Chapter
9:
ENTER
THE CIA
In the
late 1940s mind
control experimentation was
initiated in narcohypnotic techniques,
as well as
in the administering
of drugs with contradictory
effects to induce
a "twilight zone" state. Among
the drugs that
were most commonly
used in this kind of
research were Desoxyn and
Pentothal, Seconal and Dexedrine. CIA
experimenters fixed intravenous
hookups in both of
the subject's arms,
monitoring the effects
of the drugs and
regulating their flow.
The idea, according
to laborers in the
CIA's mind fields,
was to create
a sudden cathartic expulsion of the
feelings and thoughts,
and the communication
of any information that the subject might be hiding. [1]
In 1947
the Navy instituted
Project CHATTER, run by
Dr. Samuel Thompson, a
Navy commander and
psychiatrist, with G. Richard Wendt,
chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of
Rochester being the
functional head of the
program. CHATTER is
reported to have
been a relatively unsuccessful truth
drug project that
ended in 1953. At
about the same time
the Army was involved in THIRD CHANCE and DERBY HAT. [2]
The mindset
of the CIA
at its inception
is reflected in a top secret
report submitted to
President Eisenhower in
1954. The report called
for, "aggressive covert
psychological, political, and paramilitary organization
more effective, more
unique, and if necessary,
more ruthless than
that employed by
the enemy... We... must learn to
subvert, sabotage, and destroy our
enemies by more clever, more
sophisticated, and more
effective methods than those used against us..." [3]
According to
John Marks, "In
1949 the Office
of Scientific Intelligence (OSI)
undertook the analysis
of foreign work
on certain unconventional warfare
techniques, including behavioral drugs, with an initial objective
of developing a capability to resist or
offset the effect
of such drugs. Preliminary
phases included the review of
drug-related work at institutions such as Mount Sinai Hospital,
Boston Psychopathic Hospital,
University of Illinois, University
of Michigan, University
of Minnesota, Valley Forge General Hospital, Detroit Psychopathic
clinic, Mayo Clinic, and the National Institute of Health."
"This first
project," Marks states,
"code-named Project
BLUEBIRD, was assigned
the function of
discovering means of conditioning personnel
to prevent unauthorized
extraction of information from
them by known
means. It was
further assigned to investigate
the possibility of control of
an individual by application of
special interrogation techniques,
memory enhancement, and establishing
defensive means for
preventing interrogation of agency personnel."
The black-budget
BLUEBIRD, run by
Morse Allen, was intended
to create an
"exploitable alteration of
personality" in agents,
POWs, refugees, and defectors, and CIA employees of the program were
dispatched around the
world to procure rare botanicals, herbs,
and drugs that
might be of
use. The primary agency involved
with BLUEBIRD was
the Joint Intelligence Committee, the
same group responsible
for the Project Paperclip importation of Nazis into
the U.S.
At least
a thousand soldiers
were fed up
to 20 doses
of LSD under the auspices of
BLUEBIRD. Other documented BLUEBIRD projects
involved the dispatching
of a team
to Tokyo in July,
1950 for
the interrogation of
suspected double agents,
and the use of
"advanced"
techniques on North
Korean prisoners of war
in October, 1950.
In August,
1951 BLUEBIRD was
renamed ARTICHOKE and transferred from
the Office of
Scientific Intelligence (OSI)
to the Office of
Security (OS). Additional
LSD experiments were done by
the CIA under
the auspices of
ARTICHOKE, using Agency volunteers and, verified by CIA
memoranda, unwitting subjects.One
ARTICHOKE experiment is
documented in a CIA memorandum to
the director dated
July 14, 1952.
The memo deals with the
use of narco-hypnotic induction,
sodium pentothal, and the
stimulant desoxyn. The
interrogation was conducted on
Russian agents believed to be double agents.
According to
the memo, "a
psychiatric medical cover was used to bring the
ARTICHOKE techniques into
action. In the first case,
light dosages of
drugs coupled with
hypnosis were used to
induce a complete
hypnotic trance. This
trance was held for
approximately one hour
and forty minutes
of interrogation with a
subsequent total amnesia
produced by posthypnotic suggestion.
In the second
case (an individual
of much higher intelligence than the first), a deep hypnotic trance was reached
alter light medication.
This was followed
by an interrogation lasting
for well over an hour.
However, a partial amnesia only
was obtained at
this time, although
a total amnesia was
obtained for a
major part of
the test. Since
further interrogation was desired,
a second test
was made on
this individual in which
the ARTICHOKE technique
of using a straight
medication was employed.
On this test,
highly successful results were
obtained in that
a full interrogation lasting two
hours and fifteen
minutes was produced, part of which
included a remarkable
regression. During this regression, the subject
actually 'relived' certain
past activities of
his life, some dating
back fifteen years
while, in addition,
the subject totally accepted
Mr. [deleted, the
case officer] as an
old, trusted, and beloved
personal friend whom
the subject had
known in years past
in Georgia, USSR.
Total amnesia was
apparently achieved for the entire second test on this case."
The memo
concluded, "For a
matter of record,
the case officers involved
in both cases expressed themselves
to the effect that
the ARTICHOKE operations
were entirely successful and team
members felt that
the tests demonstrated
conclusively the
effectiveness of the
combined chemical-hypnotic
technique in such cases.
In both cases,
the subjects talked
clearly and at great
length and furnished
information which the
case officers considered extremely
valuable."
More insight
into ARTICHOKE is
provided by a
conference summary, addressed to the Chief of Security, CIA, dated July
15, 1953: "Mr. [deleted] then
discussed the situation
of a former Agency official who had become a chronic
alcoholic and who, at the present
time, was undergoing
operative treatment in [deleted]
for a possible
brain tumor. This
individual had called the
Agency prior to
the operation and
warned that when
given certain types of anesthetics
(sodium pentothal), previously
he had been known
to talk coherently.
