The CIA is declassifying a new trove of documents relating to its ‘MKUltra’ program, Representative Anna Paulina Luna said on Tuesday. Nazi scientists were involved in the agency’s mind-control experiments.
Last month, Luna ordered CIA Director John Ratcliffe to preserve 40 boxes of “JFK files and MKUltra files” which it had taken from the offices of former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. After reported back-and-forth arguments between Ratcliffe and Gabbard over the files, the CIA has since agreed to declassify and release them, Luna revealed at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
“The documents – I feel comfortable enough to share here – pertain to a forgery program that was being housed under MKUltra,” Luna said.
MKUltra was a program of illegal human experimentation run by the CIA and a web of collaborating medical facilities and universities between 1953 and 1973. Participants were dosed with psychoactive drugs and subjected to torture – including sleep deprivation and sexual abuse – as CIA scientists attempted to ‘break’ their minds so that they could be controlled.
Then-CIA Director Richard Helms ordered MKUltra shut down and all related documents burned in 1973. However, one box of 20,000 files survived the fire and was discovered in 1977. Almost everything that is now known about MKUltra is based on this document cache. According to these files, MKultra snowballed into 149 subprojects, including experiments with remote-controlled dogs.
MKUltra was discussed by lawmakers during the 1975 Church Committee hearings, and drug testing on human subjects without informed consent was banned by President Gerald Ford the following year. However, neither Helms nor program director Sidney Gottlieb were ever prosecuted for their role in MKUltra.The CIA has since acknowledged that most of its MKUltra experiments had little scientific rationale.
According to Luna, these revelations were the tip of a sinister iceberg. Testifying at Tuesday’s hearing, investigative journalist Tom O’Neill told Luna that Jack Ruby – who murdered alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald – was treated by psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who conducted experiments with LSD and hypnosis on behalf of the CIA and was a confidant of Gottlieb.
West, O’Neill alleged, was ordered by Helms and Gottlieb to declare Ruby insane “to keep Jack Ruby from telling his story.”
According to today’s expert witnesses: JACK RUBY AND CHARLES MANSON WERE MKULTRA ASSETS.I am following up directly with the CIA to demand the full release of MKUltra records. The American people deserve and will be delivered the truth. pic.twitter.com/ZDjQxnRxob
Charles Manson – whose followers murdered actress Sharon Tate in 1969 – also sought treatment from West before the murders. However, O’Neill said that he has “never been able to prove absolutely” that Gottlieb was responsible for altering Manson’s mental state.
MKUltra was preceded by Project Artichoke, a similar program aimed at developing truth serums and altering human behavior with drugs, hypnosis, and chemical agents. The project was built on research carried out by Nazi scientists at Dachau concentration camp, and used North Korean prisoners of war, as well as US and Canadian citizens, as guinea pigs. Some of these scientists, including Nazi biological warfare director Kurt Blome, were among the 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians given amnesty and taken to the US under ‘Operation Paperclip’. While it is already well known that Blome and other Nazi researchers worked on Project Artichoke and MKUltra, their collaboration was deeper than previously reported, researcher and journalist Dr. Stephen Kinzer told Luna at the hearing.
What does the CIA, Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg Trials all have in common? MK Ultra. I will be meeting with German Parliament tomorrow to identify and locate victims of MK Ultra buried in Germany at the hand of the U.S. government. pic.twitter.com/S9pZtRXHsH
According to Kinzer, the CIA and a group of Nazi scientists operated a secret prison in the basement of a West German chalet, where human experiments were carried out “in continuation of the experiments the Nazis had been conducting just a few years earlier right down the road.”
Tuesday’s hearing was the first Congressional session dedicated to MKUltra in 49 years, and according to Luna, is aimed at making the “complete and truthful record” of the program public. “The American people deserve the complete record,” she said. “The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment, accountability, and justice.”
It is unlikely that any officials will be prosecuted over their involvement in the program. Gottlieb died in 1999, Helms died in 2002, and it is unclear if any MKUltra scientists are still alive.
However, Luna apparently has a secondary political goal: to use her witnesses to cast doubt over the official narratives surrounding the 2024 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk last year.
Asked whether the American public should believe that the CIA halted its mind control experiments when MKUltra shut down, O’Neill said that while he had no knowledge of either shooter being “programmed with radio waves or through their computer activity,” the CIA “developed means that we’ve never been told about many years ago, and I’d imagine they’ve evolved to be much more effective now.”
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