The Luna Hearing on MK/Ultra
On June 30th, Anna Luna held the fifth hearing of her Task Force on Federal Secrets. She has held two on the JFK case, one on the Martin Luther King case, one on UAPs and now one on MK/Ultra. There were three witnesses at the hearing. These were Steven Kinzer, Tom O’Neill, and a woman named Elizabeth Ginexi. Kinzer is more or less an MSM journalist who worked for the New York Times for many years. He has written more than a few books. His most famous effort was one he co-wrote with Stephen Schlesinger in 1982, Bitter Fruit, about the 1954 CIA overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala. He was a witness due to his 2019 book about Sidney Gottlieb entitled Poisoner in Chief. Gottlieb was a chemist who was the overall architect of the CIA’s MK/Ultra program, started by Allen Dulles and supervised by his assistant Richard Helms. It was Dulles who hired Gottlieb to work for the CIA in 1951.
Dulles recruited him on the recommendation of Ira Baldwin. Baldwin founded and organized the germ war program at Fort Detrick. Since Gottlieb had worked for the Department of Agriculture, he knew something about using poisons in plants. Project Bluebird, concerning interrogation techniques, was already established at the time. It was then expanded into Artichoke, which became Gottlieb’s domain. Artichoke began as an enhanced interrogation program, that is breaking down prisoners with drugs, torture, hypnosis and questioning techniques. It was succeeded by MK/Ultra, which evolved into a program to create a Manchurian Candidate, that is, an involuntary assassin. Gottlieb was the scientific supervisor for the CIA on these programs.
Tom O’Neill started his writing career as a magazine journalist in the entertainment field. It was in that subject area where he was commissioned to write an article for Premiere magazine on the 30th anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca killings. This sent him into a very large and long rabbit hole on that topic. He ended up getting a book contract to do a volume on the subject. This turned into the 2019 book CHAOS, with which he was assisted by Dan Piepenbring. That book is essentially a wholesale revisionist attack on Vincent Bugliosi’s best-selling crime volume Helter Skelter on the same subject. In it, O’Neill brings in the possibility that Charles Manson might have been used by another CIA MK/Ultra practitioner, namely Louis J. West. In 2025, that book was turned into a documentary film by Errol Morris. It is called Chaos: The Manson Murder. From my impression, O’Neill was not charmed by the picture.
The third witness was Elizabeth Ginexi, who had worked at the National Institute of Health for 22 years before retiring in 2025. She was a Scientific Program Director there, co-authored federal funding initiatives and is an expert in victim rights. We will address what she was doing there later.
The chair of this subcommittee is Anna Luna from Florida. She opened the hearing by saying that the CIA committed crimes in its pursuit of these behavioral modification programs, and it then destroyed much of the evidence that would incriminate certain participants in these crimes. She said it operated for at least 20 years, much of the time on American soil, and used taxpayer money. When it was over and the men who ran it were exposed, these men did not cooperate fully with the congressional investigators.
Luna explicitly stated that former CIA Director Richard Helms committed a crime when he ordered the destruction of remaining records of the program in 1973. Helms then further ordered Gottlieb to destroy his personal files on the subject. Four people spent a full day doing the former, and then his secretary incinerated Gottlieb’s own personal files. Luna labeled these acts as obstructions of justice. She added that both men, Helms and Gottlieb, managed to escape punishment for their crimes. Further, none of the victims was ever fully compensated for damages.
She then noted that in 1977, an archivist discovered that 7 boxes of records had escaped the Helms order. These were financial records of the program. As she stated:
These seven boxes included the names of institutions, the names of subprojects, the researchers who participated, the specific operations that the CIA had funded, and without them, the vast majority of MKULTRA would only be a rumor.
Those accounting records showed that the project included at least 149 subprojects, used more than 80 institutions and included 185 non-government researchers. These would indicate that the whole mind control program was quite vast in both scope and experimentation. In one instance, Dulles and Helms had approved a $375,000 grant to a hospital so their patients could be used in the project. The CIA’s own Inspector General said the program reached beyond the Agency’s charter. Luna concluded that the project had committed crimes and then the Director had participated in a cover up.
Kinzer was the first witness, and he gave an opening statement that was largely about Gottlieb. He openly stated that what Gottlieb did amounted to medical torture in prisons, clinics and safe houses. And it was not just in the USA, as MK/Ultra reached around the world into Europe, Asia and Latin America. He then added that the project essentially gave Gottlieb a license to kill. And although there were no specific numbers on this aspect, Kinzer said that he knew from witnesses in Germany that people died while being experimented upon.
