The U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets convened a pivotal hearing on June 30, titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” The session, chaired by Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna, produced testimony linking the Central Intelligence Agency’s most notorious secret program to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination through Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald before he could testify.
MKUltra operated from 1953 to 1973 and studied mind control and behavioral alteration using unwitting subjects subjected to high doses of psychoactive drugs and psychological torture techniques such as electroshock, sensory deprivation, and isolation. The program involved over 80 institutions, including schools, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. Though the CIA destroyed all operational MKUltra files in 1973, surviving financial records triggered Senate hearings in 1977.
At last month’s hearing, investigative journalist Tom O’Neill—author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties—presented evidence connecting MKUltra to Ruby. In April 1964, after Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Oswald, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a CIA-connected psychiatrist, examined Ruby on behalf of his defense attorney. West continued treating Ruby until shortly before his death in 1967.
By June 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren and members of the Kennedy Assassination Commission visited Ruby to take his sworn testimony, but he was reported babbling incoherently. Some speculate that West’s sessions influenced or impaired Ruby’s capacity to testify. Commission Counsel Arlen Specter later noted Ruby whispered to him and Warren: “They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and New Mexico.”
O’Neill revealed a 1953 letter from West to CIA MKUltra director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb detailing planned experiments at Lackland Air Force Base involving “basic airmen,” “prisoners in the local stockade,” and psychiatric patients with dissociative disorders. He described the letter as reading “like a page torn from the research notebook of Josef Mengele.”
Critically, O’Neill noted that former CIA Director Allen Dulles—who authorized MKUltra—served on the Warren Commission, while Richard Helms, who oversaw MKUltra and later ordered its records destroyed, acted as the CIA’s liaison to the same commission. Both men knew West and his methods but never disclosed his connection to the agency.
Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at Brown University, warned Congress that MKUltra may not have ended in 1973: “There have been enormous advances in cyber technology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Covert agencies may now possess tools for mind control Sidney Gottlieb could never have imagined.” O’Neill added: “Is it happening today? Did it continue? I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it didn’t, though, because the technology they worked to establish over 20 to 25 years and spent more money on than any operation the CIA conducted was successful.”
Democrats boycotted the hearing, sending only one minority witness—Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former National Institutes of Health researcher—who argued current NIH reforms represent “political control” replacing “scientific judgment.”
Luna confirmed additional MKUltra documents are being declassified as part of ongoing transparency efforts and pledged to demand full release of records from the CIA. Following the hearing, she posted on social media: “According to today’s expert witnesses: Jack Ruby and Charles Manson were MKUltra assets.”
