Law&Crime Sidebar - 9 Bombshells in MKUltra Mind Control Showdown

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Could the CIA really have been pulling the strings behind some of history's most notorious incidents? And are these dark operations continuing well into the modern day? Law&Crime's Jesse Weber breaks down a bombshell congressional hearing on Capitol Hill exploring shocking testimonies connecting clandestine mind-control experiments to figures like Charles Manson and Jack Ruby, as well as victims like biochemist Frank Olson and three-year-old Chere Jo Horton.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Grow your own audience today – go to https://www.opus.pro/sidebar for 1 week free plus 50% off the first 3 months of Opus Pro. HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger, Christina O'Shea, Alex Ciccarone, & Jay CruzScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrimeTwitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In its search for ways to destroy a human mind and body, MK Ultra conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a U.S. government agency. M.K. Ultra, the reported clandestine CIA program of mind control and influence, was thrust into the global spotlight during a bombshell congressional hearing. From Jack Ruby and Charles Manson as potential assets to an alleged murder cover-up to a three-year-old girl's death and current allegations, including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump

to the Charlie Kirk alleged assassination. We are going to break down the key moments from this testimony and put everything into context. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber. So one of the questions I always get here on Sidebar and when I cover things on Law and Crime is how are you guys able to turn all of these clips around so quickly

on the stories that are rapidly developing. And if you're interested in it, if you're into social media, if you're putting things out, you know, in content creation in any way, we use something called Opus Clips. So this is an all-on-one AI editor that makes it really easy

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and in minutes, you're going to have perfectly edited clips ready to go. For TikTok, shorts, reels, Opus Clip is really one-stop shop. And having a tool like Opusclip means that our producers can get you viral courtroom updates instantly. This is the most powerful tool there is to share ideas and edit like a pro.

So go to Opus.com pro slash sidebar to get a free week and then 50% off. This is a different kind of sidebar from what we typically cover, what we typically do. But I got to say, it's not every day you got testimony on Capitol Hill regarding alleged mind control and arguably criminal activity. by the CIA. Yesterday, there was a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It was titled, Mind Control and Accountability, Uncovering the Truth of the CIA's M.K. Ultra Project. Now, before I even get into the details of the testimony, and we're going to play a lot of key moments from it. I just got to briefly lay out what we seem to know about this from

public records and reporting. To give you an idea of this, according to the National Security Archive, The CIA has been accused of conducting experiments on people using drugs and hypnosis and isolation and sensory deprivation as part of projects with code names such as Bluebird and Artichoke and M.K. Ultra. It is believed that M.K. Ultra was authorized after Alan Dulles became the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953. Now, a name that you're going to hear a lot about is Sydney Gottlieb. So Sydney Gottlieb has been credited as basically the chief architect of MK Ultra. According to the National Archives, there is reportedly documentation supporting the existence of MK Ultra, such as a 1951 memo about a meeting between CIA and foreign intelligence officials

regarding mind control research, or a 1956 memo in which Gottlieb apparently signs off on a project that would, quote, evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD 25 in normal human volunteers on federal prisoners out in Atlanta. According to the New York Times, back in 1977, then CIA Director Stanfield Turner testified that the agency had covertly supported research into the control of human behavior at 80 institutions. We're talking colleges. We're talking universities.

But it also apparently operated in federal institutions, hospitals, pharmaceutical houses. and I'll say the scariest part of the MK Ultra project was that, and this was the allegation, that substances and methods were administered to unwitting subjects, that they didn't even know what was going on. According to Britannica, the program operated primarily from 1953 to 1964, and the alleged goal was to erase someone's memory and then control them. The idea, the goal, the objective, it was aimed at countering the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now, Britannica's article on M.K. Ultrasargeant states that Alan Dulles

believed the Soviets had already developed mind control techniques. So this is a way to respond. And one of the more elaborate operations, this was something called Operation Midnight Climax. And this is described by History.com that in 1955, a former Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, apparently hired by the CIA, set up a trap bedroom out in San Francisco where sex workers would be hired to lure men into this room. The men would be dosed with LSD without their knowledge, and then they were observed through a two-way mirror. And there were questions that swirled about whether the purpose was just to study the effects of drugs or, you know, voyeurism. It is believed that in 1973, Gottlie and then CIA director, Richard Helms, ordered the destruction

of most of the original MK Ultra records. Britannica reports that Gottlieb himself shredded seven boxes of documents. However, it appears that some material did get out in the 70s that a FOIA request for CIA financial records uncovered additional files about MK Ultra that they had been mislabeled. And that's basically the broad overview, that no one has been prosecuted for any alleged criminal activity associated with this program. So where's the accountability?

