[House Hearing, 119 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
MIND CONTROL AND ACCOUNTABILITY:
UNCOVERING THE TRUTH
OF THE CIA'S MKULTRA PROJECT
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
TASK FORCE ON THE DECLASSIFICATION
OF FEDERAL SECRETS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JUNE 30, 2026
__________
Serial No. 119-68
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available on: govinfo.gov, oversight.house.gov or docs.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
64-141 PDF WASHINGTON : 2026
=======================================================================
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
JAMES COMER, Kentucky, Chairman
Jim Jordan, Ohio Robert Garcia, California, Ranking
Mike Turner, Ohio Minority Member
Paul Gosar, Arizona Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Columbia
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts
Michael Cloud, Texas Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Gary Palmer, Alabama Ro Khanna, California
Clay Higgins, Louisiana Kweisi Mfume, Maryland
Pete Sessions, Texas Shontel Brown, Ohio
Andy Biggs, Arizona Melanie Stansbury, New Mexico
Nancy Mace, South Carolina Maxwell Frost, Florida
Pat Fallon, Texas Greg Casar, Texas
Byron Donalds, Florida Jasmine Crockett, Texas
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania Emily Randall, Washington
William Timmons, South Carolina Suhas Subramanyam, Virginia
Tim Burchett, Tennessee Yassamin Ansari, Arizona
Lauren Boebert, Colorado Wesley Bell, Missouri
Anna Paulina Luna, Florida Lateefah Simon, California
Nick Langworthy, New York Dave Min, California
Eric Burlison, Missouri James Walkinshaw, Virginia
Elijah Crane, Arizona Christian Menefee, Texas
Brian Jack, Georgia Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts
John McGuire, Virginia Rashida Tlaib, Michigan
Brandon Gill, Texas
Richard McCormick, Georgia
------
Mark Marin, Staff Director
James Rust, Deputy Staff Director
Ryan Giachetti, Chief Counsel
Sam Meunier, Professional Staff Member
Mallory Cogar, Director of Operations and Chief Clerk
Contact Number: 202-225-5074
Robert Edmonson, Minority Staff Director
Contact Number: 202-225-5051
------
Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets
Anna Paulina Luna, Florida, Chairwoman
Nancy Mace, South Carolina Jasmine Crockett, Texas, Ranking
Tim Burchett, Tennessee Member
Lauren Boebert, Colorado Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts
Eric Burlison, Missouri Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Elijah Crane, Arizona Summer Lee, Pennsylvania
Brandon Gill, Texas Dave Min, California
C O N T E N T S
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OPENING STATEMENTS
Page
Hon. Anna Paulina Luna, U.S. Representative, Chairman............ 1
WITNESSES
Dr. Stephen Kinzer, Historian, Journalist, and Senior Fellow in
International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Oral Statement................................................... 4
Mr. Tom O'Neill, Investigative Journalist, Author of ``Chaos:
Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the
Sixties''
Oral Statement................................................... 6
Dr. Elizabeth M. Ginexi, Ph.D. (Minority Witness), Research
Scientist
Oral Statement................................................... 8
Written opening statements and bios are available on the U.S.
House of Representatives Document Repository at:
docs.house.gov.
MIND CONTROL AND ACCOUNTABILITY:
UNCOVERING THE TRUTH
OF THE CIA'S MKULTRA PROJECT
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 2026
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets
Washington, D.C.
The Task Force met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., Room
2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Anna Paulina Luna
[Chairwoman of the Task Force] presiding.
Present: Representatives Luna, Mace, Burchett, Boebert,
Burlison, and Crane.
Also present, Representative Perry.
Mrs. Luna. This hearing of the Task Force on
Declassification of Federal Secrets will come to order.
Welcome, everyone.
Without objection, the Chair may declare a recess at any
time. I recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening
statement.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRWOMAN ANNA PAULINA LUNA
REPRESENTATIVE FROM FLORIDA
This hearing is about the crimes committed by the Central
Intelligence Agency against the American citizens and the
decades of secrecy used to conceal them. The American people
deserve a complete and truthful record. Victims and their
families deserve acknowledgement, and this Congress has a
constitutional obligation to ensure that full declassification
is not delayed any longer.
Project MKULTRA was not a policy failure or an overzealous
program that got out of hand. It was a deliberate, systematic
governmental operational that subjected American citizens,
prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, ordinary people to LSD,
electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psychological
torture without their knowledge or consent.
This went on for 20 years, on American soil, funded by
American taxpayer dollars, and authorized by the very top of
U.S. intelligence apparatus. And this program, when it did end,
the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators. They
did not come forward. They committed another crime: they
destroyed evidence.
The documents this Task Force has reviewed are unambiguous.
In January 1973, the Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), Richard Helms, prepared to leave office. He
personally ordered the destruction of MKULTRA records. The CIA
official document in writing states, ``Over my stated
objectives, the MKULTRA files were destroyed by the order of
DCI, Mr. Helms, shortly before his departure from office.'' A
separate internal account confirms that Helms telephoned Dr.
Gottlieb directly and instructed him to destroy, quote, ``all
files pertaining to drug research and associated activities.''
Gottlieb compiled four people, spent an entire day tearing,
burning down 152 files. Then Gottlieb had his personal papers
destroyed by his secretary before he retired. The head of the
CIA's own Records Center protested the destruction in writing,
but he was overruled.
That is obstruction of justice. That is criminal
destruction of Federal records, and neither individuals were
ever charged with a crime for it. Helms received a $2,000 file
for lying to Congress about an unrelated manner and collected
his government pension until he died. Gottlieb retired in rural
Virginia and wrote poetry. No one went to prison. No victim was
ever formally compensated by the government for the harm that
they caused.
By 1975, the Church Committee and the Rockefeller
Commission had already established, through sworn testimony,
and the surviving 1963 Inspector General report that MKULTRA
existed and that the CIA had run a program of human
experimentation on unwitting Americans.
The scope and detail of what we know today is largely
because of an accident. In 1977, an archivist, diligently
complying with a FOIA request, discovered seven boxes of
MKULTRA financial records that had been misfiled and escaped
the bonfire. Those seven boxes included the names of
institutions, the name of subprojects, the researchers who
participated, the specific operation that the CIA had funded,
and without them the vast majority of MKULTRA would only be a
rumor, just as Helms and Gottlieb intended.
Those seven boxes revealed that MKULTRA comprised at least
149 subprojects, operated across more than 80 institutions, and
involved 185 non-government researchers. They revealed that the
CIA covertly contributed $375,000 to a hospital research wing,
which was approved directly by DCI Allen Dulles, with Richard
Helms' concurrence, so the Agency could use unwitting patients
as experimental subjects in what their own documents called ``a
hospital safe house.''
The CIA's own Inspector General said, in 1963, his
classified report concluded that the program had exceeded the
agency's legal chapter and covert testing on unwitting subjects
placed the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
The program ran for a decade, that we know of, and they ignored
their own watchdog.
Let me be clear, in what I believe that we are dealing with
here. Administering drugs to people without their knowledge or
consent, and subjecting humans to psychological torture, and
using prisoners and hospital patients as non-consenting
research subjects, these are crimes against humanity. The
Central Intelligence Agency committed them, and then the
Director of the CIA was ordering the destruction of evidence.
Today, we will hear from two witnesses who have spent years
unraveling the cover-up that our government ordered. Steven
Kinzer documented the life and crimes of Sidney Gottlieb in his
book, ``Poisoner in Chief,'' and Tom O'Neill spent over 20
years investigating what the CIA buried and what they obscured
that, in my mind, constitute some of the worst notorious crimes
against humanity in the 20th century.
Their persistence in their research and this hearing is
possible simply because they are patriots. The American people
deserve the complete record; the victims and their families
deserve acknowledgement, accountability, and justice; and this
Congress has a constitutional obligation to make sure that the
CIA never does this again.
With that I am going to be opening up first questions, and
I will hold my questions to end, to Representative Burlison.
But before I do pass it, I did want to just note, a few weeks
ago we did receive reports. There was some back-and-forth
regarding the CIA and Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (ODNI) pertaining to new MKULTRA boxes that were
discovered. Myself and Representative Burlison did go down to
Langley. We did meet with the CIA, and the CIA is currently in
the process of declassifying newly found documentation,
although the documents, and I feel comfortable enough to share
here, pertain specifically to a forgery program that was being
housed under MKULTRA. So, as soon as those files are released
we will be putting out notification, with your help, to also
comb through some of the newly released documents, but I did
want to give you a quick update.