The matter was
taken care of by
placing a representative in the
operating room and by
bringing the various
personnel participating in the
operation under the Secrecy
Agreement. Mr. [deleted]
stated that the subject
did talk extensively
under the influence
of sodium pentothal and revealed
internal problems of
the Agency. Dr. [deleted]
added that he
was acquainted with the details
in the case.
"[Deleted] then
commented that this
type of thing
had been a source
of great concern
to himself and
others in the
operations work and stated that he hoped that the ARTICHOKE efforts to produce some
method that would
perhaps guarantee amnesia
on the part of
those knowing of
Agency operations in
vital spots would be
successful. He stated
that some individuals
in the Agency had
to know tremendous
amounts of information
and if any way
could be found
to produce amnesias
for this type of information—for instance,
after the individual
had left the Agency—it would be a remarkable thing.
Mr. [deleted] stated the need for amnesias
was particularly great
in operations work.
Mr. [deleted] explained that
work was continually
being done in an effort to produce controlled amnesia by
various means."
A CIA
ARTICHOKE document, dated
July 30, 1956, mentioned the
use of the
alkaloid bulbocapnine to
induce catatonia or stupor.
The document stated,
"We desire to
have certain psycho-chemical properties
tested on man,
using the bulbocapnine which
we were fortunate
to obtain from [deleted], a sample
being enclosed herewith.
More bulbocapnine is available if
needed."
A request
was included that
subjects be tested
for "loss of speech,
loss of sensitivity
to pain, loss
of memory, and
loss of will power." [4]
NOTES:
1. Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams. (New York:
Grove Press, 1985)
2. Marks,
John, The Search
for the Manchurian
Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. (New York: Times Books,
1979)
3. Bowart,
Walter, Operation Mind
Control. (New York:
Dell Paperback, 1977); Halperin,
Berman, Bororsage, and
Marwick, The Lawless
State, The Crimes of
the U.S. Intelligence
Agencies. (New York:
Penguin Books, 1976); Hougan, Jim, Secret Agenda. (New York:
Random House, 1984); Marks
4. Quoted in Bowar.
Chapter
10:
COMING
ON TO LSD
Members of
the American intelligence
agencies were not
the first group to
be interested in
the use of
psychedelic drugs for behavior
modification. Early on,
the main proponents
of the use of
psychoactive drugs in Western culture
were the social planners and
elite. Just before
the new century,
in 1898, medical man, literateur,
and Fabian Socialist
Havelock Ellis began
experimentation with peyote.
Today Ellis
is primarily known
for his seven
volume Psychology of Sex, but in
the early part of this century he
was a prime mover
in literary and
intellectual circles—particularly
communist and anarchist
groups. Ellis described
his experiences with peyote
in "Mezcal: A
New Artificial Paradise," published
in the January,
1898 issue of
the Contemporary Review. [1]
Interest in
peyote and the
synthesized version of
the alkaloid, mescaline, remained
scant, outside of
the occasional parlor peyote
ritual conducted in
a not-dissimilar way
from the spiritualist fad
of the same era, or
the odd psychiatric monograph talking
about how the
drug seemed to
reproduce schizophrenia.
But a
far more potent
brain-changer would soon
appear on the scene.
LSD was first
synthesized in 1938
at Sandoz laboratories, in
Basel, Switzerland, although
the effects of the
drug are said not to have been discovered by Dr. Albert Hofmann until 1943.
Basle was the home of
three huge chemical companies, Hoffman-LaRoche, Ciba-Geigy,
and Sandoz,the latter owned by German
chemical monolith I.G.
Farben, the mainstay of
the Third Reich's
war. Although the
connection is not
often made, and is
denied by Dr.
Hofmann, I.G. Farben
maintained a division researching
psychoactive agents, and
it is possible that Hofmann
was employed in
this capacity. It
is also a world-class coincidence that
S.S. and Gestapo
doctors were doing
mescaline experiments on prisoners at Dachau at the same time, less than
200 miles away.
Allen Dulles,
who directed the
CIA during the
MKULTRA project, was station
chief at Berne,
Switzerland during the period
of the LSD
research, and had been
an executive at
I.G. Farben. His assistant
was James Warburg,
who later worked with acid-popularizer Aldous Huxley.
[2]
Captain Al
Hubbard, the spy
who was termed
"the Johnny Appleseed
of LSD," told the story of the
beginningsof LSD in a different form
than the usual
chronologies. He said that Hofmann had
discovered LSD many years earlier,
and that he had
been a member
of a secret
group connected with
Rudolf Steiner's mystical Anthroposophy group
that had set out
to manufacture a "peace pill" in the early 1930s. [3]
Early experiments
with LSD were
conducted by Werner Stoll, a psychiatrist
affiliated with the University of
Zurich. There were rumors
that one of
Stoll's female patients
was given the drug without
her knowledge, and
had committed suicide,
a foreshadowing of later CIA atrocities.
Although perhaps
a marginally less
potent drug than the television broadcasting
that was launched
at nearly the
same time, the LSD
infusion of America
was to have
a tremendous effect on
the future of
the country. When
LSD arrived in America
in 1949, psychiatry
was booming, having
experienced an approximate 12-fold increase
since 1940. The
character of psychiatry was,
in many ways,
an extension of
wartime psychiatry, not surprising
considering the fact
that American "mental health"
organizations were predominantly puppeteered from Tavistock.
As per the
"societry"
engineered by that organization, after
Brigadier General William
Menninger was elected the
head of American
psychiatry an ambitious
strategy was hammered out,
namely the application
of psychiatry to the
man in the street. [4]
NOTES:
1. Stevens, Jay,
Storming Heaven. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
2. Editors of
the Executive Intelligence
Review, Dope, Inc. (Washington, D.C.): EIR,
1992; Lee and
Shlain, Acid Dreams.
