See ending notes and JFK of this book and updated facts at http://www.mireilletorjman.com and the reasons why Helms ordered docs destroyed beyond experiments 1973 and against NSA Director of the Central Intelligence has the responsibility to protect from unauthorized disclosure pursuant to section 102 (d) (3) of the National Security Act of 1947.”
(Text Box comment Released by RareReactor) Office of Research and development
Author’s Note
This book has grown out of the 16,000 pages of documents that the CIA released to me under the Freedom of Information Act. Without these documents, the best investigative reporting in the world could not have produced a book, and the secrets of CIA mind-control work would have remained buried forever, as the men who knew them had always intended. From the documentary base, I was able to expand my knowledge through interviews and readings in the behavioral sciences. Nevertheless, the final result is not the whole story of the CIA’s attack on the mind. Only a few insiders could have written that, and they choose to remain silent. I have done the best I can to make the book as accurate as possible, but I have been hampered by the refusal of most of the principal characters to be interviewed and by the CIA’s destruction in 1973 of many of the key documents.
I want to extend special thanks to the congressional sponsors of the Freedom of Information Act. I would like to think that they had my kind of research in mind when they passed into law the idea that information about the government belongs to the people, not to the bureaucrats. I am also grateful to the CIA officials who made what must have been a rather unpleasant decision to release the documents and to those in the Agency who worked on the actual mechanics of release. From my point of view, the system has worked extremely well.
I must acknowledge that the system worked almost not at all during the first six months of my three-year
Freedom of Information struggle. Then in late 1975, Joseph Petrillo and Timothy Sullivan, two skilled and energetic lawyers with the firm of Fried, Frank, Shriver, Harris and Kampelman, entered the case. I had the distinct impression that the government attorneys took me much more seriously when my requests for documents started arriving on stationery with all those prominent partners at the top. An author should not need lawyers to write a book, but I would have had great difficulty without mine. I greatly appreciate their assistance.
What an author does need is editors, a publisher, researchers, consultants, and friends, and I have been
particularly blessed with good ones. My very dear friend Taylor Branch edited the book, and I continue to be impressed with his great skill in making my ideas and language coherent. Taylor has also served as my agent, and in this capacity, too, he has done me great service.
I had a wonderful research team, without which I never could have sifted through the masses of material
and run down leads in so many places. I thank them all, and I want to acknowledge their contributions. Diane St. Clair was the mainstay of the group. She put together a system for filing and cross-indexing that worked beyond all expectations. (Special thanks to Newsday’s Bob Greene, whose suggestions for organizing a large investigation came to us through the auspices of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.) Not until a week before the book was finally finished did I fail to find a document which I needed; naturally, it was something I had misfiled myself. Diane also contributed greatly to the Cold War chapter. Richard Sokolow made similar contributions to the Mushroom and Safehouse chapters. His work was solid, and his energy boundless. Jay Peterzell delved deeply into Dr. Cameron’s “depatterning” work in Montreal and stayed with it when others might have quit. Jay also did first-rate studies of brainwashing and sensory deprivation. Jim Mintz and Ken Cummins provided excellent assistance in the early research stage. The Center for National Security Studies, under my good friend Robert Borosage, provided physical support and research aid, and I would like to express my appreciation. My thanks also to Morton Halperin who continued the support when he became director of the Center. I also appreciated the help of Penny Bevis, Hannah Delaney, Florence Oliver, Aldora Whitman, Nick Fiore, and Monica Andres.
My sister, Dr. Patricia Greenfield, did excellent work on the CIA’s interface with academia and on the
Personality Assessment System. I want to acknowledge her contribution to the book and express my thanks and love. There has been a whole galaxy of people who have provided specialized help, and I would like to thank them all: Jeff Kohan, Eddie Becker, Sam Zuckerman, Matthew Messelson, Julian Robinson, Milton Kline, Marty Lee, M. J. Conklin, Alan Scheflin, Bonnie Goldstein, Paul Avery,
Bill Mills, John Lilly, Humphrey Osmond, Julie Haggerty, Patrick Oster, Norman Kempster, Bill Richards, Paul Magnusson, Andy Sommer, Mark Cheshire, Sidney Cohen, Paul Altmeyer, Fred and Elsa Kleiner, Dr. John Cavanagh, and Senator James Abourezk and his staff.
I sent drafts of the first ten chapters to many of the people I interviewed (and several who refused to be
interviewed). My aim was to have them correct any inaccuracies or point out material taken out of context. The comments of those who responded aided me considerably in preparing the final book. My thanks for their assistance to Albert Hofmann, Telford Taylor, Leo Alexander, Walter Langer, John Stockwell, William Hood, Samuel Thompson, Sidney Cohen, Milton Greenblatt, Gordon Wasson, James Moore, Laurence Hinkle, Charles Osgood, John Gittinger (for Chapter 10 only), and all the others who asked not to be identified.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my publisher, Times Books, and especially to my editor John J. Simon. John, Tom Lipscomb, Roger Jellinek, Gyorgyi Voros, and John Gallagher all believed in this book from the beginning and provided outstanding support. Thanks also go to Judith H. McQuown, who copyedited the manuscript, and Rosalyn T. Badalamenti, Times Books’ Production Editor, who oversaw the whole production process.
John Marks
Washington, D.C. October 26, 1978
PART I
ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
World War II
On the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland, overlooking the Rhine, lies the worldwide headquarters of the Sandoz drug and chemical empire. There, on the afternoon of April 16, 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann made an extraordinary discovery—by accident.
At 37, with close-cropped hair and rimless glasses, Hofmann headed the company’s research program to develop marketable drugs out of natural products. He was hard at work in his laboratory that warm April day when a wave of dizziness suddenly overcame him. The strange sensation was not unpleasant, and Hofmann felt almost as though he were drunk.
But he became quite restless. His nerves seemed to run off in different directions. The inebriation was
unlike anything he had ever known before. Leaving work early, Hofmann managed a wobbly bicycle-ride home. He lay down and closed his eyes, still unable to shake the dizziness. Now the light of day was disagreeably bright.
With the external world shut out, his mind raced along. He experienced what he would later describe as “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness…. accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors.”
These visions subsided after a few hours, and Hofmann, ever the inquiring scientist, set out to find
what caused them. He presumed he had somehow ingested one of the drugs with which he had been working that day, and his prime suspect was d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, a substance that he himself had first produced in the same lab five years earlier. As part of his search for a circulation stimulant, Hofmann had been examining derivatives of ergot, a fungus that attacks rye.
Ergot had a mysterious, contradictory reputation. In China and some Arab countries, it was thought to have medicinal powers, but in Europe it was associated with the horrible malady from the Middle Ages called St. Anthony’s Fire, which struck periodically like the plague. The disease turned fingers and toes into blackened stumps and led to madness and death.
Hofmann guessed that he had absorbed some ergot derivative through his skin, perhaps while changing the filter paper in a suction bottle. To test his theory, he spent three days making up a fresh batch of LSD.
Cautiously he swallowed 250 micrograms (less than 1/100,000 of an ounce). Hofmann planned to take more gradually through the day to obtain a result, since no known drug had any effect on the human body in such infinitesimal amounts. He had no way of knowing that because of LSD’s potency, he had already taken several times what would later be termed an ordinary dose.
Unexpectedly, this first speck of LSD took hold after about 40 minutes, and Hofmann was off on the first self-induced “trip” of modern times.[1]
Hofmann recalls he felt “horrific… I was afraid. I feared I was becoming crazy. I had the idea I was out of my body. I thought I had died. I did not know how it would finish. If you know you will come back from this very strange world, only then can you enjoy it.” Of course, Hofmann had no way of knowing that he would return. While he had quickly recovered from his accidental trip three days earlier, he did not know how much LSD had caused it or whether the present dose was more than his body could detoxify. His mind kept veering off into an unknown dimension, but he was unable to appreciate much beyond his own terror.
Less than 200 miles from Hofmann’s laboratory, doctors connected to the S.S. and Gestapo were doing
experiments that led to the testing of mescaline (a drug which has many of the mind-changing qualities of LSD) on prisoners at Dachau. Germany’s secret policemen had the notion, completely alien to Hofmann, that they could use drugs like mescaline to bring unwilling people under their control. According to research team member Walter Neff, the goal of the Dachau experiments was “to eliminate the will of the person examined.” At Dachau, Nazis took the search for scientific knowledge of military value to its most awful extreme. There, in a closely guarded, fenced-off part of the camp, S.S. doctors studied such questions as the amount of time a downed airman could survive in the North Atlantic in February. Information of this sort was considered important to German security, since skilled pilots were
in relatively short supply. So, at Heinrich Himmler’s personal order, the doctors at Dachau simply sat by huge tubs of ice water with stopwatches and timed how long it took immersed prisoners to die. In other experiments, under the cover of “aviation medicine,” inmates were crushed to death in high-altitude pressure chambers (to learn how high pilots could safely fly), and prisoners were shot, so that special blood coagulants could be tested on their wounds. The mescaline tests at Dachau run by Dr. Kurt Plotner
were not nearly so lethal as the others in the “aviation” series, but the drug could still cause grave damage,
particularly to anyone who already had some degree of mental instability. The danger was increased by the fact that the mescaline was administered covertly by S.S. men who spiked the prisoners’ drinks. Unlike Dr. Hofmann, the subjects had no idea that a drug was causing their extreme disorientation. Many must have feared they had gone stark mad all on their own. Always, the subjects of these experiments were Jews, gypsies, Russians, and other groups on whose lives the Nazis placed little or no value. In no way were any of them true volunteers, although some may have come forward under the delusion that they would receive better treatment.
After the war, Neff told American investigators that the subjects showed a wide variety of reactions. Some became furious; others were melancholy or gay, as if they were drunk. Not surprisingly, “sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed in every case.” Neff’ noted that the drug caused certain people to reveal their “most intimate secrets.” Still, the Germans were not ready to accept mescaline as a substitute for their more physical methods of interrogation. They went on to try hypnosis in combination with the drug, but they apparently never felt confident that they had found a way to assume command of their victim’s mind.
Even as the S.S. doctors were carrying on their experiments at Dachau, the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), America’s wartime intelligence agency, set up a “truth drug” committee under Dr. Winfred Overholser, head of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington. The committee quickly tried and rejected mescaline, several barbiturates, and scopolamine. Then, during the spring of 1943, the committee decided that Cannabis indica—or marijuana—showed the most promise, and it started a testing program in cooperation with the Manhattan Project, the TOP SECRET effort to build an atomic bomb.
It is not clear why OSS turned to the bomb makers for help, except that, as one former Project official puts it, “Our secret was so great, I guess we were safer than anyone else.” Apparently, top Project leaders, who went to incredible lengths to preserve security, saw no danger in trying out drugs on their personnel.
The Manhattan Project supplied the first dozen test subjects, who were asked to swallow a concentrated,
liquid form of marijuana that an American pharmaceutical company furnished in small glass vials. A Project man who was present recalls: “It didn’t work the way we wanted.
Apparently the human system would not take it all at once orally. The subjects would lean over and vomit.” What is more, they disclosed no secrets, and one subject wound up in the hospital.
Back to the drawing board went the OSS experts. They decided that the best way to administer the marijuana was inhalation of its fumes. Attempts were made to pour the solution on burning charcoal, and an OSS officer named George White (who had already succeeded in knocking himself out with an overdose of the relatively potent substance) tried out the vapor, without sufficient effect, at St. Elizabeth’s. Finally, the OSS group discovered a delivery system which had been known for years to jazz musicians and other users: the cigarette. OSS documents reported that smoking a mix of tobacco and the marijuana essence brought on a “state of irresponsibility, causing the subject to be loquacious and free in his impartation of information.” The first field test of these marijuana-laced cigarettes took place on May 27, 1943. The subject was one August Del Gracio, who was described in OSS documents as a “notorious New York gangster.”[2] George White, an Army captain who had come to OSS from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, administered the drug by inviting Del Gracio up to his apartment for a smoke and a chat. White
had been talking to Del Gracio earlier about securing the Mafia’s cooperation to keep Axis agents out of the New York waterfront and to prepare the way for the invasion of Sicily.[3]
Del Gracio had already made it clear to White that he personally had taken part in killing informers who had squealed to the Feds. The gangster was as tough as they came, and if he could be induced to talk under the influence of a truth drug, certainly German prisoners could—or so the reasoning went. White plied him with cigarettes until “subject became high and extremely garrulous.” Over the next two hours, Del Gracio told the Federal agent about the ins and outs of the drug trade (revealing information so sensitive that the CIA deleted it from the OSS documents it released 34 years later). At one point in the conversation, after Del Gracio had begun to talk, the gangster told White, “Whatever you do, don’t ever use any of the stuff I’m telling you.” In a subsequent session, White packed the cigarettes with so much marijuana that Del Gracio became unconscious for about an hour. Yet, on the whole the experiment was
considered a success in “loosening the subject’s tongue.”
While members of the truth-drug committee never believed that the concentrated marijuana could compel a person to confess his deepest secrets, they authorized White to push ahead with the testing. On the next stage, he and a Manhattan Project counterintelligence man borrowed 15 to 18 thick dossiers from the FBI and went off to try the marijuana on suspected Communist soldiers stationed in military camps outside Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans. According to White’s Manhattan Project sidekick, a Harvard Law graduate and future judge, they worked out a standard interrogation technique: Before we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes, remove them from the bottom of the pack, use a hypodermic needle to put in the fluid, and leave the cigarettes in a shot glass to dry. Then, we resealed the pack…. We sat down with a particular soldier and tried to win his confidence. We would say something like “This is better than being overseas and getting shot at,” and we would try to break them. We started asking questions from their [FBI] folder, and we would let them see that we had the folder on them… We had a pitcher of ice water on the table, and we knew the drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass. The stuff actually worked…. Everyone but one—and he didn’t smoke—gave us more information than we had before.
The Manhattan Project lawyer remembers this swing through the South with George White as a “good time.” The two men ate in the best restaurants and took in all the sights. “George was quite a guy,” he says. “At the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans after we had interviewed our men, we were lying on the beds when George took out his pistol and shot his initials into the molding that ran along the ceiling. He used his.22 automatic, equipped with a silencer, and he emptied several clips.” Asked if he tried out the truth drug himself, the lawyer says, “Yes. The cigarettes gave you a feeling of walking a couple of feet off the floor. I had a pleasant sensation of well-being. … The fellows from my office wouldn’t take a cigarette from me for the rest of the war.”
Since World War II, the United States government, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, has searched secretly for ways to control human behavior. This book is about that search, which had its origins in World War II. The CIA programs were not only an extension of the OSS quest for a truth drug, but they also echoed such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau and Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD.
By probing the inner reaches of consciousness, Hofmann’s research took him to the very frontiers of
knowledge. As never before in history, the warring powers sought ideas from scientists capable of reaching those frontiers—ideas that could make the difference between victory and defeat. While Hofmann himself remained aloof, in the Swiss tradition, other scientists, like Albert Einstein, helped turned the abstractions of the laboratory into incredibly destructive weapons. Jules Verne’s notions of spaceships touching the moon stopped being absurd when Wernher von Braun’s rockets started pounding London. With their creations, the scientists reached beyond the speculations of science fiction. Never
before had their discoveries been so breathtaking and so frightening. Albert Hofmann’s work touched upon the fantasies of the mind—accessible, in ancient legends, to witches and wizards who used spells and potions to bring people under their sway. In the early scientific age, the dream of controlling the brain took on a modern form in Mary Shelley’s creation, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. The dream would be updated again during the Cold War era to become the Manchurian Candidate, the assassin whose mind
was controlled by a hostile government.[4] Who could say for certain that such a fantasy would not be turned into a reality like Verne’s rocket stories or Einstein’s calculations? And who should be surprised to learn that government agencies—specifically the CIA—would swoop down on Albert Hofmann’s lab in an effort to harness the power over the mind that LSD seemed to hold?
From the Dachau experiments came the cruelty that man was capable of heaping upon his fellows in the name of advancing science and helping his country gain advantage in war. To say that the Dachau experiments are object lessons of how far people can stretch ends to justify means is to belittle by cliché what occurred in the concentration camps. Nothing the CIA ever did in its postwar search for mind-control technology came close to the callous killing of the Nazi “aviation research.”
Nevertheless, in their attempts to find ways to manipulate people, Agency officials and their agents
crossed many of the same ethical barriers. They experimented with dangerous and unknown techniques
on people who had no idea what was happening. They systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects, and, like the Germans, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose existence they considered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than their own. Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA sponsors picked for subjects their own equivalents of the Nazis’ Jews and gypsies: mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic groups.
In the postwar era, American officials straddled the ethical and the cutthroat approaches to scientific
research. After an Allied tribunal had convicted the first echelon of surviving Nazi war criminals—the Görings and Speers—American prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with “crimes against humanity” at a second Nuremberg trial. None of the German scientists expressed remorse. Most claimed that someone else had carried out the vilest experiments. All said that issues of moral and personal responsibility are moot in state-sponsored research. What is critical, testified Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, is “whether the experiment is important or unimportant.” Asked his attitude toward killing human beings in the course of medical research, Brandt replied, “Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives?” The judges at Nuremberg rejected such defenses and put forth what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code on scientific research.[5] Its main points were simple: Researchers must obtain full voluntary consent from all
subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for the good of society that can be obtained in no other way; researchers should not conduct tests where death or serious injury might occur, “except, perhaps” when the supervising doctors also serve as subjects. The judges— all Americans— sentenced seven of the Germans, including Dr. Brandt, to death by hanging. Nine others received long prison sentences. Thus, the U.S. government put its full moral force behind the idea that there were limits on what scientists could do to human subjects, even when a country’s security was thought to hang in the balance.
The Nuremberg Code has remained official American policy ever since 1946, but, even before the verdicts were in, special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value. The report of one such team found that while part of the data was “inaccurate,” some of the conclusions, if confirmed, would be “an important complement to existing knowledge.” Military authorities sent the records, including a description of the mescaline and hypnosis experiments, back to the United States. None of the German mind-control research was ever made public.
Immediately after the war, large political currents began to shift in the world, as they always do. Allies
became enemies and enemies became allies. Other changes were fresh and yet old. In the United States, the new Cold War against communism carried with it a piercing sense of fear and a sweeping sense of mission—at least as far as American leaders were concerned. Out of these feelings and out of that overriding American faith in advancing technology came the CIA’s attempts to tame hostile minds and make spy fantasies real. Experiments went forward and the CIA’s scientists—bitten, sometimes obsessed—kept going back to their laboratories for one last adjustment. Some theories were crushed, while others emerged in unexpected ways that would have a greater impact outside the CIA than in the world of covert operations. Only one aspect remained constant during the quarter-century of active research: The CIA’s interest in controlling the human mind had to remain absolutely secret.
World War II provided more than the grand themes of the CIA’s behavioral programs. It also became the
formative life experience of the principal CIA officials and, indeed, of the CIA itself as an institution. The
secret derring-do of the OSS was new to the United States, and the ways of the OSS would grow into the ways of the CIA. OSS leaders would have their counterparts later in the Agency. CIA officials tended to have known the OSS men, to think like them, to copy their methods, and even, in some cases, to be the same people. When Agency officials wanted to launch their massive effort for mind control, for instance, they got out the old OSS documents and went about their goal in many of the same ways the OSS had. OSS leaders enlisted outside scientists; Agency officials also went to the most prestigious ones in academia and industry, soliciting aid for the good of the country. They even approached the same George White who had shot his initials in the hotel ceiling while on OSS assignment.
Years later, White’s escapades with OSS and CIA would carry with them a humor clearly unintended at the time. To those directly involved, influencing human behavior was a deadly serious business, but qualities like bumbling and pure craziness shine through in hindsight. In the CIA’s campaign, some of America’s most distinguished behavioral scientists would stick all kinds of drugs and wires into their experimental subjects—often dismissing the obviously harmful effects with theories reminiscent of the learned nineteenth-century physicians who bled their patients with leeches and belittled the ignorance of anyone who questioned the technique. If the schemes of these scientists to control the mind had met
with more success, they would be much less amusing. But so far, at least, the human spirit has apparently kept winning. That—if anything—is the saving grace of the mind-control campaign.
World War II signaled the end of American isolation and innocence, and the United States found it had a huge gap to close, with its enemies and allies alike, in applying underhanded tactics to war. Unlike Britain, which for hundreds of years had used covert operations to hold her empire together, the United States had no tradition of using subversion as a secret instrument of government policy. The Germans, the French, the Russians, and nearly everyone else had long been involved in this game, although no one seemed as good at it as the British.
Clandestine lobbying by British agents in the United States led directly to President Franklin Roosevelt’s
creation of the organization that became OSS in 1942. This was the first American agency set up to wage secret, unlimited war. Roosevelt placed it under the command of a Wall Street lawyer and World War I military hero, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. A burly, vigorous Republican millionaire with great intellectual curiosity, Donovan started as White House intelligence adviser even before Pearl Harbor, and he had direct access to the President.
Learning at the feet of the British who made available their expertise, if not all their secrets, Donovan put together an organization where nothing had existed before. A Columbia College and Columbia Law
graduate himself, he tended to turn to the gentlemanly preserves of the Eastern establishment for recruits. (The initials OSS were said to stand for “Oh So Social.”) Friends—or friends of friends—could be trusted. “Old boys” were the stalwarts of the British secret service, and, as with most other aspects of OSS, the Americans followed suit.
One of Donovan’s new recruits was Richard Helms, a young newspaper executive then best known for having gained an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1936 while working for United Press. Having gone to Le Rosey, the same Swiss prep school as the Shah of Iran, and then on to clubby Williams College Helms moved easily among the young OSS men. He was already more taciturn than the jovial Donovan, but he was equally ambitious and skilled as a judge of character. For Helms, OSS spywork began a lifelong career. He would become the most important sponsor of mind-control research within the CIA, nurturing and promoting it throughout his steady climb to the top position in the Agency.
Like every major wartime official from President Roosevelt down, General Donovan believed that World War II was in large measure a battle of science and organization. The idea was to mobilize science for
defense, and the Roosevelt administration set up a costly, intertwining network of research programs to deal with everything from splitting the atom to preventing mental breakdowns in combat. Donovan named Boston industrialist Stanley Lovell to head OSS Research and Development and to be the secret agency’s liaison with the government scientific community.
A Cornell graduate and a self-described “saucepan chemist,” Lovell was a confident energetic man with a
particular knack for coming up with offbeat ideas and selling them to others Like most of his generation, he was an outspoken patriot. He wrote in his diary shortly after Pearl Harbor: “As James Hilton said, ‘Once at war, to reason is treason.’ My job is clear—to do all that is in me to help America.”
General Donovan minced no words in laying out what he expected of Lovell: “I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and Japanese—by our own people—but especially by the underground resistance programs in all the occupied countries. You’ll have to invent them all, Lovell, because you’re going to be my man.” Thus Lovell recalled his marching orders from Donovan, which he instantly received on being introduced to the blustery, hyperactive OSS chief. Lovell had never met anyone with Donovan’s personal magnetism.
Lovell quickly turned to some of the leading lights in the academic and private sectors. A special group— called Division 19—within James Conant’s National Defense Research Committee was set up to produce “miscellaneous weapons” for OSS and British intelligence. Lovell’s strategy, he later wrote, was “to stimulate the Peck’s Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him, ‘Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here’s a chance to raise merry hell.'”
Dr. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist who worked on explosives research during the war (and who became science adviser to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy) remembers Stanley Lovell well: “Stan came to us and asked us to develop ways for camouflaging explosives which could be smuggled into enemy countries.” Kistiakowsky and an associate came up with a substance which was dubbed “Aunt Jemima” because it looked and tasted like pancake mix. Says Kistiakowsky: “You could bake bread or other things out of it. I personally took it to a high-level meeting at the War Department and ate cookies in front of all those characters to show them what a wonderful invention it was. All you had to do was attach a powerful detonator, and it exploded with the force of dynamite.” Thus disguised, “Aunt Jemima” could
be slipped into occupied lands. It was credited with blowing up at least one major bridge in China.
Lovell encouraged OSS behavioral scientists to find something that would offend Japanese cultural
sensibilities. His staff anthropologists reported back that nothing was so shameful to the Japanese soldier as his bowel movements. Lovell then had the chemists work up a skatole compound which duplicated the odor of diarrhea. It was loaded into collapsible tubes, flown to China, and distributed to children in enemy-occupied cities. When a Japanese officer appeared on a crowded street, the kids were encouraged to slip up behind him and squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. Lovell named the product “Who? Me?” and he credited it with costing the Japanese “face.”
Unlike most weapons, “Who? Me?” was not designed to kill or maim. It was a “harassment substance” designed to lower the morale of individual Japanese. The inspiration came from academicians who tried to make a science of human behavior. During World War II, the behavioral
sciences were still very much in their infancy, but OSS— well before most of the outside world—recognized their potential in warfare. Psychology and psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology all seemed to offer insights that could be exploited to manipulate the enemy.
General Donovan himself believed that the techniques of psychoanalysis might be turned on Adolf Hitler to get a better idea of “the things that made him tick,” as Donovan put it. Donovan gave the job of being the Fuhrer’s analyst to Walter Langer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts psychoanalyst whose older brother William had taken leave from a chair of history at Harvard to head OSS Research and Analysis.[6] Langer protested that a study of Hitler based on available data would be highly uncertain and that conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic methods could not be used without direct access to the patient. Donovan was not the sort to be deterred by such details. He told Langer to go ahead anyway.
With the help of a small research staff, Langer looked through everything he could find on Hitler and
interviewed a number of people who had know the German leader. Aware of the severe limitations on his
information, but left no choice by General Donovan, Langer plowed ahead and wrote up a final study. It pegged Hitler as a “neurotic psychopath” and proceeded to pick apart the Führer’s psyche. Langer, since retired to Florida, believes he came “pretty close” to describing the real Adolf Hitler. He is particularly proud of his predictions that the Nazi leader would become increasingly disturbed as Germany suffered more and more defeats and that he would commit suicide rather than face capture.
One reason for psychoanalyzing Hitler was to uncover vulnerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Stanley Lovell seized upon one of Langer’s ideas—that Hitler might have feminine tendencies—and got permission from the OSS hierarchy to see if he could push the Führer over the gender line.[7] “The hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano,” Lovell wrote. Lovell used OSS’s agent network to try to slip female sex hormones into Hitler’s food, but nothing apparently came of it. Nor was there ever any payoff to other Lovell schemes to blind Hitler permanently with mustard gas or to use a drug to exacerbate his suspected epilepsy. The main problem in these operations—all of which were tried—was to get Hitler to take the medicine. Failure of the delivery schemes also kept Hitler alive—
OSS was simultaneously trying to poison him.[8]
Without question, murdering a man was a decisive way to influence his behavior, and OSS scientists developed an arsenal of chemical and biological poisons that included the incredibly potent botulinus toxin, whose delivery system was a gelatin capsule smaller than the head of a pin. Lovell and his associates also realized there were less drastic ways to manipulate an enemy’s behavior, and they came up with a line of products to cause sickness, itching, baldness, diarrhea, and/or the odor thereof. They had less success finding a drug to compel truth telling, but it was not for lack of trying.
Chemical and biological substances had been used in wartime long before OSS came on the scene. Both sides had used poison gas in World War I; during the early part of World War II, the Japanese had dropped deadly germs on China and caused epidemics; and throughout the war, the Allies and Axis powers alike had built up chemical and biological warfare (CBW) stockpiles, whose main function
turned out, in the end, to be deterring the other side. Military men tended to look on CBW as a way of destroying whole armies and even populations. Like the world’s other secret services, OSS individualized CBW and made it into a way of selectively but secretly embarrassing, disorienting, incapacitating, injuring, or killing an enemy.
As diversified as were Lovell’s scientific duties for OSS, they were narrow in comparison with those of his main counterpart in the CIA’s postwar mind-control program, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb would preside over investigations that ranged from advanced research in amnesia by electroshock to dragnet searches through the jungles of Latin America for toxic leaves and barks. Fully in the tradition of making Hitler moustacheless, Gottlieb’s office would devise a scheme to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out; like Lovell, Gottlieb would personally provide operators with deadly poisons to assassinate foreign leaders like the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and he would be equally at ease discussing possible applications of new research in neurology. On a much greater scale than Lovell’s, Gottlieb would track down every conceivable gimmick that might give one person leverage over another’s mind. Gottlieb would preside over arcane fields from handwriting analysis to stress creation, and he would rise through the Agency along with his bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms.
Early in the war, General Donovan got another idea from the British, whose psychologists and psychiatrists had devised a testing program to predict the performance of military officers. Donovan thought such a program might help OSS sort through the masses of recruits who were being rushed through training. To create an assessment system for Americans, Donovan called in Harvard psychology professor Henry “Harry” Murray. In 1938 Murray had written Explorations of Personality, a notable book which laid out a whole battery of tests that could be used to size up the personalities of individuals. “Spying is attractive to loonies,” states Murray. “Psychopaths, who are people who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field.” The program’s prime objective, according to Murray, was keeping out the crazies, as well as the “sloths, irritants, bad actors, and free talkers.”
Always in a hurry, Donovan gave Murray and a distinguished group of colleagues only 15 days until the
first candidates arrived to be assessed. In the interim, they took over a spacious estate outside Washington as their headquarters. In a series of hurried meetings, they put together an assessment system that combined German and British methods with Murray’s earlier research. It tested a recruit’s ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person’s character by the nature of his clothing.
More than 30 years after the war, Murray remains modest in his claims for the assessment system, saying
that it was only an aid in weeding out the “horrors” among OSS candidates. Nevertheless, the secret agency’s leaders believed in its results, and Murray’s system became a fixture in OSS, testing Americans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray’s young behavioral scientists, like John Gardner,[9] would go on to become prominent in public affairs, and, more importantly, the OSS assessment program would be recognized as a milestone in American psychology. It was the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual’s personality in order to predict his future behavior. After the war, personality assessment would become a new field in itself, and some of Murray’s assistants would go on to establish OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting with AT&T. They also would set up study programs at universities, beginning with the University of California at Berkeley.[10] As would happen repeatedly with the CIA’s mind-control research, OSS was years ahead of public developments in behavioral theory and application.
In the postwar years, Murray would be superseded by a young Oklahoma psychologist John Gittinger, who would rise in the CIA on the strength of his ideas about how to make a hard science out of personality assessment and how to use it to manipulate people. Gittinger would build an office within CIA that refined both Murray’s assessment function and Walter Langer’s indirect analysis of foreign leaders. Gittinger’s methods would become an integral part of everyday Agency operations, and he would become Sid Gottlieb’s protégé.
Stanley Lovell reasoned that a good way to kill Hitler—and the OSS man was always looking for ideas—would be to hypnotically control a German prisoner to hate the Gestapo and the Nazi regime and then to give the subject a hypnotic suggestion to assassinate the Führer. The OSS candidate would be let loose in Germany where he would take the desired action, “being under a compulsion that might not be denied,” as Lovell wrote.
Lovell sought advice on whether this scheme would work from New York psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie and from the famed Menninger brothers, Karl and William. The Menningers reported that the weight of the evidence showed hypnotism to be incapable of making people do anything that they would not otherwise do. Equally negative, Dr. Kubie added that if a German prisoner had a logical reason to kill Hitler or anyone else, he would not need hypnotism to motivate him.
Lovell and his coworkers apparently accepted this skeptical view of hypnosis, as did the overwhelming
majority of psychologists and psychiatrists in the country. At the time, hypnosis was considered a fringe activity, and there was little recognition of either its validity or its usefulness for any purpose—let alone covert operations. Yet there were a handful of serious experimenters in the field who believed in its military potential. The most vocal partisan of this view was the head of the Psychology Department at Colgate University, George “Esty” Estabrooks. Since the early 1930s, Estabrooks had periodically ventured out from his sleepy upstate campus to advise the military on applications of hypnotism.
Estabrooks acknowledged that hypnosis did not work on everyone and that only one person in five made a good enough subject to be placed in a deep trance, or state of somnambulism. He believed that only these subjects could be induced to such things against their apparent will as reveal secrets or commit crimes. He had watched respected members of the community make fools of themselves in the hands of stage hypnotists, and he had compelled his own students to reveal fraternity secrets and the details of private love affairs—all of which the subjects presumably did not want to do.
Still his experience was limited. Estabrooks realized that the only certain way to know whether a person would commit a crime like murder under hypnosis was to have the person kill someone. Unwilling to settle the issue on his own by trying the experiment, he felt that government sanction of the process would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility. “Any ‘accidents’ that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged to profit and loss,” he wrote, “a very trifling portion of that enormous wastage in human life which is part and parcel of war.”
After Pearl Harbor, Estabrooks offered his ideas to OSS, but they were not accepted by anyone in government willing to carry them to their logical conclusion. He was reduced to writing books about the potential use of hypnotism in warfare. Cassandra-like, he tried to warn America of the perils posed by hypnotic control. His 1945 novel, Death in the Mind, concerned a series of seemingly treasonable acts committed by Allied personnel: an American submarine captain torpedoes one of our own battleships, and the beautiful heroine starts acting in an irrational way which serves the enemy. After a perilous investigation, secret agent Johnny Evans learns that the Germans have been hypnotizing Allied personnel and conditioning them to obey Nazi commands. Evans and his cohorts, shaken by the many ways hypnotism can be used against them, set up elaborate countermeasures and then cannot resist going on the offensive. Objections are heard from the heroine, who by this time has been brutally and rather graphically tortured. She complains that “doing things to people’s minds” is “a loathsome way to fight.” Her qualms are brushed aside by Johnny Evans, her lover and boss. He sets off after the Germans—”to
tamper with their minds; Make them traitors; Make them work for us.”
In the aftermath of the war, as the U.S. national security apparatus was being constructed, the leaders of
the Central Intelligence Agency would adopt Johnny Evans’ mission—almost in those very words. Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, and many others would undertake a far-flung and complicated assault on the human mind. In hypnosis and many other fields, scientists even more eager than George Estabrooks would seek CIA approval for the kinds of experiments they would not dare perform on their own. Sometimes the Agency men concurred; on other occasions, they reserved such experiments for themselves. They would tamper with many minds and inevitably cause some to be damaged. In the end, they would minimize and hide their deeds, and they would live to see doubts raised about the health of their own minds.
Notes
The information on Albert Hofmann’s first LSD trip and background on LSD came from an interview by the author with Hofmann, a paper by Hofmann called “The Discovery of LSD and Subsequent investigations on Naturally Occurring Hallucinogens,” another interview with Hofmann by Michael Horowitz printed in the June 1976 High Times magazine, and from a CIA document on LSD produced by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, August 30, 1955, titled “The Strategic Medical Significance of LSD-25.” Information on the German mescaline and hypnosis experiments at Dachau came from “Technical Report no. 331-45, German Aviation Research at the Dachau Concentration Camp,” October, 1945, US Naval Technical Mission in Europe, found in the papers of Dr. Henry Beecher. Additional information came from Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Tribunal, the book Doctors of Infamy by Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke (New York: H. Schuman, 1949), interviews with prosecution team members Telford Taylor, Leo Alexander, and James McHaney, and an article by Dr. Leo Alexander, “Sociopsychologic Structure of the SS,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, May, 1948, Vol. 59, pp. 622-34.
The OSS experience in testing marijuana was described in interviews with several former Manhattan Project counterintelligence men, an OSS document dated June 21, 1943, Subject: Development of “truth drug,” given the CIA identification number A/B, I, 12/1; from document A/B, I, 64/34, undated, Subject: Memorandum Relative to the use of truth drug in interrogation; document dated June 2, 1943, Subject: Memorandum on T. D. A “confidential memorandum,” dated April 4, 1954, found in the papers of George White, also was helpful. The quote on US prisoners passing through Manchuria came from document 19, 18 June 1953, Subject: ARTICHOKE Conference.
The information on Stanley Lovell came from his book, Of Spies and Strategems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1963), from interviews with his son Richard, a perusal of his remaining papers, interviews
with George Kistiakowsky and several OSS veterans, and from “Science in World War II, the Office of Scientific Research and Development” in Chemistry: A History of the Chemistry Components of the National Defense Research Committee, edited by W. A. Noyes, Jr. (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1948).
Dr. Walter Langer provided information about his psychoanalytic portrait of Hitler, as did his book, The
Mind of Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1972). Dr. Henry Murray also gave an interview, as did several OSS men who had been through his assessment course. Murray’s work is described at length in a book published after the war by the OSS Assessment staff, Assessment of Men (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1948).
Material on George Estabrooks came from his books, Hypnotism (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1945) and Death in the Mind, co-authored with Richard Lockridge (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1945), and interviews with his daughter, Doreen Estabrooks Michl, former colleagues, and Dr. Milton Kline.
Footnotes
1. While Hofmann specifically used the word “trip” in a 1977 interview to describe his consciousness-altering experience, the word obviously had no such meaning in 1943 and is used here anachronistically.
2. Del Gracio’s name was deleted by the CIA from the OSS document that described the incident, but his identity was learned from the papers of George White, whose widow donated them to Foothills College in Los Altos, California. CIA officials cut virtually all the names from the roughly 16,000 pages of its own papers and the few score pages from OSS that it released to me under the Freedom of Information Act. However, as in this case, many of the names could be found through collateral sources.
3. Naval intelligence officers eventually made a deal in which mob leaders promised to cooperate, and as a direct result, New York Governor Thomas Dewey ordered Del Gracio’s chief, boss of bosses, Charles “Lucky” Luciano freed from jail in 1946.
4. The term “Manchurian Candidate” came into the language in 1959 when author Richard Condon made it the title of his best-selling novel that later became a popular movie starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. The story was about a joint Soviet-Chinese plot to take an American soldier captured in Korea, condition him at a special brainwashing center located in Manchuria, and create a remote-controlled assassin who was supposed to kill the President of the United States. Condon consulted with a wide variety of experts while researching the book, and some inside sources may well have filled him in on the gist of a discussion that took place at a 1953 meeting at the CIA on behavior control. Said one participant, “… individuals who had come out of North Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom recently apparently had a blank period of disorientation while passing through a special zone in Manchuria.” The CIA and military men at this session promised to seek more information, but the matter never came up again in either the documents released by the Agency or in the interviews done for this book.
5. The Code was suggested in essentially its final form by prosecution team consultant, Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist.
6. Four months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan had enlisted Walter Langer to put together a nationwide
network of analysts to study the morale of the country’s young men, who, it was widely feared, were not
enthusiastic about fighting a foreign war. Pearl Harbor seemed to solve this morale problem, but Langer stayed with Donovan as a part-time psychoanalytic consultant.
7. Langer wrote that Hitler was “masochistic in the extreme inasmuch as he derives sexual pleasure from
punishment inflicted on his own body. There is every reason to suppose that during his early years, instead of identifying himself with his father as most boys do, he identified with his mother. This was perhaps easier for him than for most boys since, as we have seen, there is a large feminine component in his physical makeup…. His extreme sentimentality, his emotionality, his occasional softness, and his weeping, even after he became Chancellor, may be regarded as manifestations of a fundamental pattern that undoubtedly had its origin in his relationship to his mother.”