Without further ado I would like to now recognize
Representative Eric Burlison for his questions. Go ahead.
Without objection, Representative Perry and Representative
Higgins from Pennsylvania and Louisiana are waived onto the
Committee for the purpose of questioning the witnesses at
today's Subcommittee [sic] hearing.
And I would like to now recognize Dr. Kinzer and the
witnesses for their opening statements.
Stephen Kinzer is a historian, journalist, and author of
``Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA's Search for
Mind Control.'' Tom O'Neill is an investigative journalist who
authored, ``Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret
History of the Sixties.'' And Elizabeth Ginexi--did I say that
right, ma'am? Ginexi?--is an independent consultant and former
Senior Program Officer at the National Institutes of Health. We
look forward to hearing what you have to say today on this
important subject.
Pursuant to Committee Rule 9(g), the witnesses will please
stand and raise their right hands.
Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are
about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, so help you God?
[Chorus of ayes.]
Mrs. Luna. Let the record show the witnesses have answered
in the affirmative. Thank you. You may take your seats.
We appreciate you being here today. Let me remind the
witnesses that we have read your written statement and this
will appear in full in the hearing record. Please limit your
oral statements to 5 minutes. However, if it does go over, we
will not be gaveling you out.
As a reminder, please press the button on the microphone in
front of you so that it is illuminated and Members can hear
you. When you begin to speak the light in front of you, again,
will turn green. After 4 minutes the light will turn yellow.
When the red light comes on, that means your 5 minutes have
expired, and we would ask that you please wrap up.
I would now like to recognize Stephen Kinzer for his
opening statement.
STATEMENT OF DR. STEPHEN KINZER
HISTORIAN AND JOURNALIST
SENIOR FELLOW, INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
BROWN UNIVERSITY
Dr. Kinzer. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. Let me
begin by expressing my gratitude to this Task Force for
confronting the enormous issue of overclassification of
government documents and the culture of secrecy that enables
it. I am especially gratified by your interest in MKULTRA, the
project the CIA carried out through the 1950s in an attempt to
find the secret of mind control.
MKULTRA was one of the most secret government programs in
American history. The chemist who directed it, Sidney Gottlieb,
lived in total anonymity. My book ``Poisoner in Chief'' may be
the most complete account of MKULTRA that exists in public, but
I am painfully aware that I have discovered only a small
portion of what MKULTRA was and what Sidney Gottlieb did.
In 1951, the CIA hired Gottlieb and directed him to launch
what became MKULTRA. Gottlieb believed that in order to find a
way to implant a new mind into someone's brain, you first had
to find a way to destroy the mind that was in there already. In
its search for ways to destroy a human mind and body, MKULTRA
conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that
have ever been carried out by a U.S. Government agency. By any
standard they qualify as medical torture. These experiments
took place in prisons, clinics, and safe houses in the United
States, in Europe, and Asia, and even in Latin America.
Officers of MKULTRA were authorized to travel to foreign
countries, preferably those under formal or informal U.S.
occupation, and ask the local CIA station to provide them with
``expendables,'' human beings who would not be missed if they
disappeared. Gottlieb had what amounted to a license to kill
issued by the U.S. Government. Neither the number of MKULTRA
victims nor the number of those who were experimented to death
is known. Gottlieb, as a result of this license to kill, might
have been the most powerful unknown American of the 20th
century.
Some information about MKULTRA spilled out during the
1970s, but senior CIA officers had intentionally let Gottlieb
operate without supervision, so they were able to claim that
they knew nothing about his excesses. This was a way for the
CIA to deny its institutional role in MKULTRA, and to portray
it misleadingly as the product of one man's sadism or excessive
zeal.
Investigating MKULTRA is challenging because when Gottlieb
and his mentor, Richard Helms, left the CIA in 1973, they
illegally ordered that its records be destroyed. Soon
afterward, under DCI Stansfield Turner, a CIA analyst, as you
pointed out, Madam Chairman, discovered a cache of MKULTRA
documents hidden among financial records. Turner credited the
analyst with doing what he called ``a very diligent job of
Sherlock Holmes-ing.'' That same diligence, I believe, could
bring results today.
One of the great mysteries of MKULTRA has to do with the
death in 1953 of an MKULTRA scientist, Frank Olson, who had
announced his intention to quit the project. His plunge from a
New York hotel room was described in the press as the suicide
of an Army scientist. He was not an Army scientist. He worked
for the CIA. And evidence suggests that his death may not have
been a suicide. So, there could be hidden documents that could
illuminate this case.
I would also point out that in addition to searching for
unknown documents, this Committee could do a tremendous service
by simply asking for the end of redactions on the documents
that we now have. There are reams of documents about MKULTRA
that have heavy sections redacted. In the 1970s, this was
justified by the argument that it had only been 20 years since
these terrible things had happened and revealing details might
affect national security. Now 70 years have passed. That
argument can no longer be valid. So, I would urge this
Committee to try to fill out all of the blank spaces in the
documents that we have, because we know that is there.
This Task Force could also consider trying to determine
whether some new incarnation of MKULTRA exists today.
When the main phase of MKULTRA drew to a close in early
1960s, Sidney Gottlieb concluded that it had failed, that in
fact there is no such thing as mind control. Even if he was
right, however, he may have been right only at that time. In
the many decades since then, there have been enormous advances
in cyber technology, in artificial intelligence, in
neuroscience. Covert agencies may have access now to tools for
mind control that Sidney Gottlieb could not have imagined.
It may well have been true in 1963 that mind control is a
myth, but whether it is still true is uncertain. That question
of whether mind control might now be possible under our new
circumstances is something that has presumably occurred to
scientists who work for Secret Services, including our own.
This Task Force has a chance to connect the past to the
future. A renewed effort to find MKULTRA documents from the
1950s, and to fill out the redactions of those that have been
released, might shed new light on how the CIA operated during
that period. It could also inform a new inquiry into whether
any mind control projects are now underway inside the U.S.
security apparatus. That might help prevent the emergence of a
21st century MKULTRA that could be even more destructive than
the original.
Thank you.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you very much, Dr. Kinzer.
I now recognize Tom O'Neill for his opening statement.
STATEMENT OF MR. TOM O'NEILL
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
AUTHOR OF ``CHAOS: CHARLES MANSON, THE CIA,
AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES''
Mr. O'Neill. Thank you, Chairwoman Luna and Members of the
Committee. It is a privilege to be here today.
Almost 50 years ago, the last congressional hearings into
MKULTRA took place just a short walk from here in the Dirksen
Senate Office Building. At those hearings, convened in August
and September 1977, representatives of the CIA told Congress
and the American people that its 25-year effort to control
human behavior had been a colossal failure. I believe Congress
was never told the truth about what this program actually
achieved. In fact, I believe the agency misled Congress in
1977, when it characterized MKULTRA as a failure.
My name is Tom O'Neill, and in 1999 I accepted a magazine
assignment to write a story about murders committed by a group
of ``hippies'' called the Manson Family. For those unfamiliar
with this horrific episode of American history, in the summer
of 1969, four young people, acting on the orders of a cult
leader named Charles Manson, went to the home of movie director
Roman Polanski and murdered everyone they found there,
including his eight-and-a-half-month pregnant wife, the actress
Sharon Tate. The victims were complete strangers to their
killers.
The following night, Manson's followers murdered another
couple in the same grisly fashion.
At the time I accepted the assignment, I had never heard of
MKULTRA, and I would not for another two years, after I had
missed countless deadlines, lost the assignment, and fallen
down a nightmarish rabbit hole trying to answer the question I
could not quite shake--how had Manson, a barely literate ex-
con, acquired the ability to persuade ordinary young people to
murder complete strangers simply because he had told them to?
The pursuit of the answer to that question led me to Dr.
Louis Jolyon West, known to his friends as ``Jolly.'' West was
one of the most influential psychiatrists in America. During
his career, he crossed paths with some of the most
controversial events of the 20th century, including the Patty
Hearst kidnapping case and the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy
assassination investigation.
In 1977, West was one of seven academic researchers named
in a front-page New York Times story alleging that the CIA had
used American universities, hospitals, and prisons as secret
laboratories for experiments involving LSD and other drugs on
unwitting human subjects. West vigorously denied the
allegations. He acknowledged that the agency had approached
him, but insisted he had refused because he said LSD was too
dangerous and unpredictable to be used on humans. He added that
he limited all of his research with LSD to animals.
The revelations in The Times led directly to the
congressional hearings held later that year. West's denials,
however, were effective. He was never investigated, and his
name never came up at the hearings.