(Grove Press, New York,
1985); Lyttle, Thomas. "Blot
Art," an interview
conducted by Mark
Westion. Paranoia magazine, winter
1995/1996; Stevens; Marks,
John, The Search
for the Manchurian Candidate:
The CIA and
Mind Control. (New
York: Times Books, 1979)
3. Shlain, Martin.
"The CIA, LSD
and the Occult,"
an interview. High Frontiers, reprinted in The Project,
Winter 1988/89, volume VI, number 1
4. Stevens
Chapter
11:
KULT
OF MKULTRA
In September,
1950 Edward Hunter,
a CIA employee
working as a journalist,
published information that
the Chinese were
using brainwashing
techniques on American
prisoners of war
in Korea, forcing them
to confess to
crimes such as the use
of germ warfare. In fact, the
Americans were using
germ warfare, but this
provided the CIA
with air cover:
with their own
mind control research they
were simply attempting
to catch up to advances by
the Communists. This was not
a true picture,
as admitted by CIA
deputy director Richard
Helms in 1963,
when he informed the
Warren Commission that
American mind control research
had always been more
advanced than that of the Communists.
CIA Director
Allen Dulles was also out
stumping for mind control. Addressing
the National Alumni
Conference at Princeton University
on April 10, 1953, he
talked about "how sinister the
battle for men's
minds had become
in Soviet hands." Three days
later Dulles authorized MKULTRA,a
greatly augmented series of
mind control projects
run by the
Technical Services Staff of the
CIA.
MKULTRA was
the code name
for a huge
mind control project that
was, according to CIA
documents "an umbrella project for
funding sensitive projects," run
by the CIA and coordinated by
British Intelligence, Scottish
Rite Freemasons, and very-recently-reformed Nazis.
The related MKDELTA "covered... policy
and procedure for
use of biochemicals
in clandestine operations." [1]
MKULTRA was
birthed when Richard
Helms, the head
of the CIA's Directorate of
Operations (known as
the "dirty tricks" department), recommended
that the agency
expand its work in both
offensive and defensive
brainwashing. No mere
grunt in the CIA
trenches, Helms was
Eastern Establishment all
the way, his grandfather
the first director
of the International
Bank of Settlements, and a
president of the Federal Reserve. Helmswould
be present at
the death of
MKULTRA when he
ordered the destruction of the program's files in 1966.
The program
was run by
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb,
"the brainstorming
genius of MKULTRA", who
until 1973 would supervise the
CIA's research into mind
control. Gottlieb was viewed
with favor by
Richard Helms, and
would hang onto Helms'
coattails as he
climbed to higher
and higher positions in the Agency. [2]
Dulles diverted
an initial $300,000
for MKULTRA. According to
Agency documents, the
program was planned
to operate outside of
the normal channels
without "the usual
contractual arrangements" and was to be highly
"compartmented."[3]
The primary
front for funding
MKULTRA operations was
the Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, created in
1930 and staffed
by Rockefeller-financed psychologists and
eugenicists. The foundation
was headed by Black Chamber
alumnus General Marlborough Churchill.
The Macy Foundation's
medical director during 1954-55
was Frank Fremont-Smith, also
a president of General Reese's World Federation of Mental
Health. [4]
The recollections
of an intelligence
officer detailed in
a CIA memorandum flesh out the
scope of the MKULTRA project:
17 January 1975
MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD
SUBJECT: MKULTRA
1. The following
represents the best
of my unaided recollection regarding
the MKULTRA program.
I was first briefed
on it in
1962. At that
time it was
in the process
of a significant decrease
in activity and funding. As
Chief, Defense, and Espionage
(C/D&E), I continued
to decrease funds significantly each
year until the
program was phased
out in the late 1960s.
2. MKULTRA was a
group of projects most of which dealt with
drug or counter-drug
research and development. The Director Central
Intelligence (DCI) and
the Deputy Director
of Plans (DDP) were
kept informed on
the program via
annual briefings by Chief
Technical Services Division
(C/TSD) or his Deputy.
Most of the
research and development
was externally contracted and
dealt with various
materials which were purported to
have characteristics appealing
for their covert
or clandestine
administration under operational
conditions. The objectives were
behavioral control, behavior anomaly production and counter-measures for
opposition application of
similar substances. Work was
performed at U.S.
industrial, academic, und governmental
research facilities. Funding
was often through cut-out arrangements.
Testing was usually
done at such
time as laboratory work
was successfully completed
and was often carried
out at such
facilities as the
[deleted in original]
and the [deleted in
original]. In all
cases that I
am aware of, testing
was done using volunteer
inmates who were
witting of the
nature of the test program but
not the ultimate sponsoring organization.
3. As the
Soviet drug use
scare (and the
amount of significant progress
in the MKULTRA
program) decreased, the program
activities were curtailed
significantly as budgetary pressure and alternate priorities
dictated.
4. Over my
stated objections the
MKULTRA files weredestroyed
by order of
the DCI (Mr.
Helms) shortly before
his departure from office.
CI OFFICER
By Authority of 10272 [5]
A large
network of doctors
and facilities were
employed in at least
149 subprojects, all
of them relating
to mind control. MKULTRA and
MKDELTA researched the
use of at
least 139 different drugs,
as well as
radiation and electroshock,
but also delved into
more arcane social
applications in sociology, anthropology, and
psychiatry. What might
those buzzterms have concealed? Eugenics
experiments? Genetic manipulation? Tavistockian social
engineering? Within the first
year of its
operation, MKULTRA was taking
it to the streets.
Drugs that had
shown promise in the
lab were slipped to
unwitting subjects in
normal social situations;
citizens were dosed with
psychotropics without their
knowledge. This portion of
the project was supposedly
terminated in 1963, although
there are suggestions that this was not the case.
Early CIA
LSD research by the CIA
was conducted by Max
Rinkel and Robert
Hyde—reportedly the first
American to take LSD—at
Boston Psychopathic Hospital,
Carl Pfieffer at the
University of Illinois,
Harold Hodge at
the University of Rochester,
Harold Abramson at
Mt. Sinai Hospital
and Columbia University in
New York, Harris
Isbell at the
Addiction Research Center in
Lexington, Kentucky, and
Louis Jolyon West
at the University of Oklahoma.
