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The CIA began winding down the experiments in 1964 and ended them altogether in 1973. At a Senate hearing last week, CIA Director Stansfield Turner gave a final accounting: 149 projects for an undisclosed amount of money at 80 U.S. and Canadian universities, research foundations, hospitals and prisons. At least 39 projects involved human subjects, often without their knowledge. No one knows where they are now or what effects they may have suffered. Said Turner: "It is abhorrent to me to think of using humans as guinea pigs. I assure you that the CIA is in no way engaged in either witting or unwitting testing of drugs today."
Turner had more on his mind last week than those mind-bending experiments. Soon after he became CIA director, he began lobbying to consolidate all Government intelligence agencies under his aegis. The Pentagon, threatened with loss of control over the National Security Agency and the individual service agencies, objected strenuously. President Carter has resolved the dispute with a compromise rejecting the notion of an overall intelligence czar. He gave Turner authority over all intelligence budgets (estimated total: $7 billion). But he gave individual agency chiefs the right to appeal Turner's decisions and left them operationally independent.