BOMBSHELL: CIA’s Darkest Program Is Back Under Congressional Scrutiny

For nearly fifty years, Washington treated the CIA’s MKUltra program as a closed chapter of Cold War history, an ugly episode confined to dusty files and congressional apologies from the 1970s. That changed this summer when the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets hauled the program back into a hearing room for the first time since 1977.

The task force, chaired by Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna, convened a hearing titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” It was billed as an effort to finally pry loose the remaining secrets of a program that subjected American citizens, many of them unwitting, to LSD dosing, hypnosis, electroshock, and psychological torture in the name of national security.

What made headlines was not just the history but the testimony about the present. A retired CIA operations officer, Rick De La Torre, told the committee that he does not believe the agency’s behavioral research program ever truly stopped. He stopped short of claiming a smoking gun, but he was blunt about the temptation facing intelligence agencies operating without robust oversight, saying that without real transparency, the door to replicating MKUltra-style programs remains open.

That kind of statement, coming from a career intelligence officer rather than a fringe conspiracy theorist, is exactly the sort of testimony that ought to concern every American, regardless of party. This is a man who spent his career inside the agency, not someone speculating from the outside.

Luna, who has built a reputation in Congress as one of the most aggressive voices for declassifying federal secrets, opened the hearing by laying out just how much of the MKUltra record has been deliberately destroyed. According to her opening statement, the program spanned 149 subprojects across more than 80 institutions, involving at least 185 outside researchers, universities, hospitals, and prisons that participated, often without informing subjects of what was being done to them.

The reason so much remains hidden is not a mystery. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the bulk of the MKUltra records destroyed in 1973, and the chemist most associated with the program, Sidney Gottlieb, personally oversaw the destruction of files before Congress ever got a chance to review them. What survived only came to light because of a rare Freedom of Information Act request in the late 1970s that stumbled onto a set of financial records the CIA had overlooked.

Investigative journalist Tom O’Neill, author of the book “Chaos,” testified that the agency actively misled Congress during the original 1977 hearings, dismissing the program as an ineffective failure rather than disclosing its true scope. Brown University historian Stephen Kinzer, author of “Poisoner in Chief,” went further, describing the experiments as a form of medical torture carried out across prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and CIA-run safe houses on three continents.

These are not fringe voices. O’Neill and Kinzer are respected authors whose work on MKUltra has been cited across the political spectrum for years. Their presence at this hearing lent it a credibility that previous conspiracy chatter about the program has often lacked.

Skeptics, including the National Security Archive, have cautioned that the task force should focus on genuine declassification rather than reviving unfounded speculation. That is a fair caution, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Not every claim about MKUltra’s legacy holds up, and Americans should be wary of treating every unproven theory as settled fact.

But the underlying concern driving this hearing is not fringe. It is the entirely reasonable question of whether an intelligence agency that lied to Congress once, destroyed its own records to avoid accountability, and operated for two decades with almost no oversight has fully reformed itself in the decades since. That is a question worth asking regardless of one’s politics.

The CIA has pushed back forcefully. When speculation resurfaced in 2024 tying the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to lingering behavioral programs, the agency issued a flat denial, calling the claims “utterly false, absurd, and damaging” and insisting MKUltra ended decades ago. Agency officials have repeated that denial in the run up to this year’s hearing.

The trouble is that the CIA has made similar denials before, and history has not always been kind to them. When the program was first exposed in the mid-1970s through the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, the agency downplayed both its scope and its results, telling the public it had been an ineffective failure. Decades later, declassified documents and testimony from surviving researchers painted a far darker and more expansive picture than the CIA originally admitted.

That pattern—deny first, minimize second, and only fully disclose decades later once public pressure becomes unavoidable—is precisely why lawmakers like Luna argue that skepticism toward agency denials is warranted rather than paranoid. Trust has to be earned, and an agency with this particular history has not earned the benefit of the doubt on this subject.

Modern technology adds another layer of concern that did not exist in the 1970s. Witnesses at the hearing pointed out that tools for behavioral manipulation, whether through data-driven psychological profiling, targeted digital messaging, or advances in pharmacology and neuroscience, are far more sophisticated today than anything available to Sidney Gottlieb’s generation of researchers. If the appetite for this kind of program ever existed within the intelligence community, the tools to pursue it quietly have only gotten better.

Republicans on the task force have framed this as part of a broader mission of government transparency that has picked up steam in recent years, running alongside efforts to force disclosure on UAP records and other long classified programs. Luna has positioned herself as a leading voice in that push, arguing that the American public has a right to know what its own government has done to its citizens, even when the answers are uncomfortable for the intelligence community.