Astonishing Congressional Testimony About CIA Mind Control, Charles Manson, and Lee Harvey Oswald's Killer

I haven’t written here in a while. Thanks to the people who have reached out to let me know that they think what I write is important and asked me to continue.

I’ve been working on other writing projects apart from Substack, but this bit of history-as-news just came up and I feel like sharing it.

Yesterday, journalist Tom O’Neill testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee with new disclosures connecting an infamous secret CIA-administered mind-control project with serial killer Charles Manson and his followers, and with Jack Ruby, who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald was arrested for having assassinated John F. Kennedy.

A lot of people who hear of MKULTRA understandably think it is an outlandish conspiracy theory without realizing that while it was in fact a conspiracy, it was conspiracy fact, not theory.

Project MKULTRA was the name of one of several different medical-experimentation projects conceived of and implemented by the United States Central Intelligence Agency beginning (as far as evidence shows) in 1953 and continuing through 1973. It was initially approved by CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles, brother of the namesake of Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport.

MKULTRA is the stuff of horror movies—worse than many could imagine, and no worse and no less ethical than most Nazi medical experiments. During the two decades of the project, the CIA paid over 80 hospitals, universities, and prisons as testing grounds, conscripting countless medical professionals who agreed to experiment on vulnerable individuals without their knowledge or consent. Experimentations included electroshock, drugging with LSD and other psychedelics, as well as scores of other chemical substances including paralytics administered by an estimated 185 clinicians. Psychiatric patients, prisoners, sex workers, unhoused people, clinical trial volunteers at universities, and others including orphaned children and elderly patients in hospitals who had no close family were subjected to astonishing torture.

Assumed goals of the projects was to create so-called Manchurian candidates who could be programmed to carry out specific tactical orders of the U.S. government without any conscious awareness they were doing it, as well as to erase memories and to replace real memories with invented stories in subjects’ minds.

In 1977, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research convened a joint hearing on “Project MKULTRA: The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification.” You can read the report here.

Why do I care?

Well, besides being a U.S. citizen and being alarmed that this could ever happen (as I hope you are), MKULTRA has been on my radar for most of my life because my mother used to talk about it a lot.

I was born in 1978. In 1977, the Washington Post and The New York Times—once investigative newspapers of great deserved esteem—published a series of articles detailing MKULTRA and related human experimentation, including Projects Artichoke, and Bluebird, MKDELTA, MKSearch, Chickwit, and others.

My mother read books about MKULTRA when I was a child. I can admit I thought this aspect of my mother was a crazy conspiracy theorist because it all just sounded so outlandish, and so much media coverage of anything of the sort depicted people who believed in such things as crazy. When I was a bit older, my family took an unusual impromptu weekend vacation, which we abruptly left to drop off my mother at a hospital, and we came home without her. She was gone for weeks, and my father visited her for weeks. When she came back, she was different than she had been. She never discussed what had happened other than to allude to something traumatic and surreal having happened to her at a local hospital in Washington, D.C. when she was younger. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was interested in the phenomenon of repressed memories for the rest of her life. I can only write this because the rest of her life lasted only until 2018, when she died at the age of 66.

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever if my mother had a brush with these experiments, but she brought them to my attention with her focus on them.

This is not the kind of thing I typically write about—although it does play a role in the experimental novel I wrote as my MFA thesis—but it is relevant to today.

Throughout most of my life, “it was understood” (we say knowingly in passive voice) that the United States government has a low world corruption ranking and so when any person would suggest “CIA mind-control experiments” or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or anything similar, most people would roll their eyes and wave away the suggestion as preposterous. Today, the U.S. government is ranked as the 29th least-corrupt out of 182 countries in the world, so…take that for what it’s worth.

Tom O’Neill testified this week that the CIA didn’t only do what we should all have been aware since 1977 it did—paying doctors, nurses, prison staff and others to torture unwitting U.S. citizens when they were at their most vulnerable—but he also said his research from the 1970s strongly suggests that the man who killed John F. Kennedy’s alleged killer and Charles Manson, who brainwashed followers to carry out multiple murders, both had been subjected to MKULTRA experiments.

