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MKUltra only surfaced by accident
The first leak
The first crack was a leak to The New York Times, which ran Seymour Hersh's story. Frank Church and others then drew information from whistleblowers and found financial records that had not been destroyed, between 1973 and 1975.
The inspector general report
A CIA inspector general report from around 1964 existed too. It was classified and clearly never given to Congress. Part of the program went public through an oops, and the agency had to be dragged along to produce the rest.
The Church hearings
The Church committee hearings brought out more: the heart attack gun, Operation Midnight Climax and its brothels, and the family jewels, a list CIA Director Schlesinger compiled of the bad things the agency had been doing so that none of it would come out. Operation Mockingbird, which put people on the payroll, surfaced in the same era.
Why did Congress investigate the CIA in 1975?
In December 1974 Seymour Hersh reported in The New York Times that the CIA had spied on American antiwar activists. The Senate created a select committee under Frank Church in January 1975 and the House formed its own panel, while President Ford appointed the Rockefeller Commission. The Church Committee's reports in 1975 and 1976 led to the creation of permanent intelligence committees in both chambers. The Senate's came in 1976.
How did the family jewels list come to exist?
In 1973 CIA Director James Schlesinger ordered employees to report any activities that might fall outside the agency's charter. The responses ran to roughly 700 pages and covered assassination plots, surveillance of Americans, and drug experiments. The list was nicknamed the family jewels. The CIA released the document publicly in 2007.
What was the heart attack gun?
It was a dart gun developed by the CIA that fired a frozen pellet of shellfish toxin, designed to cause a heart attack with little trace. Senator Church displayed it at a Senate hearing in September 1975, and CIA Director William Colby testified about it. The committee found the agency had kept the toxin in violation of a presidential order to destroy such stocks.
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