS "quick-delivery capability" for large-scale production of microorganisms, a private alternative to Fort Detrick that kept the Army from knowing what the CIA was producing. Third was Dr. James Hamilton, the San Francisco psychiatrist who arranged access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville for clinical testing of "behavioral control materials." In a six-month span in 1967 and 1968, he spent over $10,000 in CIA funds on between 400 and 1,000 inmates.¹

Fourth was a prominent industrialist who custom-manufactured rare chemicals, supplying the Agency with 3 kilos of a deadly carbamate in 1960, the same poison OSS's Stanley Lovell had tried to use against Hitler. Fifth was Dr. Maitland Baldwin, the brain surgeon who performed lobotomies on apes, put them in sensory deprivation, and beamed radio frequency energy directly at chimpanzee brains. Sixth was Dr. Charles Geschickter, who tested powerful drugs on mental defectives and terminal cancer patients at Georgetown University Hospital and whose family foundation channeled $2.1 million to other researchers. Seventh was Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, who tested drugs on inmates of the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta and the Bordentown reformatory, and sat on the FDA committee that allocated LSD for scientific research.¹

Dissolution

MKSEARCH continued through the 1960s with a steadily decreasing budget: $250,000 in 1964, down to $110,000 and four subprojects in 1972. In June 1972, Gottlieb decided to end it, writing: "It has become very clear that these materials and techniques are too unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings, under specific circumstances, to be operationally useful. Our operations officers, particularly the emerging group of new senior operations officers, have shown a discerning and perhaps commendable distaste for utilizing these materials and techniques." He noted moral and ethical considerations and the extreme sensitivity and security constraints that effectively ruled out such operations.¹

Before retiring, Gottlieb and Helms mutually agreed to destroy all documentary traces of MKULTRA. Seven boxes of substantive records were incinerated, but seven more containing invoices and financial records survived due to misfiling. These surviving records eventually formed the basis for public revelations about the programs.¹