Other early
experimentation in LSD
research was done
by Dr. Joel Elkes, who had
concocted nerve gasses in Britain during World
War II. He
performed experiments with
LSD in England in
1949, later moving
his base of operations to St.
Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. [6]
Dr. Harold
Abramson, who had
studied in Berlin
prior to World War
II, and was
later employed in
the Technical Division of the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare
Service, received $85,000 for an
LSD study. His
proposal indicated that
he "hoped" to
give hospital patients "who
are essentially normal
from a psychiatric point of view... unwitting doses
of the drug for psychotherapeutic purposes."
Abramson was
directed to produce
"operationally pertinent
materials along the following lines:
"a.
Disturbance of Memory;
b. Discrediting Aberrent Behavior; c.
Alteration of Sex
patterns; d. Eliciting
of Information; e. Suggestibility; f. Creation of
Dependence."
Abramson performed
his research at
Columbia University and Cold
Spring Harbor, Long
Island, New York,
the latter the location
of both of
the Dulles brothers'
estates and ground
zero for eugenics research in America since the turn of the century.
Abramson was
responsible for giving
LSD to Frank
Fremont- Smith and British
cultural anthropologist Gregory
Bateson and his wife
Margaret Mead, both of whom
were involved with Tavistock and
in MKULTRA projects.
Bateson established an LSD
research center at
the Palo Alto
Veterans Administration Hospital
in California, and gave acid to Beat poet
Allen Ginsburg, among many others. [7]
As CIA
research into LSD
continued, the intoxication
was contagious. Dr. Sidney
Gottlieb, the director
of MKULTRA, and his
staff were regularly
partying with LSD,
and spiking each other's
drinks for a
lark. At one
bash in November
1953, Gottlieb slipped LSD
into Dr. Frank
Olson's Cointreau without his
knowledge. Olson became
deeply depressed and
was taken to see Dr. Harold
Abramson. After the first visit,
Abramson came to see Olson at his hotel room carrying a bottle ofbourbon
and a bottle of Nembutal.
As John Marks
comments, "an unusual combination for
a doctor to
give someone with
symptoms like Olson's."
Olson was
scheduled to be
taken to Chestnut
Lodge, a Rockville, Maryland
sanitarium where many
of the psychiatrists had top
secret CIA clearances.
The night before
he was to
enter the sanitarium, he
leaped—so it is
reported—to his death through the closed window of the
Statler Hilton in New York. [8]
The CIA
immediately went into
cover-up mode on
the Olson death. Although his
widow was given a government pension, the truth
about the cause
of the scientist's
death would not be
admitted for two
decades. Alice, Frank
Olson's wife, went
on national television and
read the following
statement from the family at that time:
"We feel
our family has
been violated by
the CIA in two
ways. 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."
For their
complicity in Olson's
death, Gottlieb and his
team received a verbal
reprimand that was
not recorded in
their personnel files.
The Olson
story was not
over. Forensic scientists investigating the
case exhumed the
man's body in
1994. They reported that
they found skull
fractures that suggested homicide, rather
than an accident.
One can only
speculate about what really
happened to Frank
Olson. Was he
threatening to blow the whistle
on MKULTRA the night of his death?[9]
Freemason Dr. Paul
Hoch was another
person involved in
investigating LSD for
the CIA. Hoch
was a member
of the American Eugenics Society,
and co-director, with
former-Nazi eugenicist Franz Kallman,
of research at
Columbia University's New York
State Psychiatric Institute.
Hoch and Kallman
worked under the direction
of the Scottish
Rite of Freemasonry's
Field Representative of Research on Dementia Praecox, Dr.Nolan D.C. Lewis. Hoch
was also appointed
State Mental HygieneCommissioner by New York Governor
Averell Harriman,and was reappointed to the position by Governor Nelson
Rockefeller.
Another MKULTRA
mastermind was 33rd
degree Freemason Robert Hanna
Felix, director of psychiatric research
for the Scottish Rite
and NIMH director
from 1949 to
1963. Using CIA funds,
Felix personally oversaw
the experiments of
Dr. Harris Isbell, who
gave black prison
inmates LSD for
75 consecutive days, tripling
and quadrupling the
dosage when the
inmates demonstrated drug tolerance,
and where drug-induced sleep was periodically
interrupted by electroshock.
According to
the Senate subcommittee
testimony of former inmate
James Childs, volunteers
for the Isbell
project were paid off
with heroin. Childs
said, "You knock
on this little
door, and the guy would look
out... and I would say, 'I want 15 milligrams.' He would say, 'Where do
you want it? In your
arm, your skin or your vein?'
Everybody that was
on the research...
got the payoff of the drug." [10]
In 1953,
Los Angeles psychiatrist
Dr. Nick Bercel
was contacted by the
CIA and asked
to determine how
much LSD it would
take to send
the entire population
of the City
of the Angels on
a trip. Bercel's
results were disappointing: he
found that chlorine in
the water supply
neutralized the drug.
The CIA, according to
internal documents, went
right to work on
a version of LSD that would not be affected by chlorine. [11]
The CIA
may have actually
attempted the acid
dosing of a town somewhat
earlier. At Pont-Saint-Esprit, France,
in 1951, the whole town suddenly
went crazy.
Many persons
died during the
course of the
unexplained hysteria, and hallucinogenic after-effects
were felt by the
townspeople for weeks.
Although the incident
is usually attributed to
the effects of
ergot contaminated rye flour,
the date of the occurrence—near
the beginning of CIA interest in LSD—is more than interesting.
