In April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles tasked a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb with finding out whether the United States could do what the Soviets were rumored to have figured out: control human minds with drugs.
His methods were absolutely insane; Gottlieb set up a brothel in San Francisco where CIA-paid prostitutes dosed unsuspecting men while government agents watched through one-way mirrors.
He also authorized CIA officers to dose their own colleagues with LSD— without their knowledge— just to see what would happen.
One of Gottlieb’s own colleagues, a biochemist named Frank Olson, was slipped LSD at a work retreat in November 1953. Olsen went out a tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York.
The program became known as MK-Ultra, and for the next twenty years it ran almost entirely in the dark. Congress did not know. The press did not know. Even most of the CIA did not know.
By 1973, Watergate convinced CIA Director Richard Helms that the press was finally willing to dig into the intelligence agencies. So he gave one last order on his way out the door: destroy the MK-Ultra files.
Twenty years of records — experiments, payments, deaths — were fed into burn bags and shredders.
By the time the government held hearings two years later, almost no evidence remained. Fortunately an incompetent clerk had misplaced the program’s financial records, so eventually roughly 16,000 pages emerged about MK-Ultra. Everything we know about the program today is because of those misplaced financial records.
Yet no one was ever punished for the experiments… or for the for the federal crime of destroying the documents.
So it’s a tiny step in the right direction that, last week, the Justice Department indicted Dr. David Morens, a former senior advisor to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, on charges of obstructing a federal investigation into the origins of Covid-19.
The NIH gave roughly $8 million in grants to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance (run by Peter Daszak) which in turn routed some of that money to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Yet the NIH had publicly insisted, for years, that it was not funding any gain-of-function research.
As the lab leak hypothesis gained traction in 2020, the indictment alleges that Dr. Morens instructed EcoHealth’s president to send all correspondence to his personal Gmail.
Dr. Morens also told colleagues that he had “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts.” Yet when a Senate document request arrived in June 2021, Dr. Morens claimed that he had “retained very few documents on these matters.”
Federal records law requires every one of his emails to be preserved.
Now we know why Francis Collins, then director of NIH, was so determined in early 2020 to crush any public discussion of a possible lab origin. In April of that year, Collins emailed Fauci calling the lab leak hypothesis a “very destructive conspiracy” and asking what NIH could do to “put it down.”
He was not asking a scientific question. He was asking how to suppress an inquiry that pointed back at money his own agency had distributed.
This is one of the premier institutions Americans were told to “trust the science” on.
The behavior across NIH, the CDC, and the FDA destroyed public trust in institutions that should have been protecting public health. The agencies served a narrative instead, and they wanted higher case numbers to scare the public into compliance.
Patients hospitalized for car accidents or hip replacements were logged as Covid if a routine swab came back positive. Patients who arrived testing positive were counted as Covid deaths even when something else (like a motorcycle accident) had killed them.
These “experts” said masks worked, after months of telling people they did not.
They said natural immunity was not a real factor, contradicting decades of immunology.
They said ivermectin was a “horse dewormer,” though it had been an FDA-approved human medication for decades.
They told the public that vaccinated people could NOT transmit the virus, when the data clearly showed they could.
Meanwhile, the pandemic’s collateral damage piled up.
The CDC’s own 2021 survey of high school students found 44% reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness, 55% emotionally abused at home, and more than one in ten physically abused.
One in four had experienced hunger. Not to mention the alcoholism, the record overdose deaths, the diseases that went undiagnosed, the learning loss the next generation will not catch up from.
Dr. Morens deleted his emails to protect an industrial level of deceit which incalculably harmed the US economy and American society.
And it wasn’t just the technical question of whether NIH funded dangerous research; it’s the broader implication that the institutions Americans were told to trust, had, in reality, spent two years telling lies.
And the costs of those lies were paid by teenagers locked in their bedrooms, small business owners watching their savings evaporate, and the roughly 1.2 million Americans who died.
The indictment of Dr. Morens will not suddenly repair all of that. But a bit of accountability is at least a step in the right direction.