I will spare you the long and tedious story of how my
Manson reporting led to West, led me to West, except to say
that I eventually learned that in 1967, when Manson transformed
into the cult leader we are familiar with today, he and his
followers were receiving free medical care at a clinic in San
Francisco, where West had established a base of operation for a
research project he was conducting nearby.
After becoming intrigued by the allegations against West, I
learned that UCLA, his last academic home, had inherited his
paper following his death in 1999. Nearly two months and more
than 200 boxes later, I found the proverbial needle in a
haystack, correspondence between West and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb,
the architect of MKULTRA.
The letters begin in 1953, just two months after CIA
Director Allen Dulles authorized the program, and while West
was stationed at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio,
Texas, where he was chief psychiatrist at the base hospital. In
his first letter to Gottlieb, West proposed conducting
experiments on unwitting human subjects, including military
personnel, prisoners, and psychiatric patients at the base
hospital. He then outlined the experiments themselves, in six
more pages that could have been written by Josef Mengele.
Using LSD in combination with hypnosis, West proposed
inducing confusion, amnesia, and specific mental disorders in
people who would remember nothing of their interaction with him
afterward. He sought to develop techniques to extract true
information and implant false information in unwilling subjects
and to alter the attitudes and beliefs of, quote, ``previously
loyal individuals,'' in other words, to completely switch their
allegiance from one group or leader to another.
But it was another sentence at the end of that letter that
stopped me cold. ``These experiments,'' he wrote, ``must
eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.''
Gottlieb's response could hardly have been more
enthusiastic. ``My good friend,'' he wrote, ``I had been
wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp
of our problems could possibly be real. You have indeed
developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are
after.'' West replied that there was no more vital undertaking
conceivable in these times.
There was another document in West's papers that had even
more significant implications. It was a 14-page report that
West wrote in 1956, just three years after he contracted with
the CIA. In the report, West described administering LSD and
other drugs in conjunction with hypnosis on unwitting human
subjects, and then he made a remarkable claim. He announced
that he had learned how to replace true memories with false
memories in people, without their knowledge. In other words, he
clarified, ``It has been found to be feasible to take the
memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and,
through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent
conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually
took place, but that a different fictional event actually did
occur.''
If West's report was accurate, this was not the failure
agency officials described in 1977. Quite the opposite. It was,
in fact, the central ambition of the MKULTRA operation, the
means of gaining the ability to seize the control of a person's
perceptions, memories, and ultimately their behavior.
But there was still one more discovery, and this time I
found it in the National Security Archives at George Washington
University, the official repository of the CIA's MKULTRA
records, which were released to Congress after the 1977
hearings. In those holdings, was a different version of West's
1956 report. The original paper had been replaced by a four-
page summary that did not exist in West's files and appears to
have been written by someone else. His claims about replacing
memories were gone. In their place was a theoretical discussion
of LSD and dissociative states.
The version supplied to Congress concluded that the effects
of LSD and similar drugs on dissociative states had, and I am
quoting, ``never been studied.'' Never been studied. In the
original report, West discusses observations from his own
experiments, including detailed descriptions of using LSD to,
as he wrote, ``speed the induction of the hypnotic state and
deepen the trance in subjects.'' Those passages had been
removed in the report turned over to Congress. The discrepancy
could not have been more stark.
Nearly 50 years ago, another congressional committee
believed it had been given the truth about MKULTRA. It had not.
In conclusion, I respectfully submit that these records,
some newly available and others that remain outside the
government's disclosure for decades, warrant a thorough
reexamination of what the program accomplished, what Congress
was told, and what may still remain hidden.
I am happy to provide the documents I have referenced
today, and I have provided many additional details in my
written testimony.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Mr. O'Neill. I now recognize
Elizabeth Ginexi for her opening statement.
STATEMENT OF DR. ELIZABETH M. GINEXI, PH.D.
(MINORITY WITNESS)
RESEARCH SCIENTIST
Dr. Ginexi. Chairman Luna and distinguished Members of the
Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
I am a health research scientist with a master's and
doctoral degrees in psychology from the George Washington
University. I spent 22 years, from 2003 to 2025, as a
scientific program official at the National Institutes of
Health, managing more than $132 million in health research
grants and co-authoring 18 Federal funding programs. I left the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) in April 2025.
I am here today because what is happening to NIH right now
is not reform. It is the replacement of scientific judgment
with political control.
For 80 years, U.S. Federal investments in biomedical
research produced outcomes that no private market would have
funded. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the
United States. NIH-funded research on blood pressure,
cholesterol, and smoking drove a 56 percent decline in heart
disease between 1950 and 1996. Cancer has been transformed.
Treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers,
along with immunotherapies that converted previously fatal
diagnoses into manageable conditions trace directly to NIH-
funded research.
HIV/AIDS were a death sentence in 1981. No pharmaceutical
company saw a profitable market for treatments. NIH ran the
trials that no one else would run. The result was anti-
retroviral therapy and preexposure prophylaxis. Global AIDS
death has fallen 54 percent since 2010.
Rare diseases that affect 30 million Americans get studied
at the NIH because no market will fund that research. Every
dollar that is appropriated to the National Institutes of
Health generates $2.46 in economic outputs. NIH-supported work
contributed to 354 of the 356 new drugs that the FDA approved
between 2010 and 2019.
Cutting the funding source of that pipeline does not slow
it. It ends it.
The proposed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Federal
Financial Assistance Rule would give political appointees
authority to terminate funded grants at any time, without
cause, including ongoing clinical trials with enrolled
patients. This is not a hypothetical. NIH has already
terminated or frozen thousands of grants, including hundreds of
ongoing clinical trials, since January 2025, concentrated in
infectious disease, vaccine, and health disparities research.
This proposed rule will make that authority permanent.
The NIH Director has eliminated the merit score thresholds
that once protected peer review, and political appointees are
right now overriding peer review outcomes to screen grants for
alignment with administrative priorities.
The proposed OMB rule will also severely restrict
international research. We are managing an H5N1 bird flu
outbreak that has more than 70 documented human cases. We
recently concluded a hantavirus response that required Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists working
alongside Argentine counterparts.
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of
Congo is now the third-largest on record, and is outpacing
containment efforts. This rule will curtail exactly that kind
of cooperation that we need.
NIH lost 1,112 Ph.D.-trained workers from 2025 to early
2026. More than half of the NIH institutes right now are
operating without permanent scientific leadership. The majority
of its advisory councils required by statute to provide
independent oversight have lost more than half of their
members.
The fundamental choice before this Congress is between a
system where scientists make scientific judgments through
accountable processes and one where political appointees make
those calls instead. That choice will determine whether the
next breakthroughs in cancer, Alzheimer's, antibiotic
resistance, and pandemic defense will happen here, somewhere
else, or perhaps not at all.
I urge this Committee to support a joint resolution of
disapproval to block the proposed OMB Financial Assistance
Rule. That authority to replace peer review with political
approval has not been granted by Congress and should not be.
Mrs. Luna. Dr. Ginexi, your time has expired.
Dr. Ginexi. Thank you very much.
Mrs. Luna. I will now go to myself for questioning. Thank
you, ma'am.
My first question is for Mr. O'Neill. MKNAOMI, the joint
CIA-Army program that ran parallel with MKULTRA at Fort
Dietrich to have been run with deliberate minimal
documentation. Army records on Special Operations Division have
apparently been destroyed. In your investigation what did you
learn about MKNAOMI, and do you believe its activities were
even more serious than what we know about MKULTRA?
Mr. O'Neill. I am sorry. I did not learn anything about
those operations. I kept my focus mostly on Dr. West and his
work. I do know that the only reason I found the documents I
found was because Dr. West accidentally left them in his
papers, and he probably did that because he corresponded with
Gottlieb under Gottlieb's assigned alias, which was Sherman
Grifford, and he addressed all his mail to a post office box
here under a false corporation.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Mr. O'Neill. I am just going to real
quick go to Dr. Kinzer. Are you aware of anything that exists
with MKNAOMI in your research? And if you could please press
the button.
Dr. Kinzer. My understanding of MKNAOMI is that it was a
joint project between the military and the CIA. And there is a
big difference because the MKULTRA project was aimed at seizing
control of the minds of individuals. The Army was interested in
something different, which was trying to use biological agents
in warfare against entire populations. So, MKNAOMI is the place
where these two goals overlapped.
