The Government Lied about MK-Ultra. Then They Burned the Receipts.

Congress is finally reopening the chapter the CIA hoped history would forget

There was a time when congressional hearings were held to explore farm subsidies, banking regulations, and whether Mark Zuckerberg was sorry enough. Now? One day it’s UFOs. The next it’s Jeffrey Epstein. JFK. MLK. 9/11. Lab leaks, gain-of-function research, and adverse events associated with government-mandated bioweapons.

This week, Congress spent hours discussing CIA mind-control experiments, notorious killers with suspicious government ties, and the deliberate destruction of federal records. At this point, C-SPAN might be one alien autopsy away from becoming Netflix Conspiracy+.

The centerpiece was MK-Ultra—the CIA’s infamous Cold War mind-control program. For all its bizarre and depraved details, MK-Ultra doesn’t fit neatly into this lineup of formerly-forbidden topics. Yes, it’s taboo. But it’s not taboo because historians disagree about whether it existed. They don’t. It’s taboo because the people who ran it did such a spectacular job covering their tracks that nobody can confidently prove it ever really ended.

The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, billed its Tuesday hearing as an effort to “examine the history and timeline” of the program that secretly dosed unwitting Americans with LSD and exposed them to hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture. That’s no longer tinfoil-hat territory. The Church Committee established it. The CIA has acknowledged it. The only reason we know as much as we do is because seven boxes of records escaped destruction after then-CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the rest of the files burned in 1973.

The surviving boxes weren’t discovered this week or even this decade. They were unearthed in 1977—the year Star Wars was released, for perspective—and left to sit like a pile of dog poop on the carpet that the entire bureaucratic apparatus pretended not to see. And they might have gotten away with it… if it weren’t for a handful of meddling journalists and historians who assigned themselves to the case. Thanks to them—plus an administration and a Congress that seem determined to pry open every dusty filing cabinet in Washington—one of the CIA’s darkest chapters is getting the second look it never wanted.

Frank Olson was in those files. In November 1953, the Army biochemist was dosed with LSD without his consent during a CIA retreat in rural Maryland. Nine days later, he fell from a thirteenth-floor window of a New York hotel. His death was ruled a suicide. “In all my years in the hotel business,” the hotel’s manager later said, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.”

Decades later, at his sons’ insistence, Olson’s body was exhumed. A forensic examination revealed he had suffered blunt force trauma to the head and chest before the fall. The government wrote the family a $750,000 apology card. That’s a remarkably expensive way to say, “It wasn’t us.”

They tried to burn the evidence. They forgot about the body. Peak competence. No notes.

ANGRY NEIGHBOR: “Why did you ding-dong ditch my house?”
KID: “I didn’t!”
ANGRY NEIGHBOR: “I have the proof right here on my Ring camera.”
KID: [swallows Ring camera]
ANGRY NEIGHBOR [to self]: “Rats.”

The coverup didn’t just hang over the hearing; it was the hearing. Investigative journalist Tom O’Neill traced Charles Manson back to CIA-funded programs. He suggested Jack Ruby’s connection to the agency hadn’t been fully explored. Assets? Who knows. That’s the point. Helms didn’t just burn files—he burned the bridge between suspicion and proof. We’re not left with conspiracy theories. We’re left with a smoking filing cabinet and a government asking us to believe it was empty.

That’s a hell of a legacy.

At one perfect point in the hearing, the past collided with the present in real time. Former NIH Scientific Program Director Elizabeth Ginexi was asked a straightforward question: would she acknowledge what lawmakers characterized as her agency’s efforts to cover up harmful vaccine side effects and misconduct surrounding COVID-era public health? She could have said yes. She could have said no. She could have said “I’m not familiar with those allegations.” Instead, she reached for Tuskegee—a scandal the government has already conceded—and explained how protections for research subjects have improved dramatically since then.

It was a masterclass in institutional judo. Use the momentum of an old confession to deflect a new accusation. Ginexi wasn’t testifying about Tuskegee because Tuskegee was relevant. She was testifying about Tuskegee because it was safe. Because everyone in that room already agrees Tuskegee was bad. Because the NIH has a pre-written script for Tuskegee and it ends with “and that’s why you can trust us now.”

But the COVID coverup didn’t wander into the hearing by accident. It wasn’t a detour. It was the destination. When you’re holding a hearing about government agencies that conduct unethical human experiments, destroy the evidence, and then demand public trust—you’re not talking about two different scandals separated by decades. You’re talking about the same institutional reflex expressing itself in a new decade with new tools and the same contempt for consent.

When pressed again on whether she acknowledged a cover-up, Ginexi replied, “I’m sorry, that’s not my understanding.” (Translation: “I acknowledge that your question exists and respect its journey.”)

And there it was. The intersection of America’s two biggest trust problems.

THEM: “Look how far we’ve come!”

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE: “How do we know you’re not still doing it?”

THEM: “We have ethics boards now.”

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE: “You had ethics boards then! They signed off on dosing people with LSD and throwing them out windows.”

In an important way, the hearing wasn’t really about MK-Ultra. It was about credibility. Government officials’ insistence that today’s safeguards are much stronger than yesterday’s is like an airline announcing that only half as many planes are falling out of the sky this year.

The problem is, yesterday’s officials said the same thing. They assured Americans that everything was ethical. That oversight existed. That our elected leaders would never use U.S. citizens as lab rats—don’t be silly. Until decades later, when Congress was forced to admit that unsuspecting Americans had in fact been exploited in gruesome, profoundly damaging ways. The country’s premier intelligence gathering-service swallowed the Ring camera—and expected us to take their word about what wasn’t on it for more than 50 years. And once history teaches citizens that institutions are capable of extraordinary deception, every administration that follows inherits the trust hangover. That’s not paranoia. It’s cause and effect.

The restaurant that poisoned its customers doesn’t get to write its own Yelp reviews. But that’s effectively what Americans have been asked to accept for decades—that the same institutions that burned the recipes and swore no one was cooking in the first place should be trusted to tell us the new menu is perfectly safe. Now, someone’s finally turning on the lights and opening the freezer. After seventeen consecutive seasons of Nothing Ever Happens, it’s a start.

“The victims and their families deserve acknowledgment,” Luna wrote in a statement. “No one went to prison. No victim was ever formally compensated by the government for the harm they caused. These are crimes against humanity. And this Congress has a constitutional obligation to ensure that full declassification is not delayed any longer… and that the CIA never does this again.”

Whether this hearing leads to genuine accountability or just another thick stack of redacted PDFs is anyone’s guess. But at least somebody finally took the caution tape off the crime scene.

P.S. The Jenna’s Side Subscriber Directory briefly flatlined (turned out “winging it” has consequences), but she’s BACK! Yuge thanks to John Wright for flagging the near-death experience—and helping bring her back to life. If you’d like to connect with other delightful dissidents, check it out and add your name. :)