8. Although historians have long known that OSS men had been in touch with the German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, the fact that OSS independently was trying to murder him has eluded
scholars of the period. Stanley Lovell gave away the secret in his 1963 book, Of Spies and Strategems, but he used such casual and obscure words that the researchers apparently did not notice. Lovell wrote: “I supplied now and then a carbamate or other quietus medication, all to be injected into der Führer’s carrots, beets, or whatever.” A “quietus medicine” is a generic term for a lethal poison, of which carbamates are one type.
9. Gardner, a psychologist teaching at Mount Holyoke College, helped Murray set up the original program and went on to open the West Coast OSS assessment site at a converted beach club in San Juan Capistrano. After the war, he would become Secretary of HEW in the Johnson administration and founder of Common Cause.
10. Murray is not at all enthusiastic with the spinoffs. “Some of the things done with it turn your
stomach,” he declares.
CIA officials started preliminary work on drugs and hypnosis shortly after the Agency’s creation in 1947, but the behavior-control program did not really get going until the Hungarian government put Josef Cardinal Mindszenty on trial in 1949. With a glazed look in his eyes, Mindszenty confessed to crimes of treason he apparently did not commit. His performance recalled the Moscow purge trials of 1937 and 1938 at which tough and dedicated party apparatchiks had meekly pleaded guilty to long series of improbable offenses. These and a string of postwar trials in other Eastern European countries seemed staged, eerie, and unreal. CIA men felt they had to know how the Communists had rendered the defendants zombielike. In the Mindszenty case, a CIA Security Memorandum declared that “some unknown force” had controlled the Cardinal, and the memo speculated that the communist authorities had used hypnosis on him. In the summer of 1949, the Agency’s head of Scientific Intelligence made a special trip to Western Europe to find out more about what the Soviets were doing and “to apply special methods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian practices.” In other words, fearful that the communists might have used drugs and hypnosis on prisoners, a senior CIA official used exactly the same techniques on refugees and returned prisoners from Eastern Europe. On returning to the United States, this official recommended two courses of action: first, that the Agency consider setting up an escape
operation to free Mindszenty; and second, that the CIA train and send to Europe a team skilled in special”
interrogation methods of the type he had tried out in Europe.
By the spring of 1950, several other CIA branches were contemplating the operational use of hypnosis. The Office of Security, whose main job was to protect Agency personnel and facilities from enemy penetration, moved to centralize all activity in this and other behavioral fields. The Security chief, Sheffield Edwards, a former army colonel who a decade later would personally handle joint CIA-Mafia operations, took the initiative by calling a meeting of all interested Agency parties and proposing that interrogation teams be formed under Security’s command. Security would use the teams to check out agents and defectors for the whole CIA. Each team would consist of a psychiatrist, a polygraph (lie detector) expert trained in hypnosis, and a technician. Edwards agreed not to use the teams operationally without the permission of a high-level committee. He called the project BLUEBIRD, a code name which, like all Agency names, had no significance except perhaps to the person who chose it. Edwards classified the program TOP SECRET and stressed the extraordinary need for secrecy. On April 20, 1950, CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter approved BLUEBIRD and authorized the use of unvouchered funds to pay for its most sensitive areas. The CIA’s behavior-control program now had a bureaucratic structure.
The chief of Scientific Intelligence attended the original BLUEBIRD meeting in Sheffield Edwards’ office
and assured those present that his office would keep trying to gather all possible data on foreign—
particularly Russian—efforts in the behavioral field. Not long afterward, his representative arranged to inspect the Nuremberg Tribunal records to see if they contained anything useful to BLUEBIRD. According to a CIA psychologist who looked over the German research, the Agency did not find much of specific help. “It was a real horror story, but we learned what human beings were capable of,” he recalls. “There were some experiments on pain, but they were so mixed up with sadism as not to be useful…. How the victim coped was very interesting.”
At the beginning, at least, there was cooperation between the scientists and the interrogators in the CIA.
Researchers from Security (who had no special expertise but who were experienced in police work) and researchers from Scientific Intelligence (who lacked operational background but who had academic training) pored jointly over all the open literature and secret reports. They quickly realized that the only way to build an effective defense against mind control was to understand its offensive possibilities. The line between offense and defense—if it ever existed—soon became so blurred as to be meaningless. Nearly every Agency document stressed goals like “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” On reading one such memo, an Agency officer wrote to his boss: “If this is supposed to be covered up as a
defensive feasibility study, it’s pretty damn transparent.”
Three months after the Director approved BLUEBIRD, the first team traveled to Japan to try out behavioral techniques on human subjects—probably suspected double agents. The three men arrived in Tokyo in July 1950, about a month after the start of the Korean War. No one needed to impress upon them the importance of their mission. The Security Office ordered them to conceal their true purpose from even the U.S. military authorities with whom they worked in Japan, using the cover that they would be performing “intensive polygraph” work. In stifling, debilitating heat and humidity, they tried out combinations of the depressant sodium amytal with the stimulant benzedrine on each of four subjects,
the last two of whom also received a second stimulant, picrotoxin. They also tried to induce amnesia. The team considered the tests successful, but the CIA documents available on the trip give only the sketchiest outline of what happened.[1] Then around October 1950, the BLUEBIRD team used “advanced” techniques on 25 subjects, apparently North Korean prisoners of war.
By the end of that year, a Security operator, Morse Allen, had become the head of the BLUEBIRD program. Forty years old at the time, Allen had spent most of his earlier career rooting out the domestic communist threat, starting in the late 1930s when he had joined the Civil Service Commision and set up its first security files on communists. (“He knows their methods,” wrote a CIA colleague.) During World War II, Allen had served with Naval intelligence, first pursuing leftists in New York and then landing with the Marines on Okinawa. After the war, he went to the State Department, only to leave in the late 1940s because he felt the Department was whitewashing certain communist cases. He soon joined the
CIA’s Office of Security. A suspicious man by inclination and training, Allen took nothing at face value. Like all counterintelligence or security operators, his job was to show why things are not what they seem to be. He was always thinking ahead and behind, punching holes in surface realities. Allen had no academic training for behavioral research (although he did take a short course in hypnotism, a subject that fascinated him). He saw the BLUEBIRD job as one that called for studying every last method the communists might use against the United States and figuring out ways to counter them.
The CIA had schooled Morse Allen in one field which in the CIA’s early days became an important part of covert operations: the use of the polygraph. Probably more than any intelligence service in the world, the Agency developed the habit of strapping its foreign agents—and eventually, its own employees— into the “box.” The polygraph measures physiological changes that might show lying—heartbeat, blood pressure, perspiration, and the like. It has never been foolproof. In 1949 the Office of Security estimated that it worked successfully on seven out of eight cases, a very high fraction but not one high enough for those in search of certainty. A psychopathic liar, a hypnotized person, or a specially trained professional can “beat” the machine. Moreover, the skill of the person running the polygraph and asking the questions determines how well the device will work. “A good operator can make brilliant use of the polygraph
without plugging it in,” claims one veteran CIA case officer. Others maintain only somewhat less extravagantly that its chief value is to deter agents tempted to switch loyalties or reveal secrets. The power of the machine— real and imagined—to detect infidelity and dishonesty can be an intimidating factor.[2] Nevertheless, the polygraph cannot compel truth. Like Pinocchio’s nose, it only indicates lying. In addition, the machine requires enough physical control over the subject to strap him in. For years, the CIA tried to overcome this limitation by developing a “super” polygraph that could be aimed from afar or concealed in a chair. In this field, as in many others, no behavior control scheme was too farfetched to investigate, and Agency scientists did make some progress.
In December 1950, Morse Allen told his boss, Paul Gaynor, a retired brigadier general with a long
background in counterintelligence and interrogation that he had heard of experiments with an “electro-sleep” machine in a Richmond, Virginia hospital. Such an invention appealed to Allen because it supposedly put people to sleep without shock or convulsions. The BLUEBIRD team had been using drugs to bring on a state similar to a hypnotic trance, and Allen hoped this machine would allow an operator to put people into deep sleep without having to resort to chemicals. In theory, all an operator had to do was to attach the electrode-tipped wires to the subject’s head and let the machine do the rest. It cost about $250 and was about twice the size of a table-model dictating machine. “Although it would not be feasible to use it on any of our own people because there is at least a theoretical danger of temporary brain damage,” Morse Allen wrote, “it would possibly be of value in certain areas in connection with POW interrogation or on individuals of interest to this Agency.” The machine never worked well enough to get into the testing stage for the CIA.
At the end of 1951, Allen talked to a famed psychiatrist (whose name, like most of the others, the CIA has deleted from the documents released) about a gruesome but more practical technique. This psychiatrist, a cleared Agency consultant, reported that electroshock treatments could produce amnesia for varying lengths of time and that he had been able to obtain information from patients as they came out of the stupor that followed shock treatments. He also reported that a lower setting of the Reiter electroshock machine produced an “excruciating pain” that, while nontherapeutic, could be effective as “a third degree method” to make someone talk. Morse Allen asked if the psychiatrist had ever taken advantage of the “groggy” period that followed normal electroshock to gain hypnotic control of his patients. No, replied the psychiatrist, but he would try it in the near future and report back to the Agency. The psychiatrist also mentioned that continued electroshock treatments could gradually reduce a subject to the “vegetable level,” and that these treatments could not be detected unless the subject was given EEG tests within two weeks. At the end of a memo laying out this information, Allen noted that portable, battery-driven electroshock machines had come on the market.
Shortly after this Morse Allen report, the Office of Scientific Intelligence recommended that this same
psychiatrist be given $100,000 in research funds “to develop electric shock and hypnotic techniques.” While Allen thought this subject worth pursuing, he had some qualms about the ultimate application of the shock treatments: “The objections would, of course, apply to the use of electroshock if the end result was creation of a ‘vegetable.’ [I] believe that these techniques should not be considered except in gravest emergencies, and neutralization by confinement and/or removal from the area would be far more appropriate and certainly safer.”
In 1952 the Office of Scientific Intelligence proposed giving another private doctor $100,000 to
develop BLUEBIRD-related “neurosurgical techniques”— presumably lobotomy-connected.[3] Similarly, the Security office planned to use outside consultants to find out about such techniques as ultrasonics, vibrations, concussions, high and low pressure, the uses of various gases in airtight chambers, diet variations, caffeine, fatigue, radiation, heat and cold, and changing light. Agency officials looked into all these areas and many others. Some they studied intensively; others they merely discussed with consultants.
The BLUEBIRD mind-control program began when Stalin was still alive, when the memory of Hitler was fresh, and the terrifying prospect of global nuclear war was just sinking into popular consciousness. The Soviet Union had subjugated most of Eastern Europe, and a Communist party had taken control over the world’s most populous nation, China. War had broken out in Korea, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was on the rise in the United States. In both foreign and domestic politics, the prevailing mood was one of fear even paranoia.
American officials have pointed to the Cold War atmosphere ever since as an excuse for crimes and
excesses committed then and afterward. One recurring litany in national security investigations has been the testimony of the exposed official citing Cold War hysteria to justify an act that he or she would not otherwise defend. The apprehensions of the Cold War do not provide a moral or legal shield for such acts, but they do help explain them. Even when the apprehensions were not well founded, they were no less real to the people involved.
It was also a time when the United States had achieved a new preeminence in the world. After World War
II, American officials wielded the kind of power that diplomats frequently dream of. They established new alliances, new rulers, and even new nations to suit their purposes. They dispensed guns, favors, and aid to scores of nations. Consequently, American officials were noticed, respected, and pampered wherever they went—as never before. Their new sense of importance and their Cold War fears often made a dangerous combination—it is a fact of human nature that anyone who is both puffed up and afraid is someone to watch out for.
In 1947 the National Security Act created not only the CIA but also the National Security Council—in sum, the command structure for the Cold War. Wartime OSS leaders like William Donovan and Allen Dulles lobbied feverishly for the Act. Officials within the new command structure soon put their fear and their grandiose notions to work. Reacting to the perceived threat, they adopted a ruthless and warlike posture toward anyone they considered an enemy—most especially the Soviet Union. They took it upon themselves to fight communism and things that might lead to communism everywhere in the world. Few citizens disagreed with them; they appeared to express the sentiments of most Americans in that era, but national security officials still preferred to act in secrecy. A secret study commission under former President Hoover captured the spirit of their call to clandestine warfare:
It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.
The men in the new CIA took this job quite seriously. “We felt we were the first line of defense in the anti-Communist crusade,” recalls Harry Rositzke, an early head of the Agency’s Soviet Division. “There was a clear and heady sense of mission—a sense of what a huge job this was.” Michael Burke, who was chief of CIA covert operations in Germany before going on to head the New York Yankees and Madison Square Garden, agrees: “It was riveting…. One was totally absorbed in something that has become misunderstood now, but the Cold War in those days was a very real thing with hundreds of thousands of
Soviet troops, tanks, and planes poised on the East German border, capable of moving to the English Channel in forty-eight hours.” Hugh Cunningham, an Agency official who stayed on for many years, remembers that survival itself was at stake, “What you were made to feel was that the country was in desperate peril and we had to do whatever it took to save it.”
BLUEBIRD and the CIA’s later mind-control programs sprang from such alarm. As a matter of course, the CIA was also required to learn the methods and intentions of all possible foes. “If the CIA had not tried to find out what the Russians were doing with mind-altering drugs in the early 1950s, I think the then-Director should have been fired,” says Ray Cline, a former Deputy Director of the Agency.
High Agency officials felt they had to know what the Russians were up to. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the contemporaneous CIA documents almost three decades later indicates that if the Russians were scoring breakthroughs in the behavior-control field—whose author they almost certainly were not—the CIA lacked intelligence to prove that. For example, a 1952 Security document, which admittedly had an ax to grind with the Office of Scientific Intelligence, called the data gathered on the Soviet programs “extremely poor.” The author noted that the Agency’s information was based on “second- or third-hand rumors, unsupported statements and non-factual data.”[4] Apparently, the fears and fantasies aroused by the Mindszenty trial and the subsequent Korean War “brainwashing” furor outstripped the facts on hand.
The prevalent CIA notion of a “mind-control gap” was as much of a myth as the later bomber and missile “gaps.” In any case, beyond the defensive curiosity, mind control took on a momentum of its own.
As unique and frightening as the Cold War was, it did not cause people working for the government to react much differently to each other or power than at other times in American history. Bureaucratic squabbling went on right through the most chilling years of the behavior-control program. No matter how alarmed CIA officials became over the Russian peril, they still managed to quarrel with their internal rivals over control of Agency funds and manpower. Between 1950 and 1952, responsibility for mind
control went from the Office of Security to the Scientific Intelligence unit back to Security again. In
the process, BLUEBIRD was rechristened ARTICHOKE. The bureaucratic wars were drawn-out affairs, baffling to outsiders; yet many of the crucial turns in behavioral research came out of essentially bureaucratic considerations on the part of the contending officials. In general, the Office of Security was full of pragmatists who were anxious to weed out communists (and homosexuals) everywhere. They believed the intellectuals from Scientific Intelligence had failed to produce “one new, usable paper, suggestion, drug, instrument, name of an individual, etc., etc.,” as one document puts it. The learned gentlemen from Scientific Intelligence felt that the former cops, military men, and investigators in Security lacked the technical background to handle so awesome a task as controlling the human mind.
“Jurisdictional conflict was constant in this area,” a Senate committee would state in 1976. A 1952 report to the chief of the CIA’s Medical Staff (itself a participant in the infighting) drew a harsher conclusion:
“There exists a glaring lack of cooperation among the various intra-Agency groups fostered by petty jealousies and personality differences that result in the retardation of the enhancing and advancing of the Agency as a body.” When Security took ARTICHOKE back from Scientific Intelligence in 1952, the victory lasted only two and one-half years before most of the behavioral work went to yet another CIA outfit, full of Ph.D.s with operational experience—the Technical Services Staff (TSS).[5]
There was bureaucratic warfare outside the CIA as well, although there were early gestures toward
interagency cooperation. In April 1951 the CIA Director approved liaison with Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence to avoid duplication of effort. The Army and Navy were both looking for truth drugs, while the prime concern of the Air Force was interrogation techniques used on downed pilots. Representatives of each service attended regular meetings to discuss ARTICHOKE matters. The Agency also invited the FBI, but J. Edgar Hoover’s men stayed away.
During their brief period of cooperation, the military and the CIA also exchanged information with the
British and Canadian governments. At the first session in June 1951, the British representative announced at the outset that there had been nothing new in the interrogation business since the days of the Inquisition
and that there was little hope of achieving valuable results through research. He wanted to concentrate on
propaganda and political warfare as they applied to such threats as communist penetration of trade unions. The CIA’s minutes of the session record that this skeptical Englishman finally agreed to the importance of behavioral research, but one doubts the sincerity of this conversion. The minutes also record a consensus of “no conclusive evidence” that either Western countries or the Soviets had made any “revolutionary progress” in the field, and describe Soviet methods as “remarkably similar . . . to the age-old methods.” Nonetheless, the representatives of the three countries agreed to continue investigating behavior-control methods because of their importance to “cold war operations.” To what extent the British and Canadians continued cannot be told. The CIA did not stop until the 1970s.
Bureaucratic conflict was not the only aspect of ordinary government life that persisted through the Cold
War. Officials also maintained their normal awareness of the ethical and legal consequences of their decisions. Often they went through contorted rationalizations and took steps to protect themselves, but at least they recognized and paused over the various ethical lines before crossing them. It would be unfair to say that all moral awareness evaporated. Officials agonized over the consequences of their acts, and much of the bureaucratic record of behavior control is the history of officials dealing with moral conflicts as they arose. The Security office barely managed to recruit the team psychiatrist in time for the first mission to Japan, and for years, Agency officials had trouble attracting qualified medical men to the project. Speculating why, one Agency memo listed such reasons as the CIA’s comparatively low salaries for doctors and ARTICHOKE’s narrow professional scope, adding that a candidate’s “ethics might be such that he might not care to cooperate in certain more revolutionary phases of our project.” This consideration became explicit in Agency recruiting. During the talent search, another CIA memo stated hy
another doctor seemed suitable: “His ethics are such that he would be completely cooperative in any phase of our program, regardless of how revolutionary it may be.”
The matter was even more troublesome in the task of obtaining guinea pigs for mind-control experiments. “Our biggest current problem,” noted one CIA memo, “is to find suitable subjects.” The men from ARTICHOKE found their most convenient source among the flotsam and jetsam of the international spy trade: “individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants, subjects having known reason for deception, etc.” as one Agency document described them. ARTICHOKE officials looked on these
people as “unique research material,” from whom meaningful secrets might be extracted while the
experiments went on.
It is fair to say that the CIA operators tended to put less value on the lives of these subjects than they
did on those of American college students, upon whom preliminary, more benign testing was done. They tailored the subjects to suit the ethical sensitivity of the experiment. A psychiatrist who worked on an ARTICHOKE team stresses that no one from the Agency wanted subjects to be hurt. Yet he and his colleagues were willing to treat dubious defectors and agents in a way which not only would be professionally unethical in the United States but also an indictable crime. In short, these subjects were, if not expendable, at least not particularly prized as human beings. As a CIA psychologist who worked for a decade in the behavior-control program, puts it, “One did not put a high premium on the civil rights of a person who was treasonable to his own country or who was operating effectively to destroy us.” Another ex-Agency psychologist observes that CIA operators did not have “a universal concept of mankind” and thus were willing to do things to foreigners that they would have been reluctant to try on Americans. “It was strictly a patriotic vision,” he says.
ARTICHOKE officials never seemed to be able to find enough subjects. The professional operators—particularly the traditionalists—were reluctant to turn over agents to the Security men with their unproved methods. The field men did not particularly want outsiders, such as the ARTICHOKE crew, getting mixed up in their operations. In the spy business, agents are very valuable property indeed, and operators tend to be very protective of them. Thus the ARTICHOKE teams were given mostly the dregs of the clandestine underworld to work on.
Inexorably, the ARTICHOKE men crossed the clear ethical lines. Morse Allen believed it proved little or
nothing to experiment on volunteers who gave their informed consent. For all their efforts to act naturally,
volunteers still knew they were playing in a make-believe game. Consciously or intuitively, they understood that no one would allow them to be harmed. Allen felt that only by testing subjects “for whom much is at stake (perhaps life and death),” as he wrote, could he get reliable results relevant to operations. In documents and conversation, Allen and his coworkers called such realistic tests “terminal experiments”—terminal in the sense that the experiment would be carried through to completion. It would not end when the subject felt like going home or when he or his best interest was about to be harmed. Indeed, the subject usually had no idea that he had ever been part of an experiment.
In every field of behavior control, academic researchers took the work only so far. From Morse Allen’s
perspective, somebody then had to do the terminal experiment to find out how well the technique worked in the real world: how drugs affected unwitting subjects, how massive electroshock influenced memory, how prolonged sensory deprivation disturbed the mind. By definition, terminal experiments went beyond conventional ethical and legal limits. The ultimate terminal experiments caused death, but ARTICHOKE sources state that those were forbidden.
For career CIA officials, exceeding these limits in the name of national security became part of the job,
although individual operators usually had personal lines they would not cross. Most academics wanted no part of the game at this stage—nor did Agency men always like having these outsiders around. If academic and medical consultants were brought along for the terminal phase, they usually did the work overseas, in secret. As Cornell Medical School’s famed neurologist Harold Wolff explained in a research proposal he made to the CIA, when any of the tests involved doing harm to the subjects, “We expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.” Any professional caught trying the kinds of things the Agency came to sponsor—holding subjects prisoner, shooting them full of unwanted drugs—probably would have been arrested for kidnapping or aggravated assault. Certainly such a researcher would have been disgraced among his peers. Yet, by performing the same experiment under the CIA’s banner, he had no worry from the law. His colleagues could not censure him because they had no idea what he was doing. And he could take pride in helping his country.
Without having been there in person, no one can know exactly what it felt like to take part in a terminal
experiment. In any case, the subjects probably do not have fond memories of the experience. While the
researchers sometimes resembled Alphonse and Gastone, they took themselves and their work very seriously. Now they are either dead, or, for their own reasons, they do not want to talk about the tests. Only in the following case have I been able to piece together anything approaching a firsthand account of a terminal experiment, and this one is quite mild compared to the others the ARTICHOKE men planned.
Notes
The origins of the CIA’s ARTICHOKE program and accounts of the early testing came from the following agency Documents # 192, 15 January 1953; #3,17 May 1949; A/B, I,8/1,24 February 1949; February 10, 1951 memo on Special Interrogations (no document #); A/B, II, 30/2, 28 September 1949; #5, 15 August 1949; #8, 27 September 1949; #6, 23 August 1949; #13, 5 April 1950; #18, 9 May 1950; #142 (transmittal slip), 19 May 1952; #124, 25 January 1952; A/B, IV, 23/32, 3 March 1952; #23, 21 June 1950; #10, 27 February 1950; #37, 27 October 1950; A/B, I, 39/1, 12 December 1950; A/B, II, 2/2, 5 March 1952; A/B, II, 2/1, 15 February 1952; A/B, V, 134/3, 3 December 1951; A/B, I, 38/5, 1 June 1951; and #400, undated, “Specific Cases of Overseas Testing and Applications of Behavioral Drugs.”
The documents were supplemented by interviews with Ray Cline, Harry Rositzke, Michael Burke, Hugh
Cunningham, and several other ex-CIA men who asked to remain anonymous. The Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence (henceforth called the Church Committee Report) provided useful background.
Documents giving background on terminal experiments include #A/B, II, 10/57; #A/B, II, 10/58, 31 August, 1954; #A/B, II, 10/ 17, 27 September 1954; and #A/B, I, 76/4, 21 March 1955.
Footnotes
1. For a better-documented case of narcotherapy and narcohypnosis, see Chapter 3.
2.While the regular polygraphing of CIA career employees apparently never has turned up a penetration
agent in the ranks, it almost certainly has a deterrent effect on those considering coming out of the homosexual closet or on those considering dipping into the large sums of cash dispensed from proverbial black bags.
3. Whether the Agency ultimately funded this or the electric-shock proposal cited above cannot be determined from the documents.
4. The CIA refused to supply either a briefing or additional material when I asked for more background on Soviet behavior-control programs.
5. This Agency component, responsible for providing the supporting gadgets disguises, forgeries, secret
writing, and weapons, has been called during its history the Technical Services Division and the Office of
Technical Services as well as TSS, the name which will be used throughout this book.
The Professor and the “A” Treatment The three men were all part of the same Navy team, traveling together to Germany. Their trip was so sensitive that they had been ordered to ignore each other, even as they waited in the terminal at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on a sweltering August morning in 1952. Just the month before, Gary Cooper had opened in High Noon, and the notion of showdown—whether with outlaws or communists—was in the air. With war still raging in Korea, security consciousness was high. Even so, the secrecy surrounding this Navy mission went well beyond ordinary TOP SECRET restrictions, for the team was slated to link up in Frankfurt with a contingent from the most hush-hush agency of all, the CIA. Then the combined group was going to perform dangerous experiments on human subjects. Both Navy and CIA officials believed that any disclosure about these tests would cause grave harm to the American national interest.
The Navy team sweated out a two-hour delay at Andrews before the four-engine military transport finally took off. Not until the plane touched down at the American field in the Azores did one of the group, a
representative of Naval intelligence, flash a prearranged signal indicating that they were not being watched and they could talk. “It was all this cloak-and-dagger crap,” recalls another participant, Dr. Samuel Thompson, a psychiatrist, physiologist, and pharmacologist who was also a Navy commander.
The third man in the party was G. Richard Wendt, chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Rochester and a part-time Navy contractor. A small 46yearold man with graying blond hair and a fair-sized paunch, Wendt had been the only one with companionship during the hours of decreed silence. He had brought along his attractive young assistant, ostensibly to help him with the experiments. She was not well received by the Navy men, nor would she be appreciated by the CIA operators in Frankfurt. The behavior-control field was very much a man’s world, except when women subjects were
used. The professor’s relationship with this particular lady was destined to become a source of friction with his fellow experimenters, and, eventually, a topic of official CIA reporting.
In theory, Professor Wendt worked under Dr. Thompson’s supervision in a highly classified Navy
program called Project CHATTER, but the strong-minded psychologist did not take anyone’s orders easily. Very much an independent spirit, Wendt ironically, had accepted CHATTER’s goal of weakening, if not eliminating, free will in others. The Navy program, which had started in 1947, was aimed at developing a truth drug that would force people to reveal their innermost secrets.
Thompson, who inherited Wendt and CHATTER in 1951 when he became head of psychiatric research at the Naval Medical Research Institute, remembers Naval intelligence telling him of the need for a truth drug in case “someone planted an A-bomb in one of our cities and we had twelve hours to find out from a person where it was. What could we do to make him talk?” Thompson concedes he was always “negative” about the possibility that such a drug could ever exist, but he cites the fear that the Russians might develop their own miracle potion as reason enough to justify the program. Also, Thompson and the other U.S. officials could not resist looking for a pill or panacea that would somehow make their side all-knowing or all-powerful.
Professor Wendt had experimented with drugs for the Navy before he became involved in the search for a truth serum. His earlier work had been on the use of Dramamine and other methods to prevent motion sickness, and now that he was doing more sensitive research, the Navy hid it under the cover of continuing his “motion sickness” study. At the end of 1950, the Navy gave Wendt a $300,000 contract to study such substances as barbiturates, amphetamines, alcohol, and heroin. To preserve secrecy, which often reached fetish proportions in mind-control research, the money flowed to him not through Navy
channels but out of the Secretary of Defense’s contingency fund. For those drugs that were not available
from pharmaceutical companies, Navy officials went to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The commissioner of Narcotics personally signed the papers, and special couriers carried pouches of illegal drugs through Washington streets and then up to the professor at Rochester. Receipts show that the Bureau sent the Navy 30 grams of pure heroin and 11 pounds of “Mexican grown” marijuana, among other drugs.
Like most serious drug researchers, Wendt sampled everything first before testing on assistants and
students. The drug that took up the most space in his first progress report was heroin. He had became his own prime subject. At weekly intervals, he told the Navy, the psychologist gave himself heroin injections and then wrote down his reactions as he moved through the “full range” of his life: driving, shopping, recreation, manual work, family relations, and sexual activity. He noted in himself “slight euphoria . . . heightened aesthetic appreciation . . . absentminded behavior . . . lack of desire to operate at full speed . . . lack of desire for alcohol . . . possibly reduced sex interest . . . feeling of physical well-being.” He concluded in his report that heroin could have “some, but slight value for interrogation” if used on someone “worked on for a long period of time.”[1]
Wendt never had any trouble getting student volunteers. He simply posted a notice on a campus
bulletin board, and he wound up with a long waiting list. He chose only men subjects over 21, and he paid everyone accepted after a long interview $1.00 an hour. With so much government money to spend, he hired over 20 staff assistants, and he built a whole new testing facility in the attic of the school library. Wendt was cautious with his students, and he apparently did not share the hard drugs with them. He usually tested subjects in small groups—four to eight at a time. He and his associates watched through a two-way mirror and wrote down the subjects’ reactions. He always used both placebos (inert substances) and drugs; the students never knew what—if anything—they were taking. According to Dr. Thompson, to have alerted them in advance and thus given themselves a chance to steel themselves up “would have spoiled the experiment.”
Nonetheless, Wendt’s procedure was a far cry from true unwitting testing. Any drug that was powerful enough to break through an enemy’s resistance could have a traumatic effect on the person taking it—particularly if the subject was totally unaware of what was happening. The Navy research plan was to do preliminary studies on subjects like Wendt’s students, and then, as soon as the drug showed promise, to try it under field conditions. Under normal scientific research, the operational tests would not have been run before the basic work was finished. But the Navy could not wait. The drugs were to be tested on involuntary subjects. Thompson readily admits that this procedure was “unethical,” but he says, “We felt we had to do it for the good of country.”
During the summer of 1952, Professor Wendt announced that he had found a concoction “so special” that it would be “the answer” to the truth-drug problem, as Thompson recalls it. “I thought it would be a good idea to call the Agency,” says Thompson. “I thought they might have someone with something to spill.” Wendt was adamant on one point: He would not tell anyone in the Navy or the CIA what his potion contained. He would only demonstrate. Neither the CHATTER nor ARTICHOKE teams could resist the
bait. The Navy had no source of subjects for terminal experiments, but the CIA men agreed to furnish the human beings—in Germany—even though they had no idea what Wendt had in store for his guinea pigs. The CIA named the operation CASTIGATE.
After settling into a Frankfurt hotel, Wendt, Thompson, and the Naval Intelligence man set out to meet
the ARTICHOKE crew at the local CIA headquarters. It was located in the huge, elongated building that had housed the I. G. Farben industrial complex until the end of the war. The frantic bustle of a U.S. military installation provided ideal cover for this CIA base, and the arrival of a few new Americans attracted no special attention. The Navy group passed quickly through the lobby and rode up the elevator. At the CIA outer office, the team members had to show identification, and Thompson says they were frisked. The Naval Intelligence man had to check his revolver.
A secretary ushered the Navy group in to meet the ARTICHOKE contingent, which had arrived earlier from Washington. The party included team leader Morse Allen, his boss in the Office of Security, Paul Gaynor, and a prominent Washington psychiatrist who regularly left his private practice to fly off on special missions for the Agency. Also present were case officers from the CIA’s Frankfurt base who had taken care of the support arrangements—the most important of which was supplying the subjects.
Everyone at the meeting wanted to know what drugs Wendt was going to use on the five selected subjects, who included one known double agent, one suspected double, and the three defectors. The professor still was not talking. Dr. Thompson asked what would happen if something went wrong and the subject died. He recalls one of the Frankfurt CIA men replying, “Disposal of the body would be no problem.”
After the session ended, Thompson took Wendt aside and pointed out that since the professor, unlike
Thompson, was neither a psychiatrist nor a pharmacologist, he was acting irresponsibly in not having
a qualified physician standing by with antidotes in case of trouble. Wendt finally relented and confided in
Thompson that he was going to slip the subjects a combination of the depressant Seconal, the stimulant
Dexedrine, and tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana. Thompson was dumbfounded. He remembers wanting to shoot Wendt on the spot. These were all well-known drugs that had been thoroughly tested. Indeed, even the idea of mixing Seconal and Dexedrine was not original: The combined drug already had its own brand name—Dexamyl (and it would eventually have a street name,
“the goofball”). Thompson quickly passed on to the CIA men what Wendt had in mind.[2] They, too, were more than a little disappointed. Nevertheless, there was never any thought of stopping the experiments. The ARTICHOKE team had its own methods to try, even if Wendt’s proved a failure, and the whole affair had developed its own momentum. Since this was one of the early ARTICHOKE trips into the field, the team was still working to perfect the logistics of testing. It had reserved two CIA “safehouses” in the countryside not far from Frankfurt, and Americans had been assigned to guard
the experimental sites. Agency managers had already completed the paperwork for the installation of hidden microphones and two-way mirrors, so all the team members could monitor the interrogations.
The first safehouse proved to be a solid old farmhouse set picturesquely in the middle of green
fields, far from the nearest dwelling. The ARTICHOKE and CHATTER groups drove up just as the CIA’s carpenters were cleaning up the mess they had made in ripping a hole through the building’s thick walls. The house had existed for several hundred years without an observation glass peering in on the sitting room, and it had put up some structural resistance to the workmen.
Subject #1 arrived in the early afternoon, delivered in a CIA sedan by armed operators, who had and cuffed him, shackled his feet, and made him lie down on the floor of the back seat. Agency officials described him as a suspected Russian agent, about 40 years old, who had a “Don Juan complex.” One can only imagine how the subject must have reacted to these rather inconsistent Americans who only a few hours earlier had literally grabbed him out of confinement, harshly bound him, and sat more or less on top of him as they wandered through idyllic German farm country, and who now were telling him to
relax as they engaged him in friendly conversation and offered him a beer. He had no way of knowing that it would be the last unspiked drink he would have for quite some time.
On the following morning, the testing started in earnest. Wendt put 20 mg. of Seconal in the subject’s
breakfast and then followed up with 50 mg. of Dexedrine in each of his two morning cups of coffee. Wendt gave him a second dose of Seconal in his luncheon beer. The subject was obviously not his normal self—whatever that was. What was clear was that Wendt was in way over his head, and even the little professor seemed to realize it. “I don’t know how to deal with these people,” he told the CIA psychiatric consultant. Wendt flatly refused to examine the subject, leaving the interrogation to the consultant. For his part, the consultant had little success in extracting information not already known to the CIA.
The third day was more of the same: Seconal with breakfast, Dexedrine and marijuana in a glass of water
afterwards. The only break from the previous day’s routine came at 10:10 A.M. when the subject was allowed to play a short poker game. Then he was given more of Wendt’s drugs in two red capsules that were, he was told, “a prescription for his nerves.” By 2:40 P.M., Wendt declared that this subject was not the right personality type for his treatment. He explained to his disgusted colleagues that if someone is determined to lie, these drugs will only make him a better liar. He said that the marijuana extract produced a feeling of not wanting to hold anything back and that it worked best on people who wanted to tell the truth but were afraid to. OSS had discovered the same thing almost a decade earlier.
Wendt retired temporarily from the scene, and the others concluded it would be a shame to waste a good
subject. They decided to give him the “A” (for ARTICHOKE) treatment. This, too, was not very original. It had been used during the war to interrogate prisoners and treat shell-shocked soldiers. As practiced on the suspected Russian agent, it consisted of injecting enough sodium pentothal into the vein of his arm to knock him out and then, twenty minutes later, stimulating him back to semiconsciousness with a shot of Benzedrine. In this case, the benzedrine did not revive the subject enough to suit the psychiatric consultant and he told Dr. Thompson to give the subject another 10 mg. ten minutes later. This put the subject into a state somewhere between waking and sleeping—almost comatose and yet bug-eyed. In hypnotic tones that had to be translated into Russian by an interpreter, the consultant used the technique of “regression” to convince the subject he was talking to his wife Eva at some earlier time in his life. This was no easy trick, since a male interpreter was playing Eva. Nevertheless, the consultant states he could “create any fantasy” with 60 to 70 percent of his patients, using narcotherapy (as in this case) or hypnosis. For roughly an hour, the subject seemed to have no idea he was not speaking with his wife but with CIA operatives trying to find out about his relationship with Soviet intelligence. When the subject started to doze, the consultant had Thompson give him a doubled jolt of Benzedrine. A half hour later, the subject began to weep violently. The consultant decided to end the session, and in his most soothing voice, he urged the subject to fall asleep. As the subject calmed down, the consultant suggested, with
friendly and soothing words, that the subject would remember nothing of the experience when he woke up.
Inducing amnesia was an important Agency goal. “From the ARTICHOKE point of view,” states a 1952 document, “the greater the amnesia produced, the more effective the results.” Obviously if a victim remembered the “A” treatment, it would stop being a closely guarded ARTICHOKE secret. Presumably, some subject who really did work for the Russians would tell them how the Americans had worked him over. This reality made “disposal” of ARTICHOKE subjects a particular problem. Killing them seems to have been ruled out, but Agency officials made sure that some stayed in foreign prisons for long periods of time. While in numerous specific cases, ARTICHOKE team members claimed success in making their subjects forget, their outside consultants had told them “that short of cutting a subject’s throat, a true amnesia cannot be guaranteed.” As early as 1950, the Agency had put out a contract to a private researcher to find a memory-destroying drug, but to no apparent avail.[3] In any case, it would be unreasonable to assume that over the years at least one ARTICHOKE subject did not shake off the amnesic commands and tell the Russians what happened to him. As was so often the case with CIA operations, the enemy probably had a much better idea of the Agency’s activities than the folks back home.
Back at the safehouse, Wendt was far from through. Four more subjects would be brought to him. The next one was an alleged double agent whom the CIA had code-named EXPLOSIVE. Agency documents describe him as a Russian “professional agent type” and “a hard-boiled individual who apparently has the ability to lie consistently but not very effectively.” He was no stranger to ARTICHOKE team members who, a few months before, had plied him with a mixture of drugs and hypnosis under the cover of a “psychiatric-medical” exam. At that time, a professional hypnotist had accompanied the team, and he had given his commands through an elaborate intercom system to an interpreter who, in turn, was apparently able to put EXPLOSIVE under.[4] Afterward, the team reported to the CIA’s Director that EXPLOSIVE had revealed “extremely valuable” information and that he had been made to forget his interrogation through a hypnotically induced amnesia. Since that time EXPLOSIVE had been kept in custody. Now
he was being brought out to give Professor Wendt a crack at him with the Seconal-Dexedrine-marijuana combination.
This time, Wendt gave the subject all three drugs together in one beer, delivered at the cocktail hour.
Next came Seconal in a dinner beer and then all three once more in a postprandial beer. There were little, if any, positive results. Wendt ended the session after midnight and commented, “At least we learned one thing from this experiment. The people you have to deal with here are different from American college students.”
