Luna Opens Hearing on MKULTRA Project Transparency

WASHINGTON—Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) delivered opening remarks at today’s hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments.” In her opening statement, Task Force Chairwoman Luna highlighted how many of the government files related to the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MKULTRA project were destroyed upon its completion, harming efforts to promote transparency and destroying Americans’ trust in the federal government. She also underscored Congress’s duty to help promote transparency and accountability within the government and expressed desire to uncover answers on this elusive initiative.

Below are Task Force Chairwoman Luna’s remarks as delivered:

This hearing is about the crimes committed by the Central Intelligence Agency against American citizens, and the decades of secrecy used to conceal them. 

The American people deserve a complete and truthful record. 

The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment. 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 operation 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 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.” 

A separate internal account confirms that Helms telephoned Dr. [Sidney] Gottlieb directly and instructed him to destroy, quote, “all files pertaining to drug research and associated activities.”

Gottlieb completed or 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 [individual was] ever charged with a crime for it. Helms received a $2,000 fine for lying to Congress about an unrelated matter 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 [Freedom of Information Act] 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 the 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’s 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 went for a decade that we know of, and they ignored their own watchdog. 

Let me be clear what I believe that we are dealing with here. 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. 

The Central Intelligence Agency committed them, and then the Director of the CIA was ordered or 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. Stephen 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, constitutes some of the worst notorious crimes against humanity in the twentieth century. Their persistence in the research in this hearing is possible simply because they are patriots. The American people deserve the complete record. The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment, accountability, and justice.

And this Congress has a constitutional obligation to make sure that the CIA never does this again.