MKULTRA Hearing on Capitol Hill Spotlights CIA ‘Crimes Against Humanity’
Panel targets Agency’s mind control program for torture, murder — and a link to JFK’s death
“Let me be clear what I believe that we are dealing with here,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) in her opening statement at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on June 30, 2026.
“Administering drugs to people without their knowledge or consent, subjecting humans to psychological torture, and using prisoners and hospital patients as non-consenting research subjects — these are crimes against humanity.”
Luna was referring to the CIA’s mind control and human behavior modification programs that started in the late 1940s and ran for over 20 years. They are collectively often known by the CIA cryptonym MKULTRA. Formally launched in 1953, MKULTRA included dosing unwitting humans with mind-altering drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and other methods a witness characterized as “medical torture.”
Entitled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project,” the proceeding heard from three witnesses: Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University; investigative reporter Tom O’Neill, author of “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” (2019); and minority witness Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, Ph.D., former senior program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
It produced testimony that was both fascinating and highly disturbing.
JFK Connection
In mid-May, JFK and MKULTRA briefly featured in the same news headlines after a CIA whistleblower testified to the Senate that the CIA had removed 40 boxes of files on those two subjects from the jurisdiction of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The ODNI was reviewing the files for declassification under President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14176. Why were JFK and MKULTRA files grouped together?
Rep. Luna offered a clue about the new MKULTRA files: “I did want to just note, a few weeks ago we did receive reports — there was some back-and-forth regarding the CIA and ODNI — pertaining to new MKULTRA boxes that were discovered.”
Luna and fellow task force member Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) had met with officials at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In updating the public, the chairwoman said she felt “comfortable enough to share” that the files taken from ODNI by the CIA “pertain specifically to a forgery program that was being housed under MKULTRA.” As soon as those files were released, she said, the task force would begin combing through them.
While the question of why MKULTRA files were located with JFK records remains unclear, Tuesday’s hearing did touch on the assassination. The panel and its witnesses referred repeatedly to Jack Ruby, the Mob-linked Dallas nightclub owner who shot to death President Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the basement of a Dallas police station on Nov. 24, 1963, less than 48 hours after the ambush in Dealey Plaza.
Luna homed in on the JFK-MKULTRA link with questions about psychiatrist Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. CIA officer Sidney Gottlieb, who ran MKULTRA, 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 Kinzer’s biography of Gottlieb, “Poisoner in Chief” — ”the human mind could be pulled away from its moorings.”
Following JFK’s death, West psychiatrically examined Ruby in prison, then produced a report concluding 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?” Luna asked.
“West inserted himself into the case,” explained O’Neill. “The day after the shooting, West approached the judge in the preliminary hearings and asked to be assigned to the case.” West was initially refused, O’Neill went on, but after Ruby’s conviction at his first trial, a psychiatrist and attorney named Dr. Hubert Winston Smith “took over Ruby’s defense for his appeal,” having “already discussed appointing West to the case.”
O’Neill recalled that a panel of eight psychiatrists had declared Ruby competent to stand trial the first time. However, Ruby’s “psychotic break” would last until his death in 1967, with West remaining his treating physician right up to that time.
Two months after West examined him, Ruby testified to the Warren Commission.
O’Neill explained:
“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 Arlen Specter — who was a 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.”
Later in the hearing, O’Neill returned to the subject of Ruby in response to Rep. Luna’s suggestion that both Oswald’s assassin and serial murderer and cult leader Charles Manson were effectively “CIA assets” by virtue of their respective MKULTRA ties.
“Yeah, Manson I’ve never been able to prove absolutely,” O’Neill said. “Jack Ruby, I believe, this is something else.”
The CIA’s deputy director for plans, Richard Helms, was both liaison to the Warren Commission and a “direct supervisor of Jolly West,” O’Neill explained.
“They knew who West was. They knew what West was capable of, and what they 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.”
In contracting West for MKULTRA, the CIA would have created a 201 or “personality” file on the nefarious shrink. West’s 201 file should qualify as JFK assassination related under the JFK Records Act of 1992. The public should see it.
Fate of MKULTRA
Both expert witnesses noted that they had been asked over the years to speculate on whether the program continued in some form after its formal termination. In fact, while MKULTRA supposedly shut down in 1964, several subprojects continued under different names, notably MKSEARCH, which formally ran until 1967.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), in customary sardonic spirit, raised the issue of the CIA and federal government once telling the public that MKULTRA didn’t exist, then admitting that it existed but insisting they weren’t doing it anymore. “Which lie do we believe?” he asked.
