---
category: Intelligence Operation
created: 2026-06-03
location: Washington, D.C.
relations:
- end: 1972-06-23
  fn: 2
  role: Navy conduit for up to 117,938 dollars of CIA funds to a Massachusetts contractor,
    in part under the OFTEN label
  start: 1971-02-26
  type: participant_in
  with: '[[Office of Naval Research]]'
- end: 1973
  fn: 2
  role: Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories took part in the MKCHICKWIT and MKOFTEN
    work, including testing of the compound EA 3167
  start: 1967
  type: participant_in
  with: '[[Edgewood Arsenal]]'
summary: The CIA behavioral control program that succeeded MKULTRA in 1964 under Richard
  Helms, retaining the most sensitive chemical and biological development activities
  until Gottlieb terminated it in June 1972.
tags:
- Program
- CIA
- MKULTRA
- BehavioralControl
- ColdWar
updated: 2026-10-03
---

MKSEARCH was the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) program that succeeded [MKULTRA](/programs/project-mkultra/) in June 1964, when [Richard Helms](/people/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](/organizations/office-of-technical-service/). [Sid Gottlieb](/people/sidney-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](/people/george-hunter-white/) and others in the [Federal Bureau of Narcotics](/organizations/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](/places/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](/organizations/office-of-technical-service/) "quick-delivery capability" for large-scale production of microorganisms, a private alternative to [Fort Detrick](/places/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](/people/stanley-lovell/) had tried to use against Hitler. Fifth was Dr. [Maitland Baldwin](/people/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](/places/atlanta/) and the Bordentown reformatory, and sat on the FDA committee that allocated [LSD](/concepts/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](/programs/project-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]

### Department of Defense search, 1977

In a memorandum for the Secretary of Defense dated September 20, 1977, signed by the [Department of Defense](/organizations/department-of-defense/) General Counsel, Deanne C. Siemer, the Office of General Counsel reported on a search of Army, Navy and Air Force records from 1950 to the present, conducted from August 15 to September 15, 1977 at the request of the Secretary after the [Director of Central Intelligence](/organizations/director-of-central-intelligence/), [Stansfield Turner](/people/stansfield-turner/), testified on August 3, 1977 to a joint session of the [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence](/organizations/senate-select-committee-on-intelligence/) and the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research that documents had been found on drug experiments on human subjects. The memorandum lists the codewords as the Director described them: MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN and MKCHICKWIT as projects with Defense Department contact, and MKULTRA, MKDELTA and [MKNAOMI](/programs/mknaomi/) as primarily CIA projects. It dates MKDELTA to October 1952, MKULTRA to April 1953 and the late 1960s, MKNAOMI to the 1950s through 1969 for biological projects, and MKSEARCH to 1965 through 1973, with MKCHICKWIT ("to identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia and to obtain information and samples") and MKOFTEN ("to test the behavioral and toxicological effects of certain drugs on animals and humans") described as parts of MKSEARCH. It states that the three codeword projects were "planned, directed and controlled by the [Central Intelligence Agency](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/)."[^2]

The memorandum reports three Army programs from 1969 to 1973, five Navy programs from 1947 to 1973 and none in the Air Force; in four of the eight, Defense Department participation "was limited to channeling funds to outside contractors in order that the sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency be covered." Army and Navy investigators began searching boxes of CIA financial records marked OFTEN and CHICKWIT on August 4, 1977, and on September 7 were allowed to search additional boxes of MKULTRA records.[^2]

The Army programs, all at or through Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories, were the identification of new drugs with behavioral effects (1967 to 1973, carried out mainly by a contractor in California, funded jointly by the Army and the CIA, which supplied 12,084 dollars in 1967 and 5,000 dollars in 1969, with no testing on human subjects; part of MKCHICKWIT); the building of computer data bases on pharmacological products (about 1968 to 1971, with CIA transfers in 1968, 1970 and 1971; part of MKOFTEN); and the determination of clinical effects of a glycolate-class chemical (1971 to 1973, funded by the CIA; part of MKOFTEN). In the third, Edgewood had tested a compound designated EA 3167 on animals, on human volunteers at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia using prisoners and at Edgewood using military personnel; the CIA reviewed the work in 1971 and transferred 37,000 dollars to Edgewood for further testing, mostly on animals, including whether the compound could be applied through the skin on adhesive tape, and the documents record one human experiment in June 1973 in which two military volunteers "were apparently tested." The Army document list (Appendix A, nine items) includes a 1966 annual report to the Edgewood Medical Research Laboratory from Duhring Laboratories of the University of Pennsylvania and an August 1975 note from Colonel McClure, Director of Biomedical at Edgewood, to Ed Owens on "Agent 3167."[^2]

The five Navy programs, run through the [Office of Naval Research](/organizations/office-of-naval-research/) as a funds conduit in most cases, were the synthesis of analogs of central nervous system stimulants (1971 to January 1973, a contractor in Massachusetts, with up to 117,938 dollars from the CIA between February 26, 1971 and June 23, 1972; the CIA authorization stated that funding through ONR "protects the Agency's association with this area of research and provides the contractor with credible sponsorship"); a search for a nonaddictive substitute for codeine (1954 to at least 1964, at the Addiction Research Center of the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, with at least 282,215 dollars from the CIA and about 800 compounds tested on addicted patients); a study of the effects of blast concussion (October 1954 to December 1955, a contractor in California, 20,000 dollars from the CIA, after which the work became MKULTRA subproject 54 on the CIA's decision that "human experiments of a type not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds" were expected); the administration of LSD to human subjects (1952 to about 1956, a researcher in New York, MKULTRA subprojects 7, 27 and 40, with the Navy named as sponsor in one later CIA document that is not otherwise corroborated); and the development of speech-inducing drugs (1947 to 1953, funded by the Navy through the Naval Medical Research Institute, a New York contractor under the cover of a motion-sickness study, with the CIA records in the BLUEBIRD and [ARTICHOKE](/programs/project-bluebird-and-project-artichoke/) files). The last item includes the memorandum's account that in August 1952 the [Office of Naval Intelligence](/organizations/office-of-naval-intelligence/) told the CIA that it had drugs it was about to test on human subjects "who would be unaware," that about eight Soviet defectors received them in Europe in September 1952, and that the tests were not satisfactory because the drugs tasted too bitter to conceal. The Navy document list (Appendix B) has 42 items, among them a May 15, 1957 report of Gross Research Laboratories, Inc., "On the Impact Thresholds of Brain Concussion," and records of the University of Rochester motion-sickness studies of 1951 to 1953.[^2]

The memorandum concludes that no Defense Department component or contractor then maintained a drug-testing program on human subjects in which the CIA was involved.[^2]

[^1]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*, Chapter 12.
[^2]: General Counsel of the Department of Defense (signed by Deanne C. Siemer), memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, "Experimentation Programs Conducted by the Department of Defense That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-control or Behavior-modification Purposes," September 20, 1977, with Appendices A and B (Army and Navy document lists) and C (CIA documents), 17 pages, release file 02-A-0846, supplied by the vault owner and read on October 3, 2026 (text layer, first and last memorandum pages by image; names in the typed text are as the scan reads, some with OCR damage).