Investigative Journalist Tom O'Neill on CIA's MKUltra Mind-Control Program

[0:00] Almost 50 years ago, the last congressional hearings into MKUltra took place just a short walk from here in the Dirkson Senate office building. [0:08] At those hearings convened in August and September of 1977, representatives of the CIA told Congress and the American people that its 25-year effort to control human behavior had been a colossal failure. [0:24] Because I believe Congress was never told the truth about what this program actually achieved. [0:30] In fact, I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MKUltra as a failure. [0:38] My name is Tom O'Neill, and in 1999, I accepted a magazine assignment to write a story about murders committed by a group of hippies called the Manson family. [0:48] For those unfamiliar with this horrific episode of American history, in the summer of 1969, four young people acting on the orders of a cult leader named Charles Manson [0:59] went to the home of movie director Roman Polanski and murdered everyone they found there, including his eight-and-a-half-month pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate. [1:09] The victims were complete strangers to their killers. [1:13] The following night, Manson's followers murdered another couple in the same grisly fashion. [1:19] At the time I accepted the assignment, I'd never heard of MKUltra, and I wouldn't for another two years after I'd missed countless deadlines, [1:28] lost the assignment, and fallen down a nightmarish rabbit hole trying to answer the question I couldn't quite shake. [1:36] How had Manson, a barely literate ex-con, acquired the ability to persuade ordinary young people to murder complete strangers simply because he had told them to? [1:47] The pursuit of the answer to that question led me to Dr. Louis Jolion West, known to his friends as Jolly. [1:58] West was one of the most influential psychiatrists in America. [2:02] During his career, he crossed paths with some of the most controversial events of the 20th century, [2:07] including the Patty Hearst kidnapping case and the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination investigation. [2:12] In 1977, West was one of seven academic researchers named in a front page New York Times story alleging [2:22] that the CIA had used American universities, hospitals, and prisons as secret laboratories for experiments involving LSD [2:30] and other drugs on unwitting human subjects. [2:34] West vigorously denied the allegations. [2:36] He acknowledged that the agency had approached him but insisted he had refused because he said LSD was too dangerous and unpredictable to be used on humans. [2:47] He added that he limited all of his research with LSD to animals. [2:52] The revelations in the Times led directly to the congressional hearings held later that year. [2:57] West's denials, however, were effective. [3:00] He was never investigated, and his name never came up at the hearings. [3:04] I'll spare you the long and tedious story of how my Manson reporting led to West, led me to West, [3:11] except to say that I eventually learned that in 1967, when Manson transformed into the cult leader we are familiar with today, [3:19] he and his followers were receiving free medical care at a clinic in San Francisco [3:25] where West had established a base of operations for a research project he was conducting nearby. [3:31] After becoming intrigued by the allegations against West, I learned that UCLA, his last academic home, [3:39] had inherited his paper following his death in 1999. [3:44] Nearly two months and more than 200 boxes later, I found the proverbial needle in a haystack. [3:50] Correspondence between West and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the architect of MKUltra. [3:55] The letters begin in 1953, just two months after CIA Director Alan Dulles authorized the program, [4:04] and while West was stationed at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, [4:09] where he was chief psychiatrist at the base hospital. [4:13] In his first letter to Gottlieb, West proposed conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, [4:19] including military personnel, prisoners, and psychiatric patients at the base hospital. [4:24] He then outlined the experiments themselves in six more pages that could have been written by Joseph Mengele. [4:32] Using LSD in combination with hypnosis, West produced inducing confusion, amnesia, [4:38] and specific mental disorders in people who would remember nothing of their interaction with him afterward. [4:44] He sought to develop techniques to extract true information and implant false information in unwilling subjects [4:51] and to alter the attitudes and beliefs of, quote, previously loyal individuals. [4:57] In other words, to completely switch their allegiance from one group or leader to another. [5:03] But it was that sentence, but it was another sentence at the end of that letter that stopped me cold. [5:08] These experiments, he wrote, must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field. [5:16] Gottlieb's response could hardly have been more enthusiastic. [5:18] My good friend, he wrote, I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. [5:26] You have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. [5:32] West replied that there was no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times. [5:37] There was another document in West's papers that had even more significant implications. [5:42] It was a 14-page report that West wrote in 1956, just three years after he contracted with the CIA. [5:51] In the report, West described administering LSD and other drugs in conjunction with hypnosis on unwitting human subjects. [5:59] And then he made a remarkable claim. [6:02] He announced that he had learned how to replace true memories with false memories in people without their knowledge. [6:08] In other words, he clarified, it has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual [6:17] and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, [6:26] but that a different fictional event actually did occur. [6:31] If West's report was accurate, this was not the failure agency officials described in 1977. [6:37] Quite the opposite. [6:39] It was, in fact, the central ambition of the MKUltra operation, the means of gaining the ability to seize the control of a person's perceptions, [6:49] memories, and ultimately their behavior. [6:51] But there was still one more discovery, and this time I found it in the National Security Archives at George Washington University, [6:59] the official repository of the CIA's MKUltra records, which were released to Congress after the 1977 hearings. [7:07] In those holdings was a different version of West's 1956 report. [7:13] The original paper had been replaced by a four-page summary that did not exist in West's files and appears to have been written by someone else. [7:21] His claims about replacing memories were gone. [7:25] In their place was a theoretical discussion of LSD and disassociative states. [7:30] The versions applied to Congress concluded that the effects of LSD and similar drugs on disassociative states had, and I'm quoting, never been studied. [7:44] Never been studied. [7:46] In the original report, West discusses observations from his own experiments, including detailed descriptions of using LSD to, as he wrote, [7:55] speed the induction of the hypnotic state and deepen the trance in subjects. [8:01] Those passages have been removed in the report turned over to Congress. [8:05] The discrepancy could not have been more stark. [8:13] Nearly 50 years ago, another congressional committee believed it had been given the truth about MKUltra. [8:19] It had not. [8:20] In conclusion, I respectfully submit that these records, some newly available and others that remained outside the government's disclosure for decades, [8:30] warrant a thorough re-examination of what the program accomplished, what Congress was told, and what may still remain hidden. [8:38] I'm happy to provide the documents I've referenced today, and I've provided many additional details in my written testimony.