Discoveries
MKULTRA: The Mind-Control Files That Survived Being Destroyed
Most MKULTRA records were ordered destroyed in 1973. A cache of financial papers found in 1977 revealed the scale of the CIA's behavioural experiments.
18 October 2026 · InMillhouse
In 1973, as the Watergate era turned scrutiny on the intelligence community, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the files of Project MKULTRA destroyed [1].
The programme, launched in 1953, funded research into drugs, hypnosis and other techniques intended to influence behaviour and interrogation. Some of the work involved administering LSD to people without their knowledge.
The destruction was not complete. In 1977 roughly 20,000 pages of financial and administrative records, misfiled in a separate archive, were discovered and released [1]. They formed the core of that year's Senate hearings, which documented more than 140 subprojects run through universities, hospitals and front organisations [2].
Because the operational files are largely gone, much of what happened inside individual subprojects remains unknown — an absence that itself forms part of the story.