A similar,
although less deadly
incident took place in
the U.S. in 1989,
when 600 junior
and senior high
school students were preparing for
a music program
in Santa Monica,
California. A sudden rash
of headaches, nausea,
dizziness, and fainting affected about
250 students. Given
the CIA and
other intelligence agency's penchant
for drug testing
on civilians, it is not
impossible that this was such another such case. [12]
In the
mid-1950s Operation BIG
CITY in New
York used a 1953
Mercury automobile with
a tailpipe extended
18 inches to emit a
gas, probably LSD,
into the streets.
Another test in the same
series tests were
undertaken with battery
powered emission equipment fitted
into suitcases. The
equipment was used to spray LSD
in the New York subway system. Anunnamed gas
was released off
of the Golden
Gate Bridge about
this time, although it is said to
have dissipated in the wind without
causing anyone any harm.
In 1957
CIA Inspector General
Lyman issued the
following internal memo, stating
that "precautions must
be taken not
only to protect the
operations from exposure
to enemy forces,
but also to conceal
these activities from
the American public
in general. The knowledge
that the Agency
is engaging in unethical
and illicit activities
would have serious repercussions in political
and diplomatic circles
and would be
detrimental to the
accomplishment." [13]
From the beginning of the
CIA's work with LSD there were concerns
about relying on
the Swiss for their
supply of the
drug. While obtaining
weekly supplies from
Sandoz, the CIA
was also funding the
Eli Lilly company
in the United
States to synthesize the drug
so as to
ensure a steady
supply. In 1954
Lilly announced that they
had succeeded. A
memo to Allen
Dulles noted that with
unlimited supplies, LSD
could now be
taken seriously as a chemical warfare agent, and that it could be bought in "tonnage
quantities." [14]
The most
infamous of MKULTRA
doctors was Dr.
DonaldEwen Cameron. In
1942 the Rockefeller
Foundation founded the Allen
Memorial Institute at McGill University,
located at gothic Ravenscrag,
in Montreal, Canada.
Dr. Cameron was placed in
charge of the
psychiatric division, and
began experimentation
straight out of the Rocky
Horror Show, but lacking
the wit. The
program was funded
by the Canadian military, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the OSS, and later, the CIA.
Cameron's training
was at the
Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland,
under Sir David
Henderson, a eugenicist. Cameron went
on to found
the World Federation
of Mental Health's Canadian
division, in association
with his friend, Tavistock's Brigadier
General John Rawlings
Rees, and to become
arguably the most
influential psychiatrist on
the planet.
He became
president of just
about every psychiatric organization there was
at the time;
the Canadian, American,
and World Psychiatric Organizations, the
Quebec Psychiatric Association, the American
Psychopathological Association, and
the Society of Biological
Psychiatry. Cameron was no
rogue in the
field of psychiatry, but instead
one of its most influentialleaders. [15]
Colonel L.
Fletcher Prouty, a Pentagon liaison
to the CIA at
the time
of Cameron's experiments,
in 1992 stated:
"If you get a hold of
a directory for
the American Psychiatric
Association in around 1956
or 1957, you'll
be surprised to
find that an enormous
percentage of the
individuals listed are
foreign-born.
Mostly they
came out of
Germany and Eastern
Europe in a big
wave. They were
all called 'technical
specialists,' but really they were
psychiatrists. They went
into jobs at
universities mostly—but many were
working on these
'unconventional' mind control programs
for U.S. intelligence... These
would go to people like Dr. Cameron in Canada."
[16]
In 1957
Cameron submitted a
grant application to
"the Society for the
Investigation of Human
Ecology," also known
as the "Human Ecology
Fund," a CIA
front working out
of the Cornell University Medical
School in New York City.Cameron's application
proposed the funding of experimentation involving:
"i. The
breaking down of
ongoing patterns of
the patient's behavior by
means of particularly
intensive electroshocks (depatterning).
"ii. The intensive
repetition (16 hours
a day for 6
or 7
days) of the prearranged verbal signal.
"iii.
During this period
of intensive repetition
the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.
"iv.
Repression of the
driving period is
carried out by
putting the patient, after
the conclusion of the period,
into continuous sleep for 7-10
days."
After receiving
the requested funding
of $60,000, Cameron and
his underlings employed
these and a
wide variety of
other mind-blasting
techniques on subjects
who had in
many cases not volunteered for
experimentation. Those techniques,
seemingly more suited for
the torture of
prisoners of war
than for the rehabilitation of
Canadian citizens, included
the "sleep treatment" developed
by Hassan Azima
at the Institute,
and the administering of
Thorazine and barbiturates
on a continuous basis so that patients would sleep
20 to 22 hours a day.
Using the
British Page-Russell electroconvulsive technique, Cameron would
put victims into
drug induced coma
for weeks, waking them
to administer a
one-second electroshock, followed by
from five to
nine additional jolts depending
on the itchiness of
his trigger finger.
Cameron increased the
voltage normally administered by practitioners of
this technique, and
the number of shock
sessions from one to two or
three
per day. Predictably, patients given
this kind of
treatment were often
reduced to a vegetables. [17]
Another of
Cameron's strategies was to place
his victims into sensory
deprivation chambers for up to
65 days, devastating them with
LSD, then using
"psychic driving," in
which a repetitive phrase
taken from the emotionally charged
material they had told
to a psychiatrist
would be played
through a pillow with
unremovable earphones. Cameron
documented his researches in
psychic driving, funded
by the Department
of Health and Welfare
between 1961-64, in
research papers titled "Study of
Factors which Promote
or Retard Personality
Change in Individuals Exposed
to Prolonged Repetition
of Verbal Signals," and
"The Effects upon
Human Behavior of the
Repetition of Verbal Signals". [18]
According to
one psychiatrist, Cameron's
theory was "the ways in
which people behave
are determined by
some sort of nervous
system arrangements in the brain.
Since psychotherapy can change
behavior, the neural arrangements must be reversible."
Cameron himself
"wondered whether the
behavior patterns of adults
could be erased
by a physiologic
process that attacked neural patterns.