Where's the answers? Now, before I even get into that testimony, that you're going to hear from these witnesses and the more specifics of, for example, the alleged abuse, Charles Manson, Jack Ruby, the strange death of this guy named Frank Olson. What could be happening today? Is the government operating anything like that today? It's an interesting conversation to have. We'll get into it.

But the best way to explain what M.K. Ultra is or what the CIA has been accused of doing is to go to the opening statement from Task Force on the declassification of Federal Secret chairwoman, Anna Polina Luna, okay, representative from Florida. And she emphasized that this is about transparency. This is about getting answers. It's about the American people deserving to know what happened and bringing justice for anyone that was affected or victimized, including their families.

But take a listen to how she describes it. Project MK Ultra was not a policy failure or an overzealous program that got out of hand. It was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, ordinary people, to LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psychological torture, without their knowledge or consent. This went on for 20 years on American soil, funded by American taxpayer dollars,

and authorized by the very top of U.S. intelligence apparatus. And this program, when it did end, the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators. They did not come forward. They committed another crime. They destroyed evidence. The documents this task force has reviewed are unambiguous. In January 1973, the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, prepared to leave office. He personally ordered the destruction of MKLTRA records.

The CIA official document in writing states, over my stated objectives, the MKULTRA files were destroyed by the order of DCI, Mr. Helms, shortly before his departure from office. A separate internal account confirms that Helms telephoned Dr. Gottlieb directly. and instructed him to destroy, quote, all files pertaining to drug research and associated activities. Gottlieb completed or compiled four people spent an entire day tearing, burning down, 152 files.

Then Gottlieb had his personal papers destroyed by his secretary before he retired. The head of the CIA-owned Records Center protested the destruction in writing, but he was overruled. That is obstruction of justice. That is criminal destruction of federal records, and neither individuals were ever charged with a crime for it.

Okay, let's go to the witnesses. Now, one of the witnesses at the hearing was Dr. Stephen Kinzer, and he is a senior fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University, and he wrote a book titled Poisoner-in-Chief, Sidney Gottlieb, and the CIA search for mind control. And he discussed the reported purposes of this program and some of its alleged activities. I'm painfully aware that I have discovered only a...

small portion of what M.K. Ultra was and what Sidney Gottlieb did. In 1951, the CIA hired Gottlieb and directed him to launch what became M.K. Ultra. Gottlieb believed that in order to find a way to implant a new mind into someone's brain, you first had to find a way to destroy the mind that was in there already. By any standard, they qualify as medical torture. These experiments took placed in prisons, clinics, and safe houses in the United States, in Europe, in Asia, and even in Latin America. Officers of M.K. Ultra were authorized to travel to foreign countries, preferably those under formal or informal U.S. occupation, and ask the local CIA station to provide them with expendables, human beings who would not be missed if they disappeared.

Gottlieb had what amounted to a licensed. to kill issued by the U.S. government. Neither the number of M.K. Ultra victims nor the number of those who were experimented to death is known. Gottlieb, as a result of this license to kill, might have been the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century. Some information about M.K. Ultra spilled out during the 1970s, but senior CIA officers had intentionally let Gottlieb operate without supervision. So they were able to claim that they knew nothing about his excesses. This was a way for the CIA to deny its institutional role in MK Ultra

and to portray it misleadingly as the product of one man's sadism or excessive zeal. I'm going to tell you right now, look, there has been a lot of research and study on this topic, of course. But what you're hearing is the opinion of Dr. Kinzer. It's going to be impossible for us right now to fact check every specific detail and claim that he and, you know, the other witness made during this hearing. So we're going to play it for you. You're going to hear what they have to say. We're going to try to put it into context, but also giving you the opportunity. You hear it.

