MKUltra Declassification Task Force Should Focus on Real Secrets and Not Conspiracy Theories

MKUltra: Declassification Task Force Should Focus on Real Secrets, Not Conspiracy Theories Anna Paulina Luna post Published: Jun 29, 2026 Briefing Book # 924 Edited by Michael Evans For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Cold War – General Covert Action Project Intelligence Gottlieb CIA staff photo of Sidney Gottlieb, who oversaw Project ARTICHOKE and later the MKULTRA behavior control programs. Helms As chief of operations in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Plans (1952-62), deputy director of plans (1962-65), deputy director of central intelligence (1965-66), and director of central intelligence (1966-73), Richard Helms was keenly interested in developing techniques to use biological and chemical materials in covert intelligence operations and, as DCI in 1973, gave the order to destroy the CIA’s MKULTRA files. Washington, D.C., June 29, 2026 - On Tuesday, June 30, the congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets chaired by Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna will hold a special hearing to uncover what they promise will be “the truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” While it’s not clear what the precise focus of session will be, it’s unlikely that the committee will shed any new light on the controversial and abusive CIA behavior control experiments that began in the early years of the Cold War and that ended more than 50 years ago. 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. 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 (formerly Twitter). Quoting a headline that appeared in the Daily Mail announcing that “Declassified CIA files” had revealed a “chilling blueprint to manipulate Americans’ minds through covert drugging with vaccines,” Luna wrote: “I think our next task force hearing will be on MK Ultra.” To which fellow Republican and vaccine skeptic Lauren Boebert, who also serves on the Task Force, replied, “I’ve been waiting my whole time in Congress for this moment!” pic 2 pic 3 And while the Daily Mail did in fact identify a CIA document from the released MKUltra files in which the use of fake vaccines and other medical playacting during Cold-War-era interrogations was contemplated, there is nothing in that document to suggest that the CIA has ever tried to use real vaccines “to manipulate Americans’ minds” or that the simulated vaccinations used under Artichoke in the 1950s to drug unsuspecting enemy agents were ever employed in other programs, much less on entire populations. The April 1952 CIA document referenced in the Daily Mail article concerns a series of suggestions for the Artichoke project from an unnamed CIA “consultant” and “a ranking officer of the TSS organization,” a reference to the Technical Services Staff, home of the CIA’s most infamous mad scientist: Sidney Gottlieb. While the writer of the memo described some of the consultant’s suggestions as “controversial”—noting, in particular, that the Agency would “under no circumstances” consider lobotomy or brain surgery as an “operative measure”—there is no doubt that techniques similar to some on the list were in fact used in what Gottlieb would later call “Artichoke interrogations.” It’s in this list of suggested techniques that the writers and editors at the Daily Mail and ultimately Rep. Luna found a reference to vaccines. One of the CIA’s top priorities under Artichoke was to find a way to secretly drug an individual, such as an enemy agent, to make them divulge information or otherwise control their behavior. To do so, the consultant suggested research on “chemicals or drugs that can be effectively concealed in common items such as food, water, coca cola, beer, liquor, cigarettes, etc.” and that “should also be capable of use in standard medical treatments such as vaccinations, shots, etc.” (emphasis in original) It’s important to understand what Project Artichoke was. In the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. government, and the CIA in particular, were under the impression that they had fallen behind the Soviet Union and China in the development of interrogation techniques that could be used on U.S. agents or that the U.S. could use against communist spies and defectors. The goals for the project grew more ambitious over time, as what began as a search for a “truth serum” transformed into an effort to gain control of and manipulate the mind of an individual. As with many things during the Cold War, the perceived “mind control gap” created a sense of urgency where everything was on the table: hypnosis, electroshock treatments, isolation, sleep deprivation, blows to the head, polygraphs, and especially drugs. In the early 1950s, no drug seemed more promising to the CIA than LSD, a newly developed chemical compound that induced wild hallucinations and bizarre behavior, and that CIA scientists thought might be the long-sought truth drug. Much of the research carried out under the auspices of Artichoke and later MKUltra focused on understanding the effects of LSD. A unique feature of Artichoke was its reliance on a “simulated medical setting” to put interrogees at ease and to create conditions under which a subject would have reason to believe that a pill or injection (of LSD, for example) was something that was being given to them for a legitimate medical purpose, like aspirin, cough medicine, or a vaccine. These were interrogations where, as Gottlieb later said, “the unwitting and total lack of awareness on the part of somebody who was being interrogated that way might have been the key thing.” A March 1954 CIA memo, for example, describes the interrogation of “an important covert operational asset” by a unit of the CIA’s Artichoke program. Conducted at an undisclosed safe house, the interrogation combined hypnosis techniques and the “massive use of chemicals” disguised as a medical treatment for a case of influenza. The report says that the subject “was held under ARTICHOKE techniques for approximately twelve hours” and that they were under “direct