Mrs. Luna. And that was the 1953 Frank Olson death. Was
that in a way tied to that, from some chatter that we had seen
in----
Mr. O'Neill. Exactly what the motivation was behind the
decision about Frank Olson, if there was such a decision, is
unknown.
Mrs. Luna. My next question is also for you, sir. Operation
Paperclip brought over 1,600 German scientists into the U.S.
Government after World War II, including individuals who had
conducted human experimentation in concentration camps. The CIA
and military were aware of their backgrounds and recruited them
anyways.
In your research, did you find direct documentation between
Paperclip scientists and the development of MKULTRA's
experimental protocols, specifically the use of mescaline,
hypnosis, and sensory deprivation, which were techniques also
documented at Dachau?
Mr. O'Neill. Absolutely. Kurt Blome, who was the chief of
biological weapons development for the Nazi government came to
work for the CIA. So did Walter Schreiber, who was the surgeon
general of the Nazi army.
I can just tell a brief story. When I was researching my
book, I found what I think might be the first secret CIA
prison, or black site. It is a nice chalet in Germany. And the
guy who now owns it took me into the basement. He said these
were the cells where the MKULTRA officers, working side-by-side
with Nazis, carried out those gruesome experiments, which were
actually just continuations of the experiments that those Nazis
had been conducting just a few years earlier, right down the
road.
Mrs. Luna. Just for timeline and clarification, these
experiments were happening after the Nuremberg trials. Correct?
So, the CIA would have known that these were crimes against
humanity.
Mr. O'Neill. I looked for an episode in which the Nuremberg
doctrines were posted on the wall in some MKULTRA or CIA
office, and I was never able to find any indication that those
Nuremberg principles ever were even consulted, much less
obeyed.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you. My next question would be for either
witness to comment, Dr. Kinzer or Mr. O'Neill. Both witnesses
have written about the psychiatrist, Louis ``Jolly'' West.
Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the MKULTRA program for the CIA, hired
West as a contractor to conduct research for Subproject 43,
combining hypnotism, drugs, and sensory deprivation to create
dissociative states in which, to quote Mr. Kinzer in his book,
``Poisoner in Chief,'' ``The human mind could be pulled away
from its moorings.''
Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
West psychiatrically examined Jack Ruby, then in prison for
murdering the President [sic] accused of the assassination of
Lee Harvey Oswald--the assassin accused of murdering President
Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. A report emerged from West's
examination said that Ruby had suffered an acute psychotic
break. Can you explain why Dr. West, in particular, was chosen
to conduct an examination of Jack Ruby alone in his jail cell
with no other psychologist present?
Dr. Kinzer. I would be happy to. West inserted himself into
the case. When Ruby was--the day after the shooting, West
approached the judge in the preliminary hearings and asked to
be assigned to the case. He was refused by the judge. After
Ruby was convicted at his first trial, an associate of West,
Dr. Hubert Winston Smith, who was a psychiatrist and an
attorney, took over Ruby's defense for his appeal, and he had
already discussed appointing Ruby to the case, or excuse me,
West to the case.
And as you said, West examined Ruby alone at the jail cell,
and emerged to announce that in the preceding 48 hours he had
had an acute psychotic break from which he would never recover.
He had been declared competent to stand trial the first time by
a panel of, I think, eight psychiatrists. This psychotic break
lasted until his death in 1967. Two months after West examined
him, Ruby testified for the first time, and only time, to the
Warren Commission. It was the first time he ever publicly was
supposed to say what his reasons were for shooting Oswald. The
testimony had to be halted because he was babbling
incoherently, and as Arlin Specter, who was the counsel to the
Commission, wrote in his memoirs, he pulled him aside, and said
that they were cutting off the arms and legs of children in
Albuquerque and El Paso, and he said he was making no sense
whatsoever.
West in his letters to Gottlieb from 1953, discussed
experiments where he would induce specific mental disorders in
people without their awareness. A year before the Kennedy
assassination, he publicly spoke in Oklahoma City, and talked
about his LSD experiments inducing psychiatric breaks and
psychosis in people with the use of LSD, which, of course,
later contradicted what he told The New York Times when he said
he never used LSD except in animal experimentation.
Mrs. Luna. What an interesting connection. I am out of
time, but I will be now recognizing Mr. Burlison from Missouri
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Burlison. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for your
diligent work on this, and hopefully we will hear back from the
CIA on those boxes of documents that have so many questions
about.
Dr. Kinzer and Mr. O'Neill, the CIA recruit created MKULTRA
in 1953, supposedly out of fear that the Soviet Union and China
had developed mind control capabilities. Let me go back a
little bit further.
One of my questions has to do with the event that happened
in 1951 in August, in France. There was a bakery that, I guess
the people that lived in that community, over 250, some say
300, people were poisoned from the bread. It was determined
that that was LSD that was causing all of these people to
hallucinate. Some people died.
Is there any connection, Dr. Kinzer, to that event, and was
that something that either inspired the MKULTRA program or the
MKNAOMI program? Or is that something that we were involved in
even that early on?
Dr. Kinzer. I would turn that question back to you. I do
not think anybody really knows the full story of what happened
in that town in France, that the United States could have been
involved, that this could have been part of what was then
called Operation Artichoke, the predecessor for MKULTRA. Seems
to me not beyond the realm of possibility.
There is a lot of overlap between the ergot enzyme that is
the basis of LSD and certain rye and wheat funguses that can be
used in breads. Was that something intentional? Was it
something the Americans were involved in? I have my suspicions,
but just based on my background as a journalist, I do not
operate on suspicions. So, I would love to see more
investigation of that episode.
Mr. Burlison. My next question has to do with once the
program began, I think one of the most shocking things that we
have determined is the Operation Midnight Climax that occurred
in the early 1950s, 1960s, where the CIA had safe houses. I
would say, Dr. Kinzer, I mean, obviously this is extremely
disturbing behavior that was happening where you had American
citizens who were being lured into these brothels and then
dosed with a hallucinogenic and then filmed during their sex
acts. Was there anyone prosecuted for these crimes?
Dr. Kinzer. No, there have been no prosecutions for any
crime related to MKULTRA, as far as I know. To me, the
remarkable aspect of that Operation Midnight Climax was that
there was not even the pretense of scientific experimentation.
The person watching behind the one-way mirror was a grossly
overweight drug officer sitting on a portable toilet and
drinking cocktails out of a pitcher. There was nobody there
that was a scientist or somebody who understood sexual behavior
or human psychology. So, there was no science involved in it at
all.
I can add a little footnote. When I was researching
``Poisoner in Chief'', I came across a document in which one of
the officers involved in setting up that program, Operation
Midnight Climax, said that Sidney Gottlieb himself used to fly
from Washington out to inspect the project regularly and always
asked that women be provided for him. So, it made me wonder.
Mr. Burlison. That was my next question. Do you think that
the agents were involved in the sexual encounters?
Dr. Kinzer. And could that have actually been the reason
why the bordello was opened? There was no prospect of any
serious scientific result out of that project, given the
personnel who were overseeing it. So, those CIA officers,
particularly Gottlieb, involved in overseeing Operation
Midnight Climax certainly were able to take advantage of what
it offered.
Mr. Burlison. Thank you. And my last question. First, I
want to say thank you to Mr. O'Neill. The book ``Chaos,'' I
checked it out from the Library of Congress, and greatly
appreciate your work there.
I was intrigued by one of the statements that you made
based on your research, that the MKULTRA program, they were
actually successfully able to replace memories. And because of
that, I am wondering if--and Dr. Kinzer, you can chime in if
you have any knowledge of this--did the program continue, and
do you think that the program in some aspect is still
continuing today?
Mr. O'Neill. You are asking if the program continued after
1973 when it was halted, supposedly?
Mr. Burlison. That is right.
Mr. O'Neill. Honestly, that is a question I am asked at
almost every appearance I do. Is it happening today? Did it
continue? I do not know. I cannot imagine that it did not
though, because the technology that they worked to establish
over 20, 25 years, and spent more money on than any operation
the CIA had ever conducted, was successful. I imagine it is
being used. I have no evidence of it being used, so it is a
complete assumption.
Dr. Kinzer. I would just add that one of the letters, to
which Mr. O'Neill referred, contains a quote from Mr. Gottlieb
saying that these experiments were necessary, quote, ``in these
times.'' I think it is important to put yourself back in that
mindset where the United States felt that it was under such
overwhelming threat that the loss of a few lives or a few
hundred lives was a small price to pay.
Commitment to a great cause is one of the most fundamental
justifications for committing immoral acts, and patriotism is
among the most noble of causes. It can be twisted, and it can
be used as an excuse to carry out research under the guise that
this is simply research we are doing to protect ourselves
against others. And I think that is a mindset that may still be
active in some parts of our government.
