00:00Almost 50 years ago, the last Congressional hearings into MKUltra took place just a short
00:05walk from here in the Dirkson Senate office building.
00:09At those hearings convened in August and September of 1977, representatives of the CIA told Congress
00:16and the American people that its 25-year effort to control human behavior had been a colossal
00:21failure because I believe Congress was never told the truth about what this program actually
00:29achieved.
00:30In fact, I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MKUltra as a
00:37failure.
00:38My name is Tom O'Neil, and in 1999, I accepted a magazine assignment to write a story about
00:45murders committed by a group of hippies called the Manson Family.
00:49For those unfamiliar with this horrific episode of American history, in the summer of 1969,
00:55four young people acting on the orders of a cult leader named Charles Manson went to
01:00the home of movie director Roman Polanski and murdered everyone they found there, including
01:05his eight-and-a-half-month pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate.
01:09The victims were complete strangers to their killers.
01:13The following night, Manson's followers murdered another couple in the same grisly fashion.
01:20At the time I accepted the assignment, I'd never heard of MKUltra, and I wouldn't for another
01:25two years after I'd missed countless deadlines, lost the assignment, and fallen down a nightmarish
01:32rabbit hole trying to answer the question I couldn't quite shake.
01:36How had Manson, a barely literate ex-con, acquired the ability to persuade ordinary young people
01:44to murder complete strangers simply because he had told them to?
01:48The pursuit of the answer to that question led me to Dr. Louis Jolly and West, known to
01:55his friends as Jolly.
01:58West was one of the most influential psychiatrists in America.
02:01During his career, he crossed paths with some of the most controversial events of the 20th
02:06century, including the Patty Hearst kidnapping case and the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy
02:11assassination investigation.
02:13In 1977, West was one of seven academic researchers named in a front page New York Times story alleging
02:22that the CIA had used American universities, hospitals, and prisons as secret laboratories for
02:28experiments involving LSD and other drugs on unwitting human subjects.
02:33West vigorously denied the allegations.
02:36He acknowledged that the agency had approached him, but insisted he had refused because he
02:42said LSD was too dangerous and unpredictable to be used on humans.
02:46He added that he limited all of his research with LSD to animals.
02:52The revelations in the times led directly to the congressional hearings held later that year.
02:57West's denials, however, were effective.
03:00He was never investigated, and his name never came up at the hearings.
03:05I'll spare you the long and tedious story of how my Manson reporting led to West, led me to West,
03:11except to say that I eventually learned that in 1967, when Manson transformed into the cult leader we are familiar
03:18with today, he and his followers
03:20were receiving free medical care at a clinic in San Francisco where West had established a base of operations for
03:28a research project he was conducting nearby.
03:32After becoming intrigued by the allegations against West, I learned that UCLA, his last academic home, had inherited his paper
03:40following his death in 1999.
03:44Nearly two months and more than 200 boxes later, I found the proverbial needle in a haystack, correspondence between West
03:52and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the architect of MKUltra.
03:56The letters begin in 1953, just two months after CIA director Alan Dulles authorized the program, and while West was
04:05stationed at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, where he was chief psychiatrist at the base hospital.
04:12In his first letter to Gottlieb, West proposed conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and psychiatric
04:22patients at the base hospital.
04:24He then outlined the experiments themselves in six more pages that could have been written by Joseph Mengele.
04:31Using LSD in combination with hypnosis, West produced inducing confusion, amnesia, and specific mental disorders in people who would remember
04:41nothing of their interaction with him afterward.
04:44He sought to develop techniques to extract true information and implant false information in unwilling subjects and alter the attitudes
04:54and beliefs of, quote, previously loyal individuals.
04:57In other words, to completely switch their allegiance from one group or leader to another.
05:02But it was that sentence, but it was another sentence at the end of that letter that stopped me cold.
05:08These experiments, he wrote, must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.
05:16Gottlieb's response could hardly have been more enthusiastic.
05:18My good friend, he wrote, I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could
05:25possibly be real.
05:26You have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after.
05:32West replied that there was no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.
05:36There was another document in West's papers that had even more significant implications.
05:42It was a 14-page report that West wrote in 1956, just three years after he contracted with the CIA.
05:51In the report, West described administering LSD and other drugs in conjunction with hypnosis on unwitting human subjects.
05:59And then he made a remarkable claim.
06:01He announced that he had learned how to replace true memories with false memories in people without their knowledge.
06:08In other words, he clarified, it has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event
06:15in the life of an individual
06:17and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place,
06:25but that a different fictional event actually did occur.
06:30If West's report was accurate, this was not the failure agency officials described in 1977, quite the opposite.
06:38It was, in fact, the central ambition of the MKUltra operation, the means of gaining the ability to seize the
06:47control of a person's perceptions,
06:49memories, and ultimately their behavior.
06:51But there was still one more discovery, and this time I found it in the National Security Archives at George
06:58Washington University,
06:59the official repository of the CIA's MKUltra records, which were released to Congress after the 1977 hearings.
07:06In those holdings was a different version of West's 1956 report.
07:13The original paper had been replaced by a four-page summary that did not exist in West's files and appears
07:19to have been written by someone else.
07:21His claims about replacing memories were gone, and their place was a theoretical discussion of LSD and disassociative states.
07:30The versions applied to Congress concluded that the effects of LSD and similar drugs on disassociative states had,
07:40and I'm quoting, never been studied, never been studied.
07:46In the original report, West discusses observations from his own experiments including detailed descriptions of using LSD to,
07:54as he wrote, speed the induction of the hypnotic state and deepen the trance in subjects.
08:01Those passages have been removed in the report turned over to Congress.
08:04The discrepancy could not have been more stark.
08:12Nearly 50 years ago, another congressional committee believed it had been given the truth about MKUltra.
08:19It had not.
08:20In conclusion, I respectfully submit that these records, some newly available and others that remained outside the government's disclosure for
08:28decades,
08:29weren't a thorough reexamination of what the program accomplished, what Congress was told, and what may still remain hidden.
08:37I'm happy to provide the documents I've referenced today, and I've provided many additional details in my written testimony.
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