Anna Paulina Luna Held a Hearing on CIA Mind Control. It Went Off the Rails.

On Tuesday, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) held a House oversight hearing on MKULTRA, the notorious and failed CIA mind control program that is believed to have operated from 1953 to 1973. Luna heads the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets; the two witnesses called were authors who both wrote excellent books on different aspects of MKULTRA, and who used their testimony to call for the declassification of more documents related to the program.  But Luna, a Trump loyalist, muddied the proceedings by trying to link MKULTRA with her own pet conspiracy theories. She made it clear that she thought MKULTRA could still be active today, asking one witness if USAID, the international humanitarian aid organization dismantled by the Trump administration, “may have been used overseas” on “prisoners of war” to further the CIA program, a suggestion for which she provided no direct evidence.

As with a hearing she held on the JFK assassination last year, Luna implied that the MKULTRA hearing was merely the opening salvo, and that further revelations about bygone conspiracies would come. She said that she had “received reports” about “new MKULTRA boxes that were discovered,” and that the CIA was in the process of declassifying what was in those files, which appeared to relate to a “forgery program that was being housed under MKULTRA.” Luna promised that the documents would be released as soon as possible.

“Why were they talking about COVID and Anthony Fauci at a hearing about MKUltra?”

It was obvious to knowledgeable observers that Luna would likely use the hearing to promote conspiracy theories. Mike Evans, an author at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, warned as much in a blog post earlier this week. (The National Security Archive is an NGO that focuses on government transparency and holds a large collection of declassified government documents.)

“Instead of focusing on the real and enduring secrets surrounding MKULTRA, there are strong indications that Luna will use the hearing as a platform to incite panic about vaccines, something she has done time and time again,” Evans wrote. “Luna’s preoccupation with the perceived dangers of ordinary vaccines was also what originally inspired her to call for a hearing on MKULTRA, according to a February 24 post to her account on X.com.”

One of the authors called to testify was Dr. Stephen Kinzer, the author of Poisoner In Chief, a book about Sidney Gottlieb, the infamous chemist who headed the CIA’s Technical Services Division in the 1950s and 1960s and oversaw both MKULTRA and multiple attempts to kill or discredit Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The other was Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos, a book that documents his decades-long quest to determine whether Charles Manson or members of his murderous Family may have been subject to CIA experiments, served as FBI informants, or both.

“I would urge this committee to fill out all the blank spaces in the documents that we have,” Kinzer said in his opening statement.

The task force, Kinzer added, “could also consider trying to determine whether some new incarnation of MKULTRA exists today,” arguing that some kind of mind control technology could exist that did not in the ‘60s and ‘70s. “In the many decades since then, there have been enormous advances in cybertechnology and artificial intelligence, in neuroscience; covert agencies may have access now to tools for mind control that Sidney Gottlieb could not even have imagined.”

The question of whether mind control “might now be possible under our new circumstances,” Kinzer said, “is something that has presumably occurred to scientists who work for secret services, including our own.”

O’Neill also pointed out that a key promise of the 1977 hearings into MKULTRA and other governmental abuses was never fulfilled. “Committee members like yourselves,” he told the panel, “promised that the victims of MKULTRA would be identified, compensated and provided lifetime medical care. None of that ever happened.” Later in his remarks, O’Neill also argued that the documents that have thus far been discovered, “warrant a thorough reexamination of what this program accomplished, what Congress was told, and what may still remain hidden.”

Luna also noted during the hearing that more documents related to MKULTRA could and should be declassified, but presented an incomplete picture of what’s been released already. Documents about MKULTRA released by a Senate committee beginning in 1975. Two years later, in 1977, records containing far more detailed revelations were made public, including that the CIA had given drugs like LSD to unwitting civilians. One particularly infamous operation related to MKULTRA was Operation Midnight Climax, in which sex workers in CIA safehouses drugged patrons with LSD while CIA agents watched behind two-way mirrors. At least one person is known to have died as a result of MKULTRA: Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who was drugged with LSD at a CIA meeting in 1953 and either jumped or was pushed from a hotel window the same night. His death remains one of the most hotly-contested and infamous incidents in US intelligence history. (Gottlieb, meanwhile, the architect of MKULTRA, was allowed to retire quietly after his time in the CIA, living in rural Virginia, taking up folk dancing and breeding goats.)

