On July 30, I finally got my interview with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, after several months of pestering her staff. I was finishing a book on her House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and I wanted to hear, in her own words, what she thought had been accomplished and what remained.
Near the end, I mentioned I was disappointed they hadn't had time for a hearing on the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. She gave me a scoop.
"You'll be the first to know, but Sirhan Sirhan has agreed to come testify before my committee specifically on the RFK assassination," Luna told me. She added that she was talking with Sirhan's attorney, "who has all of his medical records. You'll hear directly from him."
I've spent a lot of years looking at the dark corners of our history, and I'll admit that one stopped me.
For nearly six decades, Sirhan has said he doesn't remember shooting Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. Many people have dismissed that as a convenient story. Maybe it is. But it's worth knowing what our own government was working on in the years before that night.
At the task force's hearing on MK-Ultra this June, Luna described the program as "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." It ran for some twenty years. The few financial records that survived show at least 149 subprojects at more than 80 institutions.
Let's try to separate what's proven from what isn't.
It's proven that the CIA wanted to know whether a person's defenses could be broken down with drugs, sensory deprivation and hypnosis, and whether that person could be turned into an assassin with no memory of being trained.
It's proven that in 1953, one of the program's psychiatrists, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, reported success with at least the first part of that plan: creating false memories in a person.
And it's proven that we can't see most of the record. In January 1973, as he prepared to leave office, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the MK-Ultra files destroyed. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the program, spent an entire day tearing up and burning 152 files. The head of the CIA's own Records Center protested in writing. He was overruled.
What isn't proven is that Sirhan Sirhan was a product of any of it. None of this is definitive proof. But if all of this were placed in a novel, I think the reader would have a pretty good idea who the bad guys were.
That's why his testimony matters. So does another piece of the investigation Luna shared with me. The task force plans to run ballistics on a firearm owned by Thane Eugene Cesar, a shadowy figure with intelligence ties who was working as a security guard for Kennedy the night he was killed, and who has long been suspected of being a second assassin.
I asked Luna what had surprised her most. "Just the amount of crap the CIA hid and gaslit the American people on," she said. When I asked who she thought had been running our country in the recent past, her answer came quickly: "In the past it was the intelligence agencies. Now it's not."
I don't take that lightly. For most of my life, investigations like this one were stonewalled, often by the very agencies being investigated. Luna credits an administration that put people in place who were willing to open the files.
But this work isn't finished. The Sirhan testimony hasn't happened yet. The ballistics haven't been run. Luna says the CIA has located the MK-Ultra files and put them in the declassification order, but they haven't been released. Every one of those threads depends on a House majority that wants to keep pulling on them. In three weeks, voters will decide whether it still has one.
When this task force was created, people joked that it was set up to fail. Rep. Eric Burlison told me more than once he worried it would, and that my book would have little value to voters. I always told him the same thing: whether this effort succeeds or fails, the public needs to know. If the people's representatives can't get answers, the people deserve to know that, too.
I don't know whether justice can still be given to those who were victimized over the years. Sirhan is 82 years old. Many of the people who ran these programs are long gone. But we can have accountability. We can tell the truth.
I've been as much of a critic as anybody about the failures of our democracy. But as I finished this book, I found a certain lightness in my soul. Pulling these dark chapters into the light is long, laborious and painful work, and it's finally being done.
I'd like to see it finished.
Kent Heckenlively is an attorney, science teacher and New York Times best-selling author. His new book is "Book of Secrets: Congress Tries to Find the Truth About the Deep State" (Permuted Press).
Near the end, I mentioned I was disappointed they hadn't had time for a hearing on the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. She gave me a scoop.
"You'll be the first to know, but Sirhan Sirhan has agreed to come testify before my committee specifically on the RFK assassination," Luna told me. She added that she was talking with Sirhan's attorney, "who has all of his medical records. You'll hear directly from him."
I've spent a lot of years looking at the dark corners of our history, and I'll admit that one stopped me.
For nearly six decades, Sirhan has said he doesn't remember shooting Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. Many people have dismissed that as a convenient story. Maybe it is. But it's worth knowing what our own government was working on in the years before that night.
At the task force's hearing on MK-Ultra this June, Luna described the program as "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." It ran for some twenty years. The few financial records that survived show at least 149 subprojects at more than 80 institutions.
Let's try to separate what's proven from what isn't.
It's proven that the CIA wanted to know whether a person's defenses could be broken down with drugs, sensory deprivation and hypnosis, and whether that person could be turned into an assassin with no memory of being trained.
It's proven that in 1953, one of the program's psychiatrists, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, reported success with at least the first part of that plan: creating false memories in a person.
And it's proven that we can't see most of the record. In January 1973, as he prepared to leave office, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the MK-Ultra files destroyed. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the program, spent an entire day tearing up and burning 152 files. The head of the CIA's own Records Center protested in writing. He was overruled.
What isn't proven is that Sirhan Sirhan was a product of any of it. None of this is definitive proof. But if all of this were placed in a novel, I think the reader would have a pretty good idea who the bad guys were.
That's why his testimony matters. So does another piece of the investigation Luna shared with me. The task force plans to run ballistics on a firearm owned by Thane Eugene Cesar, a shadowy figure with intelligence ties who was working as a security guard for Kennedy the night he was killed, and who has long been suspected of being a second assassin.
I asked Luna what had surprised her most. "Just the amount of crap the CIA hid and gaslit the American people on," she said. When I asked who she thought had been running our country in the recent past, her answer came quickly: "In the past it was the intelligence agencies. Now it's not."
I don't take that lightly. For most of my life, investigations like this one were stonewalled, often by the very agencies being investigated. Luna credits an administration that put people in place who were willing to open the files.
But this work isn't finished. The Sirhan testimony hasn't happened yet. The ballistics haven't been run. Luna says the CIA has located the MK-Ultra files and put them in the declassification order, but they haven't been released. Every one of those threads depends on a House majority that wants to keep pulling on them. In three weeks, voters will decide whether it still has one.
When this task force was created, people joked that it was set up to fail. Rep. Eric Burlison told me more than once he worried it would, and that my book would have little value to voters. I always told him the same thing: whether this effort succeeds or fails, the public needs to know. If the people's representatives can't get answers, the people deserve to know that, too.
I don't know whether justice can still be given to those who were victimized over the years. Sirhan is 82 years old. Many of the people who ran these programs are long gone. But we can have accountability. We can tell the truth.
I've been as much of a critic as anybody about the failures of our democracy. But as I finished this book, I found a certain lightness in my soul. Pulling these dark chapters into the light is long, laborious and painful work, and it's finally being done.
I'd like to see it finished.
Kent Heckenlively is an attorney, science teacher and New York Times best-selling author. His new book is "Book of Secrets: Congress Tries to Find the Truth About the Deep State" (Permuted Press).