During the next week, the CIA men brought Wendt three more subjects, with little success. The general attitude toward Wendt became, in Thompson’s words, “hostile as all hell.” Both the Agency and the Navy groups questioned his competence. With one subject, the professor declared he had given too strong a dose; with the next, too weak. While he had advertised his drugs as tasteless, the subjects realized they had swallowed something. As one subject in the next room was being interrogated in Russian that no one was bothering to translate, Wendt took to playing the same pattern on the piano over and over for a half hour. While the final subject was being questioned, Wendt and his female assistant got a little tipsy on beer. Wendt became so distracted during this experiment that he finally admitted, “My thoughts are
elsewhere.” His assistant began to giggle. Her presence had become like an open sore—which was made more painful when Mrs. Wendt showed up in Frankfurt and the professor threatened to jump off a church tower, Thompson recalls.
Wendt is not alive to give his version of what happened, but both CIA and Navy sources are consistent in
their description of him. ARTICHOKE team leader Morse Allen felt he had been the victim of “a fraud or at least a gross misinterpretation,” and he described the trip as “a waste of time and money.” A man who usually hid his feelings, Allen became livid when Wendt’s assistant measured drugs out with a penknife. He recommended in his final report that those who develop drugs not be allowed to participate in future field testing. “This, of course, does not mean that experimental work is condemned by the ARTICHOKE team,” he wrote, “but a common sense approach in this direction will preclude arguments, alibis, and
complaints as in the recent situation.” In keeping with this “common sense approach,” he also recommended that as “an absolute rule,” no women be allowed on ARTICHOKE missions—because of the possible danger and because “personal convenience, toilet facilities, etc., are complicated by the presence of women.”
Morse Allen and his ARTICHOKE mates returned to the States still convinced that they could find ways to control human behavior, but the Navy men were shaken. Their primary contractor had turned out to be a tremendous embarrassment. Dr. Thompson stated he could never work with Wendt again. Navy officials soon summoned Wendt to Bethesda and told him they were canceling their support for his research. Adding insult to injury, they told him they expected refund of all unspent money. While the Navy managers made some effort to continue CHATTER at other institutions, the program never recovered from the Wendt fiasco. By the end of the next year, 1953, the Korean War had ended and the Navy abandoned CHATTER altogether.
Over the next two decades, the Navy would still sponsor large amounts of specialized behavioral research, and the Army would invest huge sums in schemes to incapacitate whole armies with powerful drugs. But the CIA clearly pulled far into the lead in mind control. In those areas in which military research continued, the Agency stayed way ahead. The CIA consistently was out on what was called the “cutting edge” of the research, sponsoring the lion’s share of the most harrowing experiments. ARTICHOKE and its successor CIA programs became an enormous effort that harnessed the energies of hundreds of scientists.
The experience of the CIA psychiatric consultant provides a small personal glimpse of how it felt to be a
soldier in the mind-control campaign. This psychiatrist, who insists on anonymity, estimates that he made between 125 and 150 trips overseas on Agency operations from 1952 through his retirement in 1966. “To be a psychiatrist chasing off to Europe instead of just seeing the same patients year after year, that was extraordinary,” he reminisces. “I wish I was back in those days. I never got tired of it.” He says his assignments called for “practicing psychiatry in an ideal way, which meant you didn’t become involved with your patients. You weren’t supposed to.” Asked how he felt about using drugs on unwitting foreigners, he snaps, “Depends which side you were on. I never hurt anyone. . . . We were at war.”
For the most part, the psychiatrist stopped giving the “A” treatment after the mid-1950s but he continued to use his professional skills to assess and manipulate agents and defectors. His job was to help find out if a subject was under another country’s control and to recommend how the person could be switched to the CIA’s. In this work, he was contributing to the mainstream of CIA activity that permeates its institutional existence from its operations to its internal politics to its social life: the notion of controlling people. Finding reliable ways to do that is a primary CIA goal, and the business is often a brutal one. As former CIA Director Richard Helms stated in Senate testimony, “The clandestine operator . . . is trained to believe you can’t count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul.”
Like all the world’s secret services, the CIA sought to find the best methods of owning people and making sure they stayed owned. How could an operator be sure of an agent’s loyalties? Refugees and defectors were flooding Western Europe, and the CIA wanted to exploit them. Which ones were telling the truth? Who was a deception agent or a provocateur. The Anglo-American secret invasion of Albania had failed miserably. Had they been betrayed?[5] Whom could the CIA trust?
One way to try to answer these questions is to use physical duress—or torture. Aside from its ethical
drawbacks, however, physical brutality simply does not work very well. As a senior counterintelligence official explains, “If you have a blowtorch up someone’s ass, he’ll give you tactical information.” Yet he will not be willing or able to play the modern espionage game on the level desired by the CIA. One Agency document excludes the use of torture “because such inhuman treatment is not only out of keeping with the traditions of this country, but of dubious effectiveness as compared with various supplemental psychoanalytical techniques.”
The second and most popular method to get answers is traditional spy tradecraft. Given enough time, a good interrogator can very often find out a person’s secrets. He applies persuasion and mental seduction, mixed with psychological pressures of every description—emotional carrots and sticks. A successful covert operator uses the same sorts of techniques in recruiting agents and making sure they stay in line. While the rest of the population may dabble in this sort of manipulation, the professional operator does it for a living, and he operates mostly outside the system of restraints that normally govern personal relationships. “I never gave a thought to legality or morality,” states a retired and quite cynical Agency case officer with over 20 years’ experience. “Frankly, I did what worked.”
The operator pursues people he can turn into “controlled sources”—agents willing to do his bidding
either in supplying intelligence or taking covert action. He seeks people in a position to do something useful for the Agency—or who someday might be in such a position, perhaps with CIA aid. Once he picks his target, he usually looks for a weakness or vulnerability he can play on. Like a good fisherman, the clever operator knows that the way to hook his prey is to choose an appropriate bait, which the target will think he is seizing because he wants to. The hook has to be firmly implanted; the agent sometimes tries to escape once he understands the implications of betraying his country. While the case officer might try to convince him he is acting for the good of his homeland, the agent must still face up to being branded a traitor.
Does every man have his price? Not exactly, states the senior counterintelligence man, but he believes a
shrewd operator can usually find a way to reach anyone, particularly through his family. In developing countries, the Agency has caused family members to be arrested and mistreated by the local police, given or withheld medical care for a sick child, and, more prosaically, provided scholarships for a relative to study abroad. This kind of tactic does not work as well on a Russian or Western European, who does not live in a society where the CIA can exert pressure so easily.
Like a doctor’s bedside manner or a lawyer’s courtroom style, spy tradecraft is highly personalized.
Different case officers swear by different approaches, and successful methods are carefully observed and copied. Most CIA operators seem to prefer using an ideological lure if they can. John Stockwell, who left the Agency in 1977 to write a book about CIA operations in Angola, believes his best agents were “people convinced they were doing the right thing . . . who disliked communists and felt the CIA was the right organization.” Stockwell recalls his Agency instructors “hammering away at the positive aspect of recruitment. This was where they established the myth of CIA case officers being good guys. They said we didn’t use negative control, and we always made the relationship so that both parties were better off for having worked together.” More cynical operators, like the one quoted above, take a different view: “You can’t create real motivation in a person by waving the flag or by saying this is for the future good of democracy. You’ve got to have a firmer hold than that…. His opinions can change.” This ex-operator favors approaches based either on revenge or helping the gent advance his career:
Those are good motives because they can be created with the individual…. Maybe you start with a Communist party cell member and you help him become a district committee member by eliminating his competition, or you help him get a position where he can get even with someone. At the same time, he’s giving you more and more information as he moves forward, and if you ever surface his reports, he’s out of business. You’ve really got him wrapped up. You don’t even have to tell him. He realizes it himself. No matter what the approach to the prospective agent, the case officer tries to make money a factor in the
relationship. Sometimes the whole recruiting pitch revolves around enrichment. In other instances, the case officer allows the target the illusion that he has sold out for higher motives. Always, however, the operator tries to use money to make the agent dependent. The situation can become sticky with money-minded agents when the case officer insists that part or all of the payments be placed in escrow, to prevent attracting undue attention. But even cash does not create control in the spy business. As the cynical case officer puts it, “Money s tenuous because somebody can always offer more.”
Surprisingly, each of the CIA operators sampled agrees that overt blackmail is a highly overrated form of
control. The senior counterintelligence man notes that while the Russians frequently use some variety of
entrapment—sexual or otherwise—the CIA rarely did. “Very few [Agency] case officers were tough enough” to pull it off and sustain it, he says. “Anytime an agent has been forced to cooperate, you can take it for granted that he has two things on his mind: he is looking for a way out and for revenge. Given the slightest opportunity, he will hit you right between the eyes.” Blackmail could backfire in unexpected ways. John Stockwell remembers an agent in Southeast Asia who wanted to quit: “The case officer
leaned on the guy and said, ‘Look, friend, we still need your intelligence, and we have receipts you signed which we can turn over to the local police.‘ The agent blew his brains out, leaving a suicide note regretting his cooperation with the CIA and telling how the Agency had tried to blackmail him. It caused some problems with the local government.”
The case officer always tries to weave an ever-tightening web of control around his agent. His methods of doing so are so personal and so basic that they often reveal more about the case officer himself than the agent, reflecting his outlook and his personal philosophy. The cynical operator describes his usual technique, which turns out to be a form of false idealism: “You’ve got to treat a man as an equal and convince him you’re partners in this thing. Even if he’s a communist party member, you can’t deal with him like a crumb. You sit down with him and ask how are the kids, and you remember that he told you last time that his son was having trouble in school. You build personal rapport. If you treat him like dirt or an object of use, eventually he’ll turn on you or drop off the bandwagon.”
John Stockwell’s approach relies on the power of imagination in a humdrum world: “I always felt the real
key was that you were offering something special—a real secret life—something that he and you only knew made him different from all the pedestrian paper shufflers in a government office or a boring party cell meeting. Everybody has a little of Walter Mitty in him—what a relief to know you really do work for the CIA in your spare time.”
Sometimes a case officer wants to get the agent to do something he does not think he wants to do. One former CIA operator uses a highly charged metaphor to describe how he did it: “Sometimes one partner in a relationship wants to get into deviations from standard sex. If you have some control, you might be able to force your partner to try different things, but it’s much better to lead her down the road a step at a time, to discuss it and fantasize until eventually she’s saying, ‘Let’s try this thing.’ If her inhibitions and moral reservations are eroded and she is turned on, it’s much more fun and there’s less chance of blowback [exposure, in spy talk]…. It’s the same with an agent.” All case officers—and particularly counterintelligence men—harbor recurring fears that their agents will betray them. The suspicious professional looks for telltale signs like lateness, nervousness, or inconsistency. He relies on his intuition. “The more you’ve been around agents, the more likely you are to sense that something isn’t what it should be,” comments the senior counterintelligence man. “It’s like with children.”
No matter how skillfully practiced, traditional spycraft provides only incomplete answers to the nagging
question of how much the Agency can really trust an agent. All the sixth sense, digging, and deductive
reasoning in the world do not produce certainty in a field that is based on deception and lies. Whereas the British, who invented the game, have historically understood the need for patience and a stiff upper lip, Americans tend to look for quick answers, often by using the latest technology. “We were very gimmick-prone,” says the senior counterintelligence official. Gimmicks— machines, drugs, technical tricks—comprise the third method of behavior control, after torture and tradecraft.
Like safecrackers who swear by the skill in their fingertips, most of the Agency’s mainstream operators
disparage newfangled gadgets. Many now claim that drugs, hypnosis, and other exotic methods actually detract from good tradecraft because they make operators careless and lazy.
Nevertheless, the operators and their high-level sponsors, like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms,
consistently pushed for the magic technique—the deus ex machina—that would solve their problems. Caught in the muck and frustration of ordinary spywork, operators hoped for a miracle tool. Faced with liars and deceivers, they longed for a truth drug. Surrounded by people who knew too much, they sought a way to create amnesia. They dreamed of finding means to make unwilling people carry out specific tasks, such as stealing documents, provoking a fight, killing someone, or otherwise committing an antisocial act. Secret agents recruited by more traditional appeals to idealism, greed, ambition, or fear had always done such deeds, but they usually gave their spymasters headaches in the process Sometimes they balked. Moreover, first they had to agree to serve the CIA. The best tradecraft in the world seldom works against a well-motivated target. (The cynical operator recalls offering the head of Cuban intelligence $1,000,00~in 1966 at a Madrid hotel—only to receive a flat rejection.) Plagued by the unsureness, Agency officials hoped to take the andomness— indeed, the free will—out of agent handling. As one psychologist who worked on behavior control describes it, “The problem of every intelligence operation is how do you remove the human element? The operators would come to us and ask for the human element to be removed.” Thus the impetus toward mind-control research came not only from the lure of science and the fantasies of science fiction, it also came from the heart of the spy business.
Notes
The primary sources for the material on Professor Wendt’s trip to Frankfurt were Dr. Samuel V. Thompson then of the Navy, the CIA psychiatric consultant, several of Wendt’s former associates, as well as three CIA documents that described the testing: Document # 168, 19 September 1952, Subject: “Project LGQ”; Document # 168, 18 September 1952, Subject: Field Trip of ARTICHOKE team,20 August-September 1952; and #A/B, II, 33/21, undated, Subject: Special Comments.
Information on the Navy’s Project CHATTER came from the Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 337-38. Declassified Navy Documents N-23, February 13, 1951, Subject: Procurement of Certain Drugs; N-27, undated, Subject: Project CHATTER; N-29, undated, Subject: Status Report: Studies of Motion Sickness, Vestibular Function, and Effects of Drugs; N-35, October 27, 1951, Interim Report; N-38, 30 September, 1952, Memorandum for File; and N-39, 28 October, 1952, Memorandum for File.
The information on the heroin found in Wendt’s safe comes from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, October 2, 1977 and considerable background on Wendt’s Rochester testing program was found in the Rochester Times-Union, January 28, 1955. The CIA quote on heroin came from May 15,1952 OSI Memorandum to the Deputy Director, CIA, Subject: Special Interrogation.
Information on the Agency’s interest in amnesia came from 14 January 1952 memo, Subject: BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE, Proposed Research; 7 March 1951, Subject: Informal Discussion with Chief [deleted] Regarding “Disposal”; 1 May 1951, Subject: Recommendation for Disposal of Maximum
Custody Defectors; and #A/B, I, 75/13, undated, Subject: Amnesia.
The quote from Homer on nepenthe was found in Sidney
Cohen’s The Beyond Within: The LSD Story (New York:
Atheneum, 1972).
The section on control came from interviews with John
Stockwell and several other former CIA men.
Footnotes
1. What Wendt appears to have been getting at—namely,
that repeated shots of heroin might have an effect on
interrogation—was stated explicitly in a 1952 CIA
document which declared the drug “can be useful in
reverse because of the stresses produced when . . .
withdrawn from those addicted.” Wendt’s interest in
heroin seems to have lasted to his death in 1977, long
after his experiments had stopped. The woman who cleaned
out his safe at that time told the Rochester Democrat and
Chronicle she found a quantity of the white powder, along
with syringes and a good many other drugs.
2. Being good undercover operators, the CIA men never
let on to Wendt that they knew his secret, and Wendt was
not about to give it away. Toward the end of the trip, he
told the consultant he would feel “unpatriotic” if he
were to share his secret because the ARTICHOKE team was
“not competent” to use the drugs.
3. Homer reported the ancient Greeks had such a
substance—nepenthe—”a drug to lull all pain and anger,
and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow.”
4. Neither Morse Allen nor anyone else on the
ARTICHOKE teams spoke any foreign languages. Allen
believed that the difficulty in communicating with the
guinea pigs hampered ARTICHOKE research.
5. The answer was yes, in the sense that Soviet agent
Harold “Kim” Philby, working as British intelligence’s
liaison with the CIA apparently informed his spymasters
of specific plans to set up anticommunist resistance
movements in Albania and all over Eastern Europe. The
Russians almost certainly learned about CIA plans to
overthrow communist rule in Eastern Europe and in the
Soviet Union itself. Knowing of such operations
presumably increased Soviet hostility.
PART II
INTELLIGENCE OR “WITCHES POTIONS”
LSD
Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD in 1943 may have
begun a new age in the exploration of the human mind, but
it took six years for word to reach America. Even after
Hofmann and his coworkers in Switzerland published their
work in a 1947 article, no one in the United States
seemed to notice. Then in 1949, a famous Viennese doctor
named Otto Kauders traveled to the United States in
search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston
Psychopathic Hospital,[1] a pioneering mental-health
institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School, and
he spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic
acid diethylamide. Milton Greenblatt, the hospital’s
research director, vividly recalls Kauders’ description
of how an infinitesimally small dose had rendered Dr.
Hofmann temporarily “crazy.” “We were very interested in
anything that could make someone schizophrenic,” says
Greenblatt. If the drug really did induce psychosis for a
short time, the Boston doctors reasoned, an antidote—
which they hoped to find—might cure schizophrenia. It
would take many years of research to show that LSD did
not, in fact, produce a “model psychosis,” but to the
Boston doctors in 1949, the drug showed incredible
promise. Max Rinkel, a neuropsychiatrist and refugee from
Hitler’s Germany, was so intrigued by Kauders’
presentation that he quickly contacted Sandoz, the huge
Swiss pharmaceutical firm where Albert Hofmann worked.
Sandoz officials arranged to ship some LSD across the
Atlantic.
The first American trip followed. The subject was
Robert Hyde, a Vermont-born psychiatrist who was Boston
Psychopathic’s number-two man. A bold, innovative sort,
Hyde took it for granted that there would be no testing
program until he tried the drug. With Rinkel and the
hospital’s senior physician, H. Jackson DeShon looking
on, Hyde drank a glass of water with 100 micrograms of
LSD in it—less than half Hofmann’s dose, but still a
hefty jolt. DeShon describes Hyde’s reaction as “nothing
very startling.” The perpetually active Hyde insisted on
making his normal hospital rounds while his colleagues
tagged along. Rinkel later told a scientific conference
that Hyde became “quite paranoiac, saying that we had not
given him anything. He also berated us and said the
company had cheated us, given us plain water. That was
not Dr. Hyde’s normal behavior; he is a very pleasant
man.” Hyde’s first experience was hardly as dramatic as
Albert Hofmann’s, but then the Boston psychiatrist had
not, like Hofmann, set off on a voyage into the complete
unknown. For better or worse, LSD had come to America in
1949 and had embarked on a strange trip of its own.
Academic researchers would study it in search of
knowledge that would benefit all mankind. Intelligence
agencies, particularly the CIA, would subsidize and shape
the form of much of this work to learn how the drug could
be used to break the will of enemy agents, unlock secrets
in the minds of trained spies, and otherwise manipulate
human behavior. These two strains—of helping people and
of controlling them—would coexist rather comfortably
through the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, LSD would escape
from the closed world of scholar and spy, and it would
play a major role in causing a cultural upheaval that
would have an impact both on global politics and on
intimate personal beliefs. The trip would wind up—to
borrow some hyperbole from the musical Hair— with “the
youth of America on LSD.”
The counterculture generation was not yet out of the
nursery, however, when Bob Hyde went tripping: Hyde
himself would not become a secret CIA consultant for
several years. The CIA and the military intelligence
agencies were just setting out on their quest for drugs
and other exotic methods to take possession of people’s
minds. The ancient desire to control enemies through
magical spells and potions had come alive again, and
several offices within the CIA competed to become the
head controllers. Men from the Office of Security’s
ARTICHOKE program were struggling—as had OSS before them—
to find a truth drug or hypnotic method that would aid in
interrogation. Concurrently, the Technical Services Staff
(TSS) was investigating in much greater depth the whole
area of applying chemical and biological warfare (CBW) to
covert operations. TSS was the lineal descendent of
Stanley Lovell’s Research and Development unit in OSS,
and its officials kept alive much of the excitement and
urgency of the World War II days when Lovell had tried to
bring out the Peck’s Bad Boy in American scientists.
Specialists from TSS furnished backup equipment for
secret operations: false papers, bugs, taps, suicide
pills, explosive seashells, transmitters hidden in false
teeth, cameras in tobacco pouches, invisible inks, and
the like. In later years, these gadget wizards from TSS
would become known for supplying some of history’s more
ludicrous landmarks, such as Howard Hunt’s ill-fitting
red wig; but in the early days of the CIA, they gave
promise of transforming the spy world.
Within TSS, there existed a Chemical Division with
functions that few others—even in TSS—knew about. These
had to do with using chemicals (and germs) against
specific people. From 1951 to 1956, the years when the
CIA’s interest in LSD peaked, Sidney Gottlieb, a native
of the Bronx with a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech,
headed this division. (And for most of the years until
1973, he would oversee TSS’s behavioral programs from one
job or another.) Only 33 years old when he took over the
Chemical Division, Gottlieb had managed to overcome a
pronounced stammer and a clubfoot to rise through Agency
ranks. Described by several acquaintances as a
“compensator,” Gottlieb prided himself on his ability,
despite his obvious handicaps, to pursue his cherished
hobby, folk dancing. On returning from secret missions
overseas, he invariably brought back a new step that he
would dance with surprising grace. He could call out
instructions for the most complicated dances without a
break in his voice, infecting others with enthusiasm. A
man of unorthodox tastes, Gottlieb lived in a former
slave cabin that he had remodeled himself—with his wife,
the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in India, and
his four children. Each morning, he rose at 5:30 to milk
the goats he kept on his 15 acres outside Washington. The
Gottliebs drank only goat’s milk, and they made their own
cheese. They also raised Christmas trees which they sold
to the outside world. Greatly respected by his former
colleagues, Gottlieb, who refused to be interviewed for
this book, is described as a humanist, a man of
intellectual humility and strength, willing to carry out,
as one ex-associate puts it, “the tough things that had
to be done.” This associate fondly recalls, “When you
watched him, you gained more and more respect because he
was willing to work so hard to get an idea across. He
left himself totally exposed. It was more important for
us to get the idea than for him not to stutter.” One idea
he got across was that the Agency should investigate the
potential use of the obscure new drug, LSD, as a spy
weapon.
At the top ranks of the Clandestine Services
(officially called the Directorate of Operations but
popularly known as the “dirty tricks department”), Sid
Gottlieb had a champion who appreciated his qualities,
Richard Helms. For two decades, Gottlieb would move into
progressively higher positions in the wake of Helms’
climb to the highest position in the Agency. Helms, the
tall, smooth “preppie,” apparently liked the way the
Jewish chemist, who had started out at Manhattan’s City
College, could thread his way through complicated
technical problems and make them understandable to
nonscientists. Gottlieb was loyal and he followed orders.
Although many people lay in the chain of command between
the two men, Helms preferred to avoid bureaucratic
niceties by dealing directly with Gottlieb.
On April 3, 1953, Helms proposed to Director Allen
Dulles that the CIA set up a program under Gottlieb for
“covert use of biological and chemical materials.” Helms
made clear that the Agency could use these methods in
“present and future clandestine operations” and then
added, “Aside from the offensive potential, the
development of a comprehensive capability in this field .
. . gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy’s
theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend
ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in
the use of these techniques as we are.” Once again, as it
would throughout the history of the behavioral programs,
defense justified offense. Ray Cline, often a
bureaucratic rival of Helms, notes the spirit in which
the future Director pushed this program: “Helms fancied
himself a pretty tough cookie. It was fashionable among
that group to fancy they were rather impersonal about
dangers, risks, and human life. Helms would think it
sentimental and foolish to be against something like
this.”
On April 13, 1953—the same day that the Pentagon
announced that any U.S. prisoner refusing repatriation in
Korea would be listed as a deserter and shot if caught—
Allen Dulles approved the program, essentially as put
forth by Helms. Dulles took note of the “ultra-sensitive
work” involved and agreed that the project would be
called MKULTRA.[2] He approved an initial budget of
$300,000, exempted the program from normal CIA financial
controls, and allowed TSS to start up research projects
“without the signing of the usual contracts or other
written agreements.” Dulles ordered the Agency’s
bookkeepers to pay the costs blindly on the signatures of
Sid Gottlieb and Willis Gibbons, a former U.S. Rubber
executive who headed TSS.
As is so often the case in government, the activity
that Allen Dulles approved with MKULTRA was already under
way, even before he gave it a bureaucratic structure.
Under the code name MKDELTA, the Clandestine Services had
set up procedures the year before to govern the use of
CBW products. (MKDELTA now became the operational side of
MKULTRA.) Also in 1952, TSS had made an agreement with
the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army’s
biological research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland
whereby SOD would produce germ weapons for the CIA’s use
(with the program called MKNAOMI). Sid Gottlieb later
testified that the purpose of these programs was “to
investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an
individual’s behavior by covert means. The context in
which this investigation was started was that of the
height of the Cold War with the Korean War just winding
down; with the CIA organizing its resources to liberate
Eastern Europe by paramilitary means; and with the threat
of Soviet aggression very real and tangible, as
exemplified by the recent Berlin airlift” (which occurred
in 1948).
In the early days of MKULTRA, the roughly six TSS
professionals who worked on the program spent a good deal
of their time considering the possibilities of LSD.[3]
“The most fascinating thing about it,” says one of them,
“was that such minute quantities had such a terrific
effect.” Albert Hofmann had gone off into another world
after swallowing less than 1/100,000 of an ounce.
Scientists had known about the mind-altering qualities of
drugs like mescaline since the late nineteenth century,
but LSD was several thousand times more potent. Hashish
had been around for millennia, but LSD was roughly a
million times stronger (by weight). A two-suiter suitcase
could hold enough LSD to turn on every man, woman, and
child in the United States. “We thought about the
possibility of putting some in a city water supply and
having the citizens wander around in a more or less happy
state, not terribly interested in defending themselves,”
recalls the TSS man. But incapacitating such large
numbers of people fell to the Army Chemical Corps, which
also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens. The CIA
was concentrating on individuals. TSS officials
understood that LSD distorted a person’s sense of
reality, and they felt compelled to learn whether it
could alter someone’s basic loyalties. Could the CIA make
spies out of tripping Russians—or vice versa? In the
early 1950s, when the Agency developed an almost
desperate need to know more about LSD, almost no outside
information existed on the subject. Sandoz had done some
clinical studies, as had a few other places, including
Boston Psychopathic, but the work generally had not moved
much beyond the horse-and-buggy stage. The MKULTRA team
had literally hundreds of questions about LSD’s
physiological, psychological, chemical, and social
effects. Did it have any antidotes? What happened if it
were combined with other drugs? Did it affect everyone
the same way? What was the effect of doubling the dose?
And so on.
TSS first sought answers from academic researchers,
who, on the whole, gladly cooperated and let the Agency
pick their brains. But CIA officials realized that no one
would undertake a quick and systematic study of the drug
unless the Agency itself paid the bill. Almost no
government or private money was then available for what
had been dubbed “experimental psychiatry.” Sandoz wanted
the drug tested, for its own commercial reasons, but
beyond supplying it free to researchers, it would not
assume the costs. The National Institutes of Mental
Health had an interest in LSD’s relationship to mental
illness, but CIA officials wanted to know how the drug
affected normal people, not sick ones. Only the military
services, essentially for the same reasons as the CIA,
were willing to sink much money into LSD, and the Agency
men were not about to defer to them. They chose instead
to take the lead—in effect to create a whole new field of
research.
Suddenly there was a huge new market for grants in
academia, as Sid Gottlieb and his aides began to fund LSD
projects at prestigious institutions. The Agency’s LSD
pathfinders can be identified: Bob Hyde’s group at Boston
Psychopathic, Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and
Columbia University in New York, Carl Pfeiffer at the
University of Illinois Medical School, Harris Isbell of
the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in
Lexington, Kentucky, Louis Jolyon West at the University
of Oklahoma, and Harold Hodge’s group at the University
of Rochester. The Agency disguised its involvement by
passing the money through two conduits: the Josiah Macy,
Jr. Foundation, a rich establishment institution which
served as a cutout (intermediary) only for a year or two,
and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, a
Washington, D.C. family foundation, whose head, Dr.
Charles Geschickter, provided the Agency with a variety
of services for more than a decade. Reflexively, TSS
officials felt they had to keep the CIA connection
secret. They could only “assume,” according to a 1955
study, that Soviet scientists understood the drug’s
“strategic importance” and were capable of making it
themselves. They did not want to spur the Russians into
starting their own LSD program or into devising
countermeasures.
The CIA’s secrecy was also clearly aimed at the folks
back home. As a 1963 Inspector General’s report stated,
“Research in the manipulation of human behavior is
considered by many authorities in medicine and related
fields to be professionally unethical”; therefore,
openness would put “in jeopardy” the reputations of the
outside researchers. Moreover, the CIA Inspector General
declared that disclosure of certain MKULTRA activities
could result in “serious adverse reaction” among the
American public.
At Boston Psychopathic, there were various levels of
concealment. Only Bob Hyde and his boss, the hospital
superintendent, knew officially that the CIA was funding
the hospital’s LSD program from 1952 on, to the tune of
about $40,000 a year. Yet, according to another member of
the Hyde group, Dr. DeShon, all senior staff understood
where the money really came from. “We agreed not to
discuss it,” says DeShon. “I don’t see any objection to
this. We never gave it to anyone without his consent and
without explaining it in detail.” Hospital officials told
the volunteer subjects something about the nature of the
experiments but nothing about their origins or purpose.
None of the subjects had any idea that the CIA was paying
for the probing of their minds and would use the results
for its own purposes; most of the staff was similarly
ignorant.
Like Hyde, almost all the researchers tried LSD on
themselves. Indeed, many believed they gained real
insight into what it felt like to be mentally ill, useful
knowledge for health professionals who spent their lives
treating people supposedly sick in the head. Hyde set up
a multidisciplinary program—virtually unheard of at the
time—that brought together psychiatrists, psychologists,
and physiologists. As subjects, they used each other,
hospital patients, and volunteers—mostly students—from
the Boston area. They worked through a long sequence of
experiments that served to isolate variable after
variable. Palming themselves off as foundation officials,
the men from MKULTRA frequently visited to observe and
suggest areas of future research. One Agency man, who
himself tripped several times under Hyde’s general
supervision, remembers that he and his colleagues would
pass on a nugget that another contractor like Harold
Abramson had gleaned and ask Hyde to perform a follow-up
test that might answer a question of interest to the
Agency. Despite these tangents, the main body of research
proceeded in a planned and orderly fashion. The
researchers learned that while some subjects seemed to
become schizophrenic, many others did not. Surprisingly,
true schizophrenics showed little reaction at all to LSD,
unless given massive doses. The Hyde group found out that
the quality of a person’s reaction was determined mainly
by the person’s basic personality structure (set) and the
environment (setting) in which he or she took the drug.
The subject’s expectation of what would happen also
played a major part. More than anything else, LSD tended
to intensify the subject’s existing characteristics—often
to extremes. A little suspicion could grow into major
paranoia, particularly in the company of people perceived
as threatening.
Unbeknownst to his fellow researchers, the energetic
Dr. Hyde also advised the CIA on using LSD in covert
operations. A CIA officer who worked with him recalls:
“The idea would be to give him the details of what had
happened [with a case], and he would speculate. As a
sharp M.D. in the old-school sense, he would look at
things in ways that a lot of recent bright lights
couldn’t get…. He had a good sense of make-do.” The
Agency paid Hyde for his time as a consultant, and TSS
officials eventually set aside a special MKULTRA
subproject as Hyde’s private funding mechanism. Hyde
received funds from yet another MKULTRA subproject that
TSS men created for him in 1954, so he could serve as a
cutout for Agency purchases of rare chemicals. His first
buy was to be $32,000 worth of corynanthine, a possible
antidote to LSD, that would not be traced to the CIA.
Bob Hyde died in 1976 at the age of 66, widely hailed
as a pacesetter in mental health. His medical and
intelligence colleagues speak highly of him both
personally and professionally. Like most of his
generation, he apparently considered helping the CIA a
patriotic duty. An Agency officer states that Hyde never
raised doubts about his covert work. “He wouldn’t
moralize. He had a lot of trust in the people he was
dealing with [from the CIA]. He had pretty well reached
the conclusion that if they decided to do something
[operationally], they had tried whatever else there was
and were willing to risk it.”
Most of the CIA’s academic researchers published
articles on their work in professional journals, but
those long, scholarly reports often gave an incomplete
picture of the research. In effect, the scientists would
write openly about how LSD affects a patient’s pulse
rate, but they would tell only the CIA how the drug could
be used to ruin that patient’s marriage or memory. Those
researchers who were aware of the Agency’s sponsorship
seldom published anything remotely connected to the
instrumental and rather unpleasant questions the MKULTRA
men posed for investigation. That was true of Hyde and of
Harold Abramson, the New York allergist who became one of
the first Johnny Appleseeds of LSD by giving it to a
number of his distinguished colleagues. Abramson
documented all sorts of experiments on topics like the
effects of LSD on Siamese fighting fish and snails,[4]
but he never wrote a word about one of his early LSD
assignments from the Agency. In a 1953 document, Sid
Gottlieb listed subjects he expected Abramson to
investigate with the $85,000 the Agency was furnishing
him. Gottlieb wanted “operationally pertinent materials
along the following lines: a. Disturbance of Memory; b.
Discrediting by Aberrant Behavior; c. Alteration of Sex
Patterns; d. Eliciting of Information; e. Suggestibility;
f. Creation of Dependence.”
Dr. Harris Isbell, whose work the CIA funded through
Navy cover with the approval of the Director of the
National Institutes of Health, published his principal
findings, but he did not mention how he obtained his
subjects. As Director of the Addiction Research Center at
the huge Federal drug hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, he
had access to a literally captive population. Inmates
heard on the grapevine that if they volunteered for
Isbell’s program, they would be rewarded either in the
drug of their choice or in time off from their sentences.
Most of the addicts chose drugs—usually heroin or
morphine of a purity seldom seen on the street. The
subjects signed an approval form, but they were not told
the names of the experimental drugs or the probable
effects. This mattered little, since the “volunteers”
probably would have granted their informed consent to
virtually anything to get hard drugs.
Given Isbell’s almost unlimited supply of subjects,
TSS officials used the Lexington facility as a place to
make quick tests of promising but untried drugs and to
perform specialized experiments they could not easily
duplicate elsewhere. For instance, Isbell did one study
for which it would have been impossible to attract
student volunteers. He kept seven men on LSD for 77
straight days.[5] Such an experiment is as chilling as it
is astonishing—both to lovers and haters of LSD. Nearly
20 years after Dr. Isbell’s early work, counterculture
journalist Hunter S. Thompson delighted and frightened
his readers with accounts of drug binges lasting a few
days, during which Thompson felt his brain boiling away
in the sun, his nerves wrapping around enormous barbed
wire forts, and his remaining faculties reduced to their
reptilian antecedents. Even Thompson would shudder at the
thought of 77 days straight on LSD, and it is doubtful he
would joke about the idea. To Dr. Isbell, it was just
another experiment. “I have had seven patients who have
now been taking the drug for more than 42 days,” he wrote
in the middle of the test, which he called “the most
amazing demonstration of drug tolerance I have ever
seen.” Isbell tried to “break through this tolerance” by
giving triple and quadruple doses of LSD to the inmates.
Filled with intense curiosity, Isbell tried out a
wide variety of unproven drugs on his subjects. Just as
soon as a new batch of scopolamine, rivea seeds, or
bufotenine arrived from the CIA or NIMH, he would start
testing. His relish for the task occasionally shone
through the dull scientific reports. “I will write you a
letter as soon as I can get the stuff into a man or two,”
he informed his Agency contact.
No corresponding feeling shone through for the
inmates, however. In his few recorded personal comments,
he complained that his subjects tended to be afraid of
the doctors and were not as open in describing their
experiences as the experimenters would have wished.
Although Isbell made an effort to “break through the
barriers” with the subjects, who were nearly all black
drug addicts, Isbell finally decided “in all probability,
this type of behavior is to be expected with patients of
this type.” The subjects have long since scattered, and
no one apparently has measured the aftereffects of the
more extreme experiments on them.
One subject who could be found spent only a brief
time with Dr. Isbell. Eddie Flowers was 19 years old and
had been in Lexington for about a year when he signed up
for Isbell’s program. He lied about his age to get in,
claiming he was 21. All he cared about was getting some
drugs. He moved into the experimental wing of the
hospital where the food was better and he could listen to
music. He loved his heroin but knew nothing about drugs
like LSD. One day he took something in a graham cracker.
No one ever told him the name, but his description sounds
like it made him trip—badly, to be sure. “It was the
worst shit I ever had,” he says. He hallucinated and
suffered for 16 or 17 hours. “I was frightened. I
wouldn’t take it again.” Still, Flowers earned enough
“points” in the experiment to qualify for his “payoff in
heroin. All he had to do was knock on a little window
down the hall. This was the drug bank. The man in charge
kept a list of the amount of the hard drug each inmate
had in his account. Flowers just had to say how much he
wanted to withdraw and note the method of payment. “If
you wanted it in the vein, you got it there,” recalls
Flowers who now works in a Washington, D.C. drug
rehabilitation center.
Dr. Isbell refuses all request for interviews. He did
tell a Senate subcommittee in 1975 that he inherited the
drug payoff system when he came to Lexington and that “it
was the custom in those days…. The ethical codes were
not so highly developed, and there was a great need to
know in order to protect the public in assessing the
potential use of narcotics…. I personally think we did
a very excellent job.”
For every Isbell, Hyde, or Abramson who did TSS
contract work, there were dozens of others who simply
served as casual CIA informants, some witting and some
not. Each TSS project officer had a skull session with
dozens of recognized experts several times a year. “That
was the only way a tiny staff like Sid Gottlieb’s could
possibly keep on top of the burgeoning behavioral
sciences,” says an ex-CIA official. “There would be no
way you could do it by library research or the Ph.D.
dissertation approach.” The TSS men always asked their
contacts for the names of others they could talk to, and
the contacts would pass them on to other interesting
scientists.
In LSD research, TSS officers benefited from the
energetic intelligence gathering of their contractors,
particularly Harold Abramson. Abramson talked regularly
to virtually everyone interested in the drug, including
the few early researchers not funded by the Agency or the
military, and he reported his findings to TSS. In
addition, he served as reporting secretary of two
conference series sponsored by the Agency’s sometime
conduit, the Macy Foundation. These series each lasted
over five year periods in the 1950s; one dealt with
“Problems of Consciousness” and the other with
“Neuropharmacology.” Held once a year in the genteel
surroundings of the Princeton Inn, the Macy Foundation
conferences brought together TSS’s (and the military’s)
leading contractors, as part of a group of roughly 25
with the multidisciplinary background that TSS officials
so loved. The participants came from all over the social
sciences and included such luminaries as Margaret Mead
and Jean Piaget. The topics discussed usually mirrored
TSS’s interests at the time, and the conferences served
as a spawning ground for ideas that allowed researchers
to engage in some healthy cross-fertilization.
