A former Central Intelligence Agency employee told a Senate subcommittee today that he and another C.I.A. employee were sent to San Francisco in 1959 to lure unsuspecting people to a party at which the two agents were to spray the air with LSD 25 as part of the agency's secret drug testing program. The test [was] part of a much larger drug testing program known by the cryptonym MK ULTRA, David Rhodes told the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. Mr. Rhodes, two former C.I.A. employees, two former Bureau of Narcotics agents and Dr. Charles Geschickter, head of a foundation that channeled C.I.A. medical research funds to universities for nine or 10 years, were questioned this morning in the first of two days of hearings into C.I.A. testing of drugs on human beings. Today's testimony by Mr. Rhodes provided the first look the public has had at an LSD test inside a C.I.A. safehouse. The agency carried out other drug tests in both California and New York City from 1953 to 1966 in such safehouses, mainly apartments and motel rooms. These were secretly rented for the agency by George H. White, an official of the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which has since been supplanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Rhodes, a psychologist employed by the C.I.A. from 1957 to 1961, said he went to California in 1959 with Walter P. Pasternak. Mr. Pasternak, a former employee of the agency, was also an official with the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
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