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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., led the House Oversight Committee’s hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments” as part of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on Tuesday.
This revealed the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) destruction of government files related to the experiments and brought witnesses forward to testify regarding the controversial MKULTRA project, which is rumored to have involved giving unknowing participants mind-altering drugs to test their effect on controlling individuals’ behavior.
For decades, questions about MKUltra were dismissed or ignored. Today, investigative journalist Tom O’Neill lays out why those questions still deserve answers. @chaosmansonbook
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026
WATCH his compelling opening statement below👇 pic.twitter.com/aWJl8CYdKR
During his testimony, investigative journalist Tom O’Neill explained that the 1977 Congressional hearings on the MKULTRA experiments were not a clear representation of what actually took place when the CIA deemed the project a failure. He explained that after being assigned an article exploring the Manson Family Murders where cult members killed complete strangers due to instruction from cult leader Charles Manson, he discovered that a CIA-contracted psychiatrist named Dr. Louis Jolyon West was approached to join a project that would test LSD and other mind-altering drugs on prisoners, hospital patients, and college students without their consent.
Although West denied ever getting involved, O’Neill explained that West conducted research at a clinic in San Francisco where Charles Manson and his followers received free medical care. Upon receiving access to hundreds of boxes of West’s records after his death in the 1990s, O’Neill discovered letters between West and CIA leader, chemist Sydney Gottlieb.
The first letter was sent from West in 1953, just two months after the CIA authorized the MKULTRA program, and detailed six pages of experiments he conducted that O’Neill said, “could have been written by Josef Mengele,” the infamous Nazi doctor known for inhuman experiments.
These details the use of LSD in combination with hypnosis to create confusion, amnesia, and specific mental disorders in people who wouldn’t remember him. “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,” O’Neill stated.
Gottleib praised these results and encouraged West’s MKULTRA experiments.
In a 14-page report written by West in 1956, he described giving LSD and other drugs with hypnosis to unknowing patients. He claimed to have successfully replaced true memories with false memories in subjects without their knowledge.
O’Neill offered to officially enter the documents as proof of his testimony to Congress.
WATCH journalist and author Dr. @stephenkinzer’s opening statement at today’s explosive MK Ultra hearing regarding the over classification of secret government programs and the CIA’s quest to weaponize mind control against Americans. pic.twitter.com/UwsSJXWBce
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026
Investigative journalist Stephen Kinzer also shared incriminating information regarding Gottlieb. “In its search for ways to destroy the 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,” he stated. “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 Latin America.”
He explained that in his research he discovered that CIA agents traveled the globe to find “expendables,” people they deemed as disposable for these experiments. “Gottleib had what amounted to a license to kill issued by the U.S. Government.” It’s uncertain how many people were experimented on and how many of them died during the illegal experimentation.
Although the investigation into MKULTRA presents many challenges because the project records were destroyed in 1973 after Gottlieb ordered their destruction when he left the CIA, Kinzer urged Congress to unredact the original 1977 hearing records, which were left out at the time due to potential national security threats. He also explained that investigating the 1953 suicide of MKULTRA Dr. Frank Olson could offer more details. “Evidence suggests that his death may not have been a suicide.”
“This task force could also consider trying to determine whether some new incarnation of MKULTRA exists today,” he added, noting that advances in AI, cyber technology, and neuroscience have offered covert agencies more tools for mind control experiments worse than MKULTRA.
Luna questioned Kinzer about the link between MKULTRA and the 1,600 Nazi scientists who were recruited by the CIA through Operation Paperclip.
What does the CIA, Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg Trials all have in common?
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026
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
Kinzer stated, “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.”
He explained that when researching his book, he discovered the first secret CIA prion/black site prison, where MKULTRA officers worked with Nazi’s to carry out experiments after the Nuremberg Trials. He described them as “Continuations of the experiments that those nazi’s had been conducting just a few years earlier.”
The ongoing Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets continues to seek answers regarding the MKULTRA experiments and other mysterious government operations in pursuit of rebuilding public trust between Americans and their government officials.