During a 1977 hearing, the late-Sen. Edwardy Kennedy (D-Mass.), denounced MKULTRA’s bizarre and unethical pseudo-experimentation in stark terms.

“The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense,” he said. “The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers. The test subjects were seldom accessible beyond the first hours of the test. In a number of instances, the test subject became ill for hours or days, and effective followup was impossible. Other experiments were equally offensive. For example, heroin addicts were enticed into participating in LSD experiments in order to get a reward, heroin. Perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of experimentation on human subjects was unknown.”

The present-day hearing was considerably less focused, and no one involved, elected officials or witnesses, seemed able to answer the questions they were raising, particularly about whether MKULTRA or a similar program might still exist in some form. House Democrats also didn’t appear to know what to do with this strange event; they called as a witness a former NIH employee, Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a research psychologist who had no specific knowledge of MKULTRA, but who warned that the agency is being stripped, warped, and politicized beyond recognition.

In response to Ginexi’s presence on the panel, Republicans grilled her about Anthony Fauci and the origins of Covid. “Do you believe the NIH or Dr. Fauci lied to the American people about Covid?” Rep. Nancy Mace, (R-SC) asked, in one representative exchange.

“No,” Ginexi replied.

Mace questioned why Ginexi had been sent to participate in the panel at all, if she wasn’t an expert on MKULTRA. Ginexi responded that she’s an expert on human subjects research; not appearing to understand the connection, Mace moved on.

Ginexi also tried to tell the members of Congress that canceling government-backed clinical trials, something that’s happened repeatedly under the Trump administration, was harming people’s trust in science and in the government, and would make it hard to recruit patients for such trials in the future. Republican members of Congress seemed uninterested in discussing that idea, instead focusing repeatedly on Covid and Covid conspiracy theories.

“You just brought up trust,” shot back Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.). “Do you think the NIH has a trust problem, based on how they handled Covid?”

“No, I do not,” Genexi responded. “I think the NIH is beloved by the American people because we know about the advances in human health and cancer treatment and heart disease and diabetes and all the health gains the research has produced.”

“Well I think you’re wrong, ma’am,” Crane responded. “I think the public has a serious mistrust issue with the NIH. Do you deny that the NIH tried to cover up the origin of Covid?”

Mike Evans of the National Security Archive told Mother Jones on Wednesday that the hearing had proceeded more or less as he expected.

“I think that the two main witnesses did their best to stay focused on what the committee can do to illuminate the historical record,” he told me in an email. “But l just don’t think that this is a sincere effort by the Task Force to do that. Why were they talking about COVID and Anthony Fauci at a hearing about MKULTRA?”

Evans was also confused by Genexi’s inclusion: “I also have to say that I found the decision by the minority members to call a former NIH staffer with no background in researching MKULTRA to be rather baffling. I still don’t understand why they did that.”

By far “the most underwhelming part,” Evans added, was Luna’s announcement that files will be reviewed related to an apparent forgery program. “What does that have to do with MKULTRA or CIA mind control efforts?” he asked. “That’s just basic intelligence tradecraft. My guess is that CIA felt like they needed to produce something to satisfy the task force, but if that’s the extent of it, then these hearings were a total failure.”

“In the end, the hearing didn’t break any new ground as far as I can tell,” Evans added. None of what was presented at the hearings, he said, “is really new. So why are they holding hearings now?”

In all, the hearing was a neat demonstration of current Republican priorities, their interest in promising disclosures that never really come, as well as their energetic embrace of any conspiracy theory that does not directly implicate Donald Trump. A neat, if accidental, encapsulation of what happened during the hearing was provided by Kinzer, the Poisoner in Chief author, near the end of the proceedings.

“There’s a reason why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America,” Kinzer told Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). “It has to do with the dissociation between what we say we are and do, and what we really are and do. This has become more and more clear to more and more people. Therefore, they’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the US and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all.”