Beyond the academic world, TSS looked to the
pharmaceutical companies as another source on drugs—and
for a continuing supply of new products to test. TSS’s
Ray Treichler handled the liaison function, and this
secretive little man built up close relationships with
many of the industry’s key executives. He had a
particular knack for convincing them he would not reveal
their trade secrets. Sometimes claiming to be from the
Army Chemical Corps and sometimes admitting his CIA
connection, Treichler would ask for samples of drugs that
were either highly poisonous, or, in the words of the
onetime director of research of a large company, “caused
hypertension, increased blood pressure, or led to other
odd physiological activity.”
Dealing with American drug companies posed no
particular problems for TSS. Most cooperated in any way
they could. But relations with Sandoz were more
complicated. The giant Swiss firm had a monopoly on the
Western world’s production of LSD until 1953. Agency
officials feared that Sandoz would somehow allow large
quantities to reach the Russians. Since information on
LSD’s chemical structure and effects was publicly
available from 1947 on, the Russians could have produced
it any time they felt it worthwhile. Thus, the Agency’s
phobia about Sandoz seems rather irrational, but it
unquestionably did exist.
On two occasions early in the Cold War, the entire
CIA hierarchy went into a dither over reports that Sandoz
might allow large amounts of LSD to reach Communist
countries. In 1951 reports came in through military
channels that the Russians had obtained some 50 million
doses from Sandoz. Horrendous visions of what the
Russians might do with such a stockpile circulated in the
CIA, where officials did not find out the intelligence
was false for several years. There was an even greater
uproar in 1953 when more reports came in, again through
military intelligence, that Sandoz wanted to sell the
astounding quantity of 10 kilos (22 pounds) of LSD enough
for about 100 million doses—on the open market.
A top-level coordinating committee which included CIA
and Pentagon representatives unanimously recommended that
the Agency put up $240,000 to buy it all. Allen Dulles
gave his approval, and off went two CIA representatives
to Switzerland, presumably with a black bag full of cash.
They met with the president of Sandoz and other top
executives. The Sandoz men stated that the company had
never made anything approaching 10 kilos of LSD and that,
in fact, since the discovery of the drug 10 years before,
its total production had been only 40 grams (about 11/2
ounces).[6] The manufacturing process moved quite slowly
at that time because Sandoz used real ergot, which could
not be grown in large quantities. Nevertheless, Sandoz
executives, being good Swiss businessmen, offered to
supply the U.S. Government with 100 grams weekly for an
indefinite period, if the Americans would pay a fair
price. Twice the Sandoz president thanked the CIA men for
being willing to take the nonexistent 10 kilos off the
market. While he said the company now regretted it had
ever discovered LSD in the first place, he promised that
Sandoz would not let the drug fall into communist hands.
The Sandoz president mentioned that various Americans had
in the past made “covert and sideways” approaches to
Sandoz to find out about LSD, and he agreed to keep the
U.S. Government informed of all future production and
shipping of the drug. He also agreed to pass on any
intelligence about Eastern European interest in LSD. The
Sandoz executives asked only that their arrangement with
the CIA be kept “in the very strictest confidence.”
All around the world, the CIA tried to stay on top of
the LSD supply. Back home in Indianapolis, Eli Lilly &
Company was even then working on a process to synthesize
LSD. Agency officials felt uncomfortable having to rely
on a foreign company for their supply, and in 1953 they
asked Lilly executives to make them up a batch, which the
company subsequently donated to the government. Then, in
1954, Lilly scored a major breakthrough when its
researchers worked out a complicated 12- to 15-step
process to manufacture first lysergic acid (the basic
building block) and then LSD itself from chemicals
available on the open market. Given a relatively
sophisticated lab, a competent chemist could now make LSD
without a supply of the hard-to-grow ergot fungus. Lilly
officers confidentially informed the government of their
triumph. They also held an unprecedented press conference
to trumpet their synthesis of lysergic acid, but they did
not publish for another five years their success with the
closely related LSD.
TSS officials soon sent a memo to Allen Dulles,
explaining that the Lilly discovery was important because
the government henceforth could buy LSD in “tonnage
quantities,” which made it a potential chemical-warfare
agent. The memo writer pointed out, however, that from
the MKULTRA point of view, the discovery made no
difference since TSS was working on ways to use the drug
only in small-scale covert operations, and the Agency had
no trouble getting the limited amounts it needed. But now
the Army Chemical Corps and the Air Force could get their
collective hands on enough LSD to turn on the world.
Sharing the drug with the Army here, setting up
research programs there, keeping track of it everywhere,
the CIA generally presided over the LSD scene during the
1950s. To be sure, the military services played a part
and funded their own research programs.[7] So did the
National Institutes of Health, to a lesser extent. Yet
both the military services and the NIH allowed themselves
to be co-opted by the CIA—as funding conduits and
intelligence sources. The Food and Drug Administration
also supplied the Agency with confidential information on
drug testing. Of the Western world’s two LSD
manufacturers, one—Eli Lilly—gave its entire (small)
supply to the CIA and the military. The other—Sandoz—
informed Agency representatives every time it shipped the
drug. If somehow the CIA missed anything with all these
sources, the Agency still had its own network of scholar-
spies, the most active of whom was Harold Abramson who
kept it informed of all new developments in the LSD
field. While the CIA may not have totally cornered the
LSD market in the 1950s, it certainly had a good measure
of control—the very power it sought over human behavior.
Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues at MKULTRA soaked up
pools of information about LSD and other drugs from all
outside sources, but they saved for themselves the
research they really cared about: operational testing.
Trained in both science and espionage, they believed they
could bridge the huge gap between experimenting in the
laboratory and using drugs to outsmart the enemy.
Therefore the leaders of MKULTRA initiated their own
series of drug experiments that paralleled and drew
information from the external research. As practical men
of action, unlimited by restrictive academic standards,
they did not feel the need to keep their tests in strict
scientific sequence. They wanted results now—not next
year. If a drug showed promise, they felt no qualms about
trying it out operationally before all the test results
came in. As early as 1953, for instance, Sid Gottlieb
went overseas with a supply of a hallucinogenic drug—
almost certainly LSD. With unknown results, he arranged
for it to be slipped to a speaker at a political rally,
presumably to see if it would make a fool of him.
These were freewheeling days within the CIA—then a
young agency whose bureaucratic arteries had not started
to harden. The leaders of MKULTRA had high hopes for LSD.
It appeared to be an awesome substance, whose advent,
like the ancient discovery of fire, would bring out
primitive responses of fear and worship in people. Only a
speck of LSD could take a strongwilled man and turn his
most basic perceptions into willowy shadows. Time, space,
right, wrong, order, and the notion of what was possible
all took on new faces. LSD was a frightening weapon, and
it took a swashbuckling boldness for the leaders of
MKULTRA to prepare for operational testing the way they
first did: by taking it themselves. They tripped at the
office. They tripped at safehouses, and sometimes they
traveled to Boston to trip under Bob Hyde’s penetrating
gaze. Always they observed, questioned, and analyzed each
other. LSD seemed to remove inhibitions, and they thought
they could use it to find out what went on in the mind
underneath all the outside acts and pretensions. If they
could get at the inner self, they reasoned, they could
better manipulate a person—or keep him from being
manipulated.
The men from MKULTRA were trying LSD in the early
1950s—when Stalin lived and Joe McCarthy raged. It was a
foreboding time, even for those not professionally
responsible for doomsday poisons. Not surprisingly, Sid
Gottlieb and colleagues who tried LSD did not think of
the drug as something that might enhance creativity or
cause transcendental experiences. Those notions would not
come along for years. By and large, there was thought to
be only one prevailing and hardheaded version of reality,
which was “normal,” and everything else was “crazy.” An
LSD trip made people temporarily crazy, which meant
potentially vulnerable to the CIA men (and mentally ill,
to the doctors). The CIA experimenters did not trip for
the experience itself, or to get high, or to sample new
realities. They were testing a weapon; for their
purposes, they might as well have been in a ballistics
lab.
Despite this prevailing attitude in the Agency, at
least one MKULTRA pioneer recalls that his first trip
expanded his conception of reality: “I was shaky at
first, but then I just experienced it and had a high. I
felt that everything was working right. I was like a
locomotive going at top efficiency. Sure there was
stress, but not in a debilitating way. It was like the
stress of an engine pulling the longest train it’s ever
pulled.” This CIA veteran describes seeing all the colors
of the rainbow growing out of cracks in the sidewalk. He
had always disliked cracks as signs of imperfection, but
suddenly the cracks became natural stress lines that
measured the vibrations of the universe. He saw people
with blemished faces, which he had previously found
slightly repulsive. “I had a change of values about
faces,” he says. “Hooked noses or crooked teeth would
become beautiful for that person. Something had turned
loose in me, and all I had done was shift my attitude.
Reality hadn’t changed, but I had. That was all the
difference in the world between seeing something ugly and
seeing truth and beauty.”
At the end of this day of his first trip, the CIA man
and his colleagues had an alcohol party to help come
down. “I had a lump in my throat,” he recalls wistfully.
Although he had never done such a thing before, he wept
in front of his coworkers. “I didn’t want to leave it. I
felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn’t be
able to hold on to this kind of beauty. I felt very
unhappy. The people who wrote the report on me said I had
experienced depression, but they didn’t understand why I
felt so bad. They thought I had had a bad trip.”
This CIA man says that others with his general
personality tended to enjoy themselves on LSD, but that
the stereotypical CIA operator (particularly the extreme
counterintelligence type who mistrusts everyone and
everything) usually had negative reactions. The drug
simply exaggerated his paranoia. For these operators, the
official notes, “dark evil things would begin to lurk
around,” and they would decide the experimenters were
plotting against them.
The TSS team understood it would be next to
impossible to allay the fears of this ever-vigilant,
suspicious sort, although they might use LSD to disorient
or generally confuse such a person. However, they toyed
with the idea that LSD could be applied to better
advantage on more trusting types. Could a clever foe “re
educate” such a person with a skillful application of
LSD? Speculating on this question, the CIA official
states that while under the influence of the drug, “you
tend to have a more global view of things. I found it
awfully hard when stoned to maintain the notion: I am a
U.S. citizen—my country right or wrong…. You tend to
have these good higher feelings. You are more open to the
brotherhood-of-man idea and more susceptible to the seamy
sides of your own society…. I think this is exactly
what happened during the 1960s, but it didn’t make people
more communist. It just made them less inclined to
identify with the U.S. They took a plague-on-both-yourhouses
position.”
As to whether his former colleagues in TSS had the
same perception of the LSD experience, the man replies,
“I think everybody understood that if you had a good
trip, you had a kind of above-it-all look into reality.
What we subsequently found was that when you came down,
you remembered the experience, but you didn’t switch
identities. You really didn’t have that kind of feeling.
You weren’t as suspicious of people. You listened to
them, but you also saw through them more easily and
clearly. We decided that this wasn’t the kind of thing
that was going to make a guy into a turncoat to his own
country. The more we worked with it, the less we became
convinced this was what the communists were using for
brainwashing.”
The early LSD tests—both outside and inside the
Agency—had gone well enough that the MKULTRA scientists
moved forward to the next stage on the road to “field”
use: They tried the drug out on people by surprise. This,
after all, would be the way an operator would give—or
get—the drug. First they decided to spring it on each
other without warning. They agreed among themselves that
a coworker might slip it to them at any time. (In what
may be an apocryphal story, a TSS staff man says that one
of his former colleagues always brought his own bottle of
wine to office parties and carried it with him at all
times.) Unwitting doses became an occupational hazard.
MKULTRA men usually took these unplanned trips in
stride, but occasionally they turned nasty. Two TSS
veterans tell the story of a coworker who drank some LSD-
laced coffee during his morning break. Within an hour,
states one veteran, “he sort of knew he had it, but he
couldn’t pull himself together. Sometimes you take it,
and you start the process of maintaining your composure.
But this grabbed him before he was aware, and it got away
from him.” Filled with fear, the CIA man fled the
building that then housed TSS, located on the edge of the
Mall near Washington’s great monuments. Having lost sight
of him, his colleagues searched frantically, but he
managed to escape. The hallucinating Agency man worked
his way across one of the Potomac bridges and apparently
cut his last links with rationality. “He reported
afterwards that every automobile that came by was a
terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him
personally,” says the veteran. “Each time a car passed,
he would huddle down against the parapet, terribly
frightened. It was a real horror trip for him. I mean, it
was hours of agony. It was like a dream that never stops—
with someone chasing you.”
After about an hour and a half, the victim’s
coworkers found him on the Virginia side of the Potomac,
crouched under a fountain, trembling. “It was awfully
hard to persuade him that his friends were his friends at
that point,” recalls the colleague. “He was alone in the
world, and everyone was hostile. He’d become a full-blown
paranoid. If it had lasted for two weeks, we’d have
plunked him in a mental hospital.” Fortunately for him,
the CIA man came down by the end of the day. This was not
the first, last, or most tragic bad trip in the Agency’s
testing program.[8]
By late 1953, only six months after Allen Dulles had
formally created MKULTRA, TSS officials were already well
into the last stage of their research: systematic use of
LSD on “outsiders” who had no idea they had received the
drug. These victims simply felt their moorings slip away
in the midst of an ordinary day, for no apparent reason,
and no one really knew how they would react.
Sid Gottlieb was ready for the operational
experiments. He considered LSD to be such a secret
substance that he gave it a private code name (“serunim”)
by which he and his colleagues often referred to the
drug, even behind the CIA’s heavily guarded doors. In
retrospect, it seems more than bizarre that CIA
officials—men responsible for the nation’s intelligence
and alertness when the hot and cold wars against the
communists were at their peak—would be sneaking LSD into
each other’s coffee cups and thereby subjecting
themselves to the unknown frontiers of experimental
drugs. But these side trips did not seem to change the
sense of reality of Gottlieb or of high CIA officials,
who took LSD on several occasions. The drug did not
transform Gottlieb out of the mind set of a master
scientist-spy, a protégé of Richard Helms in the CIA’s
inner circle. He never stopped milking his goats at 5:30
every morning.
The CIA leaders’ early achievements with LSD were
impressive. They had not invented the drug, but they had
gotten in on the American ground floor and done nearly
everything else. They were years ahead of the scientific
literature—let alone the public—and spies win by being
ahead. They had monopolized the supply of LSD and
dominated the research by creating much of it themselves.
They had used money and other blandishments to build a
network of scientists and doctors whose work they could
direct and turn to their own use. All that remained
between them and major espionage successes was the
performance of the drug in the field.
That, however, turned out to be a considerable
stumbling block. LSD had an incredibly powerful effect on
people, but not in ways the CIA could predict or control.
Notes
The description of Robert Hyde’s first trip came from
interviews with Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Dr. J. Herbert
DeShon, and a talk by Max Rinkel at the 2nd Macy
Conference on Neuropharmacology, pp. 235-36, edited by
Harold A. Abramson, 1955: Madison Printing Company.
The descriptions of TSS and Sidney Gottlieb came from
interviews with Ray Cline, John Stockwell, about 10 other
ex-CIA officers, and other friends of Gottlieb.
Memos quoted on the early MKULTRA program include
Memorandum from ADDP Helms to DCI Dulles, 4/3/53, Tab A,
pp. 1-2 (quoted in Church Committee Report, Book I); APF
A-1, April 13, 1953, Memorandum for Deputy Director
(Administration, Subject: Project MKULTRA—Extremely
Sensitive Research and Development Program; #A/B,I,64/6,
6 February 1952, Memorandum for the Record, Subject:
Contract with [deleted] #A/B,I,64/29, undated, Memorandum
for Technical Services Staff, Subject: Alcohol
Antagonists and Accelerators, Research and Development
Project. The Gottlieb quote is from Hearing before the
Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the
Senate Committee on Human Resources, September 21, 1977,
p. 206.
The background data on LSD came particularly from The
Beyond Within: The LSD Story by Sidney Cohen (New York:
Atheneum,1972). Other sources included Origins of
Psychopharmacology: From CPZ to LSD by Anne E. Caldwell
(Springfield, III.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970) and Document
352, “An OSI Study of the Strategic Medical Importance of
LSD-25,” 30 August 1955.
TSS’s use of outside researchers came from interviews
with four former TSSers. MKULTRA Subprojects 8, 10, 63,
and 66 described Robert Hyde’s work. Subprojects 7, 27,
and 40 concerned Harold Abramson. Hodge’s work was in
subprojects 17 and 46. Carl Pfeiffer’s Agency connection,
along with Hyde’s, Abramson’s, and Isbell’s, was laid out
by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Memorandum for the Record, 1
December 1953, Subject: Conversation with Dr. Willis
Gibbons of TSS re Olson Case (found at p. 1030, Kennedy
Subcommittee 1975 Biomedical and Behavioral Research
Hearings). Isbell’s testing program was also described at
those hearings, as it was in Document # 14, 24 July,
1953, Memo For: Liaison & Security Officer/TSS, Subject
#71 An Account of the Chemical Division’s Contacts in the
National Institute of Health; Document #37, 14 July 1954,
subject [deleted]; and Document # 41,31 August,1956,
subject; trip to Lexington, Ky.,21-23 August 1956.
Isbell’s program was further described in a “Report on
ADAMHA Involvement in LSD Research,” found at p. 993 of
1975 Kennedy subcommittee hearings. The firsthand account
of the actual testing came from an interview with Edward
M. Flowers, Washington, D.C.
The section on TSS’s noncontract informants came from
interviews with TSS sources, reading the proceedings of
the Macy Conferences on “Problems of Consciousness” and
“Neuropharmacology,” and interviews with several
participants including Sidney Cohen, Humphrey Osmond, and
Hudson Hoagland.
The material on CIA’s relations with Sandoz and Eli
Lilly came from Document #24, 16 November, 1953, Subject:
ARTICHOKE Conference; Document #268, 23 October, 1953,
Subject: Meeting in Director’s Office at 1100 hours on 23
October with Mr. Wisner and [deleted]; Document # 316,6
January,1954, Subject: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD25);
and Document #338, 26 October 1954, Subject:
Potential Large Scale Availability of LSD through newly
discovered synthesis by [deleted]; interviews with Sandoz
and Lilly former executives; interviews with TSS sources;
and Sidney Gottlieb’s testimony before Kennedy
subcommittee, 1977, p. 203.
Henry Beecher’s US government connections were
detailed in his private papers, in a report on the Swiss-
LSD death to the CIA at p. 396, Church Committee Report,
Book I, and in interviews with two of his former
associates.
The description of TSS’s internal testing progression
comes from interviews with former staff members. The
short reference to Sid Gottlieb’s arranging for LSD to be
given a speaker at a political rally comes from Document
#A/B, II, 26/8, 9 June 1954, Subject: MKULTRA. Henry
Beecher’s report to the CIA on the Swiss suicide is found
at p. 396, Church Committee Report, Book I.
Footnotes
1. During the 1950s, Boston Psychopathic changed its
name to Massachusetts Mental Health Center, the name it
bears today.
2. Pronounced M-K-ULTRA. The MK digraph simply
identified it as a TSS project. As for the ULTRA part, it
may have had its etymological roots in the most closely
guarded Anglo-American World War II intelligence secret,
the ULTRA program, which handled the cracking of German
military codes. While good espionage tradecraft called
for cryptonyms to have no special meaning, wartime
experiences were still very much on the minds of men like
Allen Dulles.
3. By no means did TSS neglect other drugs. It looked
at hundreds of others from cocaine to nicotine, with
special emphasis on special-purpose substances. One 1952
memo talked about the urgent operational need for a
chemical “producing general listlessness and lethargy.”
Another mentioned finding—as TSS later did—a potion to
accelerate the effects of liquor, called an “alcohol
extender.”
4. As happened to Albert Hofmann the first time,
Abramson once unknowingly ingested some LSD, probably by
swallowing water from his spiked snail tank. He started
to feel bad, but with his wife’s help, he finally
pinpointed the cause. According to brain and dolphin
expert John Lilly, who heard the story from Mrs.
Abramson, Harold was greatly relieved that his discomfort
was not grave. “Oh, it’s nothing serious,” he said. “It’s
just an LSD psychosis. I’ll just go to bed and sleep it
off.”
5. Army researchers, as usual running about five
years behind the CIA, became interested in the sustained
use of LSD as an interrogation device during 1961 field
tests (called Operation THIRD CHANCE). The Army men
tested the drug in Europe on nine foreigners and one
American, a black soldier named James Thornwell, accused
of stealing classified documents. While Thornwell was
reacting to the drug under extremely stressful
conditions, his captors threatened “to extend the state
indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insanity,”
according to an Army document. Thornwell is now suing the
U.S. government for $30 million.
In one of those twists that Washington insiders take
for granted and outsiders do not quite believe, Terry
Lenzner, a partner of the same law firm seeking this huge
sum for Thornwell, is the lawyer for Sid Gottlieb, the
man who oversaw the 77-day trips at Lexington and even
more dangerous LSD testing.
6. A 1975 CIA document clears up the mystery of how
the Agency’s military sources could have made such a huge
error in estimating Sandoz’s LSD supply (and probably
also explains the earlier inaccurate report that the
Russians had bought 50,000,000 doses). What happened,
according to the document, was that the U.S. military
attaché in Switzerland did not know the difference
between a milligram (1/1,000 of a gram) and a kilogram
(1,000 grams). This mix-up threw all his calculations off
by a factor of 1,000,000.
7. Military security agencies supported the LSD work
of such well-known researchers as Amedeo Marrazzi of the
University of Minnesota and Missouri Institute of
Psychiatry, Henry Beecher of Harvard and Massachusetts
General Hospital, Charles Savage while he was at the
Naval Medical Research Institute, James Dille of the
University of Washington, Gerald Klee of the University
of Maryland Medical School, Neil Burch of Baylor
University (who performed later experiments for the CIA),
and Paul Hoch and James Cattell of the New York State
Psychiatric Institute, whose forced injections of a
mescaline derivative led to the 1953 death of New York
tennis professional Harold Blauer. (Dr. Cattell later
told Army investigators, “We didn’t know whether it was
dog piss or what it was we were giving him.”)
8. TSS officials had long known that LSD could be
quite dangerous. In 1952, Harvard Medical School’s Henry
Beecher who regularly gave the Agency information on his
talks with European colleagues, reported that a Swiss
doctor had suffered severe depression after taking the
drug and had killed herself three weeks later.
Concerning the Case of Dr. Frank Olsen
In November 1953, Sid Gottlieb decided to test LSD on
a group of scientists from the Army Chemical Corps’
Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in
Frederick, Maryland. Although the Clandestine Services
hierarchy had twice put TSS under strict notice not to
use LSD without permission from above, Gottlieb must have
felt that trying the drug on SOD men was not so different
from giving it to his colleagues at the office. After
all, officials at TSS and SOD worked intimately together,
and they shared one of the darkest secrets of the Cold
War: that the U.S. government maintained the capability—
which it would use at times—to kill or incapacitate
selected people with biological weapons. Only a handful
of the highest CIA officials knew that TSS was paying SOD
about $200,000 a year in return for operational systems
to infect foes with disease.
Gottlieb planned to drop the LSD on the SOD men in
the splendid isolation of a three-day working retreat.
Twice a year, the SOD and TSS men who collaborated on
MKNAOMI, their joint program, held a planning session at
a remote site where they could brainstorm without
interruption. On November 18, 1953, they gathered at Deep
Creek Lodge, a log building in the woods of Western
Maryland. It had been built as a Boy Scout camp 25 years
earlier. Surrounded by the water of a mountain lake on
three sides, with the peaks of the Appalachian chain
looking down over the thick forest, the lodge was
isolated enough for even the most security conscious spy.
Only an occasional hunter was likely to wander through
after the summer months.
Dr. John Schwab, who had founded SOD in 1950, Lt.
Colonel Vincent Ruwet, its current chief, and Dr. Frank
Olson, its temporary head earlier that year, led the
Detrick group. These germ warriors came under the cover
of being wildlife writers and lecturers off on a busman’s
holiday. They carefully removed the Fort Detrick parking
stickers from their cars before setting out. Sid Gottlieb
brought three co-workers from the Agency, including his
deputy Robert Lashbrook.
They met in the living room of the lodge, in front of
a roaring blaze in the huge walk-in fireplace. Then they
split off into smaller groups for specialized meetings.
The survivors among those who attended these sessions
remain as tight-lipped as ever, willing to share a few
details of the general atmosphere but none of the
substance. However, from other sources at Fort Detrick
and from government documents, the MKNAOMI research can
be pieced together. It was this program that was
discussed during the fateful retreat.
Under MKNAOMI, the SOD men developed a whole arsenal
of toxic substances for CIA use. If Agency operators
needed to kill someone in a few seconds with, say, a
suicide pill, SOD provided super-deadly shellfish
toxin.[1] On his ill-fated U-2 flight over the Soviet
Union in 1960, Francis Gary Powers carried—and chose not
to use—a drill bit coated with this poison concealed in a
silver dollar. While perfect for someone anxious to die—
or kill—instantly, shellfish toxin offered no time to
escape and could be traced easily. More useful for
assassination, CIA and SOD men decided, was botulinum.
With an incubation period of 8 to 12 hours, it allowed
the killer time to separate himself from the deed. Agency
operators would later supply pills laced with this lethal
food poison to its Mafia allies for inclusion in Fidel
Castro’s milkshake. If CIA officials wanted an
assassination to look like a death from natural causes,
they could choose from a long list of deadly diseases
that normally occurred in particular countries. Thus in
1960, Clandestine Services chief Richard Bissell asked
Sid Gottlieb to pick out an appropriate malady to kill
the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. Gottlieb told the Senate
investigators that he selected one that “was supposed to
produce a disease that was . . . indigenous to that area
[of West Africa] and that could be fatal.” Gottlieb
personally carried the bacteria to the Congo, but this
murderous operation was scrubbed before Lumumba could be
infected. (The Congolese leader was killed shortly
thereafter under circumstances that still are not clear.)
When CIA operators merely wanted to be rid of
somebody temporarily, SOD stockpiled for them about a
dozen diseases and toxins of varying strengths. At the
relatively benign end of the SOD list stood Staph.
enterotoxin, a mild form of food poisoning—mild compared
to botulinum. This Staph. infection almost never killed
and simply incapacitated its victim for 3 to 6 hours.
Under the skilled guidance of Sid Gottlieb’s wartime
predecessor, Stanley Lovell, OSS had used this very
substance to prevent Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht from
attending an economic conference during the war. More
virulent in the SOD arsenal was Venezuelan equine
encephalomyelitis virus. It usually immobilized a person
for 2 to 5 days and kept him in a weakened state for
several more weeks. If the Agency wanted to incapacitate
someone for a period of months, SOD had two different
kinds of brucellosis.[2]
A former senior official at Fort Detrick was kind
enough to run me through all the germs and toxins SOD
kept for the CIA, listing their advantages and
disadvantages. Before doing so, he emphasized that SOD
was also trying to work out ways to protect U.S. citizens
and installations from attack with similar substances.
“You can’t have a serious defense,” he says, “unless
someone has thought about offense.” He stated that Japan
made repeated biological attacks against China during
World War II—which was one reason for starting the
American program.[3] He knows of no use since by the
Soviet Union or any other power.
According to the Detrick official, anyone
contemplating use of a biological product had to consider
many other factors besides toxicity and incubation
period.
Can the germ be detected easily and countered with a
vaccine? He notes that anthrax, a fatal disease (when
inhaled) that SOD stored for CIA, has the advantage of
symptoms that resemble pneumonia; similarly, Venezuelan
equine encephalomyelitis can be mistaken for the grippe.
While vaccines do exist for many of the stockpiled
diseases, SOD was forever developing more virulent
strains. “I don’t know of any organism susceptible to a
drug that can’t be made more resistant,” states the
Detrick man.
Did the disease have a high degree of secondary
spread? SOD preferred it not to, because these germ
warfare men did not want to start epidemics—that was the
job of others at Fort Detrick.
Was the organism stable? How did humidity affect it?
SOD considered these and many other factors.
To the CIA, perhaps the most important question was
whether it could covertly deliver the germ to infect the
right person. One branch of SOD specialized in building
delivery systems, the most famous of which now is the
dart gun fashioned out of a .45 pistol that ex-CIA
Director William Colby displayed to the world at a 1975
Senate hearing. The Agency had long been after SOD to
develop a “non-discernible microbioinoculator” which
could give people deadly shots that, according to a CIA
document, could not be “easily detected upon a detailed
autopsy.” SOD also rigged up aerosol sprays that could be
fired by remote control, including a fluorescent starter
that was activated by turning on the light, a cigarette
lighter that sprayed when lit, and an engine head bolt
that shot off as the engine heated. “If you’re going to
infect people, the most likely way is respiratory,” notes
the high Detrick official. “Everybody breathes, but you
might not get them to eat.”
Frank Olson specialized in the airborne delivery of
disease. He had been working in the field ever since
1943, when he came to Fort Detrick as one of the original
military officers in the U. S. biological warfare
program. Before the end of the war, he developed a
painful ulcer condition that led him to seek a medical
discharge from the uniformed military, but he had stayed
on as a civilian. He joined SOD when it started in 1950.
Obviously good at what he did, Olson served for several
months as acting chief of SOD in 1952-53 but asked to be
relieved when the added stress caused his ulcer to flare
up. He happily returned to his lesser post as a branch
chief, where he had fewer administrative duties and could
spend more time in the laboratory. A lover of practical
jokes, Olson was very popular among his many friends. He
was an outgoing man, but, like most of his generation, he
kept his inner feelings to himself. His great passion was
his family, and he spent most of his spare time playing
with his three kids and helping around the house. He had
met his wife while they both studied at the University of
Wisconsin.
Olson attended all the sessions and apparently did
everything expected of him during the first two days at
the lodge. After dinner on Thursday, November 19, 1953—
the same day that a Washington Post editorial decried the
use of dogs in chemical experiments—Olson shared a drink
of Cointreau with all but two of the men present. (One
had a heart condition; the other, a reformed alcoholic,
did not drink.) Unbeknownst to the SOD men, Sid Gottlieb
had decided to spike the liqueur with LSD.[4]
“To me, everyone was pretty normal,” says SOD’s
Benjamin Wilson. “No one was aware anything had happened
until Gottlieb mentioned it. [20 minutes after the drink]
Gottlieb asked if we had noticed anything wrong. Everyone
was aware, once it was brought to their attention.” They
tried to continue their discussion, but once the drug
took hold, the meeting deteriorated into laughter and
boisterous conversation. Two of the SOD men apparently
got into an all-night philosophical conversation that had
nothing to do with biological warfare. Ruwet remembers it
as “the most frightening experience I ever had or hope to
have.” Ben Wilson recalls that “Olson was psychotic. He
couldn’t understand what happened. He thought someone was
playing tricks on him…. One of his favorite expressions
was ‘You guys are a bunch of thespians.'”
Olson and most of the others became increasingly
uncomfortable and could not sleep.[5] When the group
gathered in the morning, Olson was still agitated,
obviously disturbed, as were several of his colleagues.
The meeting had turned sour, and no one really wanted to
do more business. They all straggled home during the day.
Alice Olson remembers her husband coming in before
dinner that evening: “He said nothing. He just sat there.
Ordinarily when he came back from a trip, he’d tell me
about the things he could—what they had to eat, that sort
of thing. During dinner, I said, ‘It’s a damned shame the
adults in this family don’t communicate anymore.’ He
said, ‘Wait until the kids get to bed and I’ll talk to
you.’ ” Later that night, Frank Olson told his wife he
had made “a terrible mistake,” that his colleagues had
laughed at him and humiliated him. Mrs. Olson assured him
that the others were his friends, that they would not
make fun of him. Still, Olson would not tell her any
more. He kept his fears bottled up inside, and he shared
nothing of his growing feeling that someone was out to
get him. Alice Olson was accustomed to his keeping
secrets. Although she realized he worked on biological
warfare, they never talked about it. She had had only
little glimpses of his profession. He complained about
the painful shots he was always taking.[6] He almost
never took a bath at home because he showered upon
entering and leaving his office every day. When a Detrick
employee died of anthrax (one of three fatalities in the
base’s 27-year history), Frank Olson told his wife the
man had died of pneumonia.
Alice Olson had never even seen the building where
her husband worked. Fort Detrick was built on the
principle of concentric circles, with secrets concealed
inside secrets. To enter the inner regions where SOD
operated, one needed not only the highest security
clearance but a “need to know” authorization. Her husband
was not about to break out of a career of government
imposed secrecy to tell her about the TOP SECRET
experiment that Sid Gottlieb had performed on him.
The Olsons spent an uncommunicative weekend together.
On Sunday they sat on the davenport in their living room,
holding hands—something they had not done for a long
time. “It was a rotten November day,” recalls Mrs. Olson.
“The fog outside was so thick you could hardly see out
the front door. Frank’s depression was dreadful.”
Finally, she recalls, they packed up the three young
children, and went off to the local theater. The film
turned out to be Luther. “It was a very serious movie,”
remembers Mrs. Olson, “not a good one to see when you’re
depressed.”
The following day, Olson appeared at 7:30 A.M. in the
office of his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Ruwet, To Ruwet,
Olson seemed “agitated.” He told Ruwet he wanted either
to quit or be fired. Taken aback, Ruwet reassured Olson
that his conduct at the lodge had been “beyond reproach.”
Seemingly satisfied and relieved, Olson agreed to stay on
and spent the rest of the day on routine SOD business.
That evening, the Olsons spent their most lighthearted
evening since before the retreat to Deep Creek Lodge, and
they planned a farewell party for a colleague the
following Saturday night.
Tuesday morning, Ruwet again arrived at his office to
find a disturbed Frank Olson waiting for him. Olson said
he felt “all mixed up” and questioned his own competence.
He said that he should not have left the Army during the
war because of his ulcer and that he lacked the ability
to do his present work. After an hour, Ruwet decided
Olson needed “psychiatric attention.” Ruwet apparently
felt that the CIA had caused Olson’s problem in the first
place, and instead of sending him to the base hospital,
he called Gottlieb’s deputy Robert Lashbrook to arrange
for Olson to see a psychiatrist.
After a hurried conference, Lashbrook and Gottlieb
decided to send Olson to Dr. Harold Abramson in New York.
Abramson had no formal training in psychiatry and did not
hold himself out to be a psychiatrist. He was an
allergist and immunologist interested in treating the
problems of the mind. Gottlieb chose him because he had a
TOP SECRET CIA security clearance and because he had been
working with LSD—under Agency contract—for several years.
Gottlieb was obviously protecting his own bureaucratic
position by not letting anyone outside TSS know what he
had done. Having failed to observe the order to seek
higher approval for LSD use, Gottlieb proceeded to
violate another CIA regulation. It states, in effect,
that whenever a potential flap arises that might
embarrass the CIA or lead to a break in secrecy, those
involved should immediately call the Office of Security.
For health problems like Olson’s, Security and the CIA
medical office keep a long list of doctors (and
psychiatrists) with TOP SECRET clearance who can provide
treatment.
Gottlieb had other plans for Frank Olson, and off to
New York went the disturbed SOD biochemist in the company
of Ruwet and Lashbrook. Olson alternately improved and
sank deeper and deeper into his feelings of depression,
inadequacy, guilt, and paranoia. He began to think that
the CIA was putting a stimulant like Benzedrine in his
coffee to keep him awake and that it was the Agency that
was out to get him. That first day in New York, Abramson
saw Olson at his office. Then at 10:30 in the evening,
the allergist visited Olson in his hotel room, armed with
a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of the sedative
Nembutal—an unusual combination for a doctor to give to
someone with symptoms like Olson’s.
Before Olson’s appointment with Dr. Abramson the
following day, he and Ruwet accompanied Lashbrook on a
visit to a famous New York magician named John
Mulholland, whom TSS had put under contract to prepare a
manual that would apply “the magician’s art to covert
activities.” An expert at pulling rabbits out of hats
could easily find new and better ways to slip drugs into
drinks, and Gottlieb signed up Mulholland to work on,
among other things, “the delivery of various materials to
unwitting subjects.” Lashbrook thought that the magician
might amuse Olson, but Olson became “highly suspicious.”
The group tactfully cut their visit short, and Lashbrook
dropped Olson off at Abramson’s office. After an hour’s
consultation with Abramson that afternoon the allergist
gave Olson permission to return to Frederick the
following day, Thanksgiving, to be with his family.
Olson, Ruwet, and Lashbrook had plane reservations
for Thursday morning, so that night, in a preholiday
attempt to lift spirits, they all went to see the Rodgers
and Hammerstein hit musical, Me and Juliet. Olson became
upset during the first act and told Ruwet that he knew
people were waiting outside the theater to arrest him.
Olson and Ruwet left the show at intermission, and the
two old friends walked back to the Statler Hotel, near
Penn Station. Later, while Ruwet slept in the next bed,
Olson crept out of the hotel and wandered the streets.
Gripped by the delusion that he was following Ruwet’s
orders, he tore up all his paper money and threw his
wallet down a chute. At 5:30 A.M., Ruwet and Lashbrook
found him sitting in the Statler lobby with his hat and
coat on.
They checked out of the hotel and caught the plane
back to Washington. An SOD driver picked Olson and Ruwet
up at National Airport and started to drive them back to
Frederick. As they drove up Wisconsin Avenue, Olson had
the driver pull into a Howard Johnson’s parking lot. He
told Ruwet that he was “ashamed” to see his family in his
present state and that he feared he might become violent
with his children. Ruwet suggested he go back to see
Abramson in New York, and Olson agreed. Ruwet and Olson
drove back to Lashbrook’s apartment on New Hampshire
Avenue off Dupont Circle, and Lashbrook summoned Sid
Gottlieb from Thanksgiving dinner in Virginia. All agreed
that Lashbrook would take Olson back to New York while
Ruwet would go back to Frederick to explain the situation
to Mrs. Olson and to see his own family. (Ruwet was
Olson’s friend, whereas Lashbrook was no more than a
professional acquaintance. Olson’s son Eric believes that
his father’s mental state suffered when Ruwet left him in
the hands of the CIA’s Lashbrook, especially since Olson
felt the CIA was “out to get him.”) Olson and Lashbrook
flew to LaGuardia airport and went to see Abramson at his
Long Island office. Then the two men ate a joyless
Thanksgiving dinner at a local restaurant. Friday morning
Abramson drove them into Manhattan. Abramson, an
allergist, finally realized that he had more on his hands
with Olson than he could handle, and he recommended
hospitalization. He wrote afterward that Olson “was in a
psychotic state . . . with delusions of persecution.”
Olson agreed to enter Chestnut Lodge, a Rockville,
Maryland sanitarium that had CIA-cleared psychiatrists on
the staff. They could not get plane reservations until
the next morning, so Olson and Lashbrook decided to spend
one last night at the Statler. They took a room on the
tenth floor. With his spirits revived, Olson dared to
call his wife for the first time since he had left
originally for New York. They had a pleasant talk, which
left her feeling better.
In the early hours of the morning, Lashbrook woke up
just in time to see Frank Olson crash through the drawn
blinds and closed window on a dead run.
Within seconds, as a crowd gathered around Olson’s
shattered body on the street below, the cover-up started.
