For the first time in decades, a new tranche of CIA documents related to the agency’s infamous MKUltra mind-control program is set to be released to the public — and according to Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), the files contain details about a forgery operation housed beneath the program’s classified umbrella. The announcement came during a July 1, 2026 Congressional hearing titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments,” convened by Luna’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

From Preserved Boxes to the Capitol Floor

The chain of custody for these documents begins at the office of former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Last month, Luna formally ordered CIA Director John Ratcliffe to preserve 40 boxes described as “JFK files and MKUltra files” that had been held there. According to RT’s reporting on the hearing, after a reported dispute between Ratcliffe and Gabbard over the documents, the CIA subsequently agreed to declassify and release them.

“The documents — I feel comfortable enough to share here — pertain to a forgery program that was being housed under MKUltra,” Luna stated during the Capitol Hill hearing. While details of that specific subproject remain to be fully disclosed, the confirmation that a forgery operation existed within MKUltra’s architecture adds another layer to an already sprawling and deeply troubling historical record.

What MKUltra Actually Was

MKUltra was not a rumor or a fringe theory. It was a documented, classified program of illegal human experimentation conducted by the CIA and a network of cooperating medical facilities and universities between 1953 and 1973. Subjects — including American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, and veterans — were administered psychoactive drugs, subjected to electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture, often without their knowledge or consent.

In her opening statement at the hearing, Luna was unambiguous about the program’s nature: “Project 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, ordinary people to LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psychological torture without their knowledge or consent.”

The program sprawled across at least 149 subprojects, operated within more than 80 institutions, and involved 185 non-government researchers — figures confirmed only because of a bureaucratic accident. When CIA Director Richard Helms ordered MKUltra shut down in January 1973 and directed program director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb to destroy all related files, a single cache of financial records had been misfiled and escaped the purge. In 1977, an archivist fulfilling a Freedom of Information Act request discovered seven boxes of those surviving records, and nearly everything the public now knows about MKUltra traces back to that find.

The Destruction of Evidence — and the Absence of Accountability

Luna’s task force reviewed internal CIA documents that leave little interpretive ambiguity. One states plainly: “Over my stated objectives, the MKULTRA files were destroyed by the order of DCI.” A separate internal account confirms that Helms telephoned Gottlieb directly and instructed him to destroy “all files pertaining to drug research and associated activities.” Four individuals then spent an entire day physically tearing and burning 152 files. Gottlieb subsequently had his personal papers destroyed by his secretary before his retirement.

The CIA’s own records center chief protested the destruction in writing. He was overruled.

“That is obstruction of justice. That is criminal destruction of federal records,” Luna stated at the hearing. “And neither [individual was] ever charged with a crime for it. Helms received a $2,000 fine for lying to Congress about an unrelated matter and collected his government pension until he died. Gottlieb retired in rural Virginia and wrote poetry.”

No victim of MKUltra was ever formally compensated by the federal government.

Nazi Scientists and the Program’s Origins

RT’s reporting on the hearing notes that Nazi scientists were involved in the CIA’s mind-control experiments — a connection that places MKUltra within the broader postwar context of Operation Paperclip, through which the U.S. government recruited German scientists following World War II. The precise nature and extent of that involvement is among the details that newly declassified documents may help illuminate.

The program’s existence was first publicly established through the 1975 Church Committee hearings and the Rockefeller Commission, both of which relied on sworn testimony and a surviving 1963 Inspector General report. President Gerald Ford subsequently banned drug testing on human subjects without informed consent the following year. Yet the architects of MKUltra faced no criminal prosecution.

Jack Ruby, Louis Jolyon West, and the JFK Connection

Among the hearing’s more striking moments was testimony from investigative journalist Tom O’Neill, who appeared before Luna’s task force. O’Neill alleged that Jack Ruby — the man who shot accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald — was treated by psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, a researcher who conducted LSD and hypnosis experiments on behalf of the CIA and was described as a confidant of Sidney Gottlieb.

According to O’Neill’s testimony, West was directed by Helms and Gottlieb to declare Ruby legally insane “to keep Jack Ruby from telling his story.” The allegation draws a direct line between MKUltra’s operational personnel and one of the most consequential and contested figures in American political history. These are allegations presented at a Congressional hearing by a named journalist; the documentary record supporting them in full has not yet been made public.

The Scope of What Remains Unknown

The National Security Archive at George Washington University, which published a briefing ahead of the hearing, noted that the surviving seven boxes of MKUltra records — as significant as they are — represent only a fragment of what once existed. Those records confirmed the CIA covertly contributed $375,000 to a hospital research wing, approved directly by then-CIA Director Allen Dulles with Helms’s concurrence. The full scope of institutional funding, participating researchers, and experimental outcomes across all 149 documented subprojects remains impossible to reconstruct from surviving records alone.

The forthcoming declassification, if it proceeds as Luna described, would represent the first significant addition to the publicly available MKUltra record since the 1977 FOIA discovery. The forgery subproject she referenced has not previously been a focal point of public MKUltra documentation, and its relationship to the program’s better-known human experimentation components remains to be established from the released files themselves.

A Record Still Being Written

The CIA has previously acknowledged that most of its MKUltra experiments had little scientific rationale. That admission, combined with the confirmed destruction of records by the program’s directors, the absence of any criminal prosecution, and the decades of incomplete public disclosure, forms the backdrop against which Luna’s task force is now operating.

What the newly committed declassification will ultimately reveal — about the forgery program, about the Nazi-scientist connections, and about the full operational scope of a program deliberately designed to erase its own history — remains to be seen. The documents, once released, will carry that weight on their own.

This article draws on reporting from RT World News, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the National Security Archive at George Washington University.