Congressional MKUltra Hearings as MAGA PSYOP

David Price

 July 1, 2026

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Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida) kicks off the MKUltra hearing. Image courtesy House.gov.

As a scholar who spent decades using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and archives studying Cold War CIA operations, it was with great interest that I watched yesterday’s US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” Because my academic research focuses on the CIA’s use of funding fronts and various specific CIA operations, including its MKUltra program, I was surprised to learn of congressional interest in a program that was terminated over half a century ago.

UKUltra was the code name of a secret CIA program launched after US prisoners of war during the Korean War appeared to be brainwashed, leading the CIA to begin researching the possibilities of “mind control” and a variety of interrogation techniques. Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA used hundreds of witting and unwitting scientists to conduct at least 149 MKUltra subprojects at over 80 institutions, employing hundreds of researchers. Most of this research was unethical, with hideous abuses of research subjects who were often unaware of what was happening to them. This included dosing unsuspecting people with powerful drugs like LSD or potent concentrations of liquefied THC. Other MKUltra-funded research studies followed more conventional protocols, and researchers funded to do the research were often unaware they were conducting research for the CIA. I studied one of these programs, run through a research facility located at the Cornell University Medical School, the Human Ecology Fund, which during the 1950s and 60s funded a variety of seemingly mundane social science research, conducted by unwitting scholars. Some of these research projects studied topics, like cross-cultural stress indicators, that supplied information that would be reused in writing the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual, and other horrible CIA projects that MKUltra informed.

While there’s lots of wild speculation about MKUltra in popular culture, most of what is known about the program comes from revelations made during the Church Committee Senate Hearings in the mid-1970s, during that brief post-Watergate moment when the dam holding back so many state secrets broke. Most of the CIA’s records on the program were destroyed, though a small cache listing names of MKUltra research projects was later released in response to a FOIA request made by John Marks, a former State Department employee, which provided us with the precious little documentation we now have on the program.

There is scarce new information on MKUltra, so it is surprising to see congressional inquiry over half a century after the program terminated. But as is often the case, these questions about the past have less to do with this horrible past than they do with the horrible present.

In her opening statement, the chair of the Taskforce on Declassification of Federal Secrets, Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida), made a surprisingly decent statement,

“MKUltra 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, and ordinary people to LSD electroshock hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and 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 US 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.”

Luna explained that as Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms was preparing to leave office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of all CIA MKUltra records. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who directed MKUltra, also destroyed all his records. Luna correctly identified these acts as illegal and as the CIA’s obstruction of justice. Luna stressed that Helms and Gottlieb were never meaningfully pushing for their crimes.

Luna made a special point of stressing that for some projects, regular civilian hospitals were used as research sites, with some experimenting on unsuspecting, unconsenting patients. In a revealing moment, her voice slipped into a eye-rolling-sarcastic-tone as she states “…the program ran for a decade, that we know of…” Her focus on government funded hospital based research did not seem accidental, and the task force’s later clash with one of the three witnesses, seems to indicate there is more to this.

The three witnesses delivering sworn testimony before the committee were Dr. Stephen Kinzer, author of the 2019 book, Poisoner In Chief, which tells the story of Sidney Gottleib, the CIA mad scientist director of MKUltra. Tom O’Neill author of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former senior program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As she introduced the witnesses, Luna called all three witnesses “patriots” for their years of research into these CIA crimes.

Dr. Stephen Kinzer testified first. He spoke about the damages of the culture of secrecy and overclassification of documents, explained the details of how MKUltra secretly tried to discover methods of brainwashing and improved interrogation through torturous research, and described Gottlieb as having an unsupervised “license to kill.” Kinzer stressed that it may still be possible to find and release other MKUltra documents that still exist, to unredact existing documents, and to investigate whether some extension of MKUltra exists today using techniques of neuroscience or Artificial Intelligence.

Next, Tom O’Neill testified that CIA officials lied to Congress when they testified in the mid-70s to the Church Committee that MKUltra had been a failure (this is a controversial claim among MKUltra academic scholars, and his single source for this claim is suspect). He recounted his years of research he claims uncovered MKUltra links to Charles Mason and the Manson killings; which remains among MKUltra scholars one of the more controversial claims about the program. O’Neill described documents he discovered claiming MKUltra researchers had discovered methods, using hypnosis and drugs, to implant false memories in subjects, which he described as a “means of gaining the ability to seize control of a person’s perceptions, memories, and ultimately their behavior.”