Lashbrook called Gottlieb to tell him what had happened
before he notified the police. Next, Lashbrook called
Abramson, who, according to Lashbrook, “wanted to be kept
out of the thing completely.” Abramson soon called back
and offered to assist. When the police arrived, Lashbrook
told them he worked for the Defense Department. He said
he had no idea why Olson killed himself, but he did know
that the dead man had “suffered from ulcers.” The
detectives assigned to the case later reported that
getting information out of Lashbrook was “like pulling
teeth.” They speculated to each other that the case could
be a homicide with homosexual overtones, but they soon
dropped their inquiries when Ruwet and Abramson verified
Lashbrook’s sketchy account and invoked high government
connections.
Back in Washington, Sid Gottlieb finally felt
compelled to tell the Office of Security about the Olson
case. Director Allen Dulles personally ordered Inspector
General Lyman Kirkpatrick to make a full investigation,
but first, Agency officials tried to make sure that no
outsider would tie Olson’s death either to the CIA or
LSD. Teams of Security officers were soon scurrying
around New York and Washington, making sure the Agency
had covered its tracks. One interviewed Lashbrook and
then accompanied him to a meeting with Abramson. When
Lashbrook and Abramson asked the security officer to
leave them alone, he complied and then, in the best
traditions of his office, listened in on the conversation
covertly. From his report on their talk, it can safely be
said that Lashbrook and Abramson conspired to make sure
they told identical stories. Lashbrook dictated to
Abramson, who made a recording of the symptoms that Olson
was supposed to be suffering from and the problems that
were bothering him. Lashbrook even stated that Mrs. Olson
had suggested her husband see a psychiatrist months
before the LSD incident.[7] Lashbrook’s comments appeared
in three reports Abramson submitted to the CIA, but these
reports were internally inconsistent. In one memo,
Abramson wrote that Olson’s “psychotic state . . . seemed
to have been crystallized by [the LSD] experiment.” In a
later report, Abramson called the LSD dose “therapeutic”
and said he believed “this dosage could hardly have had
any significant role in the course of events that
followed.[8]
The CIA officially—but secretly—took the position
that the LSD had “triggered” Olson’s suicide. Agency
officials worked industriously behind the scenes to make
sure that Mrs. Olson received an adequate government
pension—two-thirds of her husband’s base pay. Ruwet, who
had threatened to expose the whole affair if Mrs. Olson
did not get the pension, submitted a form saying Olson
had died of a “classified illness.” Gottlieb and
Lashbrook kept trying to have it both ways in regard to
giving Olson LSD, according to the CIA’s General Counsel.
They acknowledged LSD’s triggering function in his death,
but they also claimed it was “practically impossible” for
the drug to have harmful aftereffects. The General
Counsel called these two positions “completely
inconsistent,” and he wrote he was “not happy with what
seems to me a very casual attitude on the part of TSS
representatives to the way this experiment was conducted
and to their remarks that this is just one of the risks
running with scientific investigation.”
As part of his investigation, Inspector General
Kirkpatrick sequestered Gottlieb’s LSD files, which
Kirkpatrick remembers did not make Gottlieb at all happy.
“I brought out his stutter,” says Kirkpatrick with a wry
smile. “He was quite concerned about his future.”
Kirkpatrick eventually recommended that some form of
reprimand be given to Gottlieb, TSS chief Willis Gibbons,
and TSS deputy chief James “Trapper” Drum, who had waited
20 days after Olson’s death to admit that Gottlieb had
cleared the experiment with him. Others opposed
Kirkpatrick’s recommendation. Admiral Luis deFlorez, the
Agency’s Research Chairman, sent a personal memo to Allen
Dulles saying reprimands would be an “injustice” and
would hinder “the spirit of initiative and enthusiasm so
necessary in our work.” The Director’s office went along,
and Kirkpatrick began the tortuous process of preparing
letters for Dulles’ signature that would say Gottlieb,
Gibbons, and Drum had done something wrong, but nothing
too wrong. Kirkpatrick went through six drafts of the
Gottlieb letter alone before he came up with acceptable
wording. He started out by saying TSS officials had
exercised “exceedingly bad judgment.” That was too harsh
for high Agency officials, so Kirkpatrick tried “very
poor judgment.” Still too hard. He settled for “poor
judgment.” The TSS officials were told that they should
not consider the letters to be reprimands and that no
record of the letters would be put in their personnel
files where they could conceivably harm future careers.
The Olson family up in Frederick did not get off so
easily. Ruwet told them Olson had jumped or fallen out of
the window in New York, but he mentioned not a word about
the LSD, whose effects Ruwet himself believed had led to
Olson’s death. Ever the good soldier, Ruwet could not
bring himself to talk about the classified experiment—
even to ease Alice Olson’s sorrow. Mrs. Olson did not
want to accept the idea that her husband had willfully
committed suicide. “It was very important to me—almost
the core of my life—that my children not feel their
father had walked out on them,” recalls Mrs. Olson.
For the next 22 years, Alice Olson had no harder
evidence than her own belief that her husband did not
desert her and the family. Then in June 1975, the
Rockefeller Commission studying illegal CIA domestic
operations reported that a man fitting Frank Olson’s
description had leaped from a New York hotel window after
the CIA had given him LSD without his knowledge. The
Olson family read about the incident in the Washington
Post. Daughter Lisa Olson Hayward and her husband went to
see Ruwet, who had retired from the Army and settled in
Frederick. In an emotional meeting, Ruwet confirmed that
Olson was the man and said he could not tell the family
earlier because he did not have permission. Ruwet tried
to discourage them from going public or seeking
compensation from the government, but the Olson family
did both. [9] On national television, Alice Olson and
each of her grown children took turns reading from a
prepared family statement:
We feel our family has been violated by the CIA in two
ways,” it said. “First, Frank Olson was experimented upon
illegally and negligently. Second, the true nature of his
death was concealed for twenty-two years…. In telling
our story, we are concerned that neither the personal
pain this family has experienced nor the moral and
political outrage we feel be slighted. Only in this way
can Frank Olson’s death become part of American memory
and serve the purpose of political and ethical reform so
urgently needed in our society.
The statement went on to compare the Olsons with
families in the Third World “whose hopes for a better
life were destroyed by CIA intervention.” Although Eric
Olson read those words in behalf of the whole family,
they reflected more the politics of the children than the
feelings of their mother, Alice Olson. An incredibly
strong woman who seems to have made her peace with the
world, Mrs. Olson went back to college after her
husband’s death, got a degree, and held the family
together while she taught school. She has no malice in
her heart toward Vin Ruwet, her friend who withheld that
vital piece of information from her all those years. He
comforted her and gave support during the most difficult
of times, and she deeply appreciates that. Mrs. Olson
defends Ruwet by saying he was in “a bad position,” but
then she stops in mid-sentence and says, “If I had only
been given some indication that it was the pressure of
work…. If only I had had something I could have told
the kids. I don’t know how [Ruwet] could have done it
either. It was a terrible thing for a man who loved him.”
“I’m not vindicative toward Vin [Ruwet],” reflects
Mrs. Olson. “Gottlieb is a different question. He was
despicable.” She tells how Gottlieb and Lashbrook both
attended Olson’s funeral in Frederick and contributed to
a memorial fund. A week or two later, the two men asked
to visit her. She knew they did not work at Detrick, but
she did not really understood where they came from or
their role. “I didn’t want to see them,” she notes. “Vin
told me it would make them feel better. I didn’t want an
ounce of flesh from them. I didn’t think it was
necessary, but, okay, I agreed. In retrospect, it was so
bizarre, it makes me sick . . . I was a sucker for them.”
Gottlieb and Lashbrook apparently never returned to
the biological warfare offices at SOD. Little else
changed, however. Ray Treichler and Henry Bortner took
over CIA’s liaison with SOD. SOD continued to manufacture
and stockpile bacteriological agents for the CIA until
1969, when President Richard Nixon renounced the use of
biological warfare tactics.
And presumably, someone replaced Frank Olson.
Notes
The description of the CIA’s relationship with SOD at
Fort Detrick comes from interviews with several ex-Fort
Detrick employees; Church Committee hearings on
“Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents, Volume 1; Church
Committee “Summary Report on CIA Investigation of
MKNAOMI” found in Report, Book I, pp. 360-63; and/
Kennedy subcommittee hearings on Biological Testing
Involving Human Subjects by the Department of Defense,
1977. The details of Sid Gottlieb’s involvement in the
plot to kill Patrice Lumumba are found in the Church
Committee’s Interim Report on “Alleged Assassination
Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” pp. 20-21. The Church
committee allowed Gottlieb to be listed under the
pseudonym Victor Scheider, but several sources confirm
Gottlieb’s true identity, as does the biographic data on
him submitted to the Kennedy subcommittee by the CIA,
which puts him in the same job attributed to “Scheider”
at the same time. The plot to give botulinum to Fidel
Castro is outlined in the Assassination report, pp. 79
83. The incident with the Iraqi colonel is on p. 181 of
the same report.
The several inches of CIA documents on the Olson case
were released by the Olson family in 1976 and can be
found in the printed volume of the 1975 Kennedy
subcommittee hearings on Biomedical
and Behavioral Resarch, pp.1005-1132. They form the
base of much of the narrative, along with interviews with
Alice Olson, Eric Olson, Benjamin Wilson, and several
other ex-SOD men (who added next to nothing). Information
also was gleaned from Vincent Ruwet’s testimony before
the Kennedy subcommittee in 1975, pp. 138-45 and the
Church committee’s summary of the affair, Book I, pp.
394-403. The quote on Harold Abramson’s intention to give
his patients unwitting doses of LSD is found in MKULTRA
subproject 7, June 8, 1953, letter to Dr. [deleted].
Magician John Mulholland’s work for the Agency is
described in MKULTRA subprojects 19 and 34.
Footnotes
1. Toxins are chemical substances, not living
organisms, derived from biological agents. While they can
make people sick or dead, they cannot reproduce
themselves like bacteria. Because of their biological
origin, toxins came under the responsibility of Fort
Detrick rather than Edgewood Arsenal, the facility which
handled the chemical side of America’s chemical and
biological warfare (CBW) programs.
2. Brucellosis may well have been the disease that
Gottlieb selected in the spring of 1960 when the
Clandestine Services’ Health Alteration Committee
approved an operation to disable an Iraqi colonel, said
to be “promoting Soviet-bloc political interests” for at
least three months. Gottlieb told the Church committee
that he had a monogrammed handkerchief treated with the
incapacitating agency, and then mailed it to the colonel.
CIA officials told the committee that the colonel was
shot by a firing squad—which the Agency had nothing to do
with—before the handkerchief arrived.
3. For some reason, the U.S. government has made it a
point not to release information about Japanese use of
biological warfare. The senior Detrick source says, “We
knew they sprayed Manchuria. We had the results of how
they produced and disseminated [the biological agents,
including anthrax]…. I read the autopsy reports myself.
We had people who went over to Japan after the war.”
4. Gottlieb stated just after Olson’s death, at a
time when he was trying to minimize his own culpability,
that he had talked to the SOD men about LSD and that they
had agreed in general terms to the desirability of
unwitting testing. Two of the SOD group in interviews and
a third in congressional testimony flatly deny the
Gottlieb version. Gottlieb and the SOD men all agree
Gottlieb gave no advance warning that he was giving them
a drug in their liqueur.
5. For the very reason that most trips last about
eight hours no matter what time a subject takes the drug,
virtually all experimenters, including TSS’s own
contractors, give LSD in the morning to avoid the
discomfort of sleepless nights.
6. To enter the SOD building, in addition to needing
an incredibly hard-to-get security clearance, one had to
have an up-to-date shot card with anywhere from 10 to 20
immunizations listed. The process was so painful and time
consuming that at one point in the 1960s the general who
headed the whole Army Chemical Corps decided against
inspecting SOD and getting an on-the-spot briefing. When
asked about this incident, an SOD veteran who had earlier
resigned said, “That’s the way we kept them out. Those
[military] types didn’t need to know. Most of the
security violations came from the top level…. He could
have gone in without shots if he had insisted. The safety
director would have protested, but he could have.”
7. Mrs. Olson says that this is an outright lie.
8. Nonpsychiatrist Abramson who allowed chemist
Lashbrook to tell him about his patient’s complexes
clearly had a strange idea what was “therapeutic”—or
psychotherapeutic, for that matter. In Abramson’s 1953
proposal to the CIA for $85,000 to study LSD, he wrote
that over the next year he “hoped” to give hospital
patients “who are essentially normal from a psychiatric
point of view . . . unwitting doses of the drug for
psychotherapeutic purposes.” His treatment brings to mind
the William Burroughs character in Naked Lunch who
states; “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation
performed very often, and there’s a reason for that . . .
you see, it has absolutely no medical value.”
9. President Gerald Ford later personally apologized
to the Olson family, and Congress passed a bill in 1976
to pay $750,000 in compensation to Mrs. Olson and her
three children. The family voluntarily abandoned the
suit.
Them Unwitting: The Safehouses
Frank Olson’s death could have been a major setback
for the Agency’s LSD testing, but the program, like Sid
Gottlieb’s career, emerged essentially unscathed. High
CIA officials did call a temporary halt to all
experiments while they investigated the Olson case and
re-examined the general policy. They cabled the two field
stations that had supplies of the drug (Manila and
Atsugi, Japan) not to use it for the time being, and they
even took away Sid Gottlieb’s own private supply and had
it locked up in his boss’ safe, to which no one else had
the combination. In the end, however, Allen Dulles
accepted the view Richard Helms put forth that the only
“operationally realistic” way to test drugs was to try
them on unwitting people. Helms noted that experiments
which gave advance warning would be “pro forma at best
and result in a false sense of accomplishment and
readiness.” For Allen Dulles and his top aides, the
possible importance of LSD clearly outweighed the risks
and ethical problem of slipping the drug to involuntary
subjects. They gave Gottlieb back his LSD.
Once the CIA’s top echelon had made its decision to
continue unwitting testing, there remained, in Richard
Helms’ words, “only then the question of how best to do
it.” The Agency’s role in the Olson affair had come too
perilously close to leaking out for the comfort of the
security-minded, so TSS officials simply had to work out
a testing system with better cover. That meant finding
subjects who could not be so easily traced back to the
Agency.
Well before Olson’s death, Gottlieb and the MKULTRA
crew had started pondering how best to do unwitting
testing. They considered using an American police force
to test drugs on prisoners, informants, and suspects, but
they knew that some local politicians would inevitably
find out. In the Agency view, such people could not be
trusted to keep sensitive secrets. TSS officials thought
about trying Federal prisons or hospitals, but, when
sounded out, the Bureau of Prisons refused to go along
with true unwitting testing (as opposed to the voluntary,
if coercive, form practiced on drug addicts in Kentucky).
They contemplated moving the program overseas, where they
and the ARTICHOKE teams were already performing
operational experiments, but they decided if they tested
on the scale they thought was necessary, so many
foreigners would have to know that it would pose an
unacceptable security risk.
Sid Gottlieb is remembered as the brainstorming
genius of the MKULTRA group—and the one with a real
talent for showing others, without hurting their
feelings, why their schemes would not work. States an ex-
colleague who admires him greatly, “In the final
analysis, Sid was like a good soldier—if the job had to
be done, he did it. Once the decision was made, he found
the most effective way.”
In this case, Gottlieb came up with the solution
after reading through old OSS files on Stanley Lovell’s
search for a truth drug. Gottlieb noted that Lovell had
used George White, a prewar employee of the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics, to test concentrated marijuana.
Besides trying the drug out on Manhattan Project
volunteers and unknowing suspected Communists, White had
slipped some to August Del Gracio, the Lucky Luciano
lieutenant. White had called the experiment a great
success. If it had not been—if Del Gracio had somehow
caught on to the drugging—Gottlieb realized that the
gangster would never have gone to the police or the
press. His survival as a criminal required he remain
quiet about even the worst indignities heaped upon him by
government agents.
To Gottlieb, underworld types looked like ideal test
subjects. Nevertheless, according to one TSS source, “We
were not about to fool around with the Mafia.” Instead,
this source says they chose “the borderline underworld”—
prostitutes, drug addicts, and other small-timers who
would be powerless to seek any sort of revenge if they
ever found out what the CIA had done to them. In addition
to their being unlikely whistle-blowers, such people
lived in a world where an unwitting dose of some drug—
usually knockout drops—was an occupational hazard anyway.
They would therefore be better equipped to deal with—and
recover from—a surprise LSD trip than the population as a
whole. Or so TSS officials rationalized. “They could at
least say to themselves, ‘Here I go again. I’ve been
slipped a mickey,”‘ says a TSS veteran. Furthermore, this
veteran remembers, his former colleagues reasoned that if
they had to violate the civil rights of anyone, they
might as well choose a group of marginal people.
George White himself had left OSS after the war and
returned to the Narcotics Bureau. In 1952 he was working
in the New York office. As a high-ranking narcotics
agent, White had a perfect excuse to be around drugs and
people who used them. He had proved during the war that
he had a talent for clandestine work, and he certainly
had no qualms when it came to unwitting testing. With his
job, he had access to all the possible subjects the
Agency would need, and if he could use LSD or any other
drug to find out more about drug trafficking, so much the
better. From a security viewpoint, CIA officials could
easily deny any connection to anything White did, and he
clearly was not the crybaby type. For Sid Gottlieb,
George White was clearly the one. The MKULTRA chief
decided to contact White directly to see if he might be
interested in picking up with the CIA where he had left
off with OSS.
Always careful to observe bureaucratic protocol,
Gottlieb first approached Harry Anslinger, the longtime
head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and got
permission to use White on a part-time basis. Then
Gottlieb traveled to New York and made his pitch to the
narcotics agent, who stood 5’7”, weighed over 200 pounds,
shaved his head, and looked something like an extremely
menacing bowling ball. After an early-morning meeting,
White scrawled in his sweat-stained, leather-bound diary
for that day, June 9, 1952: “Gottlieb proposed I be a CIA
consultant—I agree.” By writing down such a thing and
using Gottlieb’s true name,[1] White had broken CIA
security regulations even before he started work. But
then, White was never known as a man who followed rules.
Despite the high priority that TSS put on drug
testing, White’s security approval did not come through
until almost a year later. “It was only last month that I
got cleared,” the outspoken narcotics agent wrote to a
friend in 1953. “I then learned that a couple of crewcut,
pipe-smoking punks had either known me—or heard of
me—during OSS days and had decided I was ‘too rough’ for
their league and promptly blackballed me. It was only
when my sponsors discovered the root of the trouble they
were able to bypass the blockade. After all, fellas, I
didn’t go to Princeton.”
People either loved or hated George White, and he had
made some powerful enemies, including New York Governor
Thomas Dewey and J. Edgar Hoover. Dewey would later help
block White from becoming the head of the Narcotics
Bureau in New York City, a job White sorely wanted. For
some forgotten reason, Hoover had managed to stop White
from being hired by the CIA in the Agency’s early days,
at a time when he would have preferred to leave narcotics
work altogether. These were two of the biggest
disappointments of his life. White’s previous exclusion
from the CIA may explain why he jumped so eagerly at
Gottlieb’s offer and why at the same time he privately
heaped contempt on those who worked for the Agency. A
remarkably heavy drinker, who would sometimes finish off
a bottle of gin in one sitting, White often mocked the
CIA crowd over cocktails. “He thought they were a joke,”
recalls one longtime crony. “They were too complicated,
and they had other people do their heavy stuff.”
Unlike his CIA counterparts, White loved the glare of
publicity. A man who gloried in talking about himself and
cultivating a hard-nosed image, White knew how to milk a
drug bust for all it was worth—a skill that grew out of
early years spent as a newspaper reporter in San
Francisco and Los Angeles. In search of a more
financially secure profession, he had joined the
Narcotics Bureau in 1934, but he continued to pal around
with journalists, particularly those who wrote favorably
about him. Not only did he come across in the press as a
cop hero, but he helped to shape the picture of future
Kojaks by serving as a consultant to one of the early-
television detective series. To start a raid, he would
dramatically tip his hat to signal his agents—and to let
the photographers know that the time had come to snap his
picture. “He was sort of vainglorious,” says another good
friend, “the kind of guy who if he did something, didn’t
mind having the world know about it.”[2]
The scientists from TSS, with their Ph.D.s and lack
of street experience, could not help admiring White for
his swashbuckling image. Unlike the men from MKULTRA,
who, for all their pretensions, had never worked as real-
live spies, White had put his life on the line for OSS
overseas and had supposedly killed a Japanese agent with
his bare hands. The face of one ex-TSS man lit up, like a
little boy’s on Christmas morning, as he told of racing
around New York in George White’s car and parking
illegally with no fear of the law. “We were Ivy League,
white, middle-class,” notes another former TSSer. “We
were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty
expert. He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who
brought in the drugs. He’d purportedly been in a number
of shootouts where he’d captured millions of dollars
worth of heroin…. He was a pretty wild man. I know I
was afraid of him. You couldn’t control this guy . . . I
had a little trouble telling who was controlling who in
those days.”
White lived with extreme personal contradictions. As
could be expected of a narcotics agent, he violently
opposed drugs. Yet he died largely because his beloved
alcohol had destroyed his liver. He had tried everything
else, from marijuana to LSD, and wrote an acquaintance,
“I did feel at times I was having a ‘mind-expanding’
experience but this vanished like a dream immediately
after the session.” He was a law-enforcement official who
regularly violated the law. Indeed, the CIA turned to him
because of his willingness to use the power of his office
to ride roughshod over the rights of others—in the name
of “national security,” when he tested LSD for the
Agency, in the name of stamping out drug abuse, for the
Narcotics Bureau. As yet another close associate summed
up White’s attitude toward his job, “He really believed
the ends justified the means.”
George White’s “pragmatic” approach meshed perfectly
with Sid Gottlieb’s needs for drug testing. In May 1953
the two men, who wound up going folk dancing together
several times, formally joined forces. In CIA jargon,
White became MKULTRA subproject #3. Under this
arrangement, White rented two adjacent Greenwich Village
apartments, posing as the sometime artist and seaman
“Morgan Hall.” White agreed to lure guinea pigs to the
“safehouse”—as the Agency men called the apartments—slip
them drugs, and report the results to Gottlieb and the
others in TSS. For its part, the CIA let the Narcotics
Bureau use the place for undercover activities (and often
for personal pleasure) whenever no Agency work was
scheduled, and the CIA paid all the bills, including the
cost of keeping a well-stocked liquor cabinet—a
substantial bonus for White. Gottlieb personally handed
over the first $4,000 in cash, to cover the initial costs
of furnishing the safehouse in the lavish style that
White felt befitted him.
Gottlieb did not limit his interest to drugs. He and
other TSS officials wanted to try out surveillance
equipment. CIA technicians quickly installed see-through
mirrors and microphones through which eavesdroppers could
film, photograph, and record the action. “Things go wrong
with listening devices and two-way mirrors, so you build
these things to find out what works and what doesn’t,”
says a TSS source. “If you are going to entrap, you’ve
got to give the guy pictures [flagrante delicto] and
voice recordings. Once you learn how to do it so that the
whole thing looks comfortable, cozy, and safe, then you
can transport the technology overseas and use it.” This
TSS man notes that the Agency put to work in the bedrooms
of Europe some of the techniques developed in the George
White safehouse operation.
In the safehouse’s first months, White tested LSD,
several kinds of knockout drops, and that old OSS
standby, essence of marijuana. He served up the drugs in
food, drink, and cigarettes and then tried to worm
information—usually on narcotics matters—from his
“guests.” Sometimes MKULTRA men came up from Washington
to watch the action. A September 1953 entry in White’s
diary noted: “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Street—Owen Winkle
and LSD surprise—can wash.” Sid Gottlieb’s deputy, Robert
Lashbrook, served as “project monitor” for the New York
safehouse.[3]
White had only been running the safehouse six months
when Olson died (in Lashbrook’s company), and Agency
officials suspended the operation for re-evaluation. They
soon allowed him to restart it, and then Gottlieb had to
order White to slow down again. A New York State
commissioner had summoned the narcotics agent to explain
his role in the deal that wound up with Governor Dewey
pardoning Lucky Luciano after the war. The commissioner
was asking questions that touched on White’s use of
marijuana on Del Gracio, and Gottlieb feared that word of
the CIA’s current testing might somehow leak out. This
storm also soon passed, but then, in early 1955, the
Narcotics Bureau transferred White to San Francisco to
become chief agent there. Happy with White’s performance,
Gottlieb decided to let him take the entire safehouse
operation with him to the Coast. White closed up the
Greenwich Village apartments, leaving behind unreceipted
“tips” for the landlord “to clear up any difficulties
about the alterations and damages,” as a CIA document put
it.[4]
White soon rented a suitable “pad” (as he always
called it) on Telegraph Hill, with a stunning view of San
Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz. To
supplement the furniture he brought from the New York
safehouse, he went out and bought items that gave the
place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse-
Lautrec posters, a picture of a French cancan dancer, and
photos of manacled women in black stockings. “It was
supposed to look rich,” recalls a narcotics agent who
regularly visited, “but it was furnished like crap.”
White hired a friend’s company to install bugging
equipment, and William Hawkins, a 25-year-old electronics
whiz then studying at Berkley put in four DD-4
microphones disguised as electrical wall outlets and
hooked them up to two F-301 tape recorders, which agents
monitored in an adjacent “listening post.” Hawkins
remembers that White “kept a pitcher of martinis in the
refrigerator, and he’d watch me for a while as I
installed a microphone and then slip off.” For his own
personal “observation post,” White had a portable toilet
set up behind a two-way mirror, where he could watch the
proceedings, usually with drink in hand.
The San Francisco safehouse specialized in
prostitutes. “But this was before The Hite Report and
before any hooker had written a book,” recalls a TSS man,
“so first we had to go out and learn about their world.
In the beginning, we didn’t know what a john was or what
a pimp did.” Sid Gottlieb decided to send his top staff
psychologist, John Gittinger, to San Francisco to probe
the demimonde.
George White supplied the prostitutes for the study,
although White, in turn, delegated much of the pimping
function to one of his assistants, Ira “Ike” Feldman. A
muscular but very short man, whom even the 5’7″ White
towered over, Feldman tried even harder than his boss to
act tough. Dressed in suede shoes, a suit with flared
trousers, a hat with a turned-up brim, and a huge zircon
ring that was supposed to look like a diamond, Feldman
first came to San Francisco on an undercover assignment
posing as an East Coast mobster looking to make a big
heroin buy. Using a drug-addicted prostitute name Janet
Jones, whose common-law husband states that Feldman paid
her off with heroin, the undercover man lured a number of
suspected drug dealers to the “pad” and helped White make
arrests.
As the chief Federal narcotics agent in San
Francisco, White was in a position to reward or punish a
prostitute. He set up a system whereby he and Feldman
provided Gittinger with all the hookers the psychologist
wanted. White paid off the women with a fixed number of
“chits.” For each chit, White owed one favor. “So the
next time the girl was arrested with a john,” says an
MKULTRA veteran, “she would give the cop George White’s
phone number. The police all knew White and cooperated
with him without asking questions. They would release the
girl if he said so. White would keep good records of how
many chits each person had and how many she used. No
money was exchanged, but five chits were worth $500 to
$1,000.” Prostitutes were not the only beneficiaries of
White’s largess. The narcotics agent worked out a similar
system to forgive the transgressions of small time drug
pushers when the MKULTRA men wanted to talk to them about
“the rules of their game,” according to the source.
TSS officials wanted to find out everything they
could about how to apply sex to spying, and the
prostitute project became a general learning and then
training ground for CIA carnal operations. After all,
states one TSS official, “We did quite a study of
prostitutes and their behavior…. At first nobody really
knew how to use them. How do you train them? How do you
work them? How do you take a woman who is willing to use
her body to get money out of a guy to get things which
are much more important, like state secrets. I don’t care
how beautiful she is—educating the ordinary prostitute up
to that level is not a simple task.”
The TSS men continually tried to refine their
knowledge. They realized that prostitutes often wheedled
extra money out of a customer by suggesting some
additional service as male orgasm neared. They wondered
if this might not also be a good time to seek sensitive
information. “But no,” says the source, “we found the guy
was focused solely on hormonal needs. He was not thinking
of his career or anything else at that point.” The TSS
experts discovered that the postsexual, light-up-acigarette
period was much better suited to their ulterior
motives. Says the source:
Most men who go to prostitutes are prepared for the fact
that [after the act] she’s beginning to work to get
herself out of there, so she can get back on the street
to make some more money. . . . To find a prostitute who
is willing to stay is a hell of a shock to anyone used to
prostitutes. It has a tremendous effect on the guy. It’s
a boost to his ego if she’s telling him he was really
neat, and she wants to stay for a few more hours…. Most
of the time, he gets pretty vulnerable. What the hell’s
he going to talk about? Not the sex, so he starts talking
about his business. It’s at this time she can lead him
gently. But you have to train prostitutes to do that.
Their natural inclination is to do exactly the opposite.
The men from MKULTRA learned a great deal about
varying sexual preferences. One of them says:
We didn’t know in those days about hidden sadism and all
that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature
in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people
wanted sex, it wasn’t just what we had thought of—you
know, the missionary position…. We started to pick up
knowledge that could be used in operations, but with a
lot of it we never figured out any way to use it
operationally. We just learned…. All these ideas did
not come to us at once. But evolving over three or four
years in which these studies were going on, things
emerged which we tried. Our knowledge of prostitutes’
behavior became pretty damn good. . . . This comes across
now that somehow we were just playing around and we just
found all these exotic ways to waste the taxpayers’ money
on satisfying our hidden urges. I’m not saying that
watching prostitutes was not exciting or something like
that. But what I am saying was there was a purpose to the
whole business.[5]
In the best tradition of Mata Hari, the CIA did use
sex as a clandestine weapon, although apparently not so
frequently as the Russians. While many in the Agency
believed that it simply did not work very well, others
like CIA operators in Berlin during the mid-1960s felt
prostitutes could be a prime source of intelligence.
Agency men in that city used a network of hookers to good
advantage—or so they told visitors from headquarters.
Yet, with its high proportion of Catholics and Mormons—
not to mention the Protestant ethic of many of its top
leaders—the Agency definitely had limits beyond which
prudery took over. For instance, a TSS veteran says that
a good number of case officers wanted no part of
homosexual entrapment operations. And to go a step
further, he recalls one senior KGB man who told too many
sexual jokes about young boys. “It didn’t take too long
to recognize that he was more than a little fascinated by
youths,” says the source. “I took the trouble to point
out he was probably too good, too well-trained, to be
either entrapped or to give away secrets. But he would
have been tempted toward a compromising position by a
preteen. I mentioned this, and they said, ‘As a
psychological observer, you’re probably quite right. But
what the hell are we going to do about it? Where are we
going to get a twelve-year-old boy?’ ” The source
believes that if the Russian had had a taste for older
men, U.S. intelligence might have mounted an operation,
“but the idea of a twelve-year-old boy was just more than
anybody could stomach.”
As the TSS men learned more about the San Francisco
hustlers, they ventured outside the safehouse to try out
various clandestine-delivery gimmicks in public places
like restaurants, bars, and beaches. They practiced ways
to slip LSD to citizens of the demimonde while buying
them a drink or lighting up a cigarette, and they then
tried to observe the effects when the drug took hold.
Because the MKULTRA scientists did not move smoothly
among the very kinds of people they were testing, they
occasionally lost an unwitting victim in a crowd—thereby
sending a stranger off alone with a head full of LSD.
In a larger sense, all the test victims would become
lost. As a matter of policy, Sid Gottlieb ordered that
virtually no records be kept of the testing. In 1973,
when Gottlieb retired from the Agency, he and Richard
Helms agreed to destroy what they thought were the few
existing documents on the program. Neither Gottlieb nor
any other MKULTRA man has owned up to having given LSD to
an unknowing subject, or even to observing such an
experiment—except of course in the case of Frank Olson.
Olson’s death left behind a paper trail outside of
Gottlieb’s control and that hence could not be denied.
Otherwise, Gottlieb and his colleagues have put all the
blame for actual testing on George White, who is not
alive to defend himself. One reason the MKULTRA veterans
have gone to such lengths to conceal their role is
obvious: fear of lawsuits from victims claiming damaged
health.
At the time of the experiments, the subjects’ health
did not cause undue concern. At the safehouse, where most
of the testing took place, doctors were seldom present.
Dr. James Hamilton, a Stanford Medical School
psychiatrist and White’s OSS colleague, visited the place
from time to time, apparently for studies connected to
unwitting drug experiments and deviant sexual practices.
Yet neither Hamilton nor any other doctor provided much
medical supervision. From his perch atop the toilet seat,
George White could do no more than make surface
observations of his drugged victims. Even an experienced
doctor would have had difficulty handling White’s role.
In addition to LSD, which they knew could cause serious,
if not fatal problems, TSS officials gave White even more
exotic experimental drugs to test, drugs that other
Agency contractors may or may not have already used on
human subjects. “If we were scared enough of a drug not
to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco,”
recalls a TSS source. According to a 1963 report by CIA
Inspector General John Earman, “In a number of instances,
however, the test subject has become ill for hours or
days, including hospitalization in at least one case, and
[White] could only follow up by guarded inquiry after the
test subject’s return to normal life. Possible sickness
and attendant economic loss are inherent contingent
effects of the testing.”
The Inspector General noted that the whole program
could be compromised if an outside doctor made a “correct
diagnosis of an illness.” Thus, the MKULTRA team not only
made some people sick but had a vested interest in
keeping doctors from finding out what was really wrong.
If that bothered the Inspector General, he did not report
his qualms, but he did say he feared “serious damage to
the Agency” in the event of public exposure. The
Inspector General was only somewhat reassured by the fact
that George White “maintain[ed] close working relations
with local police authorities which could be utilized to
protect the activity in critical situations.”
If TSS officials had been willing to stick with their
original target group of marginal underworld types, they
would have had little to fear from the police. After all,
George White was the police. But increasingly they used
the safehouse to test drugs, in the Inspector General’s
words, “on individuals of all social levels, high and
low, native American and foreign.” After all, they were
looking for an operational payoff, and they knew people
reacted differently to LSD according to everything from
health and mood to personality structure. If TSS
officials wanted to slip LSD to foreign leaders, as they
contemplated doing to Fidel Castro, they would try to
spring an unwitting dose on somebody as similar as
possible. They used the safehouse for “dry runs” in the
intermediate stage between the laboratory and actual
operations.
For these dress rehearsals, George White and his
staff procurer, Ike Feldman, enticed men to the apartment
with prostitutes. An unsuspecting john would think he had
bought a night of pleasure, go back to a strange
apartment, and wind up zonked. A CIA document that
survived Sid Gottlieb’s shredding recorded this process.
Its author, Gottlieb himself, could not break a lifelong
habit of using nondescriptive language. For the MKULTRA
chief, the whores were “certain individuals who covertly
administer this material to other people in accordance
with [White’s] instructions.” White normally paid the
women $100 in Agency funds for their night’s work, and
Gottlieb’s prose reached new bureaucratic heights as he
explained why the prostitutes did not sign for the money:
“Due to the highly unorthodox nature of these activities
and the considerable risk incurred by these individuals,
it is impossible to require that they provide a receipt
for these payments or that they indicate the precise
manner in which the funds were spent.” The CIA’s auditors
had to settle for canceled checks which White cashed
himself and marked either “Stormy” or, just as
appropriately, “Undercover Agent.” The program was also
referred to as “Operation Midnight Climax.”
TSS officials found the San Francisco safehouse so
successful that they opened a branch office, also under
George White’s auspices, across the Golden Gate on the
beach in Marin County.[6] Unlike the downtown apartment,
where an MKULTRA man says “you could bring people in for
quickies after lunch,” the suburban Marin County outlet
proved useful for experiments that required relative
isolation. There, TSS scientists tested such MKULTRA
specialties as stink bombs, itching and sneezing powders,
and diarrhea inducers. TSS’s Ray Treichler, the Stanford
chemist, sent these “harassment substances” out to
California for testing by White, along with such delivery
systems as a mechanical launcher that could throw a foul-
smelling object 100 yards, glass ampules that could be
stepped on in a crowd to release any of Treichler’s
powders, a fine hypodermic needle to inject drugs through
the cork in a wine bottle, and a drug-coated swizzle
stick.
TSS men also planned to use the Marin County
safehouse for an ill-fated experiment that began when
staff psychologists David Rhodes and Walter Pasternak
spent a week circulating in bars, inviting strangers to a
party. They wanted to spray LSD from an aerosol can on
their guests, but according to Rhodes’ Senate testimony,
“the weather defeated us.” In the heat of the summer,
they could not close the doors and windows long enough
for the LSD to hang in the air and be inhaled. Sensing a
botched operation, their MKULTRA colleague, John
Gittinger (who brought the drug out from Washington) shut
himself in the bathroom and let go with the spray. Still,
Rhodes testified, Gittinger did not get high, and the CIA
men apparently scrubbed the party.[7]
The MKULTRA crew continued unwitting testing until
the summer of 1963 when the Agency’s Inspector General
stumbled across the safehouses during a regular
inspection of TSS activities. This happened not long
after Director John McCone had appointed John Earman to
the Inspector General position.[8] Much to the
displeasure of Sid Gottlieb and Richard Helms, Earman
questioned the propriety of the safehouses, and he
insisted that Director McCone be given a full briefing.
Although President Kennedy had put McCone in charge of
the Agency the year before, Helms—the professional’s
professional—had not bothered to tell his outsider boss
about some of the CIA’s most sensitive activities,
including the safehouses and the CIA-Mafia assassination
plots.[9] Faced with Earman’s demands, Helms—surely one
of history’s most clever bureaucrats—volunteered to tell
McCone himself about the safehouses (rather than have
Earman present a negative view of the program). Sure
enough, Helms told Earman afterward, McCone raised no
objections to unwitting testing (as Helms described it).
A determined man and a rather brave one, Earman countered
with a full written report to McCone recommending that
the safehouses be closed. The Inspector General cited the
risks of exposure and pointed out that many people both
inside and outside the Agency found “the concepts
involved in manipulating human behavior . . . to be
distasteful and unethical.” McCone reacted by putting off
a final decision but suspending unwitting testing in the
meantime. Over the next year, Helms, who then headed the
Clandestine Services, wrote at least three memos urging
resumption. He cited “indications . . . of an apparent
Soviet aggressiveness in the field of covertly
administered chemicals which are, to say the least,
inexplicable and disturbing,” and he claimed the CIA’s
“positive operational capacity to use drugs is
diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing.”[10] To
Richard Helms, the importance of the program exceeded the
risks and the ethical questions, although he did admit,
“We have no answer to the moral issue.” McCone simply did
nothing for two years. The director’s indecision had the
effect of killing the program, nevertheless. TSS
officials closed the San Francisco safehouse in 1965 and
the New York one in 1966.