It was a point expressed repeatedly by several lawmakers throughout the hearing, i.e., whether MKULTRA still continued in some form to the present day despite the denials.
O’Neill: I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it didn’t though, because the technology that they worked to establish over 20, 25 years and spent more money on than any operation the CIA ever conducted was successful. I imagine it’s being used. I have no evidence it’s being used.
Rep. Burchett then conjured a deadly specter. With everything the U.S. had learned from MKULTRA, could “mass propagation” of online messaging through algorithms get “loners” — i.e., disaffected and alienated sociopaths — to “maybe take a shot at a president?”
“I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about the Butler shooting and I guess even the Charlie Kirk shooting,” said O’Neill. “I just hate to speculate, because I don’t know.”
The investigative author had no “first-hand knowledge” on whether those gunmen were “programmed through radio waves or through their computer activity.” So, he didn’t want to “hazard a guess.” However, he did feel comfortable repeating a point he had already made: that U.S. intelligence had “developed means that we’ve never been told about, many many years ago, and I imagine they’ve evolved to be much more effective now.”
A keen Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) reminded the audience of a continuity with history. She brought up other operations such as MKNAOMI, a joint project between the CIA and the Pentagon aimed at controlling the minds of large populations, not individuals, and Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project to control mass media.
Boebert: 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 types of programs, and even using direct energy weapons or the like?
O’Neill: There was an objective outlined in the early proposals for MKULTRA to do experimentation to see whether they could do mass conversions. You know, convert entire populations. … Again, today it’s 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 people don’t know. That was where they had CIA assets or coopted 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 wasn’t.
Kinzer agreed with O’Neill that modern-day manifestations of MKULTRA might not be found in radio waves or drugs. Forces such as “advertising propaganda, press, social media collaboration” ensure that “certain opinions are marginalized and real debate is frustrated.” The public can’t readily access complete information, resulting in population mind control without “sophisticated electronic or psycho-pharmacological means.”
Cold War Atrocities
“When I was researching my book, I found what I think might be the first secret CIA prison or ‘black site,’” Kinzer said about the link between Nazi SS experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners and MKULTRA’s experimental protocols. “It’s a nice chalet in Germany, and the guy who owns it took me into the basement.”
Kinzer’s German host told him “these were the cells where the MKULTRA officers — working side by side with Nazis — carried out those gruesome experiments.” These were in fact “just continuations” of experiments that Nazis had been conducting only a few years earlier “right down the road.”
“Just for timeline and clarification, these experiments were happening after the Nuremberg Trials, correct?” asked Rep. Luna. “So, the CIA would have known that these were crimes against humanity.”
“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 were ever consulted, much less obeyed,” Kinzer replied.
The idea, as Kinzer noted in his opening statement, was for the CIA station in foreign countries to provide MKULTRA officers with “expendables” — “human beings who would not be missed if they disappeared” — to be subjected to criminal experimentation.
Rep. Boebert then inquired as to whether the CIA or U.S. government had ever claimed that what they were doing with MKULTRA was “for the betterment of humanity.”
“I’m not aware — other than in private communications — that the CIA ever claimed that they made advances under MKULTRA, because the CIA largely denied that MKULTRA ever existed,” Kinzer responded.
“What are some of the worst abuses that you’re aware of in the MKULTRA program?” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) asked.
“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,” Kinzer replied. “We have no idea what happened to them,” he added, or whether they ever knew they were human subjects of CIA experiments. They could very well be dead.
Kinzer: 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 …
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?
Kinzer: Yes. There is a memo that was written by the German secret service to Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of Germany, telling him: American citizens are here capturing people and conducting extreme experiments, which are in violation of German law. And Adenauer decided to put that aside and not to investigate further.
In response to Mace’s question whether MKULTRA represented a massive cover-up by the U.S. government, both witnesses agreed that it did.
Pursuit of Justice
The hearing touched on the history of official inquiry and adjudication of MKULTRA after Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) tried to turn attention to information that had survived the CIA’s massive, illegal destruction of records and was still available today.
O’Neill: If I could just begin by saying at the end of the 1977 hearings, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Dan 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 locate victims, compensate them, notify them — because many didn’t even know they’d 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. I interviewed them before they passed away.
