Richard Helms was a director of the CIA. John Kiriakou cites him as the figure responsible for the destruction of the MK-Ultra record.
Destroying the MK-Ultra files
Per Kiriakou, during the Church Committee era Senator Frank Church explicitly told Helms not to destroy the MK-Ultra documents. Helms returned to CIA headquarters from that meeting and ordered everything destroyed: “Senator Church told him, ‘Do not destroy the documents.’ And he went back to headquarters from that meeting and said, ‘Destroy all the documents.’”[1]
Helms was held in contempt of Congress for the destruction. The fine was roughly $100 — small enough, Kiriakou says, that “everybody was chipping in a buck, two bucks in the hallway to pay the director’s congressional fine.” In another telling, Kiriakou describes a parade of CIA employees lining the hallway to Helms’s office after the fine, each one throwing cash into a hat to help cover it.[1][2]
What survived
Because of the destruction order, only about fifteen percent of the MK-Ultra record survives — a fraction that escaped destruction only because it had been misfiled in a separate financial-records warehouse. Everything publicly known about MK-Ultra, Kiriakou says, comes from this remnant, which he characterized as “a sanitized version.”[3]