Years later in a personal letter to Sid Gottlieb,
George White wrote an epitaph for his role with the CIA:
“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I
toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was
fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American
boy lie, kill, cheat, steak rape, and pillage with the
sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
After 10 years of unwitting testing, the men from
MKULTRA apparently scored no major breakthroughs with LSD
or other drugs. They found no effective truth drug,
recruitment pill, or aphrodisiac. LSD had not opened up
the mind to CIA control. “We had thought at first that
this was the secret that was going to unlock the
universe,” says a TSS veteran. “We found that human
beings had resources far greater than imagined.”
Yet despite the lack of precision and uncertainty,
the CIA still made field use of LSD and other drugs that
had worked their way through the MKULTRA testing
progression. A 1957 report showed that TSS had already
moved 6 drugs out of the experimental stage and into
active use. Up to that time, CIA operators had utilized
LSD and other psychochemicals against 33 targets in 6
different operations. Agency officials hoped in these
cases either to discredit the subject by making him seem
insane or to “create within the individual a mental and
emotional situation which will release him from the
restraint of self-control and induce him to reveal
information willingly under adroit manipulation.” The
Agency has consistently refused to release details of
these operations, and TSS sources who talk rather freely
about other matters seem to develop amnesia when the
subject of field use comes up. Nevertheless, it can be
said that the CIA did establish a relationship with an
unnamed foreign secret service to interrogate prisoners
with LSD-like drugs. CIA operators participated directly
in these interrogations, which continued at least until
1966. Often the Agency showed more concern for the safety
of its operational targets abroad than it did for its
unwitting victims in San Francisco, since some of the
foreign subjects were given medical examinations before
being slipped the drug.[11]
In these operations, CIA men sometimes brought in
local doctors for reasons that had nothing to do with the
welfare of the patient. Instead, the doctor’s role was to
certify the apparent insanity of a victim who had been
unwittingly dosed with LSD or an even more durable
psychochemical like BZ (which causes trips lasting a week
or more and which tends to induce violent behavior). If a
doctor were to prescribe hospitalization or other severe
treatment, the effect on the subject could be
devastating. He would suffer not only the experience
itself, including possible confinement in a mental
institution, but also social stigma. In most countries,
even the suggestion of mental problems severely damages
an individual’s professional and personal standing (as
Thomas Eagleton, the recipient of some shock therapy, can
testify). “It’s an old technique,” says an MKULTRA
veteran. “You neutralize someone by having their
constituency doubt them.” The Church committee confirms
that the Agency used this technique at least several
times to assassinate a target’s character.[12]
Still, the Clandestine Services did not frequently
call on TSS for LSD or other drugs. Many operators had
practical and ethical objections. In part to overcome
such objections and also to find better ways to use
chemical and biological substances in covert operations,
Sid Gottlieb moved up in 1959 to become Assistant for
Scientific Matters to the Clandestine Services chief.
Gottlieb found that TSS had kept the MKULTRA programs so
secret that many field people did not even know what
techniques were available. He wrote that tight controls
over field use in MKDELTA operations “may have generated
a general defeatism among case officers,” who feared they
would not receive permission or that the procedure was
not worth the effort. Gottlieb tried to correct these
shortcomings by providing more information on the drug
arsenal to senior operators and by streamlining the
approval process. He had less luck in overcoming views
that drugs do not work or are not reliable, and that
their operational use leads to laziness and poor
tradecraft.
If the MKULTRA program had ever found that LSD or any
other drug really did turn a man into a puppet, Sid
Gottlieb would have had no trouble surmounting all those
biases. Instead, Gottlieb and his fellow searchers came
frustratingly close but always fell short of finding a
reliable control mechanism. LSD certainly penetrated to
the innermost regions of the mind. It could spring loose
a whole gamut of feelings, from terror to insight. But in
the end, the human psyche proved so complex that even the
most skilled manipulator could not anticipate all the
variables. He could use LSD and other drugs to chip away
at free will. He could score temporary victories, and he
could alter moods, perception—sometimes even beliefs. He
had the power to cause great harm, but ultimately he
could not conquer the human spirit.
Notes
The CIA’s reaction to Frank Olson’s death is
described in numerous memos released by the Agency to the
Olson family, which can be found at pp.1005-1132 of the
Kennedy Subcommittee 1975 hearings on Biomedical and
Behavioral Research. See particularly at p. 1077, 18
December 1953, Subject: The Suicide of Frank Olson and at
p. 1027, 1 December 1953, Subject: Use of LSD.
Richard Helms’ views on unwitting testing are found
in Document #448, 17 December 1963, Subject: Testing of
Psychochemicals and Related Materials and in a memorandum
to the CIA Director, June 9, 1964, quoted from on page
402 of the Church Committee Report, Book I.
George White’s diary and letters were donated by his
widow to Foothills Junior College, Los Altos, California
and are the source of a treasure chest of material on
him, including his letter to a friend explaining his
almost being “blackballed” from the CIA, the various
diary entries cited, including references to folk-dancing
with Gottlieb, the interview with Hal Lipset where he
explains his philosophy on chasing criminals, and his
letter to Sid Gottlieb dated November 21, (probably)
1972.
The New York and San Francisco safehouses run by
George White are the subjects of MKULTRA subprojects
3,14,16,42, and 149. White’s tips to the landlord are
described in 42-156, his liquor bills in 42-157, “dryruns”
in 42-91. The New York safehouse run by Charles
Siragusa is subproject 132. The “intermediate” tests are
described in document 132-59.
Paul Avery, a San Francisco freelance writer
associated with the Center for Investigative Reporting in
Oakland, California interviewed William Hawkins and
provided assistance on the details of the San Francisco
safehouse and George White’s background. Additional
information on White came from interviews with his widow,
several former colleagues in the Narcotics Bureau,
and other knowledgeable sources in various San Francisco
law-enforcement agencies. An ex-Narcotics Bureau official
told of Dr. James Hamilton’s study of unusual sexual
practices and the description of his unwitting drug
testing comes from MKULTRA subproject 2, which is his
subproject.
Ray Treichler discussed some of his work with
harassment substances in testimony before the Kennedy
subcommittee on September 20, 1977, pp. 105-8. He
delivered his testimony under the pseudonym “Philip
Goldman.”
“The Gang that Couldn’t Spray Straight” article
appeared in the September 20, 1977 Washington Post.
Richard Helms’ decision not to tell John McCone about
the CIA’s connection to the Mafia in assassination
attempts against Castro is described in the Church
Committee’s Assassination report, pp. 102-3.
The 1957 Inspector General’s Report on TSS, Document
#417 and the 1963 inspection of MKULTRA, 14 August 1963,
Document #59 provided considerable detail throughout the
entire chapter. The Church Committee Report on MKULTRA in
Book I, pp. 385-422 also provided considerable
information.
Sid Gottlieb’s job as Assistant to the Clandestine
Services chief for Scientific Matters is described in
Document #74 (operational series) 20 October 1959,
Subject: Application of Imaginative Research on the
Behavioral and Physical Sciences to [deleted] Problems”
and in the 1963 Inspector General’s report.
Interviews with ex-CIA Inspector General Lyman
Kirkpatrick, another former Inspector General’s staff
employee, and several ex-TSS staffers contributed
significantly to this chapter.
Helms’ letter to the Warren Commission on “Soviet
Brainwashing Techniques,” dated 19 June 1964, was
obtained from the National Archives.
The material on the CIA’s operational use of LSD came
from the Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 399-403 and
from an affidavit filed in the Federal Court case of John
D. Marks v. Central Intelligence Agency, et. al., Civil
Action No. 76-2073 by Eloise R. Page, Chief, Policy and
Coordination Staff of the CIA’s Directorate of
Operations. In listing all the reasons why the Agency
should not provide the operational documents, Ms. Page
gave some information on what was in the documents. The
passages on TSS’s and the Medical Office’s positions on
the use of LSD came from a memo written by James
Angleton, Chief, Counterintelligence Staff on December
12, 1957 quoted in part at p. 401 of the Church Committee
Report, Book I.
Footnotes
1. CIA operators and agents all had cover names by
which they were supposed to be called—even in classified
documents. Gottlieb was “Sherman R. Grifford.” George
White became “Morgan Hall.”
2. One case which put White in every newspaper in the
country was his 1949 arrest of blues singer Billie
Holliday on an opium charge. To prove she had been set up
and was not then using drugs, the singer checked into a
California sanitarium that had been recommended by a
friend of a friend, Dr. James Hamilton. The jury then
acquitted her. Hamilton’s involvement is bizarre because
he had worked with George White testing truth drugs for
OSS, and the two men were good friends. White may have
put his own role in perspective when he told a 1970
interviewer he “enjoyed” chasing criminals. “It was a
game for me,” he said. “I felt quite a bit of compassion
for a number of the people that I found it necessary to
put in jail, particularly when you’d see the things that
would happen to their families. I’d give them a chance to
stay out of jail and take care of their families by
giving me information, perhaps, and they would stubbornly
refuse to do so. They wouldn’t be a rat, as they would
put it.”
3. Despite this indication from White’s diary that
Lashbrook came to the New York safehouse for an “LSD
surprise” and despite his signature on papers authorizing
the subproject, Lashbrook flatly denied all firsthand
knowledge of George White’s testing in 1977 Senate
testimony. Subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy did not
press Lashbrook, nor did he refer the matter to the
Justice Department for possible perjury charges.
4. This was just one of many expenditures that would
drive CIA auditors wild while going over George White’s
accounts. Others included $44.04 for a telescope, liquor
bills over $1,000 “with no record as to the necessity of
its use,” and $31.75 to make an on-the-spot payment to a
neighborhood lady whose car he hit. The reason stated for
using government funds for the last expense: “It was
important to maintain security and forestall an insurance
investigation.”
5. In 1984, George Orwell wrote about government-
encouraged prostitution: “Mere debauchery did not matter
very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and
only involved the women of a submerged and despised
class.”
6. In 1961 MKULTRA officials started a third
safehouse in New York, also under the Narcotics Bureau’s
supervision. This one was handled by Charles Siragusa
who, like White, was a senior agent and OSS veteran.
7. Rhodes’ testimony about this incident, which had
been set up in advance with Senator Edward Kennedy’s
staff, brought on the inevitable “Gang That Couldn’t
Spray Straight” headline in the Washington Post. This
approach turned the public perception of a deadly serious
program into a kind of practical joke carried out badly
by a bunch of bumblers.
8. Lyman Kirkpatrick, the longtime Inspector General
who had then recently left the job to take a higher
Agency post, had personally known of the safehouse
operation since right after Olson’s death and had never
raised any noticeable objection. He now states he was
“shocked” by the unwitting testing, but that he “didn’t
have the authority to follow up . . . I was trying to
determine what the tolerable limits were of what I could
do and still keep my job.”
9. Trying to explain why he had specifically decided
not to inform the CIA Director about the Agency’s
relationship with the mob, Helms stated to the Church
committee, “Mr. McCone was relatively new to this
organization, and I guess I must have thought to myself,
well this is going to look peculiar to him . . . This
was, you know not a very savory effort.” Presumably,
Helms had similar reasons for not telling McCone about
the unwitting drug-testing in the safehouses.
10. Helms was a master of telling different people
different stories to suit his purposes. At the precise
time he was raising the Soviet menace to push McCone into
letting the unwitting testing continue, he wrote the
Warren Commission that not only did Soviet behavioral
research lag five years behind the West’s but that “there
is no present evidence that the Soviets have any
singular, new potent, drugs . . . to force a course of
action on an individual.”
11. TSS officials led by Sid Gottlieb, who were
responsible for the operational use of LSD abroad, took
the position that there was “no danger medically” in
unwitting doses and that neither giving a medical exam or
having a doctor present was necessary. The Agency’s
Medical Office disagreed, saying the drug was “medically
dangerous.” In 1957 Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick
noted it would be “unrealistic” to give the Medical
Office what amounted to veto power over covert operations
by letting Agency doctors rule on the health hazard to
subjects in the field.
12. While I was doing the research for this book,
many people approached me claiming to be victims of CIA
drugging plots. Although I listened carefully to all and
realized that some might be authentic victims, I had no
way of distinguishing between someone acting strangely
and someone made to act strangely. Perhaps the most
insidious aspect of this whole technique is that anyone
blaming his aberrant behavior on a drug or on the CIA
gets labeled a hopeless paranoid and his case is thrown
into the crank file. There is no better cover than
operating on the edge of madness.
One leftist professor in a Latin American university
who had opposed the CIA says that he was working alone in
his office one day in 1974 when a strange woman entered
and jabbed his wrist with a pin stuck in a small round
object. Almost immediately, he become irrational, broke
glasses, and threw water in colleagues’ faces. He says
his students spotted an ambulance waiting for him out
front. They spirited him out the back door and took him
home, where he tripped (or had psychotic episodes) for
more than a week. He calls the experience a mix of
“heaven and hell,” and he shudders at the thought that he
might have spent the time in a hospital “with nurses and
straitjackets.” Although he eventually returned to his
post at the university, he states that it took him
several years to recover the credibility he lost the day
he “went crazy at the office.” If the CIA was involved,
it had neutralized a foe.
93
Mushrooms to Counterculture
The MKULTRA scientists reaped little but disaster,
mischief, and disappointment from their efforts to use
LSD as a miracle weapon against the minds of their
opponents. Nevertheless, their insatiable need to try
every possibility led them to test hundreds of other
substances, including all the drugs that would later be
called psychedelic. These drugs were known to have great
potency. They were derived from natural botanical
products, and the men from MKULTRA believed from the
beginning that rare organic materials might somehow have
the greatest effect on the human mind. The most amazing
of the psychedelics came from odd corners of the natural
world. A1bert Hofmann created LSD largely out of ergot, a
fungus that grows on rye; mescaline is nothing more than
the synthetic essence of peyote cactus. Psilocybin, the
drug that Timothy Leary preferred to LSD for his Harvard
experiments, was synthesized from exotic Mexican
mushrooms that occupy a special place in CIA history.
When the MKULTRA team first embarked on its mind-
control explorations, the “magic mushroom” was only a
rumor or fable in the linear history of the Western
world. On nothing more than the possibility that the
legend was based on fact, the Agency’s scientists tracked
the mushroom to the most remote parts of Mexico and then
spent lavishly to test and develop its mind-altering
properties. The results, like the LSD legacy, were as
startling as they were unintended.
Among the botanicals that mankind has always turned
to for intoxicants and poisons, mushrooms stand out.
There is something enchantingly odd about the damp little
buttons that can thrill a gourmet or kill one, depending
on the subtle differences among the countless varieties.
These fungi have a long record in unorthodox warfare. Two
thousand years before the CIA looked to unleash powerful
mushrooms in covert operations, the Roman Empress
Agrippina eliminated her husband Claudius with a dish of
poisonous mushrooms. According to Roman history,
Agrippina wanted the emperor dead so that her son Nero
could take the throne. She planned to take advantage of
Claudius’ love for the delicious Amanita caesarea
mushroom, but she had to choose carefully among its
deadly look-alikes. The poison could not be “sudden and
instantaneous in its operation, lest the desperate
achievement should be discovered,” wrote Gordon and
Valentina Wasson in their monumental and definitive work,
Mushrooms, Russia and History. The Empress settled on the
lethal Amanita phalloides, a fungus the Wassons
considered well suited to the crime: “The victim would
not give away the game by abnormal indispositions at the
meal, but when the seizure came he would be so severely
stricken that thereafter he would no longer be in command
of his own affairs.” Agrippina knew her mushrooms, and
Nero became Emperor.
CIA mind-control specialists sought to emulate and
surpass that kind of sophistication, as it might apply to
any conceivable drug. Their fixation on the “magic
mushroom” grew indirectly out of a meeting between drug
experts and Morse Allen, head of the Agency’s ARTICHOKE
program, in October 1952. One expert told Allen about a
shrub called piule, whose seeds had long been used as an
intoxicant by Mexican Indians at religious ceremonies.
Allen, who wanted to know about anything that distorted
reality, immediately arranged for a young CIA scientist
to take a Mexican field trip and gather samples of piule
as well as other plants of “high narcotic and toxic value
of interest to ARTICHOKE.”
That young scientist arrived in Mexico City early in
1953. He could not advertise the true purpose of his trip
because of ARTICHOKE’s extreme secrecy, so he assumed
cover as a researcher interested in finding native plants
which were anesthetics. Fluent in Spanish and familiar
with Mexico, he had no trouble moving around the country,
meeting with leading experts on botanicals. Then he was
off into the mountains south of the capital with his own
field-testing equipment, gathering specimens and testing
them crudely on the spot. By February, he had collected
sacks full of material, including 10 pounds of piule.
Before leaving Mexico to look for more samples around the
Caribbean, the young scientist heard amazing tales about
special mushrooms that grew only in the hot and rainy
summer months. Such stories had circulated among
Europeans in Mexico since Cortez had conquered the
country early in the sixteenth century. Spanish friars
had reported that the Aztecs used strange mushrooms in
their religious ceremonies, which these converters of the
heathens described as “demonic holy communions.” Aztec
priests called the special mushrooms teonanactl, “God’s
flesh.” But Cortez’s plunderers soon lost track of the
rite, as did the traders and anthropologists who followed
in their wake. Only the legend survived.
Back in Washington, the young scientist’s samples
went straight to the labs, and Agency officials scoured
the historical record for accounts of the strange
mushrooms. Morse Allen himself, though responsible in
ARTICHOKE research for everything from the polygraph to
hypnosis, took the trouble to go through the Indian lore.
“Very early accounts of the ceremonies of some tribes of
Mexican Indians show that mushrooms are used to produce
hallucinations and to create intoxication in connection
with religious festivals,” he wrote. “In addition, this
literature shows that witch doctors or ‘divinators’ used
some types of mushrooms to produce confessions or to
locate stolen objects or to predict the future.” Here was
a possible truth drug, Morse Allen reasoned. “Since it
had been determined that no area of human knowledge is to
be left unexplored in connection with the ARTICHOKE
program, it was therefore regarded as essential that the
peculiar qualities of the mushroom be explored….” Allen
declared. “Full consideration,” he concluded, should be
given to sending an Agency man back to Mexico during the
summer. The CIA had begun its quest for “God’s flesh.”
Characteristically, Morse Allen was planning ahead in
case the CIA’s searchers came up with a mushroom worth
having in large quantities. He knew that the supply from
the tropics varied by season, and, anyway, it would be
impractical to go to Mexico for fungi each time an
operational need popped up. So Allen decided to see if it
were possible to grow the mushrooms at home, either
outdoors or in hothouses. On June 24, 1953, he and an
associate drove from Washington to Toughkenamon,
Pennsylvania, in the heart of “the largest mushroom-
growing area in the world.” At a three-hour session with
the captains of the mushroom industry, Allen explained
the government’s interest in poisonous and narcotic
fungi. Allen reported that the meeting “was primarily
designed to obtain a ‘foothold’ in the center of the
mushroom-growing industry where, if requirements for
mushroom growing were demanded, it would be done by
professionals in the trade.” The mushroom executives were
quite reluctant to grow toxic products because they knew
that any accidental publicity would scare their
customers. In the end, however, their patriotism won out,
and they agreed to grow any kind of fungus the government
desired. Allen considered the trip a great success.
As useful as this commitment might be, an element of
chance remained as long as the CIA had to depend on the
natural process. But if the Agency could find synthetic
equivalents for the active ingredients, it could
manufacture rather than grow its own supply. Toward this
goal of bypassing nature, Morse Allen had little choice
but to turn for help to the man who the following year
would wrest most of the ARTICHOKE functions from his
grasp: Sid Gottlieb. Gottlieb, himself a Ph.D. in
chemistry, had scientists working for him who knew what
to do on the level of test tubes and beakers. Allen ran
ARTICHOKE out of the Office of Security, which was not
equipped for work on the frontiers of science.
Gottlieb and his colleagues moved quickly into the
mysteries of the Mexican hallucinogens. They went to work
on the chemical structures of the piule and other plants
that Morse Allen’s emissary brought back from his field
trip, but they neglected to report their findings to the
bureaucratically outflanked Allen. Gottlieb and the
MKULTRA crew soon got caught up in the search for the
magic mushroom. While TSS had its own limited laboratory
facilities, it depended on secret contractors for most
research and development. Working with an associate, a
cadaverously thin chemistry Ph.D. named Henry Bortner,
Gottlieb passed the tropical plants to a string of
corporate and academic researchers. One of them, Dr.
James Moore, a 29-yearold chemist at Parke, Davis &
Company in Detroit, was destined to be the first man in
the CIA camp to taste the magic mushroom. Moore’s career
was typical of the specialists in the CIA’s vast network
of private contractors. His path to the mushroom led
through several jobs and offbeat assignments, always with
Agency funds and direction behind him. A precise,
meticulous man of scientific habits, Moore was hardly the
sort one would expect to find chasing psychedelic drugs.
Such pursuits began for him in March 1953, when he had
returned to his lab at Parke, Davis after a year of
postdoctoral research at the University of Basel. His
supervisor had called him in with an intriguing proposal:
How would he like to work inside the company on a CIA
contract? “Those were not particularly prosperous times,
and the company was glad to get someone else to pay my
salary [$8,000 a year],” notes Moore 25 years later. “If
I had thought I was participating in a scheme run by a
small band of mad individuals, I would have demurred.”
He accepted the job.
The Agency contracted with Parke, Davis, as it did
with numerous other drug companies, universities, and
government agencies to develop behavioral products and
poisons from botanicals. CIA-funded chemists extracted
deadly substances like the arrow-poison curare from
natural products, while others worked on ways to deliver
these poisons most effectively, like the “nondiscernible
microbioinoculator” (or dart gun) that the Army Chemical
Corps invented. CIA-connected botanists collected—and
then chemists analyzed—botanicals from all over the
tropics: a leaf that killed cattle, several plants deadly
to fish, another leaf that caused hair to fall out, sap
that caused temporary blindness, and a host of other
natural products that could alter moods, dull or
stimulate nerves, or generally disorient people. Among
the plants Moore investigated was Jamaica dogwood, a
plant used by Caribbean natives to stun fish so they
could be easily captured for food. This work resulted in
the isolation of several new substances, one of which
Moore named “lisetin,” in honor of his daughter.
Moore had no trouble adjusting to the secrecy
demanded by his CIA sponsors, having worked on the
Manhattan Project as a graduate student. He dealt only
with his own case officer, Henry Bortner, and two or
three other CIA men in TSS. Once Moore completed his
chemical work on a particular substance, he turned the
results over to Bortner and apparently never learned of
the follow-up. Moore worked in his own little isolated
compartment, and he soon recognized that the Agency
preferred contractors who did not ask questions about
what was going on in the next box.
In 1955 Moore left private industry for academia,
moving from Detroit to the relatively placid setting of
the University of Delaware in Newark. The school made him
an assistant professor, and he moved into a lab in the
Georgian red-brick building that housed the chemistry
department. Along with his family, Moore brought his CIA
contract—then worth $16,000 a year, of which he received
$650 per month, with the rest going to pay research
assistants and overhead. Although the Agency allowed a
few top university officials to be briefed on his secret
connection, Moore appeared to his colleagues and students
to be a normal professor who had a healthy research grant
from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research in
Washington.
In the world of natural products—particularly
mushrooms—the CIA soon made Moore a full-service agent.
With some help from his CIA friends, he made contact with
the leading lights in mycology (the study of mushrooms),
attended professional meetings, and arranged for others
to send him samples. From the CIA’s point of view, he
could not have had better cover. As Sid Gottlieb wrote,
Moore “maintains the fiction that the botanical specimens
he collects are for his own use since his field interest
is natural-product chemistry.” Under this pretext, Moore
had a perfect excuse to make and purchase for the CIA
chemicals that the Agency did not want traced. Over the
years, Moore billed the Agency for hundreds of purchases,
including 50 cents for an unidentified pamphlet, $433.13
for a particular shipment of mescaline, $1147.60 for a
large quantity of mushrooms, and $12,000 for a quarter-
ton of fluothane, an inhalation anesthetic. He shipped
his purchases on as Bortner directed.
Moore eventually became a kind of short-order cook
for what CIA documents call “offensive CW, BW” weapons at
“very low cost and in a few days’ time . . .” If there
were an operational need, Bortner had only to call in the
order, and Moore would whip up a batch of a “reputed
depilatory” or hallucinogens like DMT or the incredibly
potent BZ. On one occasion in 1963, Moore prepared a
small dose of a very lethal carbamate poison—the same
substance that OSS used two decades earlier to try to
kill Adolf Hitler. Moore charged the Agency his regular
consulting fee, $100, for this service.
“Did I ever consider what would have happened if this
stuff were given to unwitting people?” Moore asks,
reflecting on his CIA days. “No. Particularly no. Had I
been given that information, I think I would have been
prepared to accept that. If I had been knee-jerk about
testing on unwitting subjects, I wouldn’t have been the
type of person they would have used. There was nothing
that I did that struck me as being so sinister and
deadly…. It was all investigative.”
James Moore was only one of many CIA specialists on
the lookout for the magic mushroom. For three years after
Morse Allen’s man returned from Mexico with his tales of
wonder, Moore and the others in the Agency’s network
pushed their lines of inquiry among contacts and
travelers into Mexican villages so remote that Spanish
had barely penetrated. Yet they found no magic mushrooms.
Given their efforts, it was ironic that the man who beat
them to “God’s flesh” was neither a spy nor a scientist,
but a banker. It was R. Gordon Wasson, vice-president of
J. P. Morgan & Company, amateur mycologist, and co-author
with his wife Valentina of Mushrooms, Russia and History.
Nearly 30 years earlier, Wasson and his Russian-born wife
had become fascinated by the different ways that
societies deal with the mushroom, and they followed their
lifelong obsession with these fungi, in all their glory,
all over the globe.[1] They found whole nationalities,
such as the Russians and the Catalans, were mycophiles,
while others like the Spaniards and the Anglo-Saxons were
not. They learned that in ancient Greece and Rome there
was a belief that certain kinds of mushrooms were brought
into being by lightning bolts. They discovered that
widely scattered peoples, including desert Arabs,
Siberians, Chinese, and Maoris of New Zealand, have
shared the idea that mushrooms have supernatural
connections. Their book appeared in limited edition,
selling new in 1957 for $125. It contains facts and
legends, lovingly told, as well as beautiful photographs
of nearly every known species of mushroom.
Inevitably, the Wassons heard tell of “God’s flesh,”
and in 1953 they started spending their vacations
pursuing it. They took their first unsuccessful trek to
Mexico about the time James Moore got connected to the
CIA and Morse Allen met with the Pennsylvania mushroom
executives. They had no luck until their third
expedition, when Gordon Wasson and his traveling
companion, Allan Richardson, found their holy grail high
in the mountains above Oaxaca. On June 29, 1955, they
entered the town hall in a village called Huautla de
Jimenez. There, they found a young Indian about 35,
sitting by a large table in an upstairs room. Unlike most
people in the village, he spoke Spanish. “He had a
friendly manner,” Wasson later wrote, “and I took a
chance. Leaning over the table, I asked him earnestly and
in a low voice if I could speak to him in confidence.
Instantly curious, he encouraged me. ‘Will you,’ I went
on, ‘help me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?’
and I used the Indian name nti sheeto, correctly
pronouncing it with glottal stop and tonal
differentiation of the syllables. When [he] recovered
from his surprise he said warmly that nothing could be
easier.”
Shortly thereafter, the Indian led Wasson and
Richardson down into a deep ravine where mushrooms were
growing in abundance. The white men snapped picture after
picture of the fungi and picked a cardboard box-full.
Then, in the heavy humid heat of the afternoon, the
Indian led them up the mountain to a woman who performed
the ancient mushroom rite. Her name was Maria Sabina. She
was not only a curandera, or shaman, of “the highest
quality,” wrote Wasson, but a “señora sin mancha, a woman
without stain.” Wasson described her as middle-aged and
short, “with a spirituality in her expression that struck
us at once. She had a presence. We showed our mushrooms
to the woman and her daughter. They cried out in rapture
over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of our
young specimens. Through the interpreter we asked if they
would serve us that night. They said yes.”
That night, Wasson, Richardson, and about 20 Indians
gathered in one of the village’s adobe houses. The
natives wore their best clothes and were friendly to the
white strangers. The host provided chocolate drinks,
which evoked for Wasson accounts of similar beverages
being served early Spanish writers. Maria Sabina sat on a
mat before a simple altar table that was adorned with the
images of the Child Jesus and the Baptism in Jordan.
After cleaning the mushrooms, she handed them out to all
the adults present, keeping 26 for herself and giving
Wasson and Richardson 12 each.
Maria Sabina put out the last candle about midnight,
and she chanted haunting, tightly measured melodies. The
Indian celebrants responded with deep feeling. Both
Wasson and Richardson began to experience intense
hallucinations that did not diminish until about 4:00
A.M. “We were never more wide awake, and the visions came
whether our eyes were open or closed,” Wasson wrote:
They emerged from the center of the field of our vision,
opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly at the
pace that our will chose. They were vivid in color,
always harmonious. They began with art motifs, such as
might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the
drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into
palaces with courts, arcades, gardens—resplendent palaces
with semiprecious stones…. Could the miraculous
mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for
the flying witches that played some important part in the
folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These
reflections passed through my mind at the very time that
I was seeing the vision, for the effect of the mushrooms
is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the
person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side
continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that
the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached by an
elastic cord to the vagrant senses.
Thus Gordon Wasson described the first known mushroom
trip by “outsiders” in recorded history. The CIA’s men
missed the event, but they quickly learned of it, even
though Wasson’s visit was a private noninstitutional one
to a place where material civilization had not reached.
Such swiftness was assured by the breadth of the Agency’s
informant network, which included formal liaison
arrangements with agencies like the Agriculture
Department and the FDA and informal contacts all over the
world. A botanist in Mexico City sent the report that
reached both CIA headquarters and then James Moore. In
the best bureaucratic form, the CIA description of
Wasson’s visions stated sparsely that the New York banker
thought he saw “a multitude of architectural forms.”
Still, “God’s flesh” had been located, and the MKULTRA
leaders snatched up information that Wasson planned to
return the following summer and bring back some
mushrooms.
During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote
Wasson—”out of the blue,” as Wasson recalls—and expressed
a desire to look into the chemical properties of Mexican
fungi. Moore eventually suggested that he would like to
accompany Wasson’s party, and, to sweeten the
proposition, he mentioned that he knew a foundation that
might be willing to help underwrite the expedition. Sure
enough, the CIA’s conduit, the Geschickter Fund, made a
$2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the quest for
the divine mushroom became Subproject 58.
Joining Moore and Wasson on the 1956 trip were the
world-renowned French mycologist Roger Heim and a
colleague from the Sorbonne. The party made the final leg
of the trip, one at a time, in a tiny Cessna, but when it
was Moore’s turn, the load proved too much for the plane.
The pilot suddenly took a dramatic right angle turn
through a narrow canyon and made an unscheduled stop on
the side of a hill. Immediately on landing, an Indian
girl ran out and slid blocks under the wheels, so the
plane would not roll back into a ravine. The pilot
decided to lighten the load by leaving Moore among the
local Indians, who spoke neither English nor Spanish.
Later in the day, the plane returned and picked up the
shaken Moore.
Finally in Huautla, sleeping on a dirt floor and
eating local food, everyone reveled in the primitiveness
of the adventure except Moore, who suffered. In addition
to diarrhea, he recalls, “I had a terribly bad cold, we
damned near starved to death, and I itched all over.”
Beyond his physical woes, Moore became more and more
alienated from the others, who got on famously. Moore was
a “complainer,” according to Wasson. “He had no empathy
for what was going on,” recalls Wasson. “He was like a
landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated
it all.” Moore states, “Our relationship deteriorated
during the course of the trip.”
Wasson returned to the same Maria Sabina who had led
him to the high ground the year before. Again the ritual
started well after dark and, for everyone but Moore, it
was an enchanted evening. Sings Wasson: “I had the most
superb feeling—a feeling of ecstasy. You’re raised to a
height where you have not been in everyday life—not
ever.” Moore, on the other hand, never left the lowlands.
His description: “There was all this chanting in the
dialect. Then they passed the mushrooms around, and we
chewed them up. I did feel the hallucinogenic effect,
although ‘disoriented’ would be a better word to describe
my reaction.”
Soon thereafter, Moore returned to Delaware with a
bag of mushrooms—just in time to take his pregnant wife
to the hospital for delivery. After dropping her off with
the obstetrician, he continued down the hall to another
doctor about his digestion. Already a thin man, Moore had
lost 15 pounds. Over the next week, he slowly nursed
himself back to health. He reported in to Bortner and
started preliminary work in his lab to isolate the active
ingredient in the mushrooms. Bortner urged him on; the
men from MKULTRA were excited at the prospect that they
might be able to create “a completely new chemical
agent.” They wanted their own private supply of “God’s
flesh.” Sid Gottlieb wrote that if Moore succeeded, it
was “quite possible” that the new drugs could “remain an
Agency secret.”
Gottlieb’s dream of a CIA monopoly on the divine
mushroom vanished quickly under the influence of unwanted
competitors, and indeed, the Agency soon faced a control
problem of burgeoning proportions. While Moore toiled in
his lab, Roger Heim in Paris unexpectedly pulled off the
remarkable feat of growing the mushrooms in artificial
culture from spore prints he had made in Mexico. Heim
then sent samples to none other than Albert Hofmann, the
discoverer of LSD, who quickly isolated and chemically
reproduced the active chemical ingredient. He named it
psilocybin.
The dignified Swiss chemist had beaten out the
CIA,[2] and the men from MKULTRA found themselves trying
to obtain formulas and supplies from overseas. Instead of
locking up the world’s supply of the drug in a safe
somewhere, they had to keep track of disbursements from
Sandoz, as they were doing with LSD. Defeated by the old
master, Moore laid his own work aside and sent away to
Sandoz for a supply of psilocybin.
This lapse in control still did not quash the hopes
of Agency officials that the mushroom might become a
powerful weapon in covert operations. Agency scientists
rushed it into the experimental stage. Within three
summers of the first trip with James Moore, the CIA’s
queasy professor from America, the mushroom had journeyed
through laboratories on two continents, and its chemical
essence had worked its way back to Agency conduits and a
contractor who would test it. In Kentucky, Dr. Harris
Isbell ordered psilocybin injected into nine black
inmates at the narcotics prison. His staff laid the
subjects out on beds as the drug took hold and measured
physical symptoms every hour: blood pressure, knee-jerk
reflexes, rectal temperature, precise diameter of eye
pupils, and so on. In addition, they recorded the
inmates’ various subjective feelings:
After 30 minutes, anxiety became quite definite and was
expressed as consisting of fear that something evil was
going to happen, fear of insanity, or of death…. At
times patients had the sensation that they could see the
blood and bones in their own body or in that of another
person. They reported many fantasies or dreamlike states
in which they seemed to be elsewhere. Fantastic
experiences, such as trips to the moon or living in
gorgeous castles were occasionally reported…. Two of
the 9 patients . . . felt their experiences were caused
by the experimenters controlling their minds….
Experimental data piled up, with operational testing
to follow.
But the magic mushroom never became a good spy
weapon. It made people behave strangely but no one could
predict where their trips would take them. Agency
officials craved certainty.
On the other hand, Gordon Wasson found revelation.
After a lifetime of exploring and adoring mushrooms, he
had discovered the greatest wonder of all in that remote
Indian village. His experience inspired him to write an
account of his journey for the “Great Adventures” series
in Life magazine. The story, spread across 17 pages of
text and color photographs, was called “Seeking the Magic
Mushroom: A New York banker goes to Mexico’s mountains to
participate in the age-old rituals of Indians who chew
strange growths that produce visions.” In 1957, before
the Russian sputnik shook America later that year, Life
introduced its millions of readers to the mysteries of
hallucinogens, with a tone of glowing but dignified
respect. Wasson wrote movingly of his long search for
mushroom lore, and he became positively rhapsodic in
reflecting on his Mexican “trip”:
In man’s evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from
his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time
when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory
mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only
have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the
mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons
known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a
different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell.
For the credulous, primitive mind, the mushrooms must
have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. Many
emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but
awe and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to
men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and
ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms,
one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may
not have planted in primitive man the very idea of God.
The article caused a sensation in the United States,
where people had already been awakened to ideas like
these by Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. It
lured waves of respectable adults—precursors of later
hippie travelers—to Mexico in search of their own
curanderas. (Wasson came to have mixed feelings about the
response to his story, after several tiny Mexican
villages were all but trampled by American tourists on
the prowl for divinity.) One person whose curiosity was
stimulated by the article was a young psychology
professor named Timothy Leary. In 1959, in Mexico on
vacation, he ate his first mushrooms. He recalls he “had
no idea it was going to change my life.” Leary had just
been promised tenure at Harvard, but his life of
conventional prestige lost appeal for him within five
hours of swallowing the mushroom: “The revelation had
come. The veil had been pulled back…. The prophetic
call. The works. God had spoken.”
Having responded to a Life article about an
expedition that was partially funded by the CIA, Leary
returned to a Harvard campus where students and
professors had for years served as subjects for CIA- and
military-funded LSD experiments. His career as a drug
prophet lay before him. Soon he would be quoting in his
own Kamasutra from the CIA’s contractor Harold Abramson
and others, brought together for scholarly drug
conferences by the sometime Agency conduit, the Macy
Foundation.
With LSD, as with mushrooms, the men from MKULTRA
remained oblivious, for the most part, to the rebellious
effect of the drug culture in the United States. “I don’t
think we were paying any attention to it,” recalls a TSS
official. The CIA’s scientists looked at drugs from a
different perspective and went on trying to fashion their
spy arsenal. Through the entire 1960s and into the 1970s,
the Agency would scour Latin America for poisonous and
narcotic plants.[3] Earlier, TSS officials and
contractors actually kept spreading the magic touch of
drugs by forever pressing new university researchers into
the field. Boston Psychopathic’s Max Rinkel stirred up
the interest of Rochester’s Harold Hodge and told him how
to get a grant from the Agency conduit, the Geschickter
Fund. Hodge’s group found a way to put a radioactive
marker into LSD, and the MKULTRA crew made sure that the
specially treated substance found its way to still more
scientists. When a contractor like Harold Abramson spoke
highly of the drug at a new conference or seminar, tens
or hundreds of scientists, health professionals, and
subjects—usually students—would wind up trying LSD.
One day in 1954, Ralph Blum, a senior at Harvard on
his way to a career as a successful author, heard from a
friend that doctors at Boston Psychopathic would pay $25
to anyone willing to spend a day as a happy
schizophrenic. Blum could not resist. He applied, passed
the screening process, took a whole battery of Wechsler
psychological tests, and was told to report back on a
given morning. That day, he was shown into a room with
five other Harvard students. Project director Bob Hyde
joined them and struck Blum as a reassuring father
figure. Someone brought in a tray with six little glasses
full of water and LSD. The students drank up. For Blum,
the drug did not take hold for about an hour and a half—
somewhat longer than the average. While Hyde was in the
process of interviewing him, Blum felt his mind shift
gears. “I looked at the clock on the wall and thought how
well behaved it was. It didn’t pay attention to itself.