O’Neill said these CIA investigators “completely avoided institutional experimental programs” at hospitals, prisons, universities and other locations around the country. A criminal investigation into Gottlieb’s destruction of MKULTRA records was planned and announced by the Justice Department. But when O’Neill interviewed Griffin Bell about what happened to all those investigations and attempts to locate victims, the former attorney general told him the whole effort “just must have fallen through the cracks.”
“Do you know if the DOJ in their investigation visited the places that you’ve named?” Perry asked.
“No, absolutely not,” O’Neill said. He had asked the two men who conducted the investigation, and they told him they only inquired into what happened at the safe houses in San Francisco and New York City from 1962-65.
When Perry raised the possibility that information and documentation remains at the prisons, treatment centers and universities where these things were conducted, O’Neill reminded the panel that he had found Dr. West’s records in his file at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA), but that hospital records were “really hard to get” because of privacy laws. Still, on prison records, he offered hope.
“The Bureau of Prisons do have a lot,” he said. “So, yeah, it is possible there’s still documents buried places.”
Kinzer, in turn, looked abroad for an example of proper inquiry and reconciliation”
“I would just add that there’s 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’re 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.”
Still, Perry expressed perplexity at the “mass redaction” of surviving MKULTRA records after five decades. Indeed, in the financial records discovered in 1977, identities of both witting and unwitting participants in experiments but also CIA monitors, sponsors and principal researchers, as well as locations and project descriptions, are blacked out.
The task force will presumably pursue transparency over these surviving MKULTRA records. Chairwoman Luna announced she would be reaching out to the German government on the fate of human MKULTRA victims in Germany. Full disclosure of remaining MKULTRA records should form part of the process of achieving justice as well.
Postscript: Minority Meltdown
Not one Democratic Party member of the subcommittee even bothered to appear in the chamber during Tuesday’s hearing, never mind question any witnesses. This might seem negligent enough on an important topic of civil and human rights. But America’s parliamentary opposition left the witness it had invited alone, to fend haplessly for herself.
Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, by her own admission, knew nothing about MKULTRA. She described herself as a “health research scientist” with a doctorate in psychology. Having spent 22 years as a “scientific program official” at the NIH, she came to complain that current policy toward the NIH amounted to “the replacement of scientific judgment with political control.”
As the hearing unfolded, it became clear that attending Task Force members were bewildered as to why Ginexi was even there. But perhaps something that appeared the day before on the website of the National Security Archive at George Washington University — which has posted many MKULTRA documents — could explain the move.
The day before the hearing, the site published an article, “MKUltra: Declassification Task Force Should Focus on Real Secrets, Not Conspiracy Theories.” It cautioned that “there are strong indications that Luna will use the hearing as a platform to incite panic about vaccines.” As matters transpired, no Task Force member did anything like that.
If Ginexi was there to preemptively defend vaccines against attacks as “MKULTRA weapons,” the strategy backfired badly. The Democrats left their witness hanging out to dry as Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) subjected Ginexi’s erstwhile employer to withering verbal assault for its atrocious handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This generated loud applause from most of the members of the public in the chamber, along with a few whoops and hollers of approval for Crane as well.
JFK Facts aims for inclusivity and nonpartisanship, even if editorializing inevitably occurs sometimes. But it has to be said that the Democrats did their party no political favors with this speaker. To both absent themselves completely from a hearing and leave their own unqualified witness isolated and vulnerable in a public arena was beneath contempt.
Thank you, Chad Nagle, for this excellent review of Tuesday's hearing! It's magnificent. It's so well written, complete, and even better than I could have hoped.
I have to say, I grudgingly admire your compassion for Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, who I was angrily calling a "plant" in my mind until Representative Crane craftily let us all know that she'd been sent there by the Democrats. (I wondered what the Hell she was doing there, until he made that comment, undoubtedly for our benefit.) By the end of the hearing, I hated her. You have a warmer heart than I, evidently. I still think she was paid a significant amount of money to go there and defend the NIH. I really do not think she would have volunteered for that appearance! She must have known she was being set up.
Bravo for this superb report!
I’d highly recommend both Poisoner in Chief and Chaos. Having both authors speak to congress on the record a big win. It’s sad that one political party has no interest in exposing the evil perpetuated in US and foreign citizens with our tax dollars. Not a good sign for transparency momentum, or for that matter the future of our society.