Mr. Burlison. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Madam Chair.
My time has expired. I yield back.
Mr. Crane. [Presiding.] Thank you, Mr. Burlison. I now
recognize myself. Thank you to the witnesses for coming today
to testify about MKULTRA. Dr. Ginexi, you said you worked for
the NIH, is that correct?
Dr. Ginexi. That is correct.
Mr. Crane. And you left in 2025?
Dr. Ginexi. That is correct.
Mr. Crane. I noticed during your opening statement that you
had nothing to say about the content of this hearing being
about MKULTRA. Your statement seemed to be based more on your
issues with this Administration's attempt to reform and rein in
the NIH. Is that a fair assessment of your opening statement?
Dr. Ginexi. My opening statement was talking about the
destruction of the NIH and cancellation of grants and political
control of the NIH.
Mr. Crane. Would you deny that the NIH had involvement in
the funding of the Wuhan lab?
Dr. Ginexi. I do not have any knowledge about any funding
related to the Wuhan lab.
Mr. Crane. So, are you denying that the NIH funded the
Wuhan lab?
Dr. Ginexi. I am basically here to talk about what is
happening right now at the NIH and how we really should be
letting science be driven by scientists and not by politicians,
because that is how we fund cures and make health progress.
Mr. Crane. Well, with all due respect, ma'am, do you find
it ironic that for years we were told to trust the science, and
then in the aftermath, we have all found out that most of what
we were told during COVID was a complete lie and it was not
scientific at all?
Dr. Ginexi. The number one thing that I think that we are
doing to destroy trust in American science right now is
canceling clinical trials, in the middle of those clinical
trials. This does incredible harm to the patients who are
receiving experimental treatments, and it really destroys the
trust that we have in how do we recruit patients for future
trials if they are knowing that their trials could just be
simply canceled for political reasons.
Mr. Crane. Right. I do not think anybody up here would deny
that there has never been anything good that has come out of
the NIH and that you guys have done some good work, but you
just brought up trust. Do you think the NIH has a trust problem
based on how they handled COVID?
Dr. Ginexi. No, I do not. I think that the NIH is beloved
by the American people because we know about the advances in
human health and cancer treatments and heart disease and
diabetes, and all of the health gains that the research has
produced.
Mr. Crane. Well, I think you are wrong, ma'am. I think that
the public has a serious mistrust issue with the NIH. Do you
deny that the NIH tried to cover up the origin of COVID?
Dr. Ginexi. I am not here to testify about that. That is
not my area of science. I have no knowledge of that.
Mr. Crane. Do you believe that the NIH supported masking
and social distancing when there was really no science to
support that?
Dr. Ginexi. What I am more concerned about is what is
happening right now to destroy the Biomedical Research
Institute that has been the envy of the world. Right now, we
are ceding our leadership in biomedical research to China. That
is what is happening right now.
Mr. Crane. What about covering up harmful side effects of
vaccines and the role that the NIH has played in that? What do
you have to say about that, ma'am?
Dr. Ginexi. The U.S. history of human subjects protection
has evolved greatly. Numerous research improprieties from the
1950s to the 1970s in the United States, including the Tuskegee
Syphilis Study, forced Congress to establish formerly Federal
mandated rules----
Mr. Crane. I am not asking you about that. You know what I
am asking you about. I am asking you about how NIH handled
COVID. Obviously, this is supposed to be a hearing about
MKULTRA, but when you gave your opening statement, and I do not
even know why you were called to this hearing because you did
not offer anything about MKULTRA. But since you are here and
you are going to defend NIH, I am going to call you out on it.
[Applause.]
Mr. Crane. Do you see now what I am talking about? When you
say that the NIH does not have integrity problems and trust
issues, did you hear the applause in this room? That should
tell you right now that you are pretty tone deaf to what the
public thinks about how the NIH handled COVID and the cover-up,
not only the funding of it, but the cover-up involved in the
aftermath. Can you acknowledge that?
Dr. Ginexi. I am sorry. That is not my understanding.
Mr. Crane. Thank you. I want to acknowledge Ms. Boebert for
the next round of questioning.
Ms. Boebert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to two
of our witnesses who are here to actually talk on our subject
here today.
Mr. Kinzer, in your book, ``Poisoner in Chief,'' you
describe how Project MKULTRA was authorized by CIA Director
Allen Dulles in April 1953 as an umbrella program for research
into the covert use of biological and chemical materials for
mind control and interrogation. What specific geopolitical and
intelligence concerns, particularly regarding alleged Soviet
and Chinese, quote, ``brainwashing'' and Korean War prisoners,
drove this authorization? And how did Sidney Gottlieb's unique
background and personality and worldwide view shape the
program's direction and methods and ethical boundaries?
Dr. Kinzer. Let me start by answering your second question
about Gottlieb. He was a very different person from all of the
other senior CIA officers of that era. Most of them came from
silver spoon backgrounds. They went to the same prep schools
and the same Ivy League colleges, and belonged to the same
yacht clubs, and worked for the same law firms and
international banks. Sidney Gottlieb was the son of Orthodox
Jewish refugees from Central Europe. He had a limp. He had a
stutter. He went to Hebrew school. He was so different from all
of the other officers.
And upon reflection, I think this may not have been an
accident. I think that people at the CIA understood that
whoever had this job was going to be doing some awful, terrible
things that would be very bloody, that they might become known,
and it might be necessary to blame it all on somebody, and they
did not want to have to blame it all on one of their own. So,
Gottlieb actually became the person on whom everything was
blamed.
In fact, when he testified in secret here in Congress in
the 1970s, he complained that there were documents on which
various signatures had been redacted, but his alone had
remained. So, this, again, is a way of diverting attention away
from the institutional responsibility of the CIA and trying to
blame it on one crazy person.
As for the international situation at the time, I think it
is very important to understand this because there is a sort of
a parallel to today. The CIA misinterpreted several key
incidents in the world, including those to which you referred,
the trial of the Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary and then the
return of Korean War prisoners. Neither of those episodes
really had to do with mind control, but in the CIA they were
interpreted that way. This gave the CIA a reason to pretend
that its research was purely defensive.
So, I think when you consider the world situation and the
sense in Washington that we are surrounded by enemies, that
becomes a very dangerous environment.
Conspiracy theories stem from the growth of the covert
sphere. There is a great contradiction in American life that we
pretend to uphold certain principles at home and abroad, but it
is evident to many Americans that we actually operate in
opposition to those principles, and we operate by secret and
anti-democratic means. That contributes to suspicion of
government, and the very existence of MKULTRA proves that some
of the wildest fantasies about secret government research are
actually close to reality. That makes the paranoid mindset seem
ever more rational.
Ms. Boebert. Thank you. I am going to have to cutoff
several of my questions now, but that was very intriguing, so I
wanted you to continue.
MKULTRA ultimately encompassed at least 149 subprojects,
involving more than 80 institutions, universities, hospitals,
prisons, pharmaceutical companies, often funded through cutout
foundations to conceal CIA sponsorship. Can you detail how
these funding and operational security mechanisms worked in
practice?
And then just another subset if I do not get back to asking
a question, did the CIA or government or any of these entities
ever say that what they were doing with MKULTRA and mind
control were productive or for the betterment of humanity? Did
they ever make those claims? Thank you.
Dr. Kinzer. As for your second question, I am not aware,
other than in private communications, that the CIA ever claimed
that it had made great advances under MKULTRA, because it
largely denied that MKULTRA ever existed.
As for the foundations, yes, Sidney Gottlieb created a
couple of bogus foundations. They are called cutouts in CIA
slang. These are foundations that appear to be independent but
actually are fully funded and controlled by the CIA. It was
those foundations that approached hospitals and clinics and
asked them to become involved in research, particularly into
LSD. So, many of the institutions where these experiments took
place did not even realize that those foundations were actually
covers for the CIA.
Ms. Boebert. Thank you very much. Madam Chair, I yield.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you. I now recognize Representative Mace
from South Carolina for 5 minutes.
Ms. Mace. Thank you so much. Dr. Ginexi, you work with the
NIH. Correct?
Dr. Ginexi. No. I am no longer affiliated with the NIH.
Ms. Mace. When did you leave the NIH?
Dr. Ginexi. April of last year.
Ms. Mace. April of last year. Did you ever speak with
Anthony Fauci or any of your NIH colleagues when you were there
about the NIH's role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology
or the development of COVID-19 virus?