It just stayed on the wall and told time.” Blum felt that
he was looking at everything around him from a new
perspective. “It was a very subtle thing,” he says. “My
ego filter had been pretty much removed. I turned into a
very accessible state —accessible to myself. I knew when
someone was lying to me, and the richness of the
experience was such that I didn’t want to suffer fools
gladly.” Twenty-four years later, Blum concludes: “It was
undeniably a very important experience for me. It made a
difference in my life. It began to move the log jam of my
old consciousness. You can’t do it with just one blast.
It was the beginning of realizing it was safe to love
again. Although I wouldn’t use them until much later, it
gave me a new set of optics. It let me know there was
something downstream.”[4]
Many student subjects like Blum thought LSD
transformed the quality of their lives. Others had no
positive feelings, and some would later use the negative
memories of their trips to invalidate the whole drug
culture and stoned thinking process of the 1960s. In a
university city like Boston where both the CIA and the
Army were carrying on large testing programs at hospitals
connected to Harvard, volunteering for an LSD trip became
quite popular in academic circles. Similar reactions,
although probably not as pronounced, occurred in other
intellectual centers. The intelligence agencies turned to
America’s finest universities and hospitals to try LSD,
which meant that the cream of the country’s students and
graduate assistants became the test subjects.
In 1969 the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
published a fascinating little study designed to curb
illegal LSD use. The authors wrote that the drug’s “early
use was among small groups of intellectuals at large
Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to
undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most
often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons
of higher status. Teachers have influenced students;
upperclassmen have influenced lower-classmen.” Calling
this a “trickle-down phenomenon,” the authors seem to
have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country.
They left out only one vital element, which they had no
way of knowing: That somebody had to influence the
teachers and that up there at the top of the LSD
distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.
Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of
getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned
on Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which
passed CIA money to Abramson. In this cozy little world
where everyone knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized
the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the
academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson,
Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959
Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend
of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a
research program located of f the Stanford campus. No
stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote,
Ginsberg reacted badly to what he describes as “the
closed little doctor’s room full of instruments,” where
he took the drug. Although he was allowed to listen to
records of his choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading,
a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he “was
being connected to Big Brother’s brain.” He says that the
experience resulted in “a slight paranoia that hung on
all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until I
learned from meditation how to disperse that.”
Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then
worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo
Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was testing LSD at
that same hospital. Hollister says he entered the
hallucinogenic field reluctantly because of the
“unscientific” work of the early LSD researchers. He
refers specifically to most of the people who attended
Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA and
military-funded work, Hollister tried drugs out on
student volunteers, including a certain Ken Kesey, in
1960. Kesey said he was a jock who had only been drunk
once before, but on three successive Tuesdays, he tried
different psychedelics. “Six weeks later I’d bought my
first ounce of grass,” Kesey later wrote, adding, “Six
months later I had a job at that hospital as a
psychiatric aide.” Out of that experience, using drugs
while he wrote, Kesey turned out One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. He went on to become the counterculture’s
second most famous LSD visionary, spreading the creed
throughout the land, as Tom Wolfe would chronicle in The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
CIA officials never meant that the likes of Leary,
Kesey, and Ginsberg should be turned on. Yet these men
were, and they, along with many of the lesser-known
experimental subjects, like Harvard’s Ralph Blum, created
the climate whereby LSD escaped the government’s control
and became available by the early sixties on the black
market. No one at the Agency apparently foresaw that
young Americans would voluntarily take the drug—whether
for consciousness expansion or recreational purposes. The
MKULTRA experts were mainly on a control trip, and they
proved incapable of gaining insight from their own LSD
experiences of how others less fixated on making people
do their bidding would react to the drug.
It would be an exaggeration to put all the blame on—
or give all the credit to—the CIA for the spread of LSD.
One cannot forget the nature of the times, the Vietnam
War, the breakdown in authority, and the wide
availability of other drugs, especially marijuana. But
the fact remains that LSD was one of the catalysts of the
traumatic upheavals of the 1960s. No one could enter the
world of psychedelics without first passing, unawares,
through doors opened by the Agency. It would become a
supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous search for weapons
among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr.
Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would
wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable
minds of the counterculture.
Notes
R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson’s mammoth work,
Mushrooms, Russia and History, (New York: Pantheon,
1957), was the source for the account of the Empress
Agrippina’s murderous use of mushrooms. Wasson told the
story of his various journeys to Mexico in a series of
interviews and in a May 27, 1957 Life magazine article,
“Seeking the Magic Mushroom.”
Morse Allen learned of piule in a sequence described
in document #A/B,I,33/7, 14 November 1952, Subject:
Piule. The sending of the young CIA scientist to Mexico
was outlined in #A/B, I,33/3,5 December 1952. Morse Allen
commented on mushroom history and covert possibilities in
#A/B, I, 34/4, 26 June 1953, Subject: Mushrooms—Narcotic
and Poisonous Varieties. His trip to the American
mushroom-growing capital was described in Document Number
illegible], 25 June 1953, Subject: Trip to Toughkenamon,
Pennsylvania. The failure of TSS to tell Morse Allen
about the results of the botanical lab work is outlined
in #A/B, I, 39/5, 10 August 1954 Subject: Reports;
Request for from TSS [deleted].
James Moore told much about himself in a long
interview and in an exchange of correspondence. MKULTRA
Subproject 51 dealt with Moore’s consulting relationship
with the Agency and Subproject 52 with his ties as a
procurer of chemicals. See especially Document 51-46, 8
April 1963, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 51; 51-24, 27
August 1956, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 51-B; 52-94, 20
February 1963, Subject: (BB) Chemical and Physical
Manipulants; 52-19, 20 December 1962; 52-17, 1 March
1963; 52-23, 6 December 1962; 52-64, 24 August 1959.
The CIA’s arrangements with the Department of
Agriculture are detailed in #A/B, I, 34/4, 26 June, 1953,
Subject: Mushrooms—Narcotic and Poisonous varieties and
Document [number illegible], 13 April 1953, Subject:
Interview with Cleared Contacts.
Dr. Harris Isbell’s work with psilocybin is detailed
in Isbell document # 155, “Comparison of the Reaction
Induced by Psilocybin and LSD-25 in Man.”
Information on the counterculture and its interface
with CIA drug-testing came from interviews with Timothy
Leary, Allen Ginsburg, Humphrey Osmond, John Lilly,
Sidney Cohen, Ralph Blum, Herbert Kelman, Leo Hollister,
Herbert DeShon, and numerous others. Ken Kesey described
his first trip in Garage Sale (New York: Viking Press,
1973). Timothy Leary’s Kamasutra was actually a book
hand-produced in four copies and called Psychedelic
Theory: Working Papers from the Harvard IFlF Psychedelic
Research Project, 1960-1963. Susan Berns Wolf Rothchild
kindly made her copy available. The material about Harold
Abramson’s turning on Frank Fremont-Smith and Gregory
Bateson came from the proceedings of a conference on LSD
sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation on April 22,
23, and 24, 1959, pp. 8-22.
Footnotes
1. On their honeymoon, in the summer of 1927, the
Wassons were strolling along a mountain path when
suddenly Valentina abandoned Gordon’s side. “She had
spied wild mushrooms in the forest,” wrote Wasson, “and
racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she
knelt in poses of adoration before one cluster and then
another of these growths. In ecstasy she called each kind
by an endearing Russian name. Like all good Anglo-Saxons,
I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt the less I
knew about these putrid, treacherous excrescences the
better. For her they were things of grace infinitely
inviting to the perceptive mind.” In spite of his
protests, Valentina gathered up the mushrooms and brought
them back to the lodge were she cooked them for dinner.
She ate them all—alone. Wasson wanted no part of the
fungi. While she mocked his horror, he predicted in the
face of her laughter he would wake up a widower the next
morning. When Valentina survived, the couple decided to
find an explanation for “the strange cultural cleavage”
that had caused them to react so differently to
mushrooms. From then on, they were hooked, and the world
became the richer.
2. Within two years, Albert Hofmann would scoop the
CIA once again, with some help from Gordon Wasson. In
1960 Hofmann broke down and chemically recreated the
active ingredient in hallucinatory ololiuqui seeds sent
him by Wasson before the Agency’s contractor, William
Boyd Cook of Montana State University, could do the job.
Hofmann’s and Wasson’s professional relationship soon
grew into friendship, and in 1962 they traveled together
on horseback to Huautla de Jimenez to visit Maria Sabina.
Hofmann presented the curandera with some genuine Sandoz
psilocybin. Wasson recalls: “Of course, Albert Hofmann is
so conservative he always gives too little a dose, and it
didn’t have any effect.” The crestfallen Hofmann believed
he had duplicated “God’s flesh,” and he doubled the dose.
Then Maria Sabina had her customary visions, and she
reported, according to Wasson, the drug was the “same” as
the mushroom. States Wasson, whose prejudice for real
mushrooms over chemicals is unmistakable, “I don’t think
she said it with very much enthusiasm.”
3. See Chapter 12.
4. Lincoln Clark, a psychiatrist who tested LSD for
the Army at Massachusetts General Hospital, reflects a
fairly common view among LSD researchers when he
belittles drug-induced thinking of the sort described by
Blum. “Everybody who takes LSD has an incredible
experience that you can look at as having positive
characteristics. I view it as pseudo-insight. This is
part of the usual response of intellectually pretentious
people.” On the other hand, psychiatrist Sidney Cohen,
who has written an important book on LSD, noted that to
experience a visionary trip, “the devotee must have faith
in, or at least be open to the possibility of the ‘other
state.’ . . . He must ‘let go,’ not offer too much
resistance to losing his personal identity. The ability
to surrender oneself is probably the most important
operation of all.”
PART III
SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
Brainwashing
In September 1950, the Miami News published an
article by Edward Hunter titled ” ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics
Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.” It was the
first printed use in any language of the term
“brainwashing,” which quickly became a stock phrase in
Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who
worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady
stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up
his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—”to cleanse the
mind”—which had no political meaning in Chinese.
American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter’s
ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed
toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as
mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about
the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal
Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like,
as though drugged or hypnotized. Other defendants at
Soviet “show trials” had displayed similar symptoms as
they recited unbelievable confessions in dull, cliché-
ridden monotones. Americans were familiar with the idea
that the communists had ways to control hapless people,
and Hunter’s new word helped pull together the unsettling
evidence into one sharp fear. The brainwashing
controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in
Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda
offensive that featured recorded statements by captured
U.S. pilots, who “confessed” to a variety of war crimes
including the use of germ warfare.
The official American position on prisoner
confessions was that they were false and forced. As
expressed in an Air Force Headquarters document,
“Confessions can be of truthful details…. For purposes
of this section, ‘confessions’ are considered as being
the forced admission to a lie.” But if the military had
understandable reasons to gloss over the truth or falsity
of the confessions, this still did not address the fact
that confessions had been made at all. Nor did it lay to
rest the fears of those like Edward Hunter who saw the
confessions as proof that the communists now had
techniques “to put a man’s mind into a fog so that he
will mistake what is true for what is untrue, what is
right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did not
happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes
a robot for the Communist manipulator.”
By the end of the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190
U.S. prisoners held in China had either made confessions
or signed petitions calling for an end to the American
war effort in Asia. Fifteen percent collaborated fully
with the Chinese, and only 5 percent steadfastly
resisted. The American performance contrasted poorly with
that of the British, Australian, Turkish, and other
United Nations prisoners—among whom collaboration was
rare, even though studies showed they were treated about
as badly as the Americans. Worse, an alarming number of
the prisoners stuck by their confessions after returning
to the United States. They did not, as expected, recant
as soon as they stepped on U.S. soil. Puzzled and
dismayed by this wholesale collapse of morale among the
POWs, American opinion leaders settled in on Edward
Hunter’s explanation: The Chinese had somehow brainwashed
our boys.
But how? At the height of the brainwashing furor,
conservative spokesmen often seized upon the very mystery
of it all to give a religious cast to the political
debate. All communists have been, by definition,
brainwashed through satanic forces, they argued—thereby
making the enemy seem like robots completely devoid of
ordinary human feelings and motivation. Liberals favored
a more scientific view of the problem. Given the
incontrovertible evidence that the Russians and the
Chinese could, in a very short time and often under
difficult circumstances, alter the basic belief and
behavior patterns of both domestic and foreign captives,
liberals argued that there must be a technique involved
that would yield its secrets under objective
investigation.
CIA Director Allen Dulles favored the scientific
approach, although he naturally encouraged his propaganda
experts to exploit the more emotional interpretations of
brainwashing. Dulles and the heads of the other American
security agencies became almost frantic in their efforts
to find out more about the Soviet and Chinese successes
in mind control. Under pressure for answers, Dulles
turned to Dr. Harold Wolff, a world-famous neurologist
with whom he had developed an intensely personal
relationship. Wolff was then treating Dulles’ own son for
brain damage suffered from a Korean War head wound.
Together they shared the trauma of the younger Dulles’
fits and mental lapses. Wolff, a skinny little doctor
with an overpowering personality, became fast friends
with the tall, patrician CIA Director. Dulles may have
seen brainwashing as an induced form of brain damage or
mental illness. In any case, in late 1953, he asked Wolff
to conduct an official study of communist brainwashing
techniques for the CIA. Wolff, who had become fascinated
by the Director’s tales of the clandestine world, eagerly
accepted.
Harold Wolff was known primarily as an expert on
migraine headaches and pain, but he had served on enough
military and intelligence advisory panels that he knew
how to pick up Dulles’ mandate and expand on it. He
formed a working partnership with Lawrence Hinkle, his
colleague at Cornell University Medical College in New
York City. Hinkle handled the administrative part of the
study and shared in the substance. Before going ahead,
the two doctors made sure they had the approval of
Cornell’s president, Deane W. Malott and other high
university officials who checked with their contacts in
Washington to make sure the project did indeed have the
great importance that Allen Dulles stated. Hinkle recalls
a key White House aide urging Cornell to cooperate. The
university administration agreed, and soon Wolff and
Hinkle were poring over the Agency’s classified files on
brainwashing. CIA officials also helped arrange
interviews with former communist interrogators and
prisoners alike. “It was done with great secrecy,”
recalls Hinkle. “We went through a great deal of hoop-dedo
and signed secrecy agreements, which everyone took
very seriously.”
The team of Wolff and Hinkle became the chief
brainwashing studiers for the U.S. government, although
the Air Force and Army ran parallel programs.[1] Their
secret report to Allen Dulles, later published in a
declassified version, was considered the definitive U.S.
Government work on the subject. In fact, if allowances
are made for the Cold War rhetoric of the fifties, the
Wolff-Hinkle report still remains one of the better
accounts of the massive political re-education programs
in China and the Soviet Union. It stated flatly that
neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had any magical
weapons—no drugs, exotic mental ray-guns, or other
fanciful machines. Instead, the report pictured communist
interrogation methods resting on skillful, if brutal,
application of police methods. Its portrait of the Soviet
system anticipates, in dry and scholarly form, the work
of novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn in The Gulag
Archipelago. Hinkle and Wolff showed that the Soviet
technique rested on the cumulative weight of intense
psychological pressure and human weakness, and this
thesis alone earned the two Cornell doctors the enmity of
the more right-wing CIA officials such as Edward Hunter.
Several of his former acquaintances remember that Hunter
was fond of saying that the Soviets brainwashed people
the way Pavlov had conditioned dogs.
In spite of some dissenters like Hunter, the Wolff-
Hinkle model became, with later refinements, the best
available description of extreme forms of political
indoctrination. According to the general consensus, the
Soviets started a new prisoner off by putting him in
solitary confinement. A rotating corps of guards watched
him constantly, humiliating and demeaning him at every
opportunity and making it clear he was totally cut off
from all outside support. The guards ordered him to stand
for long periods, let him sit, told him exactly the
position he could take to lie down, and woke him if he
moved in the slightest while sleeping. They banned all
outside stimuli—books, conversation, or news of the
world.
After four to six weeks of this mind-deadening
routine, the prisoner usually found the stress unbearable
and broke down. “He weeps, he mutters, and prays aloud in
his cell,” wrote Hinkle and Wolff. When the prisoner
reached this stage, the interrogation began. Night after
night, the guards brought him into a special room to face
the interrogator. Far from confronting his captive with
specific misdeeds, the interrogator told him that he knew
his own crimes—all too well. In the most harrowing
Kafkaesque way, the prisoner tried to prove his innocence
to he knew not what. Together the interrogator and
prisoner reviewed the prisoner’s life in detail. The
interrogator seized on any inconsistency—no matter how
minute—as further evidence of guilt, and he laughed at
the prisoner’s efforts to justify himself. But at least
the prisoner was getting a response of some sort. The
long weeks of isolation and uncertainty had made him
grateful for human contact even grateful that his case
was moving toward resolution. True, it moved only as fast
as he was willing to incriminate himself, but . . .
Gradually, he came to see that he and his interrogator
were working toward the same goal of wrapping up his
case. In tandem, they ransacked his soul. The
interrogator would periodically let up the pressure. He
offered a cigarette, had a friendly chat, explained he
had a job to do—making it all the more disappointing the
next time he had to tell the prisoner that his confession
was unsatisfactory .
As the charges against him began to take shape, the
prisoner realized that he could end his ordeal only with
a full confession. Otherwise the grueling sessions would
go on forever. “The regimen of pressure has created an
overall discomfort which is well nigh intolerable,” wrote
Hinkle and Wolff. “The prisoner invariably feels that
‘something must be done to end this.’ He must find a way
out.” A former KGB officer, one of many former
interrogators and prisoners interviewed for the CIA
study, said that more than 99 percent of all prisoners
signed a confession at this stage.
In the Soviet system under Stalin, these confessions
were the final step of the interrogation process, and the
prisoners usually were shot or sent to a labor camp after
sentencing. Today, Russian leaders seem much less
insistent on exacting confessions before jailing their
foes, but they still use the penal (and mental health)
system to remove from the population classes of people
hostile to their rule.
The Chinese took on the more ambitious task of reeducating
their prisoners. For them, confession was only
the beginning. Next, the Chinese authorities moved the
prisoner into a group cell where his indoctrination
began. From morning to night, he and his fellow prisoners
studied Marx and Mao, listened to lectures, and engaged
in self-criticism. Since the progress of each member
depended on that of his cellmates, the group pounced on
the slightest misconduct as an indication of backsliding.
Prisoners demonstrated the zeal of their commitment by
ferociously attacking deviations. Constant intimacy with
people who reviled him pushed the resistant prisoner to
the limits of his emotional endurance. Hinkle and Wolff
found that “The prisoner must conform to the demands of
the group sooner or later.” As the prisoner developed
genuine changes of attitude, pressure on him relaxed. His
cellmates rewarded him with increasing acceptance and
esteem. Their acceptance, in turn, reinforced his
commitment to the Party, for he learned that only this
commitment allowed him to live successfully in the cell.
In many cases, this process produced an exultant sense of
mission in the prisoner—a feeling of having finally
straightened out his life and come to the truth. To be
sure, this experience, which was not so different from
religious conversion, did not occur in all cases or
always last after the prisoner returned to a social group
that did not reinforce it.
From the first preliminary studies of Wolff and
Hinkle, the U.S. intelligence community moved toward the
conclusion that neither the Chinese nor the Russians made
appreciable use of drugs or hypnosis, and they certainly
did not possess the brainwashing equivalent of the atomic
bomb (as many feared). Most of their techniques were
rooted in age-old methods, and CIA brainwashing
researchers like psychologist John Gittinger found
themselves poring over ancient documents on the Spanish
Inquisition. Furthermore, the communists used no
psychiatrists or other behavioral scientists to devise
their interrogation system. The differences between the
Soviet and Chinese systems seemed to grow out of their
respective national cultures. The Soviet brainwashing
system resembled a heavy-handed cop whose job was to
isolate, break, and then subdue all the troublemakers in
the neighborhood. The Chinese system was more like
thousands of skilled acupuncturists, working on each
other and relying on group pressure, ideology, and
repetition. To understand further the Soviet or Chinese
control systems, one had to plunge into the subtle
mysteries of national and individual character.
While CIA researchers looked into those questions,
the main thrust of the Agency’s brainwashing studies
veered off in a different direction. The logic behind the
switch was familiar in the intelligence business. Just
because the Soviets and the Chinese had not invented a
brainwashing machine, officials reasoned, there was no
reason to assume that the task was impossible. If such a
machine were even remotely feasible, one had to assume
the communists might discover it. And in that case,
national security required that the United States invent
the machine first. Therefore, the CIA built up its own
elaborate brainwashing program, which, like the Soviet
and Chinese versions, took its own special twist from our
national character. It was a tiny replica of the
Manhattan Project, grounded in the conviction that the
keys to brainwashing lay in technology. Agency officials
hoped to use old-fashioned American know-how to produce
shortcuts and scientific breakthroughs. Instead of
turning to tough cops, whose methods repelled American
sensibilities, or the gurus of mass motivation, whose
ideology Americans lacked, the Agency’s brainwashing
experts gravitated to people more in the mold of the
brilliant—and sometimes mad—scientist, obsessed by the
wonders of the brain.
In 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles made a rare public
statement on communist brainwashing: “We in the West are
somewhat handicapped in getting all the details,” Dulles
declared. “There are few survivors, and we have no human
guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.” Even
as Dulles spoke, however, CIA officials acting under his
orders had begun to find the scientists and the guinea
pigs. Some of their experiments would wander so far
across the ethical borders of experimental psychiatry
(which are hazy in their own right) that Agency officials
thought it prudent to have much of the work done outside
the United States.
Call her Lauren G. For 19 years, her mind has been
blank about her experience. She remembers her husband’s
driving her up to the old gray stone mansion that housed
the hospital, Allan Memorial Institute, and putting her
in the care of its director, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. The
next thing she recalls happened three weeks later:
They gave me a dressing gown. It was way too big, and I
was tripping all over it. I was mad. I asked why did I
have to go round in this sloppy thing. I could hardly
move because I was pretty weak. I remember trying to walk
along the hall, and the walls were all slanted. It was
then that I said, “Holy Smokes, what a ghastly thing.” I
remember running out the door and going up the mountain
in my long dressing gown.
The mountain, named Mont Royal, loomed high above
Montreal. She stumbled and staggered as she tried to
climb higher and higher. Hospital staff members had no
trouble catching her and dragging her back to the
Institute. In short order, they shot her full of
sedatives, attached electrodes to her temples, and gave
her a dose of electroshock. Soon she slept like a baby.
Gradually, over the next few weeks, Lauren G. began
to function like a normal person again. She took basket-
weaving therapy and played bridge with her fellow
patients. The hospital released her, and she returned to
her husband in another Canadian city.
Before her mental collapse in 1959, Lauren G. seemed
to have everything going for her. A refined, glamorous
horsewoman of 30, whom people often said looked like
Elizabeth Taylor, she had auditioned for the lead in
National Velvet at 13 and married the rich boy next door
at 20. But she had never loved her husband and had let
her domineering mother push her into his arms. He drank
heavily. “I was really unhappy,” she recalls. “I had a
horrible marriage, and finally I had a nervous breakdown.
It was a combination of my trying to lose weight, sleep
loss, and my nerves.”
The family doctor recommended that her husband send
her to Dr. Cameron, which seemed like a logical thing to
do, considering his wide fame as a psychiatrist. He had
headed Allan Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller
Foundation had donated funds to set up a psychiatric
facility at McGill University. With continuing help from
the Rockefellers, McGill had built a hospital known far
beyond Canada’s borders as innovative and exciting.
Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric
Association in 1953, and he became the first president of
the World Psychiatric Association. His friends joked that
they had run out of honors to give him.
Cameron’s passion lay in the more “objective” forms
of therapy, with which he could more easily and swiftly
bring about improvements in patients than with the
notoriously slow Freudian methods. An impatient man, he
dreamed of finding a cure for schizophrenia. No one could
tell him he was not on the right track. Cameron’s
supporter at the Rockefeller Foundation, Robert Morrison,
recorded in his private papers that he found the
psychiatrist tense and ill-at-ease, and Morrison ventured
that this may account for “his lack of interest and
effectiveness in psychotherapy and failure to establish
warm personal relations with faculty members, both of
which were mentioned repeatedly when I visited Montreal.”
Another Rockefeller observer noted that Cameron “appears
to suffer from deep insecurity and has a need for power
which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary
aloofness from his associates.”
When Lauren G.’s husband delivered her to Cameron,
the psychiatrist told him she would receive some
electroshock, a standard treatment at the time. Besides
that, states her husband, “Cameron was not very
communicative, but I didn’t think she was getting
anything out of the ordinary.” The husband had no way of
knowing that Cameron would use an unproved experimental
technique on his wife—much less that the psychiatrist
intended to “depattern” her. Nor did he realize that the
CIA was supporting this work with about $19,000 a year in
secret funds.[2]
Cameron defined “depatterning” as breaking up
existing patterns of behavior, both the normal and the
schizophrenic, by means of particularly intensive
electroshocks, usually combined with prolonged, drug-
induced sleep. Here was a psychiatrist willing—indeed,
eager—to wipe the human mind totally clean. Back in 1951,
ARTICHOKE’s Morse Allen had likened the process to
“creation of a vegetable.” Cameron justified this tabula
rasa approach because he had a theory of “differential
amnesia,” for which he provided no statistical evidence
when he published it. He postulated that after he
produced “complete amnesia” in a subject, the person
would eventually recover memory of his normal but not his
schizophrenic behavior. Thus, Cameron claimed he could
generate “differential amnesia.” Creating such a state in
which a man who knew too much could be made to forget had
long been a prime objective of the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA
programs.
Needless to say, Lauren G. does not recall a thing
today about those weeks when Cameron depatterned her.
Afterward, unlike over half of the psychiatrist’s
depatterning patients, Lauren G. gradually recovered full
recall of her life before the treatment, but then, she
remembered her mental problems, too.[3] Her husband says
she came out of the hospital much improved. She declares
the treatment had no effect one way or another on her
mental condition, which she believes resulted directly
from her miserable marriage. She stopped seeing Cameron
after about a month of outpatient electroshock
treatments, which she despised. Her relationship with her
husband further deteriorated, and two years later she
walked out on him. “I just got up on my own hind legs,”
she states. “I said the hell with it. I’m going to do
what I want and take charge of my own life. I left and
started over.” Now divorced and remarried, she feels she
has been happy ever since.
Cameron’s depatterning, of which Lauren G. had a
comparatively mild version, normally started with 15 to
30 days of “sleep therapy.” As the name implies, the
patient slept almost the whole day and night. According
to a doctor at the hospital who used to administer what
he calls the “sleep cocktail,” a staff member woke up the
patient three times a day for medication that consisted
of a combination of 100 mg. Thorazine, 100 mg. Nembutal,
100 mg. Seconal, 150 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg. Phenergan.
Another staff doctor would also awaken the patient two or
sometimes three times daily for electroshock
treatments.[4] This doctor and his assistant wheeled a
portable machine into the “sleep room” and gave the
subject a local anesthetic and muscle relaxant, so as not
to cause damage with the convulsions that were to come.
After attaching electrodes soaked in saline solution, the
attendant held the patient down and the doctor turned on
the current. In standard, professional electroshock,
doctors gave the subject a single dose of 110 volts,
lasting a fraction of a second, once a day or every other
day. By contrast, Cameron used a form 20 to 40 times more
intense, two or three times daily, with the power turned
up to 150 volts. Named the “Page-Russell” method after
its British originators, this technique featured an
initial one-second shock, which caused a major
convulsion, and then five to nine additional shocks in
the middle of the primary and follow-on convulsions. Even
Drs. Page and Russell limited their treatment to once a
day, and they always stopped as soon as their patient
showed “pronounced confusion” and became “faulty in
habits.” Cameron, however, welcomed this kind of
impairment as a sign the treatment was taking effect and
plowed ahead through his routine.
The frequent screams of patients that echoed through
the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his
associates in their attempts to “depattern” their
subjects completely. Other hospital patients report being
petrified by the “sleep rooms,” where the treatment took
place, and they would usually creep down the opposite
side of the hall.
Cameron described this combined sleep-electroshock
treatment as lasting between 15 to 30 days, with some
subjects staying in up to 65 days (in which case, he
reported, he awakened them for three days in the middle).
Sometimes, as in the case of Lauren G., patients would
try to escape when the sedatives wore thin, and the staff
would have to chase after them. “It was a tremendous
nursing job just to keep these people going during the
treatment,” recalls a doctor intimately familiar with
Cameron’s operation. This doctor paints a picture of
dazed patients, incapable of taking care of themselves,
often groping their way around the hospital and urinating
on the floor.
Cameron wrote that his typical depatterning patient—
usually a woman—moved through three distinct stages. In
the first, the subject lost much of her memory. Yet she
still knew where she was, why she was there, and who the
people were who treated her. In the second phase, she
lost her “space-time image,” but still wanted to
remember. In fact, not being able to answer questions
like, “Where am I?” and “How did I get here?” caused her
considerable anxiety. In the third stage, all that
anxiety disappeared. Cameron described the state as “an
extremely interesting constriction of the range of
recollections which one ordinarily brings in to modify
and enrich one’s statements. Hence, what the patient
talks about are only his sensations of the moment, and he
talks about them almost exclusively in highly concrete
terms. His remarks are entirely uninfluenced by previous
recollections—nor are they governed in any way by his
forward anticipations. He lives in the immediate present.
All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared. There is
complete amnesia for all events in his life.”
Lauren G. and 52 other subjects at Allan Memorial
received this level of depatterning in 1958 and 1959.
Cameron had already developed the technique when the CIA
funding started. The Agency sent the psychiatrist
research money to take the treatment beyond this point.
Agency officials wanted to know if, once Cameron had
produced the blank mind, he could then program in new
patterns of behavior, as he claimed he could. As early as
1953—the year he headed the American Psychiatric
Association—Cameron conceived a technique he called
“psychic driving,” by which he would bombard the subject
with repeated verbal messages. From tape recordings based
on interviews with the patient, he selected emotionally
loaded “cue statements”—first negative ones to get rid of
unwanted behavior and then positive to condition in
desired personality traits. On the negative side, for
example, the patient would hear this message as she lay
in a stupor:
Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a
child all through your single life. You let your mother
check you up sexually after every date you had with a
boy. You hadn’t enough determination to tell her to stop
it. You never stood up for yourself against your mother
or father but would run away from trouble…. They used
to call you “crying Madeleine.” Now that you have two
children, you don’t seem to be able to manage them and
keep a good relationship with your husband. You are
drifting apart. You don’t go out together. You have not
been able to keep him interested sexually.
Leonard Rubenstein, Cameron’s principal assistant,
whose entire salary was paid from CIA-front funds, put
the message on a continuous tape loop and played it for
16 hours every day for several weeks. An electronics
technician, with no medical or psychological background,
Rubenstein, an electrical whiz, designed a giant tape
recorder that could play 8 loops for 8 patients at the
same time. Cameron had the speakers installed literally
under the pillows in the “sleep rooms.” “We made sure
they heard it,” says a doctor who worked with Cameron.
With some patients, Cameron intensified the negative
effect by running wires to their legs and shocking them
at the end of the message.
When Cameron thought the negative “psychic driving”
had gone far enough, he switched the patient over to 2 to
5 weeks of positive tapes:
You mean to get well. To do this you must let your
feelings come out. It is all right to express your
anger…. You want to stop your mother bossing you
around. Begin to assert yourself first in little things
and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis.
You will then be free to be a wife and mother just like
other women.
Cameron wrote that psychic driving provided a way to
make “direct, controlled changes in personality,” without
having to resolve the subject’s conflicts or make her
relive past experiences. As far as is known, no present-
day psychologist or psychiatrist accepts this view. Dr.
Donald Hebb, who headed McGill’s psychology department at
the time Cameron was in charge of psychiatry, minces no
words when asked specifically about psychic driving:
“That was an awful set of ideas Cameron was working with.
It called for no intellectual respect. If you actually
look at what he was doing and what he wrote, it would
make you laugh. If I had a graduate student who talked
like that, I’d throw him out.” Warming to his subject,
Hebb continues: “Look, Cameron was no good as a
researcher…. He was eminent because of politics.”
Nobody said such things at the time, however. Cameron was
a very powerful man.
The Scottish-born psychiatrist, who never lost the
burr in his voice, kept searching for ways to perfect
depatterning and psychic driving. He held out to the CIA
front—the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology—
that he could find more rapid and less damaging ways to
break down behavior. He sent the Society a proposal that
combined his two techniques with sensory deprivation and
strong drugs. His smorgasbord approach brought together
virtually all possible techniques of mind control, which
he tested individually and together. When his Agency
grant came through in 1957, Cameron began work on sensory
deprivation.
For several years, Agency officials had been
interested in the interrogation possibilities of this
technique that Hebb himself had pioneered at McGill with
Canadian defense and Rockefeller money. It consisted of
putting a subject in a sealed environment—a small room or
even a large box—and depriving him of all sensory input:
eyes covered with goggles, ears either covered with muffs
or exposed to a constant, monotonous sound, padding to
prevent touching, no smells—with this empty regime
interrupted only by meal and bathroom breaks. In 1955
Morse Allen of ARTICHOKE made contact at the National
Institutes of Health with Dr. Maitland Baldwin who had
done a rather gruesome experiment in which an Army
volunteer had stayed in the “box” for 40 hours until he
kicked his way out after, in Baldwin’s words, “an hour of
crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending
fashion.” The experiment convinced Baldwin that the
isolation technique could break any man, no matter how
intelligent or strong-willed. Hebb, who unlike Baldwin
released his subjects when they wanted, had never left
anyone in “the box” for more than six days. Baldwin told
Morse Allen that beyond that sensory deprivation would
almost certainly cause irreparable damage. Nevertheless,
Baldwin agreed that if the Agency could provide the cover
and the subjects, he would do, according to Allen’s
report, “terminal type” experiments. After numerous
meetings inside the CIA on how and where to fund Baldwin,
an Agency medical officer finally shot down the project
as being “immoral and inhuman,” suggesting that those
pushing the experiments might want to “volunteer their
heads for use in Dr. Baldwin’s ‘noble’ project.”
With Cameron, Agency officials not only had a doctor
willing to perform terminal experiments in sensory
deprivation, but one with his own source of subjects. As
part of his CIA-funded research, he had a “box” built in
the converted stables behind the hospital that housed
Leonard Rubenstein and his behavioral laboratory.
Undaunted by the limits set in Hebb’s work, Cameron left
one woman in for 35 days, although he had so scrambled
her mind with his other techniques that one cannot say,
as Baldwin predicted to the Agency, if the prolonged
deprivation did specific damage. This subject’s name was
Mary C., and, try as he might, Cameron could not get
through to her. As the aloof psychiatrist wrote in his
notes: “Although the patient was prepared by both
prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated
depatterning, and although she received 101 days of
positive driving, no favorable results were obtained.”[5]
Before prescribing this treatment, Cameron had diagnosed
the 52-year-old Mary C.: “Conversion reaction in a woman
of the involutional age with mental anxiety;
hypochondriatic.” In other words, Mary C. was going
through menopause.
In his proposal to the CIA front, Cameron also said
he would test curare, the South American arrow poison
which, when liberally applied, kills by paralyzing
internal body functions. In nonlethal doses, curare
causes a limited paralysis which blocks but does not stop
these functions. According to his papers, some of which
wound up in the archives of the American Psychiatric
Association, Cameron injected subjects with curare in
conjunction with sensory deprivation, presumably to
immobilize them further.
Cameron also tested LSD in combination with psychic
driving and other techniques. In late 1956 and early
1957, one of his subjects was Val Orlikow, whose husband
David has become a member of the Canadian parliament.
Suffering from what she calls a “character neurosis that
started with postpartum depression,” she entered Allan
Memorial as one of Cameron’s personal patients. He soon
put her under his version of LSD therapy. One to four
times a week, he or another doctor would come into her
room and give her a shot of LSD, mixed with either a
stimulant or a depressant and then leave her alone with a
tape recorder that played excerpts from her last session
with him. As far as is known, no other LSD researcher
ever subjected his patients to unsupervised trips—
certainly not over the course of two months when her
hospital records show she was given LSD 14 times. “It was
terrifying,” Mrs. Orlikow recalls. “You’re afraid you’ve
gone off somewhere and can’t come back.” She was supposed
to write down on a pad whatever came into her head while
listening to the tapes, but often she became so
frightened that she could not write at all. “You become
very small,” she says, as her voice quickens and starts
to reflect some of her horror. “You’re going to fall off
the step, and God, you’re going down into hell because
it’s so far, and you are so little. Like Alice, where is
the pill that makes you big, and you’re a squirrel, and
you can’t get out of the cage, and somebody’s going to
kill you.” Then, suddenly, Mrs. Orlikow pulls out of it
and lucidly states, “Some very weird things happened.”
Mrs. Orlikow hated the LSD treatment. Several times
she told Cameron she would take no more, and the
psychiatrist would put his arm around her and ask,
“Lassie,” which he called all his women patients, “don’t
you want to get well, so you can go home and see your
husband?” She remembers feeling guilty about not
following the doctor’s orders, and the thought of
disappointing Cameron, whom she idolized, crushed her.
Finally, after Cameron talked her out of quitting the
treatment several times, she had to end it. She left the
hospital but stayed under his private care. In 1963 he
put her back in the hospital for more intensive psychic
driving. “I thought he was God,” she states. “I don’t
know how I could have been so stupid…. A lot of us were
naive. We thought psychiatrists had the answers. Here was
the greatest in the world, with all these titles.”
In defense of Cameron, a former associate says the
man truly cared about the welfare of his patients. He
wanted to make them well. As his former staff
psychologist wrote:
He abhorred the waste of human potential, seen most
dramatically in the young people whose minds were
distorted by what was then considered to be
schizophrenia. He felt equally strongly about the loss of
wisdom in the aged through memory malfunction. For him,
the end justified the means, and when one is dealing with
the waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt this
stance.
Cameron retired abruptly in 1964, for unexplained
reasons. His successor, Dr. Robert Cleghorn, made a
virtually unprecedented move in the academic world of
mutual back-scratching and praise. He commissioned a
psychiatrist and a psychologist, unconnected to Cameron,
to study his electroshock work. They found that 60
percent of Cameron’s depatterned patients complained they
still had amnesia for the period 6 months to 10 years
before the therapy.[6] They could find no clinical proof
that showed the treatment to be any more or less
effective than other approaches. They concluded that “the
incidence of physical complications and the anxiety
generated in the patient because of real or imagined
memory difficulty argue against” future use of the
technique.
The study-team members couched their report in
densely academic jargon, but one of them speaks more
clearly now. He talks bitterly of one of Cameron’s former
patients who needs to keep a list of her simplest
household chores to remember how to do them. Then he
repeats several times how powerful a man Cameron was, how
he was “the godfather of Canadian psychiatry.” He
continues, “I probably shouldn’t talk about this, but
Cameron—for him to do what he did—he was a very
schizophrenic guy, who totally detached himself from the
human implications of his work . . . God, we talk about
concentration camps. I don’t want to make this
comparison, but God, you talk about ‘we didn’t know it
was happening,’ and it was—right in our back yard.”