Could adults be made theoretically patternless? Could they
be returned to
a state of neurologic and psychologic infancy for
a short period,
and then could
new patterns of behavior
be introduced?" Does
one detect the
flavor of Tavistock here?
By 1960
Cameron had developed
his techniques, which he termed "ultra-conceptual communication," into
something even more horrific.
The period of
psychic driving was
increased to 16 hours
a day for
20 to 30
days and patients
were dosed with Sernyl
to "block sensory
input and produce
underactivity."
Sernyl is
an extremely powerful
drug used as
an animal anesthetic. It
produces "acute psychotic
episodes and even
the danger of chronic psychosis in humans." [19]
Although standards
for medical experimentation had
been clearly defined at
Nuremberg almost ten
years before Cameron's funding by
the CIA, specifically
requiring "informed consent"
by subjects, subjects at
the Allen Memorial
Institute did not
sign consent forms, nor
did they in
most cases have
any idea of
what they were getting
into. This was
the standard, rather
than the exception, during most
MKULTRA research, in fact.
Two of
Cameron's assistants were
Leonard Rubenstein, "an electrical whiz of
Cockney descent who
lacked medical bonafides," who
effused about the
possibilities of equipment "that will
keep tabs on
people without their
knowing," and Dr. Walter
Freeman, who had
performed 4,000 frontal
lobotomies in 20 years,
reportedly on persons
often suffering only
from depression or paranoia.
Freeman went on
to become a highly successful brain
specialist working for
many years in San
Francisco. [20]
In 1979
a public interest
legal case was
launched against the CIA for their activities during the
MKULTRA period,with details of the law suit
appearing in the
Hamline Journal of
Public Law and Policy.
Dr. Paul Termansen
appeared in court
as an expert witness, and described what
had happened to
Robert Logie, one of Cameron's patients at Ravenscrag:
"Instead of
a standard treatment,
Mr. Logie underwent
a series of experimental,
highly controversial, procedures...
Mr. Logie was not
a suitable subject
for any one
of the experimental procedures he
was subjected to, if, indeed,
anyone would be suited
for such procedures.
Most certainly, no
one would be suitable to the type of experimental
procedures used at Allan Memorial
Institute at that
time, unless they
had volunteered to undergo those experimental
procedures."
Dr. Termanson
said that after
being subjected to
Cameron's experiments,
"existence could best
be termed marginal...
He managed to function, work, and exist, but barely."
Another expert
witness in the
trial, Dr. Brian
Doyle, provided information on
the case of
Rita Zimmerman, who
was "depatterned"
by Cameron with
30 electroshocks, had 56
days of drug-induced sleep,
was subjected to
14 days of
negative "psychic
driving," and then
was given 18
days of positive "psychic driving." Dr.
Doyle said, "Mrs. Zimmerman was
not a candidate
for electroshock therapy, much
less the intensive
'depatterning' procedures that were
so disruptive as
to leave her
incontinent as to
bladder and bowel... The
intensive electro-shocks that
were used to 'depattern' Mrs.
Zimmerman were clearly
experimental, as was the
entire 'depatterning' procedure
that was carried
to an extreme in her case.
The nearly two
months of drug-induced sleep and
over one month
of 'psychic driving'
Mrs. Zimmerman underwent were
equally extreme applications of
clearly experimental
procedures... The experimental
'depatterning,' prolonged drug
induced sleep and 'psychic driving'
procedures used on Mrs.
Zimmerman would inevitably
cause injury to her
mental and physical health."
Doyle commented
similarly on the
case of Florence Langleben, who
had received electroshocks
and LSD, 43
days of drugged sleep, and 43 days of psychic
driving:
"Mrs.
Langleben was not a candidate
for electroshock therapy,
much less the intensive
'depatterning' procedures... The intensive
electroshocks that were
used to 'depattern'
Mrs. Langleben were clearly
experimental, as was
the entire 'depatterning procedure.
The six weeks
of drug-induced sleep and
six weeks of
'psychic driving' Mrs.
Langleben underwent were equally
extreme applications of
clearly experimental procedures... The
experimental 'depatterning,' prolonged
drug induced sleep and
'psychic driving' procedures
used on Mrs. Langleben would
inevitably cause injury
to her mental
and physical health." [21]
Another of
Cameron's many victims
was Mary Morrow,
whose background was in
nursing. After completing
a residency in neurology
at the University of
Michigan she approached Cameron for a fellowship at Allan Memorial.
According to a legal document filed in
Washington, D.C., "Because
Cameron thought she appeared
'nervous,' he told Dr. Morrow that a medical examination would
be required before
her application could
be considered. Dr. Morrow
was then hospitalized
at the Royal Victoria Hospital,
a facility affiliated with
McGill University and the
Allan Memorial Institute.
After she left
the Royal Victoria Hospital, Dr.
Morrow was admitted
as a paying
patient at the Allan
Memorial Institute on May 6,
1960, and placed under Cameron's care.
For an eleven
day period from
May 19, 1960, through
May 29, 1960,
Dr. Morrow was
subjected to depatterning experiments
employing Page-Russell electroconvulsive shock
treatments and a
variety of barbiturates, specifically thorazine
and anectine. The
combination of these drugs
produced a condition
of brain anoxia
[insufficient oxygen reaching the
brain] in Dr.
Morrow and on
June 17, 1960,
she was transferred, at
her family's insistence,
to the medical department of
the Royal Victoria
Hospital, where she
was diagnosed as suffering
from acute laryngeal
edema [a severe allergic reaction to the drugs]."