Dr. Ginexi. No.
Ms. Mace. Do you believe that the NIH or Dr. Fauci lied to
the American people about COVID?
Dr. Ginexi. No.
Ms. Mace. Are you familiar with Dr. Fauci's statements to
Congress about COVID?
Dr. Ginexi. No.
Ms. Mace. You did not watch any of--you worked at the NIH
and you did not watch any of Dr. Fauci's----
Dr. Ginexi. No. I did not work at National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Ms. Mace. Okay. Do you think the COVID shots harm American
citizens?
Dr. Ginexi. No, I do not.
Ms. Mace. Do you think that the COVID shots caused turbo
cancers?
Dr. Ginexi. No.
Ms. Mace. Do you know if the NIH or NIAID track COVID shot
injuries or cancers or anything harmful from them?
Dr. Ginexi. I am not aware of any harmful tracking. This is
not my area of expertise, no.
Ms. Mace. What is your area of expertise?
Dr. Ginexi. I am a research psychologist, and I did not
work at NIAID.
Ms. Mace. And you are here for what reason?
Dr. Ginexi. I am here to testify about what is happening to
the NIH right now.
Ms. Mace. You are not here to testify about MKULTRA?
Dr. Ginexi. I am not an MKULTRA expert.
Ms. Mace. Why did the Dem send you here if you are not an
MKULTRA expert?
Dr. Ginexi. But I am an expert in human subjects
protection, which is related and in the conduct of human
subjects research.
Ms. Mace. Okay. But you do not know anything about MKULTRA,
which is the purpose of this hearing.
All right, so I have a couple questions for our witnesses
who are here to talk about MKULTRA. Thank you, gentlemen, Dr.
Kinzer and Mr. O'Neill. What are some of the worst abuses that
you are aware of in the MKULTRA program?
Dr. Kinzer. I can start by just naming--I will talk about
one in particular that always sticks in my mind. In the Federal
prison in Lexington, Kentucky, a group of African American
inmates was segregated and fed what were described in the
protocol as double, triple, and quadruple doses of LSD every
day for 77 days.
Ms. Mace. Did they all survive?
Dr. Kinzer. We have no idea what happened to them.
Ms. Mace. Okay.
Dr. Kinzer. This has stuck with me ever since I wrote that
book. What happened to them? Did they ever find out what was
given to them? Did they think they were going crazy? Did they--
I think if the----
Ms. Mace. Do you think we are still experimenting on
prisoners or people in prison today?
Dr. Kinzer. I do not have any information about that.
Ms. Mace. Okay.
Dr. Kinzer. I am hoping there will be another book about
what is happening now.
Ms. Mace. Mr. O'Neill, what are some of the worst abuses in
MKULTRA?
Mr. O'Neill. There were many. The Frank Olson case, which
was referenced earlier, that was a murder. I do not believe
that was a suicide. The motivation was because he was going to
be a whistleblower. He worked at the CIA, he worked in the
development of biological weapons, and he was planning to go
public and announce that the U.S. Government was using
biological weapons in the Korean War. Also, he was going to
talk or share what he knew about MKULTRA experiments, including
lethal experiments. And there is a documented case that----
Ms. Mace. Gentlemen, how many people do you think died
through the MKULTRA program or were murdered?
Mr. O'Neill. No idea.
Dr. Kinzer. If those who died largely were outside the
United States, many people were experimented to death in that
safe house in Germany that I visited. And people in the
neighborhood told me they knew what was going on in that house
and that people who were experimented to death are now buried
in what used to be forest plots that are now covered over with
apartments plots.
Ms. Mace. Do you think the German government knew what the
U.S. Government was doing? Do you think there was a partnership
there or knowledge?
Dr. Kinzer. Yes. There is a memo that was written by the
German Secret Service to Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of
Germany, telling him Americans are here capturing citizens,
capturing people, and conducting extreme experiments, which are
in violation of German law. And Adenauer decided to put that
aside and not to investigate.
Ms. Mace. I have one more question because I have 15
seconds. Is this a massive coverup by the U.S. Government?
Dr. Kinzer. It is certainly a coverup of what happened in
the past.
Ms. Mace. Mr. O'Neill?
Mr. O'Neill. Oh, absolutely, yes.
Ms. Mace. Thank you. And I yield back.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Representative Mace. I now recognize
Mr. Perry from Pennsylvania for 5 minutes.
Mr. Perry. Thank you, Chair. Thanks to the witnesses for
being here. To Dr. Kinzer and Mr. O'Neill, I want to focus on
the information that we do have and things of that nature. Do
we know of--can you name the location, say, the prisons, the
hospitals, other institutions, and the cutouts, as you
described, either one of you folks described them, that would
be familiar to us or the American people? Can you name----
Mr. O'Neill. Yes, if I could begin just by saying, at the
end of the 1977 hearings, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator
Daniel Inouye, who were the co-chairs, demanded that there be
an investigation to find out who were the perpetrators, where
were the experiments conducted, and most importantly, to find,
to locate victims, compensate them, notify them, because many
did not even know they had been experimented on, and give them
lifetime medical care.
President Jimmy Carter and Attorney General Griffin Bell
said the Federal Government will begin an investigation. That
never happened. Instead, the CIA created something called the
Victims Task Force to investigate itself. It was a two-man
investigation to locate victims, and they only looked for
people who had been experimented on in the safe houses, because
I interviewed both of them before they passed away. They
completely avoided institutional experimental programs at the
hospitals.
And you are asking about the hospitals. The Oklahoma City
Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base Hospital, the Lexington
Addiction Center, which Dr. Kinzer referred to, the Holmesburg
Prison, Vacaville Prison, universities all over the country,
Yale, Ivy League universities. None of those records--there was
a criminal investigation that was also supposed to start into
Gottlieb's destruction of the records. That had been announced
by the Justice Department. And I interviewed Griffin Bell and
asked him what happened to all those investigations and what
happened to all those efforts to locate victims. He said it
just must have fallen through the cracks.
Mr. Perry. So, it was the DOJ that was supposed to
investigate?
Mr. O'Neill. DOJ, the Department of Justice, and they just
kept passing it off and passing it off.
Mr. Perry. Do you know if the DOJ, in their investigation,
visited the places that you have named?
Mr. O'Neill. No, absolutely not from my----
Mr. Perry. Wait, hold on a second. They did not or you do
not know?
Mr. O'Neill. Oh, no, no. I asked the two men who did the
investigation, and they said, ``All we did was look into what
happened at the safe houses in San Francisco and New York City
in 1962.''
Mr. Perry. So, is it possible that information and
documentation remains at the prisons, the treatment centers,
the universities where these things were conducted? Is that
possible?
Mr. O'Neill. Yes. Well, I found Dr. West's records at UCLA
in his file. Hospital records are really hard to get because of
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
laws. And prison records, the Bureau of Prisons do have a lot.
So yes, it is possible there are still documents buried places.
Mr. Perry. What were the average ages, if you know, of the
people that were experimented on? Were these children? Were
these middle-aged? Were they----
Mr. O'Neill. Well, there were adolescent studies done in
juvenile detention facilities and jails with kids who were 16,
17, 18 years old, and at institutional schools for wayward
kids. The National Training School for Boys here in Washington
D.C. had them. So, it ranged from, I think, adolescent, pre-
adolescent, you know, through any age.
Mr. Perry. If you could describe, either one of you, the
number of potential victims, if you could hazard a guess. Is
this hundreds?
Mr. O'Neill. There were 149 programs that we know of that
were subcontracted outside of----
Mr. Perry. 149 separate programs.
Mr. O'Neill. Yes, outside. And that is what we know of.
Again, everything we know of is minuscule compared to what was
really going on. So, I mean, that could have been into the tens
of thousands, and I believe that is another reason that nothing
was pursued, because if those people were compensated, it could
have bankrupted the United States.
Mr. Perry. Has there been any recent attempt to find,
locate, identify victims of this case?
Mr. O'Neill. Not that I know of.
Dr. Kinzer. I would just add that there has been
considerable progress in this regard in Canada. There was
MKULTRA research going on at a psychiatric hospital in Canada,
and the Canadian government has made a real effort to try to
find out who the victims were and also to compensate them and
to provide them with medical treatment. So, if we are looking
for an example of a place where it was done better, even though
it was on a much smaller scale, Canada would be a place to
look.
Mr. Perry. So, other than embarrassment to the Federal
Government, maybe agencies involved and particular individuals
who are probably likely deceased at this point, what is the
reason for the mass redaction of the information that we do
have? Has any reasoning been given?