Cameron died in 1967, at age 66, while climbing a
mountain. The American Journal of Psychiatry published a
long and glowing obituary with a full-page picture of his
not-unpleasant face.
D. Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt him.
He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research
long before the Agency front started to fund him. With
his own hospital and source of subjects, he could have
found elsewhere encouragement and money to replace the
CIA’s contribution which never exceeded $20,000 a year.
However, Agency officials knew exactly what they were
paying for. They traveled periodically to Montreal to
observe his work, and his proposal was chillingly
explicit. In Cameron, they had a doctor, conveniently
outside the United States, willing to do terminal
experiments in electroshock, sensory deprivation, drug
testing, and all of the above combined. By literally
wiping the minds of his subjects clean by depatterning
and then trying to program in new behavior, Cameron
carried the process known as “brainwashing” to its
logical extreme.
It cannot be said how many—if any—other Agency
brainwashing projects reached the extremes of Cameron’s
work. Details are scarce, since many of the principal
witnesses have died, will not talk about what went on, or
lie about it. In what ways the CIA applied work like
Cameron’s is not known. What is known, however, is that
the intelligence community, including the CIA, changed
the face of the scientific community during the 1950s and
early 1960s by its interest in such experiments. Nearly
every scientist on the frontiers of brain research found
men from the secret agencies looking over his shoulders,
impinging on the research. The experience of Dr. John
Lilly illustrates how this intrusion came about.
In 1953 Lilly worked at the National Institutes of
Health, outside Washington, doing experimental studies in
an effort to “map” the body functions controlled from
various locations in the brain. He devised a method of
pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing
into the skulls of monkeys, through which he could insert
electrodes “into the brain to any desired distance and at
any desired location from the cortex down to the bottom
of the skull,” he later wrote. Using electric
stimulation, Lilly discovered precise centers of the
monkeys’ brains that caused pain, fear, anxiety, and
anger. He also discovered precise, separate parts of the
brain that controlled erection, ejaculation, and orgasm
in male monkeys. Lilly found that a monkey, given access
to a switch operating a correctly planted electrode,
would reward himself with nearly continuous orgasms—at
least once every 3 minutes—for up to 16 hours a day.
As Lilly refined his brain “maps,” officials of the
CIA and other agencies descended upon him with a request
for a briefing. Having a phobia against secrecy, Lilly
agreed to the briefing only under the condition that it
and his work remain unclassified, completely open to
outsiders. The intelligence officials submitted to the
conditions most reluctantly, since they knew that Lilly’s
openness would not only ruin the spy value of anything
they learned but could also reveal the identities and the
interests of the intelligence officials to enemy agents.
They considered Lilly annoying, uncooperative—possibly
even suspicious.
Soon Lilly began to have trouble going to meetings
and conferences with his colleagues. As part of the
cooperation with the intelligence agencies, most of them
had agreed to have their projects officially classified
as SECRET, which meant that access to the information
required a security clearance.[7] Lilly’s security
clearance was withdrawn for review, then tangled up and
misplaced—all of which he took as pressure to cooperate
with the CIA. Lilly, whose imagination needed no
stimulation to conjure up pictures of CIA agents on
deadly missions with remote-controlled electrodes
strategically implanted in their brains, decided to
withdraw from that field of research. He says he had
decided that the physical intrusion of the electrodes did
too much brain damage for him to tolerate.
In 1954 Lilly began trying to isolate the operations
of the brain, free of outside stimulation, through
sensory deprivation. He worked in an office next to Dr.
Maitland Baldwin, who the following year agreed to
perform terminal sensory deprivation experiments for
ARTICHOKE’s Morse Allen but who never told Lilly he was
working in the field. While Baldwin experimented with his
sensory-deprivation “box,” Lilly invented a special
“tank.” Subjects floated in a tank of body-temperature
water wearing a face mask that provided air but cut off
sight and sound. Inevitably, intelligence officials
swooped down on Lilly again, interested in the use of his
tank as an interrogation tool. Could involuntary subjects
be placed in the tank and broken down to the point where
their belief systems or personalities could be altered?
It was central to Lilly’s ethic that he himself be
the first subject of any experiment, and, in the case of
the consciousness-exploring tank work, he and one
colleague were the only ones. Lilly realized that the
intelligence agencies were not interested in sensory
deprivation because of its positive benefits, and he
finally concluded that it was impossible for him to work
at the National Institutes of Health without compromising
his principles. He quit in 1958.
Contrary to most people’s intuitive expectations,
Lilly found sensory deprivation to be a profoundly
integrating experience for himself personally. He
considered himself to be a scientist who subjectively
explored the far wanderings of the brain. In a series of
private experiments, he pushed himself into the complete
unknown by injecting pure Sandoz LSD into his thigh
before climbing into the sensory-deprivation tank.[8]
When the counterculture sprang up, Lilly became something
of a cult figure, with his unique approach to scientific
inquiry—though he was considered more of an outcast by
many in the professional research community.
For most of the outside world, Lilly became famous
with the release of the popular film, The Day of the
Dolphin, which the filmmakers acknowledged was based on
Lilly’s work with dolphins after he left NIH. Actor
George C. Scott portrayed a scientist, who, like Lilly,
loved dolphins, did pioneering experiments on their
intelligence, and tried to find ways to communicate with
them. In the movie, Scott became dismayed when the
government pounced on his breakthrough in talking to
dolphins and turned it immediately to the service of war.
In real life, Lilly was similarly dismayed when Navy and
CIA scientists trained dolphins for special warfare in
the waters off Vietnam.[9]
A few scientists like Lilly made up their minds not
to cross certain ethical lines in their experimental
work, while others were prepared to go further even than
their sponsors from ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. Within the
Agency itself, there was only one final question: Will a
technique work? CIA officials zealously tracked every
lead, sparing no expense to check each angle many times
over.
By the time the MKULTRA program ended in 1963, Agency
researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash
another person.[10] “All experiments beyond a certain
point always failed,” says the MKULTRA veteran, “because
the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the
subject got amnesiac or catatonic.” Agency officials
found through work like Cameron’s that they could create
“vegetables,” but such people served no operational use.
People could be tortured into saying anything, but no
science could guarantee that they would tell the truth.
The impotency of brainwashing techniques left the
Agency in a difficult spot when Yuri Nosenko defected to
the United States in February 1964. A ranking official of
the Soviet KGB, Nosenko brought with him stunning
information. He said the Russians had bugged the American
embassy in Moscow, which turned out to be true. He named
some Russian agents in the West. And he said that he had
personally inspected the KGB file of Lee Harvey Oswald,
who only a few months earlier had been murdered before he
could be brought to trial for the assassination of
President Kennedy. Nosenko said he learned that the KGB
had had no interest in Oswald.
Was Nosenko telling the truth, or was he a KGB
“plant” sent to throw the United States off track about
Oswald? Was his information about penetration correct, or
was Nosenko himself the penetration? Was he acting in
good faith? Were the men within the CIA who believed he
was acting in good faith themselves acting in good faith?
These and a thousand other questions made up the
classical trick deck for spies—each card having “true” on
one side and “false” on the other.
Top CIA officials felt a desperate need to resolve
the issue of Nosenko’s legitimacy. With numerous Agency
counterintelligence operations hanging in the balance,
Richard Helms, first as Deputy Director and then as
Director, allowed CIA operators to work Nosenko over with
the interrogation method in which Helms apparently had
the most faith. It turned out to be not any truth serum
or electroshock depatterning program or anything else
from the Agency’s brainwashing search. Helms had Nosenko
put through the tried-and-true Soviet method: isolate the
prisoner, deaden his senses, break him. For more than
three years—1,277 days, to be exact—Agency officers kept
Nosenko in solitary confinement. As if they were using
the Hinkle-Wolff study as their instruction manual and
the Cardinal Mindszenty case as their success story, the
CIA men had guards watch over Nosenko day and night,
giving him not a moment of privacy. A light bulb burned
continuously in his cell. He was allowed nothing to read—
not even the labels on toothpaste boxes. When he tried to
distract himself by making a chess set from pieces of
lint in his cell, the guards discovered his game and
swept the area clean. Nosenko had no window, and he was
eventually put in a specially built 12′ X 12′ steel bank
vault.
Nosenko broke down. He hallucinated. He talked his
head off to his interrogators, who questioned him for 292
days, often while they had him strapped into a lie
detector. If he told the truth, they did not believe him.
While the Soviets and Chinese had shown that they could
make a man admit anything, the CIA interrogators
apparently lacked a clear idea of exactly what they
wanted Nosenko to confess. When it was all over and
Richard Helms ordered Nosenko freed after three and a
half years of illegal detention, some key Agency officers
still believed he was a KGB plant. Others thought he was
on the level. Thus the big questions remained unresolved,
and to this day, CIA men—past and present—are bitterly
split over who Nosenko really is.
With the Nosenko case, the CIA’s brainwashing
programs had come full circle. Spurred by the widespread
alarm over communist tactics, Agency officials had
investigated the field, started their own projects, and
looked to the latest technology to make improvements.
After 10 years of research, with some rather gruesome
results, CIA officials had come up with no techniques on
which they felt they could rely. Thus, when the
operational crunch came, they fell back on the basic
brutality of the Soviet system.
Notes
Edward Hunter’s article ” ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics
Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party” appeared in
the Miami News on September 24, 1950. His book was
Brainwashing in Red China (New York: Vanguard Press,
1951). Other material came from several interviews with
Hunter just before he died in June 1978.
The Air Force document cited on brainwashing was
called “Air Force Headquarters Panel Convened to Record
Air Force Position Regarding Conduct of Personnel in
Event of Capture,” December 14, 1953. Researcher Sam
Zuckerman found it and showed it to me.
The figures on American prisoners in Korea and the
quote from Edward Hunter came from hearings before the
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,84th
Congress, June 19,20,26, and 27, 1956.
The material on the setting up of the Cornell-Hinkle-
Wolff study came from interviews with Hinkle, Helen
Goodell, and several CIA sources. Hinkle’s and Wolff’s
study on brainwashing appeared in classified form on 2
April 1956 as a Technical Services Division publication
called Communist Control Techniques and in substantially
the same form but unclassified as “Communist
Interrogation and Indoctrination of ‘Enemies of the
State’—An Analysis of Methods Used by the Communist State
Police.” AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry,
August, 1956, Vol. 76.
Allen Dulles spoke on “Brain Warfare” before the
Alumni Conference of Princeton University, Hot Springs,
Virginia on April 10, 1953, and the quote on guinea pigs
came from that speech.
The comments of Rockefeller Foundation officials
about D. Ewen Cameron and the record of Rockefeller
funding were found in Robert S. Morrison’s diary, located
in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Pocantico Hills,
New York.
The key articles on Cameron’s work on depatterning
and psychic driving were “Production of Differential
Amnesia as a Factor in the Treatment of Schizophrenia,”
Comprehensive Psychiatry, 1960, 1, p. 26 and “Effects of
Repetition of Verbal Signals upon the Behavior of Chronic
Psychoneurotic Patients” by Cameron, Leonard Levy, and
Leonard Rubenstein, Journal of Mental Science, 1960, 106,
742. The background on Page-Russell electroshocks came
from “Intensified Electrical Convulsive Therapy in the
Treatment of Mental Disorders” by L. G. M. Page and R. J.
Russell, Lancet, Volume 254, Jan.—June, 1948. Dr. John
Cavanagh of Washington, D.C. provided background on
the use of electroshock and sedatives in psychiatry.
Cameron’s MKULTRA subproject was #68. See especially
document 68-37, “Application for Grant to Study the
Effects upon Human Behavior of the Repetition of Verbal
Signals,” January 21, 1957.
Part of Cameron’s papers are in the archives of the
American Psychiatric Association in Washington, and they
provided considerable information on the treatment of
Mary C., as well as a general look at his work.
Interviews with at least a dozen of his former colleagues
also provided considerable information.
Interviews Yvith John Lilly and Donald Hebb provided
background on sensory deprivation. Maitland Baldwin’s
work in the field was discussed in a whole series of
ARTICHOKE documents including #A/B, I,76/4, 21 March
1955, Subject: Total Isolation; #A/B,1, 76/12, 19 May
1955, Subject: Total Isolation—Additional Comments; and
#A/B, I, 76/17,27 April 1955, Subject: Total Isolation,
Supplemental Report #2. The quote from Aldous Huxley on
sensory deprivation is taken from the book of his
writings, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the
Visionary Experience (1931-1963), edited by Michael
Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (New York: Stonehill, 1978).
The material on Val Orlikow’s experiences with Dr.
Cameron came from interviews with her and her husband
David and from portions of her hospital records, which
she furnished.
Cameron’s staff psychologist Barbara Winrib’s
comments on him were found in a letter to the Montreal
Star, August 11, 1977.
The study of Cameron’s electroshock work ordered by
Dr. Cleghorn was published as “Intensive
Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Follow-up Study,” by A. E.
Schwartzman and P. E. Termansen, Canadian Psychiatric
Association, Volume 12, 1967.
In addition to several interviews, much material on
John Lilly came from his autobiography, The Scientist
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1978).
The CIA’s handling of Yuri Nosenko was discussed at length in hearings before the House Assassinations
Committee on September 15, 1978. The best press account of this testimony was written by Jeremiah O’Leary of the Washington Star on September 16, 1978: “How CIA Tried to Break Defector in Oswald Case.”
Footnotes
1. Among the Air Force and Army project leaders were Dr. Fred Williams of the Air Force Psychological Warfare Division, Robert Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein, Albert Biderman, and Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe (an Air Force officer who would later go to work full time in CIA behavioral programs).
2. Cameron himself may not have known that the Agency was the ultimate source of these funds which came through a conduit, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. A CIA document stated he was unwitting when the grants started in 1957, and it cannot be said whether he ever found out.
3. Cameron wrote that when a patient remembered his schizophrenic symptoms, the schizophrenic behavior usually returned. If the amnesia held for these symptoms, as Cameron claimed it often did, the subject usually did not have a relapse. Even in his “cured” patients, Cameron found that Rorschach tests continued to show schizophrenic thinking despite the improvement in overt behavior. To a layman, this would seem to indicate that Cameron’s approach got only at the symptoms, not the causes of mental problems. Not deterred, however, Cameron dismissed this inconsistency as a “persistent enigma.”
4. Cameron wrote in a professional journal that he gave only two electroshocks a day, but a doctor who
actually administered the treatment for him says that three were common at the beginning of the therapy.
5. In his proposal to the Human Ecology group, Cameron wrote that his subjects would be spending only 16 hours a day in sensory deprivation, while they listened to psychic driving tapes (thus providing some outside stimuli). Nevertheless, one of Cameron’s colleagues states that some patients, including Mary C. were in continuously. Always looking for a better way, Cameron almost certainly tried both variations.
6. Cleghorn’s team found little loss of memory on objective tests, like the Wechsler Memory Scale but
speculated that these tests measured a different memory function—short-term recall—than that the subjects claimed to be missing.
7. Lilly and other veterans of government-supported research note that there is a practical advantage for the scientist who allows his work to be classified: it gives him an added claim on government funds. He is then in a position to argue that if his work is important enough to be SECRET, it deserves money.
8. As was the case with LSD work, sensory deprivation research had both a mind control and a transcendental side. Aldous Huxley wrote thusly about the two pioneers in the field: “What men like Hebb and Lilly are doing in the laboratory was done by the Christian hermits in the Thebaid and elsewhere, and by Hindu and Tibetan hermits in the remote fastness of the Himalayas. My own belief is that these experiences really tell us something about the nature of the universe, that they are valuable in themselves and, above all, valuable when incorporated into our world-picture and acted upon [in] normal life.”
9. In a program called “swimmer nullification,” government scientists trained dolphins to attack enemy
frogmen with huge needles attached to their snouts. The dolphins carried tanks of compressed air, which when jabbed into a deepdiver caused him to pop dead to the surface. A scientist who worked in this CIA-Navy program states that some of the dolphins sent to Vietnam during the late 1960s got out of their pens and disappeared— unheard of behavior for trained dolphins. John Lilly confirms that a group of the marine mammals stationed at Cam Ranh Bay did go AWOL, and he adds that he heard that some eventually returned with their bodies and fins covered with attack marks made by other dolphins.
10. After 1963 the Agency’s Science and Technology Directorate continued brain research with unknown
results. See Chapter 12.
Human Ecology
Well before Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle finished their brainwashing study for Allen Dulles in 1956, Wolff was trying to expand his role in CIA research and operations. He offered Agency officials the cooperation of his colleagues at Cornell University, where he taught neurology and psychiatry in the Medical College. In proposal after proposal, Wolff pressed upon the CIA his idea that to understand human behavior—and how governments might manipulate it—one had to study man in relationship to his total environment. Calling this field “human ecology,” Wolff drew into it the disciplines of psychology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. In the academic world of the early 1950s, this cross-disciplinary approach was somewhat new, as was the word “ecology,” but it made sense to CIA officials. Like Wolff, they were far in advance of the trends in the behavioral sciences.
Wolff carved out vast tracts of human knowledge, some only freshly discovered, and proposed a partnership with the Agency for the task of mastering that knowledge for operational use. It was a time when knowledge itself seemed bountiful and promising, and Wolff was expansive about how the CIA could harness it. Once he figured out how the human mind really worked, he wrote, he would tell the Agency “how a man can be made to think, ‘feel,’ and behave according to the wishes of other men, and,
conversely, how a man can avoid being influenced in this manner.”
Such notions, which may now appear naive or perverse, did not seem so unlikely at the height of the Cold War. And Wolff’s professional stature added weight to his ideas. Like D. Ewen Cameron, he was no obscure academic.
He had been President of the New York Neurological Association and would become, in 1960, President of the American Neurological Association. He served for several years as editor-in-chief of the American Medical Association’s Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. Both by credentials and force of personality, Wolff was an impressive figure. CIA officials listened respectfully to his grand vision of how spies and doctors could work symbiotically to help—if not save—the world. Also, the Agency men never forgot that Wolff had become close to Director Allen Dulles while treating Dulles’ son for brain damage.
Wolff’s specialized neurological practice led him to believe that brain maladies, like migraine headaches,
occurred because of disharmony between man and his environment. In this case, he wrote to the Agency, “The problem faced by the physician is quite similar to that faced by the Communist interrogator.” Both would be trying to put their subject back in harmony with his environment whether the problem was headache or ideological dissent. Wolff believed that the beneficial effects of any new interrogation technique would naturally spill over into the treatment of his patients, and vice versa. Following the Soviet model, he felt he could help his patients by putting them into an isolated, disoriented state—from which it would be easier to create new behavior patterns. Although Russian-style isolation cells were impractical at Cornell, Wolff hoped to get the same effect more quickly through sensory deprivation. He
told the Agency that sensory-deprivation chambers had “valid medical reason” as part of a treatment that
relieved migraine symptoms and made the patient “more receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist.” He proposed keeping his patients in sensory deprivation until they “show an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure.” Then, he said, doctors could “utilize material from their own past experience in order to create psychological reactions within them.” This procedure drew heavily on the Stalinist method. It cannot be said what success, if any, Wolff had with it to the benefit of his patients at Cornell.
Wolff offered to devise ways to use the broadest cultural and social processes in human ecology for covert operations. He understood that every country had unique customs for child rearing, military training, and nearly every other form of human intercourse. From the CIA’s point of view, he noted, this kind of sociological information could be applied mainly to indoctrinating and motivating people. He distinguished these motivating techniques from the “special methods” that he felt were ‘more relevant to subversion, seduction, and interrogation.” He offered to study those methods, too, and asked the Agency to give him access to everything in its files on “threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing, “black psychiatry,’ hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents.” Beyond mere study, Wolff volunteered the unwitting use of Cornell patients for
brainwashing experiments, so long as no one got hurt. He added, however, that he would advise the CIA on experiments that harmed their subjects if they were performed elsewhere. He obviously felt that only the grandest sweep of knowledge, flowing freely between scholar and spy, could bring the best available
techniques to bear on their respective subjects.
In 1955 Wolff incorporated his CIA-funded study group as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, with himself as president.[1] Through the Society, Wolff extended his efforts for the Agency, and his organization turned into a CIA-controlled funding mechanism for studies and experiments in the behavioral sciences. In the early days of the Society, Agency officials trusted Wolff and his untried ideas with a sensitive espionage assignment. In effect, the new specialty of human ecology was going to telescope the stages of research and application into one continuing process.
Speeding up the traditional academic method was required because the CIA men faced an urgent problem. “What was bothering them,” Lawrence Hinkle explains, “was that the Chinese had cleaned up their agents in China…. What they really wanted to do was come up with some Chinese [in America], steer them to us, and make them into agents.” Wolff accepted the challenge and suggested that the Cornell group hide its real purpose behind the cover of investigating “the ecological aspects of disease” among Chinese refugees. The Agency gave the project a budget of $84,175 (about 30 percent of the money it put into Cornell in 1955) and supplied the study group with 100 Chinese refugees to work with. Nearly all these
subjects had been studying in the United States when the communists took over the mainland in 1949, so they tended to be dislocated people in their thirties.
On the Agency side, the main concern, as expressed by one ARTICHOKE man, was the “security hazard” of bringing together so many potential agents in one place. Nevertheless, CIA officials decided to go ahead. Wolff promised to tell them about the inner reaches of the Chinese character, and they recognized the operational advantage that insight into Chinese behavior patterns could provide. Moreover, Wolff said he would pick out the most useful possible agents. The Human Ecology Society would then offer these candidates “fellowships” and subject them to more intensive interviews and “stress producing” situations. The idea was to find out about their personalities, past conditioning, and present motivations, in order to figure out how they might perform in future predicaments—such as finding themselves back in Mainland China as American agents. In the process, Wolff hoped to mold these Chinese into people willing to work for the CIA. Mindful of leaving some cover for Cornell, he was adamant that Agency operators not connected with the project make the actual recruitment pitch to those Chinese whom the Agency men
wanted as agents.
As a final twist, Wolff planned to provide each agent with techniques to withstand the precise forms of hostile interrogation they could expect upon returning to China. CIA officials wanted to “precondition” the agents in order to create long lasting motivation “impervious to lapse of time and direct psychological attacks by the enemy.” In other words, Agency men planned to brainwash their agents in order to protect them against Chinese brainwashing.
Everything was covered—in theory, at least. Wolff was going to take a crew of 100 refugees and turn as many of them as possible into detection-proof, live agents inside China, and he planned to do the job quickly through human ecology. It was a heady chore for the Cornell professor to take on after classes.
Wolff hired a full complement of psychologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists to work on the
project. He bulldozed his way through his colleagues’ qualms and government red tape alike. Having hired an anthropologist before learning that the CIA security office would not give her a clearance, Wolff simply lied to her about where the money came from. “It was a function of Wolff’s imperious nature,” says his partner Hinkle. “If a dog came in and threw up on the rug during a lecture, he would continue.” Even the CIA men soon found that Harold Wolff was not to be trifled with. “From the Agency side, I don’t know anyone who wasn’t scared of him,” recalls a longtime CIA associate. “He was an autocratic man. I never knew him to chew anyone out. He didn’t have to. We were damned respectful. He moved in
high places. He was just a skinny little man but talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers.”
In the name of the Human Ecology Society, the CIA paid $1,200 a month to rent a fancy town house on
Manhattan’s East 78th Street to house the Cornell group and its research projects Agency technicians traveled to New York in December 1954 to install eavesdropping microphones around the building. These and other more obvious security devices—safes, guards, and the like—made the town house look different from the academic center it was supposed to be. CIA liaison personnel held meetings with Wolff and the staff in the secure confines of the town house, and they all carefully watched the 100 Chinese a few blocks away at the Cornell hospital. The Society paid each subject $25 a day so the researchers could test them, probe them, and generally learn all they could about Chinese people—or at least about middle-
class, displaced, anti-Communist ones.
It is doubtful that any of Wolff’s Chinese ever returned to their homeland as CIA agents, or that all of
Wolff’s proposals were put into effect. In any case, the project was interrupted in midstream by a major shake-up in the CIA’s entire mind-control effort. Early in 1955, Sid Gottlieb and his Ph.D. crew from TSS took over most of the ARTICHOKE functions, including the Society, from Morse Allen and the Pinkerton types in the Office of Security. The MKULTRA men moved quickly to turn the Society into an entity that looked and acted like a legitimate foundation. First they smoothed over the ragged covert edges. Out came the bugs and safes so dear to Morse Allen and company. The new crew even made some effort (largely unsuccessful) to attract non-CIA funds. The biggest change, however, was the Cornell professors now had to deal with Agency representatives who were scientists and who had strong ideas of their own on research questions. Up to this point, the Cornellians had been able to keep the CIA’s involvement within bounds acceptable to them. While Harold Wolff never ceased wanting to explore the furthest reaches of behavior control, his colleagues were wary of going on to the outer limits—at least under Cornell cover.
No one would ever confuse MKULTRA projects with ivory-tower research, but Gottlieb’s people did take a more academic—and sophisticated—approach to behavioral research than their predecessors. The MKULTRA men understood that not every project would have an immediate operational benefit, and they believed less and less in the existence of that one just-over-the-horizon technique that would turn men into puppets. They favored increasing their knowledge of human behavior in relatively small steps, and they concentrated on the reduced goal of influencing and manipulating their subjects. “You’re ahead of the game if you can get people to do something ten percent more often than they would otherwise,” says an MKULTRA veteran.
Accordingly, in 1956, Sid Gottlieb approved a $74,000 project to have the Human Ecology Society study the factors that caused men to defect from their countries and cooperate with foreign governments. MKULTRA officials reasoned that if they could understand what made old turncoats tick, it might help them entice new ones. While good case officers instinctively seemed to know how to handle a potential agent—or thought they did—the MKULTRA men hoped to come up with systematic, even scientific
improvements. Overtly, Harold Wolff designed the program to look like a follow-up study to the Society’s earlier programs, noting to the Agency that it was “feasible to study foreign nationals under the cover of a medical-sociological study.” (He told his CIA funders that “while some information of general value to science should be produced, this in itself will not be a sufficient justification for carrying out a study of this nature.”) Covertly, he declared the purpose of the research was to assess defectors’ social and cultural background, their life experience, and their personality structure, in order to understand their motivations, value systems, and probable future reactions.
The 1956 Hungarian revolt occurred as the defector study was getting underway, and the Human Ecology group, with CIA headquarters approval, decided to turn the defector work into an investigation of 70 Hungarian refugees from that upheaval. By then, most of Harold Wolff’s team had been together through the brainwashing and Chinese studies. While not all of them knew of the CIA’s specific interests, they had streamlined their procedures for answering the questions that Agency officials found interesting. They ran the Hungarians through the battery of tests and observations in six months, compared to a year and a half for the Chinese project.
The Human Ecology Society reported that most of their Hungarian subjects had fought against the Russians during the Revolution and that they had lived through extraordinarily difficult circumstances, including arrest, mistreatment, and indoctrination. The psychologists and psychiatrists found that, often, those who had survived with the fewest problems had been those with markedly aberrant personalities. “This observation has added to the evidence that healthy people are not necessarily ‘normal,’ but are people particularly adapted to their special life situations,” the group declared.
While CIA officials liked the idea that their Hungarian subjects had not knuckled under communist
influence, they recognized that they were working with a skewed sample. American visa restrictions kept most of the refugee left-wingers and former communist officials out of the United States; so, as a later MKULTRA document would state, the Society wound up studying “western-tied rightist elements who had never been accepted completely” in postwar Hungary. Agency researchers realized that these people would “contribute little” toward increasing the CIA’s knowledge of the processes that made a communist official change his loyalties.
In order to broaden their data base, MKULTRA officials decided in March 1957 to bring in some unwitting help. They gave a contract to Rutgers University sociologists Richard Stephenson and Jay
Schulman “to throw as much light as possible on the sociology of the communist system in the throes of
revolution.” The Rutgers professors started out by interviewing the 70 Hungarians at Cornell in New York, and Schulman went on to Europe to talk to disillusioned Communists who had also fled their country. From an operational point of view, these were the people the Agency really cared about; but, as socialists, most of them probably would have resisted sharing their experiences with the CIA—if they had known.[2]
Jay Schulman would have resisted, too. After discovering almost 20 years later that the Agency had
paid his way and seen his confidential interviews, he feels misused. “In 1957 I was myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that this study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I would have been associated with it,” says Schulman. “My view is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility for questioning the sources of funding; and the fact that I didn’t do it at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own naiveté and political innocence, in spite of my ideological bent.”
Deceiving Schulman and his Hungarian subjects did not bother the men from MKULTRA in the slightest. According to a Gottlieb aide, one of the strong arguments inside the CIA for the whole Human Ecology program was that it gave the Agency a means of approaching and using political mavericks who could not otherwise get security clearances. “Sometimes,” he chuckles, “these left-wing social scientists were damned good.” This MKULTRA veteran scoffs at the displeasure Schulman expresses: “If we’d gone to a guy and said, ‘We’re CIA,’ he never would have done it. They were glad to get the money in a world where damned few people were willing to support them…. They can’t complain about how they were treated or that they were asked to do something they wouldn’t have normally done.”
The Human Ecology Society soon became a conduit for CIA money flowing to projects, like the Rutgers one, outside Cornell. For these grants, the Society provided only cover and administrative support behind the gold-plated names of Cornell and Harold Wolff. From 1955 to 1958, Agency officials passed funds through the Society for work on criminal sexual psychopaths at Ionia State Hospital, [3] a mental institution located on the banks of the Grand River in the rolling farm country 120 miles northwest of Detroit. This project had an interesting hypothesis: That child molesters and rapists had ugly secrets buried deep within them and that their stake in not admitting their perversions approached that of spies
not wanting to confess. The MKULTRA men reasoned that any technique that would work on a sexual psychopath would surely have a similar effect on a foreign agent. Using psychologists and psychiatrists connected to the Michigan mental health and the Detroit court systems, they set up a program to test LSD and marijuana, wittingly and unwittingly, alone and in combination with hypnosis.
Because of administrative delays, the Michigan doctors managed to experiment only on 26 inmates in three years— all sexual offenders committed by judges without a trial under a Michigan law, since declared unconstitutional. The search for a truth drug went on, under the auspices of the Human Ecology Society, as well as in other MKULTRA channels.
The Ionia project was the kind of expansionist activity that made Cornell administrators, if not Harold
Wolff, uneasy. By 1957, the Cornellians had had enough. At the same time, the Agency sponsors decided that the Society had outgrown its dependence on Cornell for academic credentials—that in fact the close ties to Cornell might inhibit the Society’s future growth among academics notoriously sensitive to institutional conflicts. One CIA official wrote that the Society “must be given more established stature in the research community to be effective as a cover organization.” Once the Society was cut loose in the foundation world, Agency men felt they would be freer to go anywhere in academia to buy research that might assist covert operations. So the CIA severed the Society’s formal connection to Cornell.
The Human Ecology group moved out of its East 78th Street town house, which had always seem a little too plush for a university program, and opened up a new headquarters in Forest Hills, Queens, which was an inappropriate neighborhood for a well-connected foundation. [4] Agency officials hired a staff of four
led by Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe, who had worked closely with the CIA as head of the Air Force’s study of Korean War prisoners. Sid Gottlieb and the TSS hierarchy in Washington still made the major decisions, but Monroe and the Society staff, whose salaries the Agency paid, took over the Society’s dealings with the outside world and the monitoring of several hundred thousand dollars a year in research projects. Monroe personally supervised dozens of grants, including Dr. Ewen Cameron’s brainwashing work in Montreal. Soon the Society was flourishing as an innovative foundation, attracting
research proposals from a wide variety of behavioral scientists, at a time when these people—particularly the unorthodox ones—were still the step-children of the fund-granting world.
After the Society’s exit from Cornell, Wolff and Hinkle stayed on as president and vice-president,
respectively, of the Society’s board of directors. Dr. Joseph Hinsey, head of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center also remained on the board. Allen Dulles continued his personal interest in the Society’s work and came to one of the first meetings of the new board, which, as was customary with CIA fronts, included some big outside names. These luminaries added worthiness to the enterprise while playing essentially figurehead roles. In 1957 the other board members were John Whitehorn, chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, Carl Rogers, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, and Adolf A. Berle, onetime Assistant Secretary of State and
chairman of the New York Liberal Party. [5] Berle had originally put his close friend Harold Wolff in touch with the CIA, and at Wolff’s request, he came on the Society board despite some reservations. “I am frightened about this one,” Berle wrote in his diary. “If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants. But I don’t think it will happen.”
There was a lot of old-fashioned back-scratching among the CIA people and the academics as they settled into the work of accommodating each other. Even Harold Wolff, the first and the most enthusiastic of the scholar-spies, had made it clear from the beginning that he expected some practical rewards for his service. According to colleague Hinkle, who appreciated Wolff as one the great grantsman of his time, Wolff expected that the Agency “would support our research and we would be their consultants.” Wolff bluntly informed the CIA that some of his work would have no direct use “except that it vastly enhances
our value . . . as consultants and advisers.” In other words, Wolff felt that his worth to the CIA increased in proportion to his professional accomplishments and importance—which in turn depended partly on the resources he commanded. The Agency men understood, and over the last half of the 1950s, they were happy to contribute almost $300,000 to Wolff’s own research on the brain and central nervous system. In turn, Wolff and his reputation helped them gain access to other leading lights in the academic world.
Another person who benefited from Human Ecology funds was Carl Rogers, whom Wolff had also asked to serve on the board. Rogers, who later would become famous for his nondirective, nonauthoritarian approach to psychotherapy, respected Wolff’s work, and he had no objection to helping the CIA. Although he says he would have nothing to do with secret Agency activities today, he asks for understanding in light of the climate of the 1950s. “We really did regard Russia as the enemy,” declares Rogers, “and we were trying to do various things to make sure the Russians did not get the upper hand.” Rogers received an important professional reward for joining the Society board. Executive Director James Monroe had let him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to receive a Society grant. “That appealed to me because I was having trouble getting funded,” says Rogers. “Having gotten that grant [about $30,000 over three years], it made it possible to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH.” Rogers still feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a funding “track record,” but he emphasizes that the Agency never had any effect on his research.
Although MKULTRA psychologist John Gittinger suspected that Rogers’ work on psychotherapy might
provide insight into interrogation methods, the Society did not give Rogers money because of the content of his work. The grant ensured his services as a consultant, if desired, and, according to a CIA document, “free access” to his project. But above all, the grant allowed the Agency to use Rogers’ name. His standing in the academic community contributed to the layer of cover around the Society that Agency officials felt was crucial to mask their involvement.
Professor Charles Osgood’s status in psychology also improved the Society’s cover, but his research was more directly useful to the Agency, and the MKULTRA men paid much more to get it. In 1959 Osgood, who four years later became president of the American Psychological Association, wanted to push forward his work on how people in different societies express the same feelings, even when using different words and concepts. Osgood wrote in “an abstract conceptual framework,” but Agency
officials saw his research as “directly relevant” to covert activities. They believed they could transfer
Osgood’s knowledge of “hidden values and cues” in the way people communicate into more effective overseas propaganda. Osgood’s work gave them a tool—called the “semantic differential”—to choose the right words in a foreign language to convey a particular meaning.
Like Carl Rogers, Osgood got his first outside
funding for what became the most important work of his
career from the Human Ecology Society. Osgood had written
directly to the CIA for support, and the Society soon
contacted him and furnished $192,975 for research over
five years. The money allowed him to travel widely and to
expand his work into 30 different cultures. Also like
Rogers, Osgood eventually received NIMH money to finish
his research, but he acknowledges that the Human Ecology
grants played an important part in the progress of his
work. He stresses that “there was none of the feeling
then about the CIA that there is now, in terms of
subversive activities,” and he states that the Society
had no influence on anything he produced. Yet Society men
could and did talk to him about his findings. They asked
questions that reflected their own covert interests, not
his academic pursuits, and they drew him out, according
to one of them, “at great length.” Osgood had started
studying cross-cultural meaning well before he received
the Human Ecology money, but the Society’s support
ensured that he would continue his work on a scale that
suited the Agency’s purposes, as well as his own.
A whole category of Society funding, called “cover
grants,” served no other purpose than to build the
Society’s false front. These included a sociological
study of Levittown, Long Island (about $4,500), an
analysis of the Central Mongoloid skull ($700), and a
look at the foreign-policy attitudes of people who owned
fallout shelters, as opposed to people who did not
($2,500). A $500 Human Ecology grant went to Istanbul
University for a study of the effects of circumcision on
Turkish boys. The researcher found that young Turks,
usually circumcised between the ages of five and seven,
felt “severe emotional impact with attending symptoms of
withdrawal.” The children saw the painful operations as
“an act of aggression” that brought out previously hidden
fears—or so the Human Ecology Society reported.
In other instances, the Society put money into
projects whose covert application was so unlikely that
only an expert could see the possibilities. Nonetheless,
in 1958 the Society gave $5,570 to social psychologists
Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the University of
Oklahoma for work on the behavior of teen-age boys in
gangs. The Sherifs, both ignorant of the CIA
connection,[6] studied the group structures and attitudes
in the gangs and tried to devise ways to channel
antisocial behavior into more constructive paths. Their
results were filtered through clandestine minds at the
Agency. “With gang warfare,” says an MKULTRA source, “you
tried to get some defectors-in-place who would like to
modify some of the group behavior and cool it. Now,
getting a juvenile delinquent defector was motivationally
not all that much different from getting a Soviet one.”
MKULTRA officials were clearly interested in using
their grants to build contacts and associations with
prestigious academics. The Society put $1,500 a year into
the Research in Mental Health Newsletter published
jointly at McGill University by the sociology and
psychiatric departments. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, an
international culture heroine, sat on the newsletter’s
advisory board (with, among others, D. Ewen Cameron), and
the Society used her name in its biennial report.
Similarly, the Society gave grants of $26,000 to the
well-known University of London psychologist, H. J.
Eysenck, for his work on motivation. An MKULTRA document
acknowledged that this research would have “no immediate
relevance for Agency needs,” but that it would “lend
prestige” to the Society. The grants to Eysenck also
allowed the Society to take funding credit for no less
than nine of his publications in its 1963 report. The
following year, the Society managed to purchase a piece
of the work of the most famous behaviorist of all,
Harvard’s B. F. Skinner. Skinner, who had tried to train
pigeons to guide bombs for the military during World War
II, received a $5,000 Human Ecology grant to pay the
costs of a secretary and supplies for the research that
led to his book, Freedom and Dignity. Skinner has no
memory of the grant or its origins but says, “I don’t
like secret involvement of any kind. I can’t see why it
couldn’t have been open and aboveboard.”
A TSS source explains that grants like these “bought
legitimacy” for the Society and made the recipients
“grateful.” He says that the money gave Agency employees
at Human Ecology a reason to phone Skinner—or any of the
other recipients—to pick his brain about a particular
problem. In a similar vein, another MKULTRA man,
psychologist John Gittinger mentions the Society’s
relationship with Erwin Goffman of t