O’Neill testified that the CIA and those involved with the project either lied about or failed to disclose information to Congress and the public, based on correspondence between MKULTRA orchestrator Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and a psychiatrist who operated the psychiatric clinic Charles Manson’s followers, who he ordered to kill various people including the actress Sharon Tate while nine months pregnant and married to film director Roman Polanski. O’Neill turned over what he claims to be evidence that contradicts the CIA’s formal account of the projects.

Three years ago, the Washington Post reported that Ted Kaczynski—aka “The Unabomber” who sent explosives through the mail—was an MKULTRA subject while a student at Harvard University. Accounts of the experiments from another student in Kaczynski’s cohort can be read here.

We are living in 2026, and more details of atrocities commissioned by the federal government with willing participation from countless medical professionals over 70 years ago is still just being uncovered. The project ran for at least 20 years before it was discovered and exposed.

The Tuskegee experiment, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service (now the CDC) for 40 years (1932-1972), quite publicly tracked the slow physical and mental deterioration of Black men who lived and died with syphilis long after penicillin was known to cure the disease.

In 2007, Scientific American confirmed that the United States Census Bureau had lied for 50 years about its cooperation in identifying American people of Japanese descent to be rounded up by federal officials and placed into American concentration camps during World War II. The official story always had been “we would never do that.” As soon as the statute of limitations ran out and documents were made available publicly, they said, “Well, we did it but it was a long time ago! Bygones, amirite?”

So—our government has always done these things. Long before the government was openly corrupt and the world’s governmental corruption ranking system was obviously…suspect. (When I say this, I mean obviously to American people who for so long have trusted that we can trust.)

So where are we today? How many MKULTA/Artichoke/Bluebirds are going on right now? How many Tuskegees? How many Censuses? We can’t know.

We do know without a shadow of a doubt about one cover up that we all believe today is the biggest scandal ever (I question that the more info comes out about MKULTRA.): the Epstein files.

Are you still thinking about it? Are you still talking about it? Are you still petitioning your elected officials to do something about it? Are you pestering journalists about it via social media accounts, email and other channels? You should be.

Because this is where we stand:

Files related to Jeffrey Epstein were released selectively.

Donald Trump’s governmental staff chose what to release and, far more importantly, what not to release. Yet everyone seems satisfied.

Some individuals in Europe have been held accountable in various ways. A few have been arrested. One royal lost his royal status but (naturally) has was released from police custody and charged with no crimes.

No individual in the United States has been held accountable in any way. Like, not at all. Not Donald Trump.

We now know that MKULTRA’s experiments are closely associated with atrocious deaths—serial killer Charles Manson and his cult adherents, the Unabomber, how many others?—and we know that the tortures of Epstein’s circles have resulted in deaths by suicide and destroyed lives.

We can see from past authorized atrocities that some versions of the truth inevitably come out in time. But unlike the unsuspecting people at the times MKULTRA and Tuskegee experiments were first publicized, we now can look back in history and understand that some information is being intentionally withheld and we can demand that it not take many decades to be publicized. We have the benefit of hindsight. We have the clarity to understand that the plan seems to be “wait for the guilty parties to die and then release the information. No one will care by then. No one will ever be held accountable.” It’s a design that continues because it has worked so well to date.

Allen Dulles authorized the CIA to torment even orphaned children in hospitals. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb led the charge. Later CIA Director Richard Helms ordered that all evidence of MKULTA be destroyed. (We know what we know because he wasn’t good at his job.) Dulles and Gottlieb never faced any charges. Helms was charged with nothing related—he later plead guilty to unrelated misdemeanor charges. Ultimately, the only individuals who paid for the hellish mental torment authorized by MKULTA were those who were tormented, some of who went on to take others’ lives in acts of madness.

Epstein’s victims have paid dearly. Virginia Giuffre ended her own life. Other survivors have said they will never recover from the traumas they were subjected to.

Will the people of the United States wait for those who perpetrated these crimes to die, as seems always to happen, before the truth comes out? Or will the people demand that the justice department and judicial systems live up to some semblance of their names?

I say this all the time: There are 350 million people in the United States of America. A few thousand deeply corrupt criminals are steering our country into iceberg after iceberg. The power of the masses could easily overpower that of the few if the masses would come together and decide that we really care about what we say we care about.

The question is, who really cares enough to do anything?