You can do some research on your own. I do want to play you something. When they discuss the reported abuses of this program, listen to what Dr. Kinzer says. And you're also, by the way, you're going to hear from investigative journalist Tom O'Neill, the other witness that day, author of Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the secret history of the 60s. What are some of the worst abuses that you're aware of in the M.K. Ultra program? I can start by just naming, I'll talk about one in particular that always sticks in my mind.

In the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, a group of African American inmates was segregated and fed what were described in the protocol as double, triple, and quadruple doses of LSD every day for 77 days. Do they all survive? We have no idea what happened to them. This has stuck with me ever since I wrote that book. What happened to them? Did they ever find out what was given to them? Did they think they were going crazy?

Did they, I think if they... Do you think we're still experimenting on prisoners or people in prison today? I don't have any information about that. Okay. What were the average ages, if you know, of the people that were experimented on? Were these children? Were these middle age? Were they...

Well, there were adolescent studies done in juvenile detention facilities and jails with kids who were 16, 17, 18 years old and at institutional schools for wayward kids, the National Training School for boys here in Washington, D.C., had them. And when it comes to secret experimentation right after World War II, you know there's going to be a discussion about Germany and the Nazis, and this alleged operation called Operation Paperclip, where the United States reportedly recruited German scientists and engineers

and brought them to the United States. Operation Paperclip brought over 1,600 German scientists into the United States government after World War II, including individuals who had conducted human experimentation and concentration camps. The CIA military were aware of their backgrounds and recruited them anyways. In your research, did you find direct documentation between paperclip scientists and the development of M.Kaltrow's experimental protocols, specifically the use of mescaline, hypnosis,

and sensory deprivation, which were techniques also documented at DACO? Absolutely. Kurt Bloma, who was the chief of biological weapons development for the Nazi government, came to work for the CIA. so did Walter Schreiber, who was the Surgeon General of the Nazi Army. I can just tell a brief story. When I was researching my book, I found what I think might be the first secret CIA prison or black site. It's a nice chalet in Germany.

And the guy who now owns it took me into the basement. He said these were the cells where the M.K. Ultra officers working side by side with Nazis carried out. those gruesome experiments, which were actually just continuations of the experiments that those Nazis had been conducting just a few years earlier right down the road. Just for timeline and clarification, these experiments were happening after the Nuremberg trials, correct? So the CIA would have known that these were crimes against humanity. I looked for an episode in which the Nuremberg doctrines were posted on the wall in some M.K. Ultra or CIA office, and I was never able to find any indication that those Nuremberg,

principles ever were even consulted, much less obeyed. By the way, Luna said she's going to reach out to the German government. Charles Manson, Jack Ruby. So the question became, were they M.K. Ultra subjects? Were they assets? Start with Charles Manson, you know, the cult leader whose followers carried out savage murders. In the summer of 1969, four young people acting on the orders of a cult leader named Charles Manson went to the home. of movie director Roman Polanski and murdered everyone they found there, including his eight and a half month pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate.

The victims were complete strangers to their killers. The following night Manson's followers murdered another couple in the same grisly fashion. Howard Manson, a barely literate ex-con, acquired the ability to persuade ordinary young people to murder complete strangers simply because he had told them to. The pursuit of the answer to that question led me to Dr. Lewis, Jolian, West, known to his friends as Jolly. West was one of the most influential psychiatrists in America. I'll spare you the long and tedious story of how my Manson reporting led to West, led me to West,

except to say that I eventually learned that in 1967 when Manson transformed into the cult leader we are familiar with today, he and his followers were receiving free medical care at a clinic in San Francisco, where West had established a base of operations for a research project he was conducting nearby. After becoming intrigued by the allegations against West, I learned that UCLA, his last academic home, had inherited his paper following his death in 1999.

Nearly two months and more than 200 boxes later, I found the proverbial needle in a haystack. Correspondence between West and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the architect of M.K. Ultra. What I was able to prove was that from the moment Monson was released from federal prison in 1967, he violated his parole, went to the Bay Area without permission, and was immediately put under the supervision

of a federal parole officer who basically gave him leniency as he gathered his group of followers, gave them drugs, dominated them, turned them into more or less subservient robots who would do anything he said. All that happened under the watchful eye of a parole officer named Roger Smith, who was also doing drug research at the same clinic that Jolly West had set up his operation to recruit subjects. All the way until 1969 when Manson finally ordered the murders that he was later convicted of, he had been arrested repeatedly for escalating crimes. Now, O'Neill acknowledges he wasn't able to prove definitively, absolutely, that Manson