Similar experimentation was
taking place elsewhere. Forty- two-year-old tennis
professional Harold Blauer
had been suffering from
depression after a divorce. On December 5,1952,
he checked himself
into a psychiatric
hospital in Manhattan. Unbeknownst
to Blauer, the
hospital had contracted with the
U.S. Army for
a chemical warfare
test with mescaline derivatives. Lacking
any information as
to whether the derivatives had
ever been tested
on humans, a
doctor at the hospital
injected Blauer five
times with the
concoction. Records show that
for a while
Blauer seemed to
be experiencing some improvement, although
it is questionable
how mescaline might have
contributed. Whatever the case, the
experimentation on Blauer was
continued until the fifth injection onJanuary 8,1953. That
dosage was sixteen
times the strength
of the first injection. Blauer
began to sweat and then
went into convulsions, frothing at
the mouth. The
man lapsed into
a coma and
was pronounced dead two hours later.
The hospital
did not inform
Blauer's relatives that he
had been the unwitting
victim of a chemical warfare
experiment, instead saying that
he had died
of an "overdose of
a drug."
When Blauer's
family sued, the
claim was settled
for $18,000, half of
it provided by
the government through
the hospital, on the
condition that the
the nature of
the experimentation done on
Blauer be kept
secret by the
hospital from the
family and the world. [22]
Early on,
the CIA had
come to the
conclusion that for
truly realistic results it was necessary to test LSD outside of the lab,
n persons in
real-life situations. Harry
Anslinger, head of the
Federal Narcotics Bureau,
supervised one such
operation, run by George
Hunter White, a
narcotics officer who
had organized a spy
training school during
World War II.
Using CIA funding, White rented
an apartment in Greenwich Village,
and equipped it with surveillance
equipment and two-way
mirrors. White, posing
alternately as a
seaman and as
an artist, lured unsuspecting persons
back to his
apartment and gave them
LSD.
The large
number of adverse
reactions to the
acid—some requiring the subjects
to have weeks
of hospitalization—caused White
to code name the drug "Stormy."
In 1955
White transferred his
base of operation,
and set up two
experimental LSD launching
pads in San
Francisco. This was the
period of Operation
Midnight Climax, in
which White paid prostitutes
to bring customers
to one of
these unsafe- houses for unconventional action.
The drinks of the
unwitting participants were laced
with LSD and
their actions were observed
by White, who
sat behind a
two-way mirror on a
portable toilet with
a drink in
his hand. San
Francisco Narco Bureau agents
would also take
advantage of Midnight Climax, sampling both the drugs and
their purveyors.
White's activities
continued until 1963,
when CIA Inspector General John
Earman found out about Midnight
Climax during routine
Technical Services inspections.
Although an extended period of
Agency soul-searching followed
in the wake
of revelations about safehouse experiments,
the operations continued until
at least 1966,
when White retired
from the Narcotics Bureau.
White reminisced
about his CIA
mission, in a
quote made famous by chroniclers
of the CIA and mind control: "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, steal, rape,
and pillage with the sanction and
blessing of the All-Highest?"[23]
One prominent
victim of MKULTRA
was Philip Graham,
a graduate of the
Army Intelligence School
at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and
the owner and publisher of
the Washington Post and
Newsweek magazine. Graham
made the mistake of attacking the
American news media
in a speech
to a meeting
of publishers in January,
1963. Leslie Farber,
a psychiatrist from the
CIA's Chestnut Lodge,
was dispatched to
deal with Graham.
Graham was drugged and flown
to Maryland where after 10 days he
was released, only
to be returned
to Chestnut Lodge
in June. Released into the custody
of his wife in August, hewas foundshot
to death -
allegedly a suicide.
His will was
declared void because of
insanity, and Katherine
Graham, his widow,
inherited the Washington Post and Newsweek. [24]
Early in
the research of
mind control techniques,
the "disposal
problem" was encountered,
i.e. how to get
rid of persons who
had been the
subject of mind
control programs.
One way
of dealing with
these persons was
to put them, according to
an Agency document,
"in maximum custody
until either operations have
progressed to the
point where their knowledge is
no longer highly
sensitive, or the
knowledge they possess in
general will be
of no use to
the enemy." Other means of
disposal were putting
them into mental
institutions, slipping them a
lobotomy, or in
certain cases "termination with
extreme prejudice," killing them.
In two
series of tests,
in 1958 and
in 1959-60, U.S.
Army Intelligence, in conjunction
with the Army
Chemical Corps and the CIA,
began a program
of testing of
LSD and other psychoactive compounds
at the Medical
Research Laboratories at Edgewood
Arsenal. The focus
of the testing
was on "unwitting test reaction" with
the intention to find
out how an
LSD-dosed soldier would fare during interrogation.
Groups of
military personnel were
given EA-1729, the
Army's code designation for
LSD, then filmed
while interrogators tried to
pry forth classified
information from them.
There were also "Memory Impairment
Tests", evaluating the
ability of the subjects
to recall information
that had been
previously imparted, and drills
in skills including
tank driving, anti-aircraft
tracking, and field maneuvers.
After the
first phase of
testing, a letter
was sent from the Chief
of the Clinical
Division at Edgewood
to the Commanding General of
the Army Intelligence
Center extolling the
brilliant results of the
acid tests. Also recommended was
that "actual application of
the material [LSD]
be utilized in
real situations on an experimental basis, if possible."
U.S. Army
Intelligence encouraged Edgewood
to go ahead m with
the field testing:
"This headquarters has
forwarded your letter to
the Assistant Chief
of Staff for
Intelligence (ACSI), Department of
the Army, concurring
in your recommendation that actual
application of the material be
utilized in real situations on
an experimental basis."
In correspondence between the
Director of Medical
Research at Edgewood
and the Commander, Chemical
Warfare Labs, it
was indicated that
the plan was to use LSD outside of the U.S. or on foreign nationals.On
August 8, 1960, the Office of Assistant Chief of Staff Intelligence Liaison
Team flew to Europe to
brief intelligence agencies on
the joint project.
At least two
programs resulted, the first
being Operation THIRD
CHANCE, a 90-day
European project involving the
administering of LSD
to foreign nationals and
one American soldier
who had allegedly
stolen classified documents. Operation
DERBY HAT was
a similar project planned to
take place in
Hawaii, although accounts
of it are contradictory. One
source says that
the project was aborted, while another
states that an
Army Special Purpose
Team trained in LSD
interrogations questioned seven
alleged Japanese Communists,
putting at least one of them into a coma.
Testing was
apparently done on
unknowing Americans
citizens, as well.
These experiments were
reportedly reserved for small
groups of individuals,
although there were
suggestions of larger scale testing taking place at some point in the
future.The Chemical Corps'
Major General Creasy
remembered, " I was
attempting to put
on, with a
good cover story,
to test to see
what would happen
in subways, for example,
when a cloud
was laid down on
a city. It
was denied on
reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me."
[25]
Records show
that Chemical Corps officers were
routinely given acid during
their training at
Fort McClellan, Alabama. Other tests
of LSD on
army personnel were
conducted at the Aberdeen Proving
Ground in Maryland; Dugway ProvingGround in Utah; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; and
Fort Benning, in Georgia.
By the
mid-1960s at least
1,500 army personnel
are documented as having
been used in
Chemical Corps LSD experiments.
Other researchers
that were funded
by the military
included Charles Savage at the Naval
Medical Research Institute,
Amedeo Marrazzi of the University of Minnesota and Missouri Institute of
Psychiatry, James Dille
of the University
of Washington, Gerald Klee of the University of Maryland
Medical School, Neil Burch of Baylor
University, Henry Beecher
of Harvard and
Massachusetts General
Hospital, and Paul
Hoch and James
Cattell of the
New York State Psychiatric Institute. [26]
Soon the
Army would go
on to bigger,
but not necessarily better things.
Hoffmann-La Roche, a
pharmaceutical company in Nutley,
New Jersey, was the army's
source for a newpsychoactive compound,
quinuclidinyl benzilate: BZ. This
is a drug with
even more profound
effects than LSD,
effects that last for
about three days—but
that have been
known to last
for six weeks. One
army doctor noted
of BZ that,
"During the period
of acute effects the person is completely out of touch with his environment."
[27]
Dr. Van
Sim, who was
chief of the
Clinical Research Division at Edgewood
Arsenal, routinely tested
on himself all
of the new drugs
that he would
later give to recruits. Sim
reported of BZ, "It
zonked me for
three days. I kept
falling down and the
people at the
lab assigned someone
to follow me
around with a mattress."
Army testing
of BZ began
at Edgewood Arsenal
in 1959, and continued
until 1975. Dr.
Solomon Snyder of
Johns Hopkins University, who
was involved in drug testing
for the Chemical Corps, stated,
"The army's testing
of LSD was
just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ."
An estimated
2,800 soldiers were
given BZ, with
some of them suffering
drug-related disabilities to
this day. BZ,
deployed in the grenades,
mortar shells, and missiles, was
allegedly also used in combat in
Vietnam. [28]
NOTES:
1. Bowart, Walter,
Operation Mind Control. (Dell
Paperback, New York, New
York, 1977); Chaitkin,
Anton. "British Psychiatry:
From Eugenics to Assassination," EIR,
October 7, 1994;
Cannon, Martin, "The
Controllers: A New Hypothesis of
Alien Abductions", MUFON
UFO Journal, Number 270,
October, 1990
2.
Constantine, Alex, Psychic
Dictatorship in the
U.S.A. (Portland, Oregon: Feral
House, 1995); Marks,
John, The Search for
the "Manchurian Candidate": The
CIA and Mind
Control, (New York:
Times Books, 1979); Chaitkin
3. Stevens, Jay,
Storming Heaven, LSD and the
American Dream. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
4. Chaitkin
5. Quoted in
Bowart
6. White, Carol,
The New Dark
Ages Conspiracy. (New
York: Benjamin Franklin House,
1984); Marks; Bowart
7. Chaitkin; White;
Stevens; Hougan, Jim,
Secret Agenda. New
York: Random House, 1984; Marks
8. Chaitkin; Marks
9. Lee and
Shlain, Acid Dreams.
(New York: Grove
Press, 1985); Marks; The Modesto Bee, July 26, 1994
10. Smith, Caulfield,
Crook, and Gershman,
The Big Brother
Book of Lists. (Los Angeles:
Price/Stern/Sloan, 1984); Chaitkin
11. Lee and Shlain
12.
"Messing with the
Mass Mind," American
Journal of Psychology, 1989, otherwise undated clipping;
Lee and Shlain
13. Unattributed
segment in Matrix III, Val Valerian, ed., 1992
14. Stevens
15. Chaitkin; Weinstein,
M.D. Harvey M.,
Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control, (Washington,
D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990)
16. Prouty,
Colonel L. Fletcher. Cited in Constantine, Alex, Psychic Dictatorship in the
U.S.A. (Portland, Oregon: FeralHouse. Portland, 1995)
17. Rauh and
Turner, "Anatomy of
a Publie Interest
Case Against the CIA," Hamline
Journal of Public
Law and Policy,
Fall 1990; Chaitkin; Constantine, Alex, Psychic
Dictatorship in the
U.S.A. (Portland, Oregon:
Feral House, 1995; Weinstein)
18. Chaitkin; Anonymous
untitled research paper,
Stockholm: Mediaecco, 1993; Weinstein
19. Weinstein
20. Constantine
21. Rauh and
Turner
22. Bresler, Fenton,
Who Killed John
Lennon? New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1989
23. Lee and Shlain
24. Chaitkin; Constantine,
Alex, "Operation Mockingbird:
The CIA and the
Media," Prevailing Winds
Magazine, Number 3,
1997; Dr. John
Coleman, Conspirator's
Hierarchy: The Story
of the Committee of
300. (Carson City, Nevada: America West Publishers, 1992)
25. Lee and Shlain
26. Marks
27. Lee and
Shlain; Victorian, Armen,
"U.S. Army Intelligence
Mind Control Experiments", Lobster magazine, number 23
28. Lee and Shlain
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