Mr. O'Neill. Shame.
Mr. Perry. I am sorry?
Mr. O'Neill. Shame.
Mr. Perry. That is what I am saying, other than
embarrassment. But I think it stands to reason that probably
the individuals involved in conducting and authorizing this
activity are probably all deceased----
Mr. O'Neill. Sure.
Mr. Perry [continuing]. At this point. Is there any reason
to believe otherwise?
Dr. Kinzer. No.
Mr. O'Neill. I make those arguments in my FOIA requests,
but it does not get me anywhere. I do not know about you, Dr.
Kinzer.
Mr. Perry. All right. My time has expired. I yield.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Representative Perry. I am now going
to go to a second line of questions, so I will be recognizing
myself followed by, I believe, Representative Boebert and
either of the Representatives if they would like to join in.
I wanted to elaborate further, Dr. Kinzer, on what you had
stated about potentially there being bodies, the locations,
Germany, because I am going to reach out to the German
government after this to get the ball rolling on that if that
is indeed the case.
Can you just elaborate further on what you were hearing
from people in that area, what they were saying, and then also
to potential locations of bodies?
Dr. Kinzer. First of all, the memo that Chancellor Adenauer
received is on the record. You can find that memo warning that
these operations are going on. I did speak to people who lived
in that area and they all understood. Some of them had
cooperated with an investigation by a German magazine, Der
Spiegel, that called that house the ``CIA Torture Center.'' And
in that article it said, ``There were deaths, but the number is
not known.'' So, it was a secret to us, but what we were doing
in that house was really not even a secret to the people in the
neighborhood.
It reminds me of the bombing of Cambodia. It was a secret
to us, but if you were living in Cambodia, you would have known
about it.
So, I think there is a fruitful ground for research looking
into what happened in Germany and seeing what can be found out
about these huge, hugely destructive and devastating projects
that were essentially systematic torture going on in this house
and who knows how many others.
Mrs. Luna. Just to confirm too, when you found the initial
transcript with the Chancellor or correspondence, was there a
response from the U.S. Government to the Germans?
Dr. Kinzer. No. The U.S. Government would possibly have
advised Adenauer not to pursue it, but I do not think Adenauer
would have even needed to be told that. He would see it. He
would understand his close partnership with the United States
made it impossible for him to criticize anything the United
States was doing. Do not forget this was not so long after the
end of the Second World War. So, no, there was no effort by the
United States ever to reveal anything about what happened in
Germany.
And in fact, one of the FOIA requests that I made that was
never fulfilled, and one that I would urge you to pursue is,
what was Sidney Gottlieb doing during two years in Germany? He
went to Germany and went to live there as a case officer. I was
never able to find out what did he do during two years in
Germany. There were huge numbers of MKULTRA experiments going
on in Germany, including a number that were fatal. That would
be a very interesting cache of documents to find.
Mrs. Luna. We will definitely be following up. My next
question would be for either Dr. Kinzer or Mr. O'Neill.
Declassified CIA records have revealed that officers deployed
overseas have used U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) funding as an official cover, or USAID as an official
cover for operational work that had nothing to do with the
mission of USAID, i.e., humanitarian aid, medical relief, et
cetera. In some cases, CIA officers operated under USAID cover
engaged in lethal activity in places such as Vietnam, running
assassination missions during the war in-country from 1965 to
1975.
And since MKULTRA seems to have found its origin in drug
experiments conducted on prisoners overseas and first by the SS
in Nazi Germany and then by U.S. intelligence in camps captured
from the Germans, do you believe that USAID may have been used
overseas to further influence or further the MKULTRA for
example, on prisoners of war? Since part of USAID's mission was
to administer drugs to the poor and needy populations, would
the organization have abused its mandate by poisoning foreign
populations or creating disassociated states for interrogation
or torture?
Dr. Kinzer. I cannot speak directly to AID, but it is
certainly true that during this period after the Second World
War the United States was using publicly announced and official
U.S. Government agencies to carry out covert action. We now
know, for example, that five percent of all of the money
appropriated for the Marshall Plan was diverted for covert
activities. A number of U.S. agencies were used as cover by
covert operatives, and that AID could have been one of them
sounds very likely to me.
Mr. O'Neill. And the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH) admitted to allowing itself to be used for covert
funding of MKULTRA experiments in the 1970s, when the operation
was disclosed.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you. I now recognize Representative
Burchett for 5 minutes.
Mr. Burchett. Thank you, Chairlady. Thank you all for being
here. I remembered when all the talk about MKULTRA broke and
then they were talking about lawsuits, and there were lawsuits
and CIA and the Federal Government said that this did not
exist, and then they came back and said, ``Well, it does exist,
but we are not doing it anymore.'' I guess my question to you
all first is which lie do we believe?
[Applause.]
Mr. Burchett. Thank you. Obviously, there was an open bar
before this thing started, so thank you all. But Dr. Kinzer?
Dr. Kinzer. I put myself in the----
Mr. Burchett. Hit your mic, brother. You are not on the
mic. It is an old CIA trick. I am just kidding.
Dr. Kinzer. I put myself in the place of one of those
senior CIA officers, and I am thinking to myself like the ones
back in the 1950s, ``Well, other people must be doing this. We
would be falling behind if we do not do it. And nobody is
looking over our shoulders,'' and that, I think, is your job.
So, I think there is a definite air of urgency and total
secrecy. If any current research is going on and if it is
conducted in any comparable level of secrecy to the original
MKULTRA, it is very deeply secret.
Mr. Burchett. But one thing you said though. It is going to
be hard for Congress to act when they are so dadgum
compromised. Let us just be honest. I mean, you all are in the
business of twisting ears and telling us things that we have
done, and that sways a lot of people up here. Somebody does not
want to wreck a marriage or their business or lose this
glamorous job that we have. And so, I suspect that has a lot of
play into it. Sorry to interrupt you. I apologize.
Dr. Kinzer. All I mean to say, is that I think if there are
such projects going on inside the U.S. Government, there might
be a sense that we can do this without any hostile supervision.
Mr. Burchett. What are the possibilities that what we have
learned in MKULTRA, now that it has advanced so much to
algorithms and the computer and getting to loners, that some of
these loners could, through this just mass propagation of
whatever you are doing, could cause someone to maybe take a
shot at a President?
Mr. O'Neill. I know there is a lot of speculation out there
about the Butler shooting, and I guess even the Charlie Kirk
shooting. I just hate to speculate, because I do not know. I
have no firsthand knowledge whether those guys were programmed
through radio waves or through their computer activity. So, I
would never hazard a guess except to say what I have already
said, that they develop means that we have never been told
about many, many years ago, and I imagine they have evolved to
be much more effective now, so anything is possible.
Mr. Burchett. Let me interrupt you one more time, and I
apologize again. But don't you think that they could cast this
broad net through these algorithms and other things, and maybe
they do not know the exact person it is going to affect, but
they know what type of person it is going to affect, and they
know it is going to happen? And that way they cannot predict
when it is going to happen, but they think it will happen, and
then that way they can sort of wash their hands of this whole
thing and say, ``Well, we did not have anything to do with
it,'' but in effect they really did because they put this out
there and they continue to put it out there, through whatever
method you are talking about? Go ahead, guys. I am sorry.
Ma'am, if you want to jump in.
Ms. Boebert. She is with NIH.
Mr. Burchett. Okay. Doctor, go ahead.
Dr. Kinzer. It sounds to me like you are describing
something like the Martin Luther King assassination. The FBI
did not carry it out, but it created such a climate, just
denouncing King as the most dangerous man in America and
putting out all this material about how he was helping
communists, that they must have thought, ``It is going to
filter down. Somebody will take action and then we can say we
did not have anything to do with it.''
Mr. Burchett. And James Earl Ray was a third-rate thief. He
made an incredible shot, one foot on a commode, one foot in a
bathtub, leaning out of a window basically. And the next day,
or that afternoon, all the shrubbery was cut in front of the
flop house he was staying in. There is a lot on that one that
will never be discussed. I have some friends that were there,
so I guess I am on pretty close to firsthand knowledge. But
yes, I am sorry. I am probably going to get audited when I walk
out of the room. I know it. So, thank you. Chairlady, I yield
back my four seconds.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Representative Burchett. I would like
to now recognize Representative Boebert for 5 minutes.