was an asset through M.K. Ultra. And in fact, there hasn't been, as far as we've seen, verified definitive proof that what Manson did was caused by or connected to a federal government operation. What about Jack Ruby, the guy who killed Lee Harbourn. Oswald, right? This was actually explored by filmmaker Errol Morris, who also produced a film about psychiatrist Louis Jolly West, this doctor. And the allegation was, was that Dr. West conducted a psychiatric examination of Jack Ruby and declared him insane. So with that in mind, I want you to listen to what O'Neill says here. Jack Ruby, I believe this is something else. The Warren

Commission investigation on the Warren Commission was Alan D'Neill. Ellis, the former CIA director, who authorized and ran M.K. Alter until he was fired by President Kennedy, the liaison to the committee for the CIA who handled the information coming from the CIA back and forth to the Warren Commission was Richard Helms, who was a direct supervisor of Jolly West. They knew who West was. They knew that what West was capable of and what they had paid him to do and what he had reported to them that he could do, including inducing

mental disorders in people. That was never disclosed to the commission as far as anyone knows. So I believe that Wes was put in there to keep Jack Ruby from telling his story. Again, nothing we've seen definitively proves he was an asset or product of MK Ultra. And I'll tell you what, even on my News Nation show, Jesse Weber Live, I interviewed a retired CIA operations officer, Rick Deloire, who said there is nothing to substantiate the Ruby or Manson theories. But you talk about assets. You talk about alleged assets.

You talk about theories. What about the alleged assassination of Charlie Kirk? What about the attempted shooting of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania? You know what? That came up in this hearing because it goes to this idea is stuff like this happening today. How do you explain those instances? Where did it come from?

Social media, algorithms, AI. Is this the new form? of mind control? I mean to say is that I think if there are such projects going on inside the U.S. government, there might be a sense that we can do this without any hostile supervision. What are the possibilities that what we've learned in MK. Ultra, now that it has advanced so much to algorithms and the computer and getting to loaners, that some of these loaners could, through this just mass propagation of whatever you're doing,

could cause someone to maybe take a shot at a president? I know there's a lot of speculation out there about the Butler shooting, and I guess even the Charlie Kirk shooting. I just hate to speculate because I don't know. I have no first-hand knowledge whether those guys were programmed through radio waves, or through their computer activity. So I would never hazard a guess except to say what I've already said

that they developed means that we've never been told about many, many years ago, and I imagine they've evolved to be much more effective now. It really ties into what Congressman Burchett was talking about with radio waves, where we have these, like a van diagram

of individual people and the military casting a broader net. So you have the radio waves, computer activity, the Operation Mockingbird, the programming that is taking place. So what do you see in relation to what was happening then and what we are seeing now that could be types of the same kind of programs and even using direct energy weapons or the like?

Mr. O'Neill, you can begin. I would just like to say one thing. there was an objective outlined in the early proposals for M.K. Ultra to do experimentation to see whether they could do mass conversion, you know, convert entire populations. I think that had something to do with the France incident that you were talking about earlier. Again, today, it's all speculation, but back then they were trying to use psychological means to see, how you could influence people's thoughts. And Mockingbird played into that, which if people don't know,

that was where they had CIA assets or co-opted people in the media who would write basically propaganda and try to control the thoughts and beliefs of the population to what the CIA needed. And is it still going on today? I would be surprised if it wasn't.

All right, I want to move on. to two things now. First, Frank Olson. This is another name that you're going to hear a lot about in the MK Ultra discussion. If you go to the Ford Library, you're going to find documentation on Frank Olson, who is described in one report this way. Quote, Dr. Frank A. Olson, a biochemist, was a civilian employee of the Army working at Fort Detrick in a cooperative effort with the CIA. On November 19, 1953, at one of the periodic meetings of Fort Detrick and CIA personnel, a dosie of LSD was placed by CAA personnel in drinks consumed by Dr. Olson and others, all of whom were members of the group. Prior to receiving the LSD, Dr. Olson had participated in discussions

where the testing of such substances on unsuspecting subjects was agreed to in principle. However, neither Dr. Olson or any of the others was made aware that they had been given LSD until about 20 minutes after the fact. And this is what has made his death so strange. This is what has led to theories that he was murdered. So in a piece by, again, Dr. Kinzer, published in The Guardian in 2019, he essentially describes how on November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, crashes through this closed window of room 1018A at the Statler Hotel out in Manhattan, falls 10 floors to his death on the sidewalk below. Apparently, the only other witness was a CIA colleague in the room who was sleeping. And it is alleged that the police investigation was coordinated or influenced in some way by the CIA. And in the end, they allegedly concluded that Olson jumped, that he killed himself.

