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Sidney Gottlieb's Reckoning: When Congress Finally Faced MKUltra
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The CIA's MKUltra program dosed unwitting Americans with LSD, destroyed its own files, and nearly escaped all accountability — until 1977 changed everything. This chapter follows Sidney Gottlieb, Frank Olson, and the Church Committee hearings that cracked open one of history's darkest government secrets.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What does a government owe its citizens when it has spent twenty years secretly poisoning them? Not a rhetorical question.
To understand the Church Committee, you have to understand what it was examining. MK-Ultra ran for twenty years.
LSD was central to MK-Ultra from the beginning. In the early nineteen fifties, Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to purchase the world's entire known supply of LSD for two hundred and forty thousand dollars.
The name that became the public face of MK-Ultra's human cost is Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA scientist.
There's a thread in MK-Ultra's history that runs in a completely unexpected direction. In nineteen fifty-nine, a young writer named Ken Kesey volunteered to participate in CIA-funded LSD experiments at a veterans' hospital in California.
By nineteen seventy-three, MK-Ultra's director knew the walls were closing in. The Watergate scandal had created an environment of intense scrutiny on intelligence agencies.
Senator Frank Church had already been building a case against CIA overreach. His committee had been examining a range of intelligence abuses when the MK-Ultra story broke into public view.
Fifty years after MK-Ultra began, the questions hadn't gone away. In twenty twenty-six, Representative Anna Paulina Luna led the House Oversight Committee into a fresh examination of the program.
The Church Committee was a genuine moment of institutional honesty. It named what happened.
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