interrogation” for 90 minutes. Consultants who reviewed the interrogation report agreed that Artichoke officials “took certain (probably calculated) chances in using the massive dosages of chemicals” but that “ultimate results apparently justified the measures taken.” There’s no doubt that there were numerous abuses under the Artichoke and MKUltra projects. There were mysterious deaths and horrific experiments on federal prisoners, drug addicts and psychiatric patients. The CIA secretly contracted with prison directors, hospital administrators, and medical specialists inside and outside the U.S. to use their facilities and patients for secret experiments. The notes from one Artichoke meeting said that “all hands agreed that a great deal of work was necessary and it was essential to find an area where large numbers of bodies would be used for research and experimentation.” CIA officials even tested LSD on themselves from time to time and secretly drugged their coworkers to examine their reactions, in one case leading to the mysterious death of Army scientist Frank Olson. Such testing was for “defensive pharmacology purposes,” according to Gottlieb—so that CIA agents would learn to recognize the sensation of being drugged if it ever happened to them in the field. But Gottlieb in particular soon came to feel that the simulated medical conditions required by Artichoke, including reliance on bogus vaccines to inject mind-altering chemicals, were too cumbersome and restrictive for most intelligence applications. Gottlieb wanted something “that was more covert than the ARTICHOKE technique,” according to the first day of his secret October 1975 testimony to the Church Committee—something that did not require the subject to believe they were under medical care. “That was the general idea, or to get as close to that kind of capability as we could.” The Artichoke techniques were soon abandoned as Gottlieb and his staff set to developing more subtle techniques under MKUltra. In short, vaccines had as much to do with MKUltra as Coca Cola, beer, or cigarettes. It was one of several possible ways to deliver a cocktail of drugs that would help to secretly prep a CIA detainee for the 1950s version of an “enhanced interrogation.” In this history of CIA mind control, vaccines are a footnote. And sadly, it seems likely that the Task Force’s obsession with vaccine-related conspiracy theories will hijack what could be a serious examination of ongoing secrecy regarding the history of the CIA’s mind-control research, as there is much that remains classified. The first major declassification of documents on MKUltra came in 1977 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by John Marks, a former State Department employee who wrote the first definitive account of the program, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Marks later donated the 16,000-page collection to the National Security Archive, which published a curated selection of the most substantive records in 2024 as CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA. But those 16,000 pages did not include many of the most important records about CIA mind control efforts—the seven boxes of research files that were destroyed in 1973 on the order of outgoing CIA director Richard Helms, who had long protected the project from scrutiny and who saw major investigations on the horizon. “Let’s let this die with us,” he reportedly said to Gottlieb in ordering that the files be incinerated. According to Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, “Gottlieb took the matter seriously enough to drive to the Records Center, present the order in person, and insist that it be carried out forthwith.” But even if the most important records are unrecoverable, many of the records that do exist—the bulk of them from the CIA’s financial records or regarding MKUltra precursors like Artichoke and Project Bluebird—include redactions to this day. Now 70 years on, many of MKUltra’s mysteries will never be solved, while others remain obscured behind black ink. All five of the documents featured in this briefing book have portions that were excised by the CIA. The decision by Helms and Gottlieb to destroy the primary MKUltra research files in 1973 meant that they and their colleagues would never truly face the judgment of history. And the massive hole left in the historical record by their selfish actions ensures that internet chatrooms and dishonest political actors will continue to use the Agency’s now 70-year-old foray into mind control research as a black box to explain all manner of far-reaching government conspiracies. In May, Luna’s committee again grabbed headlines when hearing witness James Erdman, a former CIA official who worked on a declassification task force for outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, claimed that the CIA had seized “40 boxes of JFK and MKUltra files” from Gabbard’s office—part of his testimony on what he called the “COVID cover-up.” Both the CIA and Gabbard’s office denied the claim. (Not to be outdone, in her final days as DNI, Gabbard released a trove of disorganized documents that she said was evidence of a COVID-19 conspiracy and cover-up led by former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci.) One thing is for sure: A genuine effort by trained archival professionals to identify and declassify any remaining MKUltra files and remove the redactions on the documents in the John Marks FOIA collection would be a real service to historians and to the many victims of the CIA abuses under the long-discredited mind control research program. We will soon see whether the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets can find a way to focus on the real secrets and not the promotion of baseless conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19. The Documents d1 ebb924 Document 1 CIA memo, “Special Research for Artichoke,” Classification unknown, 7 pp. Apr 24, 1952 Source CIA Reading Room The Daily Mail made a splash in February 2026 after finding this record among declassified documents posted to the CIA’s online FOIA reading room with a headline