But you had those prior claims of LSD poisoning. He was allegedly sent to see a doctor reportedly connected to M.K. Ultra. So the idea was, was he killed to keep everything he knew and experienced a secret? The Frank Olson case, which was referenced earlier, that was a murder. I don't believe that was a suicide. And the motivation was because he was going to be a whistleblower. He worked at the CIA. He worked in the development of biological weapons.

And he was planning to go public and announce that the United States government was using biological weapons in the Korean War. And also he was going to talk, share. when he knew about MK Ultra experiments, including lethal experiments, and there's a documented case. How many, gentlemen, how many people do you think died through the MK Ultra program or were murdered? No idea. And then I've got to call this out. Really chilling story that O'Neill talked about when it came to Dr. West, this character in the M.K. Ultra Saga. When he contracted with the CIA, he was at Lackland Air Force Base.

He was a chief psychiatrist at the hospital. but also he began his experiments there. A year after the letter that I quoted in my statement where he was describing what he wanted to do, a year later on July 3rd, 1954, a three-year-old girl was abducted and found later in a gravel pit murdered next to a car that had been abandoned. And the search party that found the little girl's body

was approached by a man who was an airman at the base. And he asked them where he was and how he had gotten there. He was arrested for the murder and described by the military officers who had him in custody as being in a trance or days. He didn't have any drugs in his system. He didn't recognize his wife when she was brought to see him. And at his trial, where Jolly West was his advising

psychiatrist who examined him. Of course. It emerged that he had actually been being treated at the hospital at Lackland in an experimental program to cure his chronic, debilitating migraine headaches, and he was executed four years later. So based on my research, this seems to refer to the rape and murder of three-year-old Cher Joe Horton and the conviction and execution of Air Force airman Jimmy Shaver in the 1950s, a crime documented in a piece by Tom O'Neill in The Intercept. But as you heard, Dr. West was reportedly serving as chief of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base. Shaver was an airman who apparently had no history of violence, no criminal past, and yet he did this. Shaver apparently didn't remember anything. Wes, by the way, Dr. West was accused in this article of administering truth serum to Shaver, putting him under deep hypnosis,

and that is when Shaver allegedly confessed. Now, he reportedly tried to retract that confession at trial. And as outlined in the Intercept piece, there were claims of missing files related to Shaver, that he may have been a subject of the CIA LSD program. So where do we go from here? You know, there was talk of possibly trying to find additional files at other hospitals and institutions, as highlighted by Kinzer. But take a listen to what he also says should be done.

In addition to searching for unknown documents, this committee could do a try. tremendous service by simply asking for the end of redactions on the documents that we now have. There are reams of documents about MK Ultra that have heavy sections redacted. In the 1970s, this was justified by the argument that it had only been 20 years since these terrible things had happened and revealing details might affect national security. Now 70 years have passed. That argument can no longer be valid. So I would urge this committee to try to fill out all the blank spaces in the documents that we have. So it's going to be interesting to see what comes of this.

I mean, look, the argument was in the hearing. Look, Congress never got the full story. Because, by the way, according to history.com, there were congressional hearings in the past on MK Ultra back in 1977. This was conducted by Senator Edward Kennedy. So he brought in all these former CIA people. But there was a lot of we don't remember. We don't remember the details.

Today's different, right? Also, now we have these files from these financial records. But with UFOs, JFK, MOK, Epstein, we've recently seen attempts to lift the veil on these previously secret stories and conversations. And we're going to do our best here at Sidebar to try to cover as much as we can what we're learning. It's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you should get your podcast. You can also check us out on NBC's Peacock as well.

If you want to follow me, ex-instagram, my News Nation show, Jesse Weber Live, Monday, and Friday, 11 p.m. Eastern. See you next time, everybody.