The CIA’s MKULTRA Files – Investigating the 2026 Declassification Standoff

On 13 May 2026, the Chairwoman of a House task force gave the CIA 24 hours to hand back 40 boxes of Cold War files. The subpoena she threatened to file has not appeared in the committee’s own publication archive at any point since. Six weeks later, the hearing meant to force the issue spent much of its questioning time on the origins of COVID-19.

The 13 May Preservation Letter and the Missing Congressional Subpoena

On 13 May 2026, House Task Force Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna sent a preservation letter to the CIA. A preservation letter is a formal notice telling an agency to keep hold of specific records because they may be needed for an investigation.

Luna’s letter demanded the CIA return 40 boxes of documents to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) within 24 hours, and threatened a congressional subpoena if the agency refused.

That subpoena does not appear in the House Oversight Committee’s publication archive. Not on 13 May, not in the six weeks between the preservation letter and the 30 June hearing, and not afterwards. That same committee used its subpoena power freely for other targets during the same window. On 26 June 2026, Chairman James Comer issued two subpoenas to Leon Black. The publications archive logs both.

Which brings us to the walk-back. On 14 May, one day after the preservation letter, both the ODNI and the CIA disputed the media framing that a ‘raid’ had occurred at the ODNI offices. Luna amended her public statement, agreeing it had not been a raid, and reframed the transfer as a dispute over jurisdiction.

CIA v. Sims (1985)

The current stand-off is anchored in a single 1985 Supreme Court ruling. To understand the wall the CIA is holding, we start with the FOIA request that produced it.

On 22 August 1977, attorney John C. Sims and Dr Sidney M. Wolfe of the Public Citizen Health Research Group filed a FOIA request. They asked for the grant proposals and contracts, together with the names of the researchers and institutions listed in the surviving MKULTRA ledgers. In the response, the agency released the proposals and contracts, but withheld the names of the researchers and 21 specific institutions.

That refusal rested on a two-step legal argument. FOIA Exemption 3 allows agencies to withhold material shielded by other federal laws. In this case, the other law was Section 102(d)(3) of the National Security Act 1947, which requires the Director of Central Intelligence to protect intelligence sources and methods from public release.

The case reached the Supreme Court.

On 16 April 1985, the Justices ruled that the MKULTRA researchers qualified as protected ‘intelligence sources’ under the 1947 statute. FOIA, the Court held, did not require the disclosure of their names.

Their reasoning went further. Even a small chance that a court might one day order disclosure, the Justices wrote, could cause sources to ‘close up like a clam’. That single line has done most of the load-bearing work for the CIA’s position for the past forty-one years. At the 30 June 2026 hearing, Dr Stephen Kinzer told the Task Force that the redactions applied in the 1970s were justified at the time because only 20 years had passed since the events. Seven decades on, Kinzer argued, that national security case has expired.

Only seven boxes of MKULTRA financial records still exist. They survived because they had been misfiled inside a different archive during the January 1973 destruction, and a FOIA archivist pulled them out in August 1977. A legal firewall built in 1985 now covers documents that were themselves supposed to have been burned.

40 CIA Boxes and the January 2026 Repossession

On 8 April 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard set up the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG), an internal task force charged with declassifying historical files. Among its queued targets were the JFK assassination records and MKULTRA. Nine months later, the group was dissolved.

Immediately after that closure in January 2026, the CIA retrieved 40 boxes of documents from the ODNI. These files had been queued for declassification, and they have not been released to the public record since.

James Erdman III, a former CIA operations officer detailed to the DIG, testified under oath on 13 May 2026 before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Erdman’s account is contested. He alleged that the CIA had illegally monitored DIG staff communications during 2025 and required team members to report to polygraph facilities.

The whistleblower letter also describes formal internal investigations opened against DIG personnel.

The catch was that the public framing of the January 2026 retrieval did not match either side’s paperwork. Media reports called it a ‘raid’. On 14 May 2026, both the ODNI and the CIA disputed that language, with a CIA official stating the transfer was standard interagency procedure following the DIG’s closure.

Chairwoman Luna then amended her own public statement on the same day. She agreed there had been no raid, and reframed the transfer as a dispute over jurisdiction. Her original 24-hour ultimatum, issued on 13 May, remained on the record without correction.

The physical fact underneath all of this is that the 40 boxes have not surfaced on the public record. Where they sit inside the CIA, and which subprojects they contain, is a question the committee has left unanswered.

The 30 June MKULTRA Hearing – Mandate vs. Reality

This hearing had a clear written mandate. On 23 June 2026, the House Task Force announced it would ‘examine the history and timeline of the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKULTRA project‘ at a session scheduled for the following week. That notice named the CIA’s classification duties as the specific area of enquiry. Two of the witnesses stayed on that mandate. Dr Stephen Kinzer and investigative journalist Tom O’Neill testified about the history of the programme and the severe medical harm inflicted on subjects. Their submissions filled the record’s on-topic column.

Republican members Rep. Eli Crane and Rep. Nancy Mace used their allotted time to interrogate a minority witness, Dr Elizabeth Ginexi. Their questions focused on Dr Anthony Fauci and cancelled NIH clinical trials, before moving to the origins of COVID-19.

Nothing in Ginexi’s written testimony connected to MKULTRA or to CIA classification. Witness selection is not our question to answer, but the questioning that followed left the hearing off its own printed agenda for extended stretches. A press release issued after the hearing stated that members had analysed the intelligence community’s unwillingness to declassify information. The transcript shows the questioning had spent much of its time somewhere else entirely.

1977 Ledgers and the ‘Colossal Failure’ Myth

The current fight over the 40 boxes rests on an older fight over a smaller stack of paper.

In January 1973, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms ordered the destruction of the entire MKULTRA archive as he prepared to leave office. Dr Sidney Gottlieb and four other individuals burned 152 files across a single day. The head of the CIA records centre objected in writing and was overruled. That should have been the end of the paper trail. In August 1977, a FOIA archivist processing an unrelated request discovered seven boxes of financial records. They had been misfiled and had therefore escaped the burn order.

The ledgers named 149 subprojects operating across more than 80 institutions and involving 185 non-government researchers. They also confirmed a $375,000 covert contribution approved by Allen Dulles, then Director of Central Intelligence, to a hospital research wing used as a ‘safe house’ for testing on unwitting patients.

At the August to September 1977 Senate hearings in the Dirksen Senate office building, CIA representatives told Congress that the 25-year effort had been a ‘colossal failure’ that produced no usable results.

That framing sat on the public record for forty-nine years. Then Tom O’Neill testified. On 30 June 2026, the investigative journalist told the House Task Force that the 1977 submissions had been edited before delivery, with concluding documents claiming certain effects had ‘never been studied’ fabricated to shield the agency.

O’Neill’s claim is not corroborated by any other sworn source in the current record.

The 1963 classified Inspector General report survived the 1973 burn. It was folded into the 1975 Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission findings, which concluded the programme had exceeded the agency’s legal charter. That report has never been fully republished in its original 1963 form.

Source

Sources include: the 1985 US Supreme Court ruling in ‘CIA v. Sims’; official press releases and hearing wrap-ups from the House Oversight Committee (May to June 2026); the sworn written testimony of former CIA operations officer James E. Erdman III to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; the written statement of Tom O’Neill to the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets; and contemporary reporting from ‘FOX 32 Chicago’ and ‘Mother Jones’.