that focused on a reference to the possible use of fake vaccines to secretly drug a detainee or enemy agent under simulated medical conditions under the CIA’s Artichoke interrogation program. d2 ebb924 Document 2 CIA memo, Chief, Security Research Staff, Chief, Technical Branch, “Artichoke Conference – 16 April 1953,” Classification unknown, 3 pp. May 11, 1953 Source CIA Reading Room In October 1975, Senate investigators asked MKUltra chief Sidney Gottlieb about his participation in an April 16, 1953, meeting in which “all hands agreed that a great deal of work was necessary and it was essential to find an area where large numbers of bodies would be used for research and experimentation.” A participant not identified in the redacted document “stated that in connection with the testing of drugs, he was quite certain a number of psychiatrists all over the United States would be willing to test new drugs, especially drugs that affect the mind,” a proposal that sounds very much like the programs that were developed under MKULTRA. Others at the meeting “said there were foundations, laboratories, etc. that would test new drugs.” All of the meeting participants agreed “that the wider the testing the better chances of success.” The meeting included a discussion about the proposed use of Artichoke techniques on U.S. prisoners of war returning from Korea, including “a detailed description of the problem to that point and … ARTICHOKE efforts to assist in the interrogation of the returnees.” Participants “agreed that the ‘hard core’ group and those who had been successfully indoctrinated were excellent subjects for ARTICHOKE work,” but the “general opinion” in the room was “that owing to publicity and poor handling, the ARTICHOKE techniques could not probably be brought to bear.” d3 ebb924 Document 3 CIA memo, Chief, Technical Branch to Director of Security, “ARTICHOKE [Redacted] Case #1,” Classification unknown, 4 pp. Mar 1954 Source Digital National Security Archive (From John Marks Collection) An internal CIA memo describes the interrogation of “an important covert operational asset” by an operational unit of the CIA’s Artichoke program. Conducted at an undisclosed safe house, the interrogation was meant to “evaluate his past reports; to accept or not accept his past accounts or future budgets; to determine his future potentialities and clearly re-establish his bonafides.” CIA interrogators applied Artichoke techniques including hypnosis and “massive use of chemicals” under cover of medical treatment for a case of influenza. The report says that the subject “was held under ARTICHOKE techniques for approximately twelve hours” and that they were under “direct interrogation” for 90 minutes. Consultants who reviewed the interrogation report agreed that Artichoke officials “took certain (probably calculated) chances in using the massive dosages of chemicals” but that “ultimate results apparently justified the measures taken.” d4 ebb924 Document 4 U.S. Senate, “Report of Proceedings, Hearing held before Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Testimony of Sidney Gottlieb,” Top Secret, 98 pp. Oct 15, 1975 Source Digital National Security Archive (From CIA Reading Room) During the first day of his testimony before the Church Committee staff, Gottlieb responds to questions about the CIA’s support to domestic surveillance operations and engages in a long discussion about the period in the early 1950s when the Agency began to experiment with techniques that they believed could be used to influence human behavior. Gottlieb says characterizes Project Artichoke as “a whole series of what I call hypnotics or sleep inducing materials” in an attempt “to catch a person on his way down to the sleep stage, and hope that he would be more open and vulnerable to interrogation.” Key to these Artichoke interrogations, Gottlieb says, was “that it was done in a sort of a medical setting.” Gottlieb differentiates ARTICHOKE interrogations, which he said he never witnessed personally, from so-called “P-1” and “A-2” interrogations, which refer to agency codes for LSD (P-1) and Meratran (A-2), a stimulant that Gottlieb said had an effect that was something like amphetamines. The key difference was that, unlike ARTICHOKE interrogations, P-1 and A-2 interrogations did not mimic a medical setting. “The thrust of one of the aims of our research program was to get a technique that was more covert than the ARTICHOKE technique,” Gottlieb said. Asked whether any of these experiments had occurred “in prisons, mental hospitals or other facilities that might hold either criminals or the criminally insane,” Gottlieb said that hadn’t, but changed his answer the next day, claiming to have not properly understood the question. d5 ebb924 Document 5 U.S. Senate, “Report of Proceedings, Hearing held before Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Testimony of Sidney Gottlieb,” Top Secret, 87 pp. Oct 17, 1975 Source Digital National Security Archive (From CIA Reading Room) On the third day of his testimony to the staff of the Senate Church Committee, Gottlieb describes his recollections of the Agency’s involvement in so-called “P-1” and “MKDELTA” interrogations and what distinguished these operations from the “ARTICHOKE interrogations.” In Gottlieb’s view, the primary distinction was that ARTICHOKE interrogations were conducted in simulated medical settings that provided an artificial rationale to receive injections of LSD and other substances, while P-1 interrogations were for situations where such a setting was not practical. As Gottlieb said, “[A] determination might have been made that the use of the kind of a medical-like setting that Artichoke requires was simply not permissible, it would have frightened somebody, and it would have frightened people, and would have made them – I don’t quite know how to say this – would have made it very difficult to carry off the operation, somebody might have been frightened of that kind of a medical setting, and the unwitting and total lack of awareness on the part of somebody who was being interrogated that way might have been the key thing.”