The final witness was Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, whose statement completely went off script as she slammed the Trump administration and Congress’s defunding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research. She had nothing to say about MKUltra. Going rogue, she testified that what is:

“happening to NIH right now is not reform. It is the replacement of scientific judgment with political control. For eighty years, US federal investment in biomedical research produced outcomes that no private market would have funded. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. NIH-funded research on blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking drove a 56% decline in heart disease between 1950 and 1996. Cancer has been transformed. Treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers, along with immunotherapies that converted previously fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions, are traced directly to NIH research.”

Dr Ginexi described the National Institute of Health’s history of sponsoring lifesaving research that no private profit-driven pharmaceutical company would fund. She called out the administration for its role in killing programs that would have helped manage the bird flu outbreak, Ebola, and hantavirus. She made zero mention of MKUltra. While she was still reading her testimony, Chairwoman Luna interrupted her and told her she had used her allotted time.

Congresswoman Luna’s questions cast a broad fishing net. She asked questions about Operation Naomi, Operation Paperclip–the US operation that brought over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, most of whom had worked under the Nazis during the war, many of whom were Nazi party members. Luna asked if any Nazis were used in MKUltra. Dr Kinzer confirmed they were, and he described how some of MKUltra researchers extended Nazi experiments. Luna asked questions about the MKUltra personnel’s contacts with individuals reportedly involved in the assassination of JFK. O’Neill’s testimony suggested Jack Ruby could have been subjected to MKUltra.

Representative Eric Burlison (R. Missouri) asked if the CIA was involved in a famous 1951 incident in France (known as the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning) where 200 people in a village were simultaneously dosed with a powerful hallucinogen by eating bread from a local bakery. Dr Kinzer did not know, but he said he had suspicions and wanted more investigation. Burlison asked about Operation Midnight Climax’s interrogation studies, where unsuspecting US citizens were lured into safehouses by sex workers, where they were dosed with LSD, filmed, and interrogated. When Burlison asked O’Neill if he thought that MKUltra secretly continued after 1973, he replied: “I don’t know. I can’t imagine it didn’t though…I imagine it’s being used. I have no evidence of it being used.”

For the record, as someone who distrusts the CIA and who spent years studying MKUltra. I believe MKUltra died within the agency in the 1960s. It died because it didn’t work. The types of mind control they wanted do not exist. The most effective forms of mind control aren’t found in the science fiction tropes these 1950s and 60s CIA operations experimented with, they’re found in the pages of New York Times, broadcasts of Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax, and the hundreds of thousands of human and circuit-boarded bots incessantly posting on social media. Certainly, the CIA continued to do all sorts of horrible things, but beyond generating some “useful” interrogation techniques, MKUltra mostly didn’t pan out because a lot of its ideas were unsound.

Representative Eli Crane (R Arizona) asked Dr. Ginexi if her statements were referring to the administration’s efforts to “reform and rein in the NIH.” But Ginexi corrected Crane, saying her remarks were “about the destruction of the NIH, the cancelation of grants, and the political control of the NIH.” Crane ignored her reply and asked her about the NIH funding of the Wuhan laboratory, a topic about which Dr Ginexi replied she knew nothing. But Crane spotted a soapbox opportunity to speechify about how, for years, we were all told to trust science, then “most of what we were told during COVID was a complete lie, and it wasn’t scientific at all.” Unfazed, Dr. Ginexi replied that,

“the number one thing that I think that we’re doing to destroy trust in American science right now is cancelling clinical trial in the middle of those clinical trials. This does incredible harm to the patients who are receiving experimental treatments and it really destroys the trust that we have in how do we recruit patients for future trials if they are knowing that their trials could just simply be canceled for political reasons.”

Crane did not address her points. He instead tripped down an anti-vaccine rabbit hole. But his rant got audience applause which he took as proof that the American people distrusted the NIH. Which increasingly seemed to be the point of this hearing. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R. Colorado) also made a short speech claiming that COVID was propaganda, and in comments apparently directed at Dr. Ginexi, she blamed America’s response to COVID on governmental agencies that are not responsive to Congress’s questions.

These moments of COVID science bashing and anti-government-funded science grandstanding appear to have revealed why the task force seemed interested in MKUltra a half a century after the fact.

