Executive Summary
Cathy O'Brien and Dr. Juliette Engel, MD, joined me this week for a conversation about MK-Ultra that starts where most coverage stops — with the government's own admission. In 1976, when Congress finally examined the program, the CIA acknowledged that it had operated across 80 universities, hospitals, and other large institutions, through 150 defined programs and an unknown number of sub-programs it never bothered to track. It funded all of it without meaningful constraint. Then it reported that the evidence had been destroyed.
Both guests describe themselves as survivors of that program. Dr. Engel says she was placed into it in 1955, two years after it got moving in earnest. She is 77 and says she is the oldest survivor she knows. She says she still remembers the Nazi scientists who were brought into the country after the Second World War, including Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Cathy O'Brien describes what she lived through as mind control at a White House and Pentagon level.
From those accounts the conversation moves outward into structure — and the structure is documented. The Dulles brothers taking the two most powerful unelected foreign-policy positions in America in 1953, with John Foster Dulles sitting on the Rockefeller Foundation board while running the State Department. Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's intelligence chief, absorbed into Western intelligence along with his agents. Dr. Ewen Cameron installed as head of the American Psychiatric Association over the protests of American psychiatrists. LSD imported by the ton through a relationship with Eli Lilly.
And then the claim that gives the episode its title. Both women say the program was never shut down. It was redistributed — into schools, into psychiatry, into television, and now into artificial intelligence.
This is difficult material, handled carefully. It is also a conversation that ends in agency rather than despair.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
The 1976 Admission Is the Foundation of This Story
Most conversations about MK-Ultra stall on whether it happened. That question was settled by the agency that ran it.
Eighty universities and hospitals. One hundred fifty defined programs. An unknown number of sub-programs nobody counted. All of it in the congressional record — and all of it followed by the claim that the files no longer existed.
Sit with the shape of that. An institution confesses to a program of that scale and, in the same testimony, reports that the proof is gone. Anywhere else, that is the moment an investigation escalates. Here, it was the moment the story was declared closed.
Dr. Engel's timeline sharpens it. The program got going in 1953. She says she was in it by 1955 — twenty-one years before the congressional review, in a window when, by the agency's own numbers, the operation kept expanding rather than contracting.
Operation Paperclip and the Problem of Continuity
I have spent years researching the decade from 1944 to 1954, and the single most important idea in that research is continuity — how a network outlives the regime that built it.
Engel says the scientists brought over after the war were distributed across the country and placed inside institutions, cults, and secret societies. She says she remembers Dr. Gottlieb by name, and that given the number of them she encountered, she believes she met Josef Mengele. That is her personal account, and I present it as hers.
The institutional record runs parallel to it. Reinhard Gehlen, who ran Hitler's intelligence service, rose to high levels in Western intelligence with his agents intact. Engel says NATO carried Nazis at its highest levels — a fact she says most people have never been told. And she says the pattern repeated a generation later: Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's intelligence service, practically a resident at Langley, and the Banderite networks funded from the same foundations the entire time.
O'Brien put the whole thing in a single line. We did not win the Second World War. We imported the formula and spread it through the world.
The Dulles Decade and the Warnings From Three Presidents
If you want the hinge where the architecture locked, look at 1947 and then at 1953.
The 1947 National Security Act created the modern intelligence apparatus. Within three years, three presidents warned the country about what it had become.
John F. Kennedy described an adversary advancing by infiltration instead of invasion — a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy. Dwight Eisenhower, on his way out, told Americans to watch the banks and the military-industrial complex, having realized, I believe, that the Dulles brothers had played him and converted the State Department into their own operation. And Harry Truman, who signed the act into law, later wrote in the Washington Post that had he known what the CIA would become, he never would have signed it. The piece was barely covered.
Then 1953. John Foster Dulles into State. Allen Dulles into the CIA. Neither post required a single vote. And John Foster Dulles held a seat on the Rockefeller Foundation board while directing American foreign policy — the same foundation money flowing into the universities and hospitals that would surface in the 1976 admission.
From 1953 forward, at least on the foreign-policy level, this country stopped being a force for good. I do not enjoy writing that sentence. The record keeps pointing there.
Foundations, NGOs, and the Documents Filed in Moscow
Follow the money and the same handful of names arrive every time.
Rockefeller money moved into China from the early 1900s, straight through the rise of Mao and a revolution that killed a hundred million people, and it never stopped. The same foundation money was in Germany between the wars, publicly described as reconstruction while a military was being rebuilt.
The same NGOs functioned inside Nazi Germany, inside the USSR, and inside communist China during the rise of the CCP — funding university programs, academic work, and medical work without missing a beat. The way Switzerland was neutral while the postwar financial system was being drafted on its soil.
Engel says the founding documents of Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller were deposited in a library in Moscow, in Russian and in English, a block from her apartment. She says they contain extensive material on a communist takeover of the United States and of the former Soviet Union — and that you cannot obtain them in this country.
The modern version is not concealed. Ban Ki-moon tapped John Podesta as one of the writers of Agenda 2030, the successor to Agenda 21. Trace the sustainable-development architecture backward and it lands in four institutions plus the United Nations: the Center for American Progress, the Open Society, Brookings, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Podesta runs the first one.
Engel also told a story about George Soros that I present exactly as she framed it — a memory of a private conversation, not a document. In 1990 she received an award in Florida; Soros received the same award and was launching the Open Society Institute. They sat side by side for two hours. By her account he talked the whole time about having been a Nazi, about not being a philanthropist and how foolish people were to think he was, and about taking USAID money and returning it to the foundations as gifts.
One person's recollection is not proof. It is a data point that either matches the documented pattern or does not. This one matches.
