19771776 Club
20,000 pages the CIA thought it burned turn up in a warehouse
A financial records building held what Richard Helms tried to destroy in 1973: proof the agency dosed unwitting Americans with LSD for twenty years.
By 1977, the CIA had already survived one round of scandal: the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission had revealed domestic spying and assassination plots in 1975. Then a Freedom of Information Act request turned up something Director Richard Helms believed was gone. Helms had ordered MKUltra's files destroyed in 1973, but 20,000 pages had been misfiled in a financial records building and survived. They confirmed the CIA had dosed unwitting citizens with LSD from the 1950s into the early 1970s, including mental patients, prisoners, and prostitutes…
