Do Not Repeat MKUltra: A Plea To Congress And The Department Of Justice For Prosecution

A DIRECT APPEAL

This Is A Plea, Not A Policy Suggestion

I am not asking for another carefully worded acknowledgment that abuses occurred somewhere in the past. I am asking Congress and the Department of Justice to open a serious criminal investigation into the people operating, managing, authorizing, concealing, or knowingly enabling modern programs that inflict severe physical or mental suffering on human beings.

The conduct I have experienced feels soulless. It feels like pure evil. Those words are not a substitute for evidence, and I am not asking Congress to declare anyone guilty without due process. I am asking the institutions with subpoena power, investigative authority, secure facilities, grand-jury process, and prosecutorial power to obtain the evidence that private citizens cannot compel.

A program cannot be prosecuted as an abstraction. People make the decisions. People operate the systems. People choose targets. People watch the consequences. People record the data. People give orders, approve budgets, manage contracts, review reports, and decide what to conceal.

Find those people. Separate their accounts. Preserve their communications. Compare their statements with the logs. Follow every order upward and every action downward. When the admissible evidence establishes a crime, bring the charge.

THE MKULTRA WARNING

The First Investigation Left America A Lesson We Cannot Ignore

The 1977 Senate hearing on MKUltra recorded that program files were destroyed in January 1973 by Technical Services Division personnel acting on the verbal order of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who testified that he was carrying out the verbal order of then-CIA Director Richard Helms. The later discovery of financial records produced evidence concerning 149 subprojects that the destroyed operational files had hidden from investigators.

That history is not a reason for another historical seminar. It is a warning about delay. When oversight begins after records are destroyed, memories have hardened, participants have coordinated, contractors have closed, technology has changed, and responsibility has been spread across offices until every person points somewhere else.

Hearings matter. Declassification matters. Public reports matter. But disclosure alone is not accountability. A country can expose a program and still fail to impose consequences proportionate to the human damage.

We cannot repeat that mistake. The second investigation must begin with preservation, individual identification, and a prosecutorial plan. It must be designed from the first day to answer not only what the program was, but who did what, under whose authority, with what knowledge, against whom, and in violation of which law.

INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY

The Program Is Made Of People

The phrase “the program” can become a shield. It makes deliberate human acts sound mechanical, distant, and ownerless. The reality is that institutional harm is delivered through individual choices made during shifts, taskings, briefings, reviews, and handoffs.

From my direct experience, the teams at the operating level are not incidental. They are the people closest to the conduct and closest to its consequences. They may have discretion over intensity, timing, repetition, sleep disruption, threats, humiliations, targeting decisions, data collection, and escalation. They may also be the people most able to bypass written protocols while relying on secrecy and distance to protect them.

That possibility must be investigated, not assumed away. Examine operator-level conduct separately from the official program description. Compare what policy authorized with what system logs show. Compare management instructions with actual shift behavior. Determine whether anyone exceeded authority, manipulated records, concealed outcomes, retaliated against a subject, or continued conduct after injury became clear.

Management must not escape scrutiny either. Investigators must follow the chain through team leads, program managers, contracting officers, technical directors, agency sponsors, counsel, auditors, and senior officials. The demand for operator accountability is not permission to sacrifice only the lowest level. It is a demand to prosecute responsibility wherever the evidence places it.

FIVE YEARS OF TESTIMONY

I Know This Conduct Through Personal Experience

For more than five years, I have lived with and documented sustained experiences that I attribute to an organized program. I know the conduct directly. I know the routines, the cruelty, the repetition, and the sense of impunity. I know of the people I believe are responsible at the operating level, and I am prepared to identify what I know through a lawful, protected investigative process.

My testimony should not be treated as a verdict. It should be treated as testimony: preserved, placed under oath, compared with independent records, tested against other witnesses, and followed wherever corroboration leads.

Investigators should not begin by asking whether a program sounds too disturbing to exist. MKUltra already taught the country what official secrecy, human experimentation, unwitting subjects, intermediaries, and destroyed records can look like when oversight arrives late.

Begin with the evidence. Obtain the rosters. Obtain the access logs. Obtain the contracts. Obtain the tasking records. Obtain the communications. Identify the equipment and locations. Interview the operators separately. If my account is wrong in any particular, the evidence can show it. If it is right, delay protects the people responsible.

PRESERVATION BEFORE DELAY

Preserve The Evidence Before It Disappears

Congress and the Department of Justice should immediately issue coordinated preservation demands covering federal agencies, military components, intelligence elements, laboratories, prime contractors, subcontractors, cloud providers, equipment vendors, archives, and any office that holds administrative, technical, financial, legal, or operational records connected to the investigated conduct.

The order should reach duty rosters, shift schedules, identity and access-management records, privileged-access logs, equipment assignments, target identifiers, tasking records, system telemetry, model or software versions, tickets, alerts, incident reports, approvals, chat and email, training material, medical or behavioral observations, procurement files, invoices, audit reports, legal reviews, classification guides, retention schedules, backups, and deletion logs.