Ms. Boebert. Thank you. And I would love to let you
gentlemen just talk some here, but when we are bringing up
operations like NAOMI and MKULTRA, there is Operation
Mockingbird that was going on at the same time as MKULTRA, and
it really ties into what Congressman Burchett was talking about
with radio waves, where we have these, like, a Venn diagram of
individual people and the military casting a broader net. So,
you have the radio waves, computer activity, the Operation
Mockingbird, the programming that is taking place.
So, what do you see in relation to what was happening then
and what we are seeing now that could be types of the same kind
of programs and even using direct-energy weapons or the like?
Mr. O'Neill, you can begin.
Mr. O'Neill. I would just like to say one thing. There was
an objective outlined in the early proposals for MKULTRA to do
experimentation to see whether they could do mass conversion,
you know, convert entire populations. I think that had
something to do with the France incident that you were talking
about earlier. Again, today it is all speculation, but back
then they were trying to use psychological means to see how you
could influence people's thoughts. And Mockingbird played into
that, which, if people do not know, that was where they had CIA
assets or co-opted people in the media who would write
basically propaganda and try to control the thoughts and
beliefs of the population to what the CIA needed. And is it
still going on today? I would be surprised if it was not.
Ms. Boebert. Sure. I think we saw it even during COVID with
all of the NIH funding that went to COVID and the Wuhan lab and
then everything that came out of that, trying to make people
believe in something that was not there.
Dr. Kinzer, do you have anything on this?
Dr. Kinzer. I would say only that in the modern age, maybe
radio waves and drugs are not necessary to control people's
minds. We have such a great advertising propaganda, press,
social media collaboration that certain opinions are
marginalized, and real debate is frustrated because people are
not given access to full amounts of information. So, that is a
way of controlling minds of populations that does not even
require sophisticated electronic or psychopharmacological
means.
Ms. Boebert. Anything else you would like to add for our
next 2 minutes here? Maybe you have answers to questions we
have not asked.
Dr. Kinzer. I would just like to reiterate something that I
said in response to your earlier question----
Ms. Boebert. Yes, sir.
Dr. Kinzer [continuing]. And that is that there is a reason
why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to
do with the disassociation between what we say we are and do
and what we really are and do. This has become more and more
clear to more and more people. Therefore, they are suspicious
of nefarious dealings by the United States, and they are also
suspicious of other things that are not nefarious at all. But
there is just this mentality that is created by the covert
sphere, and that is what makes people realize that things that
used to seem really farfetched are not so farfetched after all.
Ms. Boebert. Yes. Well, you know, Congress, we create these
agencies, and we even provide their funding. We appropriate
that funding. And then they come before us often and are too
big to even answer simple questions that we have and be held to
account. So, it does cause for a lot of deceit, a lot of doubt
in the American people, and certainly within us as Members of
Congress, when these agencies refuse to answer to us, the
branch of government that actually creates them and provides
their funding. And then, of course, the American taxpayer whose
money is being stolen to fund all of their programs and
agencies.
So, I think that would be another reason how these
conspiracy theories grow, because government has grown so big
and will not answer to the people. Maybe they just think the
people are too dumb to understand, but certainly, we want to
get answers to the people. And I appreciate you gentlemen for
being here today. Madam Chair, I yield.
Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Representative Boebert.
Representative Burlison, do you have any further questions?
Okay. I now recognize Representative Burlison for 5 minutes.
Mr. Burlison. Mr. O'Neill, going back to Charles Manson and
the Helter Skelter incident, can you explain how in the world
someone who was an illiterate musician, that seemed to be not
exactly the brightest person, somehow became a cult leader and
was able to, you know, inspire all of these individuals to do
crazy things?
Mr. O'Neill. Unfortunately, I spent 20 years trying to find
out how that happened, and what I was able to prove was that
from the moment Manson was released from Federal prison in
1967, he violated his parole, went to the Bay Area without
permission, and was immediately put under the supervision of a
Federal parole officer who basically gave him leniency as he
gathered his group of followers, gave them drugs, dominated
them, turned them into, more or less, subservient robots who
would do anything he said. All that happened under the watchful
eye of a parole officer named Roger Smith, who was also doing
drug research at the same clinic that Jolly West had set up his
operation to recruit subjects. All the way until 1969, when
Manson finally ordered the murders that he was later convicted
of, he had been arrested repeatedly for escalating crimes,
beginning with petty thievery, stealing cars, and then rape,
attempted murder, drug possession. Each time, not only was he
not prosecuted, his parole was not violated.
So, the Federal Government in some capacity, enabled him to
do what he did and flourish until these crimes happened. And in
my book, I make a case, and it is a theoretical case, that it
was part of an operation called CHAOS, also with the CIA, that
we have not talked about today because it really does not have
anything to do with drug research, but it was created to
neutralize what the government believed was a revolution that
was happening in America in the 1960s, beginning with the anti-
war movement, and then the Black Militancy movement and the
Panthers. So, it is kind of a big stew, a cauldron of
possibilities that Manson emerged from all that, when I do not
think he should have.
Mr. Burlison. Yes. It is fascinating that you have an
individual, Jolly West, who was working with this parole
officer. Do you think the parole officer was making the
connection so that the drugs were then flowing through?
Mr. O'Neill. Well, the parole officer was, at the same time
he was supervising Manson's parole, running a research project
called the Amphetamine Research Project out of that clinic and
that was studying amphetamines and violence and drugs and group
behavior in gangs in the Bay Area.
Mr. Burlison. And----
Mr. O'Neill. Again, I hate to speculate. I know it sounds
like a cop-out, but when you see the tentacles that cross paths
with Manson, when he got to Los Angeles as well, I believe that
he was manipulated, and at the very least, given freedom to do
what he did while he was being observed.
Mr. Burlison. And then the same individual, Jolly West,
ends up in Oklahoma. Correct? So, was he operating out of
Oklahoma during this time with Mr. Manson?
Mr. O'Neill. When he contracted with the CIA, he was at
Lackland Air Force Base. He was the chief psychiatrist at the
hospital, so he began his experiments there. A year after the
letter that I quoted in my statement, where he was describing
what he wanted to do, a year later, on July 3, 1954, a three
year old girl was abducted and found later in a gravel pit,
murdered next to a car that had been abandoned.
And the search party that found the little girl's body was
approached by a man who was an airman at the base, and he asked
them where he was and how he had gotten there. He was arrested
for the murder and described by the military officers who had
him in custody as being in a trance or daze. He did not have
any drugs in his system. He did not recognize his wife when she
was brought to see him, and at his trial, where Jolly West was
his advising psychiatrist who examined him----
Mr. Burlison. Of course. Of course.
Mr. O'Neill [continuing]. It emerged that he had actually
been being treated at the hospital at Lackland in an
experimental program to cure his chronic, debilitating migraine
headaches, and he was executed four years later.
Mr. Burlison. And then years later, he ends up volunteering
to handle Jack Ruby?
Mr. O'Neill. West does, yes.
Mr. Burlison. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mrs. Luna. So, just before we wrap up, is it in your expert
opinion that Jack Ruby and Manson were assets of the
intelligence agencies specifically pertaining to MKULTRA? Were
they MKULTRA victims?
Mr. O'Neill. Yes. Theoretically, Manson, I have never been
able to prove absolutely. Jack Ruby, I believe, this is
something else--the Warren Commission investigation, on the
Warren Commission was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director,
who authorized and ran MKULTRA until he was fired by President
Kennedy. The liaison to the committee for the CIA, who handled
the information coming from the CIA back and forth to the
Warren Commission, was Richard Helms, who was a direct
supervisor of Jolly West. They knew who West was. They knew
that--what West was capable of, and what they had paid him to
do, and what he had reported to them that he could do,
including inducing mental disorders in people. That was never
disclosed to the Commission as far as anyone knows. So, I
believe that West was put in there to keep Jack Ruby from
telling his story.
Mrs. Luna. Wow. In closing, I just want to thank you all
for being here today, and we will be following up, Dr. Kinzer,
on your request to fully redact, I will be following up
personally with the Director of the CIA, the MKULTRA files that
we do have. Also, as I noted earlier, there will be more that
will be declassified, specifically pertaining to newly found
records that were located in what we were discussing earlier.
I did also want to just state that, for the record, in
regards to what statements were made earlier regarding the
German government, we will also be following up on that. If
there are indeed people that were victims of this that have
been buried, we would like to know who those people are and who
their families are as well, in order to correct the historical
wrongdoings of this government.
Without further ado, I would like to state that all Members
have five legislative days within to submit materials and
additional written questions for the witnesses that will be
then forwarded to them. If there is no further business,
without objection, the Task Force stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:34 a.m., the Task Force was adjourned.]
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