Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) announced that the CIA is working to declassify recently discovered MKUltra documents tied to the agency’s Cold War-era mind-control experiments.
Luna, the chairwoman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, gave the update during a hearing Tuesday dedicated to “uncovering the truth” about the top-secret CIA program.
“The CIA is currently in the process of declassifying newly found documentation,” Luna said, “although the documents — I feel comfortable enough to share here — pertain to a forgery program that was being housed under MKUltra.”
Luna did not expand on what “forgery program” may have been carried out in connection with Project MKUltra. Operating between 1953 and 1973, the MKUltra program was executed, largely with minimal oversight, as the U.S. intelligence community raced to compete with Soviet espionage. The CIA experimented with drugs such as LSD, including on subjects without their knowledge. Files and testimony revealed that the organization often experimented with unwitting subjects, including prisoners, mental patients, prostitutes, and their clients. The agency’s drug experimentation was designed in large part to determine if mind control and other means of coercion were attainable.
The congresswoman’s announcement comes after she claimed that the CIA seized boxes of sensitive files, containing information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the covert MKUltra program, from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office.
Following pushback from the ODNI, which denied that the CIA had ever raided Gabbard’s office, Luna softened her framing, clarifying that the CIA “took documents that ODNI has jurisdiction over” and that the incident was “not a ‘raid.’” She added that the removal of records, however, “did take place and we are just being made aware of it based on reporting.”
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“A few weeks ago, we did receive reports,” Luna reiterated at Tuesday’s hearing. “There’s been some back-and-forth regarding the CIA and ODNI pertaining to new MKUltra boxes that were discovered.”
Luna confirmed that she and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO), another House oversight committee member, visited the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and met with agency officials to discuss the documents at issue.
She said the declassification task force will comb through the never-before-seen documents as soon as those long-classified files are released.
The saga was sparked by testimony from CIA whistleblower James Erdman III. Erdman, a senior operations officer, testified in May before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that approximately 40 boxes containing material on Kennedy’s assassination and Project MKUltra had been taken from the ODNI while they were undergoing declassification review.
Luna later issued a letter addressed to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the director of national intelligence in President Donald Trump’s first administration, requesting the preservation of all records related to the matter.
ANNA PAULINA LUNA SETS DATE FOR MKULTRA HEARING ON CIA MIND CONTROL PROGRAM
“Regarding MKULTRA, these were documents specifically requested by my Task Force and currently being used for our investigation,” Luna wrote.
Luna also threatened to file a subpoena over the allegedly removed records, giving the CIA a 24-hour deadline on May 13 to return the documents to Gabbard’s office or else she would move to congressionally subpoena the agency.
