Project Description
Mr. Chairman: In my letter to you of July 15, 1977, I reported our recent discovery of seven boxes of
documents related to Project MKULTRA, a closely held CIA project conducted from 1953-1964. As
you may recall, MKULTRA was an “umbrella project” under which certain sensitive subprojects were
funded, involving among other things research on drugs and behavioral modification. During the
Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations in 1975, the cryptonym became
publicly known when details of the drug-related death of Dr. Frank Olsen were publicized. In 1953 Dr.
Olsen, a civilian employee of the Army at Fort Detrick, leaped to his death from a hotel room window
in New York City about a week after having unwittingly consumed LSD administered to him as an
experiment at a meeting of LSD researchers called by CIA.
