Committee on Central Intelligence Agency Activities Records

The Committee on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Activities at Cornell University Medical College (CUMC) was formed in 1978 in response to negative publicity in connection with the CIA’s brainwashing experiments in the 1950s.

In 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles approached Harold Wolff, MD, professor of medicine and chief neurologist at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, with reports that the Russian and Chinese militaries had developed scientific methods for controlling human thoughts and behavior. At Wolff’s prompting Dulles funded the Human Ecology Study Program at CUMC in 1954 to study human ecology on the basis that a person’s environment is a factor in their health. The initial goals of the program were to study the Chinese and Russian methods of controlling behavior and to protect U.S. personnel from those methods. In 1955 the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (the Society) was established with CIA funding as an independent incorporated body with Wolff as president. The Society’s goal was to continue funding the Human Ecology Study Program, but by 1956 the Society had broadened its scope to include further CIA research into the behavioral sciences. CUMC severed all ties with the CIA in 1957 after disagreements about the scope and purpose of the Human Ecology Study Program, but independent of CUMC Wolff continued his research with the CIA and the Society until his death in 1962. The Human Ecology Study Program continued at CUMC as the Division of Human Ecology, a joint activity of the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry, under the directorship of Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., MD until his retirement in 1988.

In 1974 The New York Times published an exposé of the CIA’s illegal domestic intelligence operations during the Nixon administration (1969–1974). The revelations prompted President Ford to create the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the CIA’s past abuses, leading to the discovery that the CIA had conducted mind-control experiments on unwitting subjects under the umbrella of Project MKULTRA in the 1950s. MKULTRA was a wide-ranging project with the goal of identifying mind-altering drugs and developing techniques of psychological torture. Over the course of investigations, it came out that the CIA had conducted the project under the guise of research with more than 80 institutions, including CUMC. Public furor culminated in the publication of John Marks’ ‘The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”’ (New York: Times Books, 1979), which documented MKULTRA and the CIA’s unethical experiments.

In response to the negative publicity, Dale R. Corson, chancellor of Cornell University, charged Walter F. Riker, Jr., MD, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at CUMC, with forming a committee to establish the circumstances of CUMC’s involvement with the CIA and the scope of the work that had been done under the CIA’s sponsorship. The Committee requested declassified documents from the CIA concerning their involvement with Cornell. Riker interviewed CUMC employees who had been involved with the project. Wolff had passed away in 1962, leaving Hinkle, who had been associate professor of clinical medicine at CUMC when Wolff approached him in 1954, as the most knowledgeable participant remaining at the time of the Committee’s investigations. Also interviewed were Loring Chapman, PhD, who had been a research fellow in neurology; E. Hugh Luckey, MD, who had been the dean of CUMC; and Helen Goodell, BS, who had been Wolff’s research assistant.

Riker’s research into the CIA program at CUMC was thorough and he maintained that he had not uncovered any suggestion that it had experimented on people. Riker did, however, call out Wolff’s proposed use of “potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures)” on unwitting subjects, though the researchers involved testified that no harmful experiments were ever actually carried out.

The scope of the Committee’s task grew unmanageable and, by about 1980, the publicity around Project MKULTRA had begun to fade. The Committee was disbanded without producing a final report.

Bibliography Hersh, Seymour M. “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” New York Times. December 22, 1974, 1.

Horrock, Nicholas M. “80 Institutions Used in C.I.A. Mind Studies.” New York Times. August 4, 1977, 17.

Horrock, Nicholas M. “Private Institutions Used in C.I.A. Effort to Control Behavior.” New York Times. August 2, 1977, 1, 16.

Marks, John D. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. New York: Times Books, 1979.

United States. Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975.