Why So Few Survivors Ever Heal
This is the part of the episode I had never heard framed so directly, and it may be the most consequential.
O'Brien says the mental-health system was deliberately corrupted so that survivors would never recover. The names are specific. Dr. Ewen Cameron — the MK-Ultra doctor of Canada — was made head of the American Psychiatric Association over the objections of American psychiatrists, and he set policy. That policy included the mass use of psychoactive drugs derived from the original LSD research. Dr. Jolly West operated out of UCLA.
The methods that followed, she says, reinforced trauma rather than resolving it, and kept people locked in a victim mentality.
Think about the architecture of that, if accurate. Run a program that damages people — then take control of the profession those people will turn to for help. The exit was not neglected. It was staffed.
The Silence That Followed the Evidence
The American people do not want to believe in evil. That is not a flaw in our character. It is decency — and it is precisely the vulnerability this whole structure was built around.
We do not want to believe that 400,000 children were trafficked across the border, or that ICE is now being blocked from finding them. We did not want to hear it about the Catholic Church, or the Boy Scouts, or Child Protective Services. Every time, the flinch bought years.
Engel took her trafficking research to international law enforcement and testified before Congress. She says she brought the receipts — the routes, the flights, the destinations, the connections — and identified Germany, Israel, and the United States as the top countries involved. Her word for what came back from the State Department was crickets.
A response like that, at that altitude, is not an absence of an answer. It is an answer.
Where the Power Actually Sits
Neither guest left the audience in the dark, and neither will I.
O'Brien says the thing these people fear most is the strength of the human spirit — that when we hold our spirit and our soul expression, we have wisdom, and wisdom out-thinks a criminal mind every time. She says the victory is inside us by divine design, they know it, and they cannot reach it. The only tool left to them is to dumb us down.
Engel says a dozen people contact her every single day who are clearly waking up from programming. Every day. And she made a point worth holding onto: we do not have to join a club, get a card, and declare ourselves a party to do any of this.
Politics is not the answer. We have not cleaned up elections anywhere, and the electronic voting machines have been suspect since their inception in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. We the People are by far the majority — arithmetic, not a slogan.
We have been conditioned for generations to hand our power to big government, big pharma, big tech, and big cult. O'Brien's prescription is refreshingly unglamorous. Shut off the device. Get outside. Feel the earth under your feet. Then go talk to your neighbors — eye to eye, heart to heart.
Excavating our true history is not unpatriotic. It is the most patriotic act available to an American citizen. The dumbing down, the compliance, the alignment with machines — the whole design fails the moment enough of us know the truth.
Key Takeaways
- The CIA told Congress in 1976 that MK-Ultra ran across 80 universities and hospitals through 150 defined programs — then said the evidence had been destroyed.
- Dr. Juliette Engel says she entered the program in 1955, remembers Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, and believes she encountered Josef Mengele; at 77 she says she is the oldest survivor she knows.
- Three presidents warned about the 1947 National Security Act within three years — Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman, who wrote that he never would have signed it.
- In 1953 the Dulles brothers took the two most powerful unelected foreign-policy posts in America, while John Foster Dulles sat on the Rockefeller Foundation board.
- The same foundations operated inside Nazi Germany, the USSR, and communist China without interruption — and their founding documents are archived in Moscow, not here.
- Cathy O'Brien says the mental-health system was deliberately corrupted so survivors could never heal, with Ewen Cameron atop the APA and Jolly West at UCLA.
- Their greatest fear is the strength of the human spirit — which is why the answer is not a party or an election, but a people who remember who they are.
Frequently Asked Questions
Wasn't MK-Ultra shut down in the 1970s?
That is the official account, and Congress did examine the program in 1976. But the agency's own numbers — 150 defined programs plus an unknown number of untracked sub-programs — do not describe an operation anyone had firm control of. And when the evidence is destroyed at the moment of disclosure, closure becomes a claim rather than a finding. Both guests say what followed was redistribution, not termination.
How much of this episode is documented history and how much is personal testimony?
Both, and the difference matters. The 1976 congressional admission, the Dulles brothers' 1953 appointments, Gehlen's absorption into Western intelligence, and Cameron's position at the APA are institutional record. What O'Brien and Engel personally experienced is their testimony, offered in the first person. I have marked which is which throughout, and you should hold them to different standards.
Isn't investigating this just tearing America down?
No — and that is the belief I most want to break. A country, like a family, is only as sick as its secrets. Excavating our true history is the most patriotic act available to a citizen. You do not restore something by refusing to look at what was done to it.
If elections can't fix this, what can?
The work is personal and local before it is ever federal. Healing, informed decisions, real research, and communities where people know each other by name. Engel is right that we do not need a card or a party to do it. We are the majority, and the majority does not need permission.
How do I raise this with family without alienating them?
Start with the documented record and let them walk the rest of the road themselves. Truman's own words about the agency he created are a good place to begin, because nobody can wave them away. Knowledge breeds confidence, confidence leads to calm — and calm is the only state from which anyone has ever changed their mind.
Watch the full episode on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7f4kpi-mel-k-w-cathy-obrien-and-dr.-juliette-engel-md-no-mk-ultra-did-not-end-it-w.html
For my readers – Yes, we used AI to turn this episode into something readable for you. My team reviews everything first and does their best to sound like me. If it doesn't, that's fair, the robots aren't perfect…yet. If you want the real thing – unscripted, unfiltered, and exactly how I said it – that's what the full episode is for. You can always find it here [https://rumble.com/v7f4kpi-mel-k-w-cathy-obrien-and-dr.-juliette-engel-md-no-mk-ultra-did-not-end-it-w.html]