John Lisle

But after they published their final reports, those reports included things about MKUltra, that the U.S.

government had performed these secret drug experiments in the past, and that led a former State Department employee named John Marks to file a Freedom of Information Act request, basically for any and all documents related to these former drug experiments.

And so, you know, not too long afterwards, a CIA...

This guy named Frank Laubinger, he was working in like the CIA archives, but he discovered these six or seven boxes of material that Sidney Gottlieb hadn't destroyed when he retired from the CIA because Gottlieb incinerated most of his files.

And so did Richard Helms.

They were in on this together.

Right.

But it turns out those boxes escaped the destruction because they had been sent to the CIA record center several years before Gottlieb and Helms retired.

Therefore, they weren't incinerated in this purge.

And so they survived.

So Marx filed that information request.

These boxes were found.

And then they were released.

And...

This was right around the time that there were a couple of subcommittee hearings on MKUltra, and that's right when all these documents came out, too.

So it became kind of a big deal.

So that's how thousands and thousands of documents related to MKUltra survived, even though Gottlieb and Helms incinerated most of the files that they actually had.

Yeah, they do reveal a lot of information.

That said, we can actually kind of run this scenario because we do know what we kind of knew before those documents were released.

So before those documents were released, you still had the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee involved.