On Tuesday, representatives heard testimony that the CIA once issued what amounted to a government-sanctioned license to kill in the name of mind control research, and that no one knows how many people died as a result.
Decades after MKUltra was officially shuttered, lawmakers gathered to demand answers about what the intelligence community could still be hiding.
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MKUltra was a clandestine CIA program that ran from 1953 to 1973 and was built around the idea that the human mind could be broken, controlled and then used for intelligence purposes.
Under chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, the program spread across nearly 150 subprojects and infiltrated more than 80 institutions, including public universities, hospitals and prisons. Many of those institutions had no idea the CIA was behind the experiments.
Subjects were often vulnerable people with little ability to consent. Government researchers would give them high doses of LSD and other drugs without their knowledge and subject them to experiments like electroshock and hypnosis.
The program’s existence might never have been revealed if it weren’t for the 1975 Church Committee investigations, which opened the project to lawmakers and, later, the public. But any accounting will always be incomplete, since former CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the majority of MKUltra’s records be destroyed just two years before the investigation began — this included the number of people who died during the experiment.
What happened at the hearing?
The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets convened a hearing Tuesday morning to attempt to shed light on the project. The committee, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., called two witnesses: Stephen Kinzer, a Brown University senior fellow who wrote a book on Gottlieb, and investigative journalist Tom O’Neill, who has reported on the links between MKUltra and the Manson family.
Luna opened the hearing by framing MKUltra not as a rogue operation, but as a deliberate campaign of crimes against humanity and cast Helms’ destruction of evidence as a cover-up.
“This program, when it did end, the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators,” Luna said. “They did not come forward. They committed another crime. They destroyed evidence.”
Kinzer’s testimony centered on Gottlieb’s largely unchecked authority. The CIA allowed MKUltra officers to obtain human subjects overseas whose disappearance wouldn’t arouse suspicion, Kinzer testified.
“Officers of MKUltra were authorized to travel to foreign countries, preferably those under formal or informal US occupation, and ask the local CIA station to provide them with ‘expendables’ — human beings who would not be missed if they disappeared,” he said. “Gottlieb had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the U.S. government.”
He also described the CIA’s use of institutional fronts, where universities served as unwitting cover for agency-directed work. Kinzer ended his testimony with a warning that while Gottlieb deemed his program a failure, modern technology could make a similar effort more effective.
O’Neill argued Congress still doesn’t have the full picture of what happened during the program. He pointed to psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West’s ties to both Charles Manson and Jack Ruby as parts that remain unexplored. He also submitted materials that he believes directly contradict CIA testimony given to Congress in 1977 on the program’s LSD experiments.
What comes next
Tuesday’s hearing is part of a broader, six-month task force also examining the Kennedy assassinations, the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins and unidentified aerial phenomena. Luna promised additional MKUltra documents would be forthcoming, though she did not give a timeline.
“The American people deserve the complete record,” Luna said during the hearing. “The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment, accountability, and justice. And this Congress has a constitutional obligation to make sure that the CIA never does this again.”
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