June 1972: Project MK-ULTRA and MK-SEARCH were terminated by Sidney Gottlieb
Sidney Gottlieb, CIA’s “Black Sorcerer” brought the infamous projects MK-ULTRA and MK-SEARCH to a halt, pronouncing the entire exercise had been a waste of time; he cited fatal scientific and operational flaws. Specifically, the biological and chemical techniques used to control human behavior were too unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings — which is exactly what the Nazi doctors at Dachau concluded in the 1940s. Albert Einstein famously observed: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Gottlieb indicated that “moral and ethical considerations among the emerging group of new senior operations officers have shown a discerning and perhaps commendable distaste for utilizing these materials and techniques.” (Marks, Ch. 12) Yet, not a word about the immorality of the irreparable harm and suffering caused to the human subjects of those admittedly useless experiments that produced nothing of value.