And then there was the infamous 1953 death of Frank Olson. Kinzer said it is not known whether this case was a homicide or suicide. O’Neill responded that he did not think it was a suicide. Olsen was part of the Army’s biological warfare program and was also knowledgeable about mind control by the CIA, since he had participated in Artichoke. In fact, at the time of his retirement, he was employed by the Agency. He was reportedly nauseated by the deaths of both animals and humans, the former in experiments and the latter in interrogation sessions. Gottlieb secretly doused him with LSD, and about a week later, he fell to his death from the window of a New York Hotel. As O’Neill said, Olson had threatened to turn over secrets of the programs. There was an out-of-court settlement due to a wrongful death suit in 1975.
In 2018, author Michael Ignatieff concluded that Dulles and Helms had ordered the death of Olson. They were quite fearful that he would expose both the Army’s germ warfare program and the torture and execution of Soviet agents at black sites in Europe in the early fifties. (New York Review of Books, 4/22/18) If this is true, then Luna was correct about Helms’ incineration order being a crime.
Kinzer finished his address by saying that Gottlieb concluded that the whole program was a failure and the concept of mind control was a myth. Which greatly sounds like CYA to this author. As many authors have pointed out, there is documented evidence that shows that some of the CIA experiments on mind control did succeed. (Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, p. 418)
O’Neill took up this subject by saying he also believed that Gottlieb’s claim about failure was false. His research on the Tate-Labianca case led him to another CIA practitioner in mind control. This was Louis J West, commonly called Jolly. In his testimony, O’Neill said that he found many of West’s papers at UCLA. In one instance, he noted where West had described a successful experiment, but this had been rewritten either by Congress or the CIA to say it had not succeeded.
He also found correspondence between West and Gottlieb extending back to 1953. Through drugs and hypnosis, West wished to attempt to replace genuine memories with false memories. Gottlieb liked the idea and, by 1956, West said he had succeeded in doing so. West had also developed ways to speed up trance-like states and to deepen them. This was likely achieved at one of two universities he worked at, Cornell or Oklahoma.
Later on, West inserted himself into the Jack Ruby case. According to O’Neill this was attempted quite early on but it did not become effective until several weeks after the preliminary hearing. After Ruby was convicted, both Hubert Winston Smith of the University of Texas, and West, more or less took over this case. Smith had designed the psychomotor epilepsy defense used by attorney Melvin Belli at trial. Now, with Belli gone, Smith and West had declared that Ruby had a psychotic break, and West went in and interviewed him. West declared him mad. O’Neill commented on this. He thought this was misleading, done in order to not have Ruby talk. (For a longer discussion, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jack-ruby-a-review-and-reassessment-part-1)
Elizabeth Ginexi did not address MK/Ultra at all. She objected to the cuts that the Office of Management and Budget was proposing for NIH. What was she doing there? According to a story in the Washington Examiner, the Democrats used their minority privilege to get her there. (6/30/26) This reminds me of what the Democrats did during my appearance with Oliver Stone and Jeff Morley in April of last year. The Democrats got John Davisson of the Electronic Privacy Information Center to complain about Social Security numbers being exposed in recently declassified JFK documents. That was a legitimate complaint. But why make the complaint before a congressional hearing about the JFK assassination? The Democrats more or less boycotted this most recent hearing, but they did get Ginexi there as a diversion from the main topic. And it worked. Under questioning by Republicans, the hearing wandered into the origins of CV 19 and the honesty of Tony Fauci. Thus creating fodder for some quarters to ridicule the hearing. (Click here https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/anna-paulina-luna-mkultra-cia-mind-control-usaid-covid-conspiracy-theories/)
I have to give Luna credit for taking on these issues because no one else I know of on the Hill is doing it as completely and assiduously as she has. But there was a missed opportunity here. To my knowledge, her hearings have not covered the RFK case. As Lisa Pease and others have shown, the alleged assassin of Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, was very likely in a trance state when he shot at Senator Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in June of 1968. And his programmer was likely William Bryan. (Pease, pp. 405-08) Why this case was not discussed on this occasion eludes me. And I really wish Pease had been there to review it. The question then would be: Did MK/Ultra end the sixties?
