On June 30, the U.S. Congress held its first hearings in 49 years on the Cold War-era mind control program known as MKULTRA. Prior to this latest meeting of Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets — titled “Mind Control and Accountability” — Congress had not raised the issue since 1977, during the last gasps of the Church Committee hearings into intelligence agency overreach that began two years earlier.
There was little in Luna’s hearings to suggest a half-century of history had passed. Instead, the witnesses and lawmakers rehashed conspiracy theories that have become a mainstay of social and mainstream media. As with recently conducted hearings on the JFK assassination, they chose to spotlight rabbit holes instead of advancing public understanding or demanding accountability. In the case of MKULTRA, this would have required connecting the program to the interrogation programs that grew from it and remain active today.
Luna’s opening statement laid out the basic facts of the clandestine Cold War-era research program funded by the CIA, and was accurate as far as it went. “MKULTRA,” she said, “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.” The secret program’s purpose was to investigate the potential of “mind control” technologies for use against the Soviets other enemies, external and domestic. Between the hatching of the project by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1953 and its shuttering 20 years later, the agency burned between $10 and $20 million (over $160 million in 2026 dollars) only to conclude that mind control was not, in fact, possible. Along the way, they also determined that LSD was too unpredictable to be used as a weapon. The CIA quickly destroyed most of the records and took what was useful to develop less exotic, more reliable means of torturing and interrogating people.
By centering last month’s hearing on conspiratorial speculation, it ignored the well-documented second life of the program, and pushed to the margins the legacy of what all that acid, hypnosis and electroshock actually produced.
The backbone of the conspiratorial narrative was provided by the testimony of Tom O’Neill, co-author of the 2019 bestseller, “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” The speculative thesis of “CHAOS” — whose eponymous CIA domestic espionage project targeted American citizens during the same timeframe as MKULTRA — is anchored by the story of a CIA-funded psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his (likely) CIA-backed study of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene at the same time and place as Manson was recruiting the Family. As O’Neill relayed to the task force, he was quite never able to put West “in the same room” as Manson that summer, but he did prove that West had lied for his entire career about ever receiving MKULTRA funds. According to the author, Manson’s techniques for persuading hippies to follow him and kill innocent people were strikingly similar to the mind control research being conducted by MKULTRA-backed researchers. His argument boiled down to this: Since West received CIA funds and worked in San Francisco at the same time as Charles Manson, and since Manson was the CIA’s equal (if not better!) at manipulating people, then the “connections” between the CIA and Manson are too wild to be a coincidence.
As is often the case in conspiracy literature, the word connection is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
There is no doubt that West was a Zelig-like figure in postwar America, and figured prominently in the shadowy Venn overlap between the California counterculture, secret intelligence research and the national security state. But unlike the chameleonic Zelig, West stood out and craved publicity. As the long-time chair of psychiatry at UCLA, he positioned himself as the nation’s premier expert on cults and coercive persuasion, most famously delivering the psychiatric evaluation that deemed JFK-assassin-killer Jack Ruby psychotic. He later served as a lead defense witness to argue that heiress Patty Hearst had been brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army. His public ambition often resulted in controversy. In 1962, he injected a bull elephant named Tusko with a lethal dose of LSD in a reckless attempt to study behavioral psychosis; in the 1970s, he proposed a “Violence Project” at UCLA that critics slammed as a dystopian blueprint for using biochemical testing and psychosurgery on minority youth.
What we know about MKULTRA and the programs that followed is damning enough.
Despite all of this, there is not a single piece of hard evidence “connecting” him to Charles Manson.
There is a Chinese saying that one should not look for a mouse on the other side of the village when there is an elephant sitting on your nose. And what we know about MKULTRA and the programs that followed is damning enough without draping it with speculation about the Los Angeles murder of the century. A CIA program experimented on Americans without consent for two decades, sending officers abroad to request “expendables” from local CIA stations (meaning human beings who, in the program’s own logic, wouldn’t be missed if they disappeared.) At home, MKULTRA scientist Frank Olson died in a fall from a New York hotel window in 1953, days after announcing he wanted out of the project; it was labeled a suicide at the time, but the case has never been fully resolved. The CIA destroyed its own files to dodge accountability, and was never seriously punished for any of it.
MKULTRA’s post-Church committee legacy likewise does not need the sensationalism attached to the UAP hearings held last year by Luna’s Task Force. MKULTRA was not a discrete 20-year episode that started with Dulles in 1953 and ended when Helms burned the files in 1973. It was part of a much longer funding stream into an ongoing research program on how to break the human mind. The mission did not die in 1973; it mutated, resurfacing in each generation’s interrogation practice under a new name.
West’s MKULTRA-era research, for example, continued his work developing the concept of “debility, dependency, and dread,” which he began in the 1950s and was quoted in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK counterintelligence interrogation manual. When the Baltimore Sun forced the manual’s declassification through a 1997 FOIA fight, it reported that the document “also taught torture.” KUBARK allowed agents to use coercion in interrogations as long as they got approval in advance, including a headquarters sign-off requirement whenever “medical, chemical or electrical methods” were used to break a subject. West’s influence on the CIA’s playbook was also apparent in its 1983 manual used to train Honduran military officers, including members of Battalion 316, a unit responsible for kidnapping, torturing and disappearing suspected leftists throughout the decade. After Congress objected, editors revised the manual by hand, writing “this is a form of torture” next to specific techniques.
The doctrine also featured prominently in the CIA’s post-Sept. 11 enhanced interrogation program, which adapted many of the same principles for use against terrorism suspects. The techniques were used at Abu Ghraib, where documented abuse followed patterns strikingly close to that prescribed in earlier research. Around the same time, the military’s Human Terrain System applied behavioral and social science to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lineage that historians trace back through the same MKULTRA-era well of experimentation.
The hearings further muddled two competing versions of the MKULTRA story.
In the end, the hearings further muddled two competing versions of the MKULTRA story. One is the documented history of an illegal CIA research program whose techniques extended official and unofficial interrogation practices. The other involves the mythology of CIA mind control creating state assassins and programming acid casualties like Charles Manson. The first is supported by records, investigations and decades of scholarship. The second is supported by coincidence, insinuation and the irresistible appeal of unanswered questions.
Judging from the headlines that gravitated toward Charles Manson and Manchurian Candidates, this second version remains ascendant. These stories are more dramatic — and easier to tell — than the story of how MKULTRA helped give birth to KUBARK and the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. A serious hearing on MKULTRA would have focused on how its experiments shaped state violence for the next 50 years, rather than the wild goose chase of whether a crazed MKULTRA asset may or may not have disemboweled Sharon Tate.
We know MKULTRA failed to deliver mind control. We still need to come to terms with the living legacy of its “successes”— past, present and future. This was the parting warning of Stephen Kinzer, author of “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control,” who served as an expert witness to Luna’s task force. In one of the hearing’s more serious moments, Kinzer warned that a program built on today’s artificial intelligence and neuroscience might already be running somewhere inside the national security state. But nobody with the power to ask seems to care much about finding out. Instead, the Task Force — a MAGA clown car that does not merit comparison to the Church Committee — focused on a distant past and a matinee mythology that benefits no one more than the contemporary national security state. While politicians, journalists and the public obsess over a program that ended in 1973, they are missing MKULTRA’s true and full patrimony.
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