CIA inspector who reported drug experiment program dies at 89

John Vance, 89, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s staff in the early 1960s who discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwitting human subjects, died May 27 of respiratory arrest.

He died at the Wilson Health Care Center of Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg, Md.

Code-named MKULTRA (pronounced m-k-ultra), the project Vance uncovered was the brainchild of CIA director Allen Dulles, who was intrigued by reports of mind-control techniques allegedly conducted by Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. The CIA wanted to use similar techniques on its own POWs and perhaps use LSD or other mind-bending substances on foreign leaders, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro a few years after the project got under way in 1953.

Heading MKULTRA was a CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. In congressional testimony, Gottlieb, who died in 1999, acknowledged that the agency had administered LSD to as many as 40 unwitting subjects, including prison inmates and patrons of brothels set up and run by the agency. At least one participant died when he jumped out the 10th-floor window of a hotel; others claimed to have suffered serious psychological damage.

Vance learned about MKULTRA in spring 1963 during a wide-ranging inspector general survey of the agency’s technical services division. The inspector general’s report said: “The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the agency to be distasteful and unethical.”

As a result of Vance’s discovery and the inspector general’s report, the CIA halted the testing and began scaling back the project. It was terminated in the late 1960s.

MKULTRA came to public light in 1977 as a result of hearings conducted by a Senate committee on intelligence chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho. Vance gave several long phone interviews to committee staff members but never had to testify.

His CIA career began in 1947. He was on the inspector’s general’s staff from 1960 to 1963, and then became the director of central reference until his retirement in 1971.