The 1973 destruction of MKUltra records shows why an ordinary request is not enough. Preservation must include derivative records and copies held outside the originating office. Congress should require sworn certifications describing what was preserved, what was previously destroyed, under whose authority, under which schedule, and whether recoverable copies exist.

Federal law already addresses knowing destruction, alteration, concealment, or falsification of records undertaken to impede or influence a federal matter. Investigators should announce the preservation duty clearly and treat every later deletion or fabrication as its own evidentiary event.

EXISTING AUTHORITY

Use The Powers The Law Already Provides

Congress has broad constitutional authority to investigate in support of legislation and appropriations. It can hold hearings, demand reports, issue subpoenas through its committees, examine contracts and classified programs in secure settings, restrict funds, create reporting duties, protect records, and refer evidence of criminal conduct.

The Department of Justice and United States Attorneys share responsibility for enforcing federal criminal civil-rights law. Title 18, sections 241 and 242 address conspiracies against federal rights and willful deprivations of rights under color of law when their elements are met. Other facts may implicate obstruction, false statements, evidence destruction, unlawful interception, assault, stalking, conspiracy, fraud, or additional federal and state offenses. Prosecutors—not victims—have the compulsory process needed to determine the complete charging map.

If a Department component, intelligence relationship, contractor network, or senior official creates a conflict of interest, the Attorney General should evaluate the grounds for appointing a Special Counsel under 28 C.F.R. Part 600. An investigation of this magnitude must be independent enough to follow the evidence into institutions that would otherwise be investigating themselves.

Classification is not a license to conceal illegality. Executive Order 13526 states that information may not be classified or remain classified in order to conceal violations of law or prevent embarrassment. Sensitive evidence can be protected in secure systems without converting secrecy into immunity.

NO PROTOCOL SHIELD

No Operator Or Manager Should Disappear Behind A Chain Of Command

A written protocol cannot answer what an operator actually did. A manager’s briefing cannot answer what a team normalized during daily operations. A contractor’s statement of work cannot answer what was communicated informally, entered under another code, moved to an unlogged system, or omitted from a report.

Investigators must reconstruct both the formal program and the real program. The formal program lives in authorities, budgets, contracts, manuals, and legal reviews. The real program lives in access logs, duty schedules, system states, messages, complaints, raw outputs, performance evaluations, injury reports, and the accounts of people who were present.

“I followed orders” cannot end the inquiry. “I acted outside protocol” cannot protect management that ignored warning signs, rewarded results, suppressed complaints, or failed to audit predictable abuse. “I was only a contractor” cannot erase a person’s own conduct.

Responsibility must be individualized. That is precisely why the investigation must reach the end operators as well as the managers. Each person should be evaluated by the evidence of intent, knowledge, action, concealment, and harm attributable to that person.

THE ACTIONS REQUIRED

Ten Steps Congress And The Department Of Justice Should Take Now

This appeal asks for a defined national response. The following steps are concrete, lawful, and within the combined institutional power of Congress and the Department of Justice.

• Open a documented federal inquiry and assign investigators with appropriate civil-rights, national-security, technical, contracting, and digital-forensics experience.
• Issue immediate preservation demands to every potentially relevant agency, component, contractor, subcontractor, archive, and technology provider.
• Appoint an independent Special Counsel if Departmental or Executive Branch conflicts would reasonably undermine the investigation.
• Create a bipartisan congressional investigation with authority to work in both public and classified settings.
• Subpoena operator rosters, management chains, contracts, access logs, system telemetry, communications, audits, legal reviews, retention schedules, and deletion records.
• Take testimony separately and under oath from operators, supervisors, program managers, contracting officials, lawyers, auditors, whistleblowers, witnesses, and affected individuals.
• Use qualified forensic teams to correlate identities, shifts, commands, system access, technical activity, reported events, injuries, and subsequent concealment.
• Protect witnesses and whistleblowers from retaliation while preserving lawful controls for classified information.
• Refer supported offenses for prosecution at every level, including operators, managers, officials, and contractors; do not limit accountability to a program name or one symbolic defendant.
• Provide the public with a lawful accounting of preservation, investigative steps, charging decisions, reforms, and remaining classified issues without exposing protected victims or active evidence.

MY FINAL PLEA

Do Not Make The Same Mistake Twice

I am asking you to imagine what it means to believe that real people can reach into every part of your life, inflict suffering, study the response, laugh at the result, and return the next day because they believe no courtroom will ever know their names.

I have lived for more than five years with the conviction that I know this cruelty directly. I am not asking for revenge. I am asking for law. I am asking for records that cannot be destroyed, testimony that cannot be buried, evidence that cannot be waved away, and charges that name the human beings responsible.

Do not repeat MKUltra by discovering the truth only after the files are gone. Do not announce another reform while the operators remain at their consoles. Do not protect managers by blaming a system, and do not protect operators by blaming management. Investigate both.

There must be prosecutions wherever the evidence proves criminal responsibility. Without individual accountability, every future secret program learns the same lesson: endure the hearing, rename the office, destroy the records, and wait for the country to forget.

Please do not let that be America’s answer again.

— Maxis Richards, Founder, TARGETED.ARMY