Harvard And the CIA

Each year Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruiters visit Harvard in search of some of the best and brightest minds to replenish the agency's ranks of intelligence analysts and cloak-and-dagger operatives. But recent disclosures indicate that the CIA's interest in what happens to a human mind at Harvard has not been solely confined to the goings-on in a lecture hall. University officials disclosed last week that CIA fiscal records show Harvard involvement in two research projects conducted under the CIA's controversial MK-ULTRA human behavior control program of the 1950s. Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, refused to release any preliminary details about the two research projects linked to Harvard, but he has promised to prepare a comprehensive statement on the issue for the public later this month.

In pondering the question of how to handle the revelation of Harvard's participation in the MK-ULTRA, Steiner should heed the example of Stanford University, whose administrators made an extensive disclosure of that institution's connections with the MK-ULTRA program last week.

The University took a major step last spring in clarifying its relationship with the CIA when it became the first American University to issue specific guidelines regulating its faculty members' dealings with the intelligence agency, and Harvard must follow up on this measure by revealing the entire story of its participation in the MK-ULTRA projects as soon as possible.