Chairwoman Luna asked Dr Kinzer about the role of USAID in MKUltra projects; speculating that since we know that USAID has been used as CIA cover in the past and ”since part of USAID mission was to administer drugs to the poor and needy populations, would the organization have abused its mandate by poisoning foreign populations or creating dissociative states for interrogation or torture?” Kizner replied that he had no direct knowledge of this, but that during the Cold War, many government agencies conducted covert operations.

Representative Timothy Floyd Burchett (R-Tennessee) asked what the chances are that, with recent technological advances, more advanced MKUltra-like techniques could cause a “loner” to take shots at a president? O’Neill referenced the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on candidate Trump and the killing of Charlie Kirk and said:

“I just hate to speculate, because I don’t know, I have no firsthand knowledge whether those guys were programed 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 much more effective now.”

Which is an awful lot of speculation for someone who, with zero evidence, hates to speculate.

Not to be outdone in describing a conspiracy theory without any concrete evidence, Representative Burchet interrupted O’Neill to say:

“Don’t you think that they could cast this broad net through these algorithms and other things, and maybe they don’t know the exact person it’s going to affect, but they know what type of person its to affect, and they know it’s going happen. And that way they can…they can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but they think it will happen. And that they can sort of wash their hands of this whole thing and say, well, we didn’t have anything to do with it. But in effect. They really did because they put this out there and they continue to put it out there.”

Dr. Kinzer replied that what Congressman Burchet described sounded like the MLK assassination and the government’s role in creating a climate where he was considered “the most dangerous man in America.” Which might conceivably be generally a reasonable thing to say in a normal discussion, but in a room where people have been freely speculating about mind controlling radio waves, I wouldn’t be confident that they understand that Hoover’s FBI was spreading leaflets and hate mail about MLK that fed a climate of violence.

Finally, at the conclusion of the hearing, when asked if he had anything to add, Dr. Kinzer explained that:

“There’s a reason why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to do with the disassociation between what we say we are and do, and what we really are and do. This has become more and more clear to more people. Therefore, they’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the US, and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all, but there’s just this mentality that is created by the covert sphere. And that’s what makes people realize that things that used to seem really farfetched, and not so farfetched after all.”

But this was almost an afterthought to an over hour and a half session, where nothing new about MKUltra was learned, and whose purpose for being held over a half century after the program’s demise was never stated, but the attacks on publicly funded research seemed to clarify.

But stated or not, the reasons for this showboating stunt seemed clear. Kinzer, O’Neill, and Ginexi were props in a broader campaign attacking government spending on research; and while Kinzer and O’Neill appeared unconcerned that their hosts were using their testimony to spread their own conspiracy theories about covid, mind control, a certain type of deep state, along with general attacks on publicly funded science; while Dr. Ginexi did not go along with the sham. Dr. Ginexi’s testimony shed more light on what this hearing was about than what her fellow witnesses did, even though she said nothing about MKUltra.

With all the talk from the congressional task force about their concern about MKUltra’s abuse of research subjects (and it there were horrible abuses), they had no answers to Dr. Ginexi’s questions about the harm being done today to members of medical research studies whose treatments were suddenly cancelled due to the federal research cuts they had approved. Never mind that I find it difficult to believe these congressional representatives would oppose using the torture and interrogation techniques developed by MKUltra-sponsored research against enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cleaning house at the CIA. If my regime was in power, I would hold hearings on these and many other CIA crimes. I might even ask some of these same questions to these and other witnesses. I’m all for dismantling the CIA as a covert arm of government; for ending the CIA’s decades of covert actions and ending their role (as Philip Agee put it) as the secret police of American capitalism. But these members of Congress and Trump obviously don’t want any of this. They want as many excuses as possible for Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to shake things up with agency purges, routing out the old deep state so he can implant the new one, and this hearing was just one more stunt in support of this campaign.

I am thankful that Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi had the courage of her convictions and the presence of mind to appear and give the sworn testimony she did. Her calm and lucid performance helped clarify why this particular committee would choose to delve into this dark chapter of ancient history, and her decision not to harmonize with this thinly veiled attack on the public funding of research was heroic.

David Price is an anthropologist living in Olympia, Washington. His latest book is Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and CIA, published by University of Washington Press.

 

Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine?

by Edward Curtin / March 26th, 2025

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox. Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

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Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.