The files were heavily redacted but one name surfaced repeatedly: Sidney Gottlieb, who appeared to have been the director of a secret chemical division within the agency. The Olsons received a settlement of $750,000 in exchange for dropping their legal action, and were invited to the White House, where Ford made them a public apology.Īs the Rockefeller report foundered, a Senate commission under the Idaho member Frank Church dredged deeper in the CIA’s records.

Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his deputy, Dick Cheney. Hersh disclosed his findings to Olson’s family, who convened a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Seymour Hersh, who had already written a front-page story for the New York Times about the CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. All records had been destroyed, and ‘all persons directly involved … were either out of the country and not available for interview or were deceased.’ But the commission had apparently reached a dead end. There were references to secret sites and experiments on prison inmates, and some passages that begged explanation in one incident, ‘an employee of the Department of the Army’ had crashed to his death through a 13th-storey hotel window after being dosed with LSD. For the most part it was vague and non-incriminating, but it did conclude that the CIA had in the past conducted ‘plainly unlawful’ investigations, including the testing of ‘potentially dangerous drugs on unsuspecting United States citizens’. Rockefeller’s report was issued in June 1975. His successor, Gerald Ford, made Nelson Rockefeller, a reliable intelligence insider, his vice president, and asked him to produce a report on the CIA’s alleged historical abuses. Nixon was finally forced to resign in August 1974.

In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. After Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. I t was during the fallout from Watergate that the American public first heard of MK-Ultra, the most notorious of the secret mind control programmes that the CIA ran through the 1950s and 1960s.

Senator of mind control files