Former CIA officer: ‘I don’t believe that the research stopped’ on MK-Ultra

Skip to content

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer on Tuesday said that he does not believe that the agency’s research on individuals through Project MK-Ultra ever stopped.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets received testimony during a hearing earlier in the day focused on MK-Ultra. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) has led the push to reveal more about the program, which started under former CIA Director Allen Dulles’s orders in 1953.

The program experimented on human subjects to study the impact of LSD and a “knockout drop” referred to as K, to manipulate a subject’s actions, according to testimonies given during a 1977 Senate hearing. MK-Ultra was shut down out of fear of being exposed following the Watergate scandal.

Former CIA staff operations officer and NewsNation national security contributor Tracy Walder said “anything is possible” if the research survived the program.

“Obviously, I wasn’t privy to everything at the CIA. I worked in a specific area,” Walder told Elizabeth Vargas on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” on NewsNation, The Hill’s broadcast partner. “But at the same time, the CIA did continue to conduct –– and it didn’t work –– experiments like this, actually using dogs to use them as, I guess, military soldiers, if you will.”

Asked how the program was kept quiet for so long, Walder pointed to the destruction of much of MK-Ultra’s documentation as the reason, adding that the burning of these documents was “categorically wrong.” Responding to Watergate, former CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all records related to MK-Ultra be destroyed, according to a research paper published by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

“You are absolutely not supposed to do that,” she continued. “And that is where these conspiracy theories come from… But I think some of this started coming to light because individuals want justice for what happened to them.”

The Hill has reached out to the CIA for comment.

Tuesday’s hearing received testimony from Dr. Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and investigative reporter Tom O’Neill, whose 2019 book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” indicates a potential link between MK-Ultra and convicted murderer Charles Manson.

Lawmakers also questioned former National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientific program official Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi about the program.

Luna resumed the congressional hearings on the program after a February article from the Daily Mail released a new report stating that the CIA added a new report to its reading room about the agency studying mind control.

“Administering drugs to people without their knowledge or consent, subjecting humans to psychological torture, and using prisoners and hospital patients as non-consenting research subjects,” Luna said as she opened the hearing. “These are crimes against humanity. The Central Intelligence Agency committed them, and then the Director of the CIA was ordered or was ordering the destruction of evidence.”

Tags

Anna Paulina Luna

Charles Manson

Elizabeth Vargas

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.