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Congress vs. the CIA: What the Files Destroyed in 1973 Actually Revealed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Fifty years after the CIA's destruction order, the surviving MKUltra files expose more than anyone admitted — and Congress is still demanding answers. This chapter follows the mechanics of concealment: Sidney Gottlieb's paper trail, Frank Olson's fatal night, and why 1973 was a cover-up, not a conclusion.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you know the full story, nineteen seventy-three looks like a clean ending. The CIA shut down a program.
To understand how MK-Ultra started, you have to understand the fear that made it feel necessary to the people who authorized it. The year is nineteen fifty-three.
The man who turned that authorization into an operational program was Sidney Gottlieb. He was a chemist.
The most audacious of MK-Ultra's subprograms ran from nineteen fifty-five to nineteen sixty-three in San Francisco. It was called Operation Midnight Climax, and the name doesn't soften with familiarity.
Frank Olson was a CIA scientist. In November of nineteen fifty-three, he was at a CIA retreat in rural Maryland.
MK-Ultra didn't stay within US borders. At McGill University in Montreal, a Scottish-born psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron received CIA funding through a series of front organizations.
There's a particular irony in what happened at Menlo Park, California in nineteen fifty-nine. The CIA was funding LSD research at Stanford, and a graduate student named Ken Kesey volunteered for the experiments.
Which brings us to the title of this episode. In January of nineteen seventy-three, Richard Helms was preparing to leave his position as CIA Director.
The reason MK-Ultra became public knowledge at all is that the destruction wasn't complete. In nineteen seventy-seven, a cache of around twenty thousand documents was found in a CIA records warehouse in Rockville, Maryland.
The most recent chapter in this story is still unfolding. In twenty twenty-six, Representative Anna Paulina Luna convened House Oversight Committee hearings specifically examining MK-Ultra.
The through-line from nineteen fifty-three to twenty twenty-six isn't complicated once you see it clearly. A government program operated for two decades with no meaningful oversight.
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