Richard Helms

Hoover at the FBI.

Helms, Richard Helms at the CIA, will be an important character in the story.

and the chiefs of the National Security Agency, and our friends at the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

God bless them.

The 1960s and 1970s.

But yes, worth setting up this CIA.

And I think in particular, the spy chief that's in those meetings, because this is Richard Helms.

Nixon has kept Helms at the CIA.

And here's how Fitzgerald introduced himself.

According to the CIA's own inspector general, before the trip, Fitzgerald went to his boss, Richard Helms, and Helms agreed that Fitzgerald should hold himself out as a personal representative of Attorney General Kennedy.

Think about that.

The CIA sends its top Cuban man to Paris and he walks into the room speaking in Robert Kennedy's name.

Files were destroyed on order.

January 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms has the MKUltra records destroyed.

Most of what is known about the program comes from roughly 20,000 pages of financial records that had been misfiled and turned up in 1977. lesson the drama borrows what survives a purge survives by accident or because somebody carried it out a man did copy secret files at night daniel ellsberg from 1969 a photocopy of some 7 000 pages published in june 1971 as the pentagon papers he expected prison The UFO files had just changed hands.

Project Blue Book closed in December 1969.

Allende was a member of the Popular Socialist Party.

Just days later, on September 15, President Richard Nixon met with his team, including his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, and CIA Director Richard Helms.

The meeting was only 20 minutes long.

Helms notes from the meeting read, one in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile, worth spending, not concerned risk involved, no involvement of embassy, $10 million available, more if necessary, full-time job, best men we have, game plan, make the economy scream.

CIA knew.

Richard Helms knew.

Sidney Gottlieb, who was running it, right, was burying the documents and shredding them when they realized Congress wanted to do an investigation.

Massive amounts of documents were destroyed.

Congress is starting to ask what the spy agencies are even doing out there.

And in 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb ordered the MKUltra files to be destroyed.

Not a bonfire, a process.

Paperwork filed, boxes pulled, records, poof, gone, clean, quiet, and official.

The LSD stayed secret for more than 20 years.

You will never read the full record of MKUltra because in 1973, as the program wound down and Watergate closed in, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the files destroyed.

What the public knows came from a surviving cache of financial records and the congressional investigations of the mid-1970s.

And documents are still trickling out.