John Marks - Search For The Manchurian Candidate (CIA & Mind Control)
John Marks - Search For The Manchurian Candidate (CIA & Mind Control)
"MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE"
THE CIA AND MIND CONTROL
John Marks
Allen Lane
Allen Lane
Penguin Books Ltd
17 Grosvenor Gardens
London SW1 OBD
First published in the U.S.A. by Times Books, a division of
Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., Inc., and
simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd, 1979
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1979
Copyright <£> John Marks, 1979
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
ISBN 07139 12790 jj
Printed in Great Britain by f
Thomson Litho Ltd, East Kilbride, Scotland J
For Barbara and Daniel
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. Neverthe-
less, 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 docu-
ments.
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 Infor-
matlon Struggle. Then in late 1975, Joseph Petrilloand 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 attor-
neys took me much more seriously when my requests for docu-
ments 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 ac-
knowledge their contributions. Diane St. Clair was the main-
stay 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 Investi-
gative 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. Rich-
ard Sokolow made similar contributions to the Mushroom and
Safehouse chapters. His work was solid, and his energy bound-
less. Jay Peterzell delved deeply into Dr. Cameron's "depattern-
ing" 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 re-
search 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.
AUTHOR'S
NOTE
xi
xii CONTENTS
PART IV CONCLUSIONS
12. THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH 195
NOTES 215
INDEX 231
THE SEARCH FOR THE
"MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE"
PART
ORIGINS OF
MIND-CONTROL
RESEARCH
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite. —WILLIAM
BLAKE.
'While Hofmann specifically used the word "trip" in a 1977 interview to de-
scribe his consciousness-altering experience, the word obviously had no such
meaning in 1943 and is used here anachronistically.
WORLD WAR II 5
•Del Grade's name was deleted by the CIA from the OSS document that de-
scribed the incident, but his Identity was learned from the papers of George
WORLD WAR II 7
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.
'Naval intelligence officers eventually made a deal in which mob leaders pro-
mised 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.
8 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
"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 cap-
tured 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 Man-
churia." 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.
10 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
*The Code was suggested in essentially its final form by prosecution team
consultant, I)r Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist.
WORLD WAR II 11
icy ever since 1946, but, even before the verdicts were in,
special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the ex-
perimental 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 commu-
nism carried with it a piercing sense of fear and a sweeping
sense of mission—at least as far as American leaders were con-
cerned. Out of these feelings and out of that overriding Ameri-
can 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 ob-
sessed—kept going back to their laboratories for one last adjust-
ment. 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 re-
search: 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
12 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
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 crazi-
ness 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 sub-
jects—often dismissing the obviously harmful effects with
theories reminiscent of the learned nineteenth-century physi-
cians 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 inno-
cence, 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 instru-
ment of government policy. The Germans, the French, the Rus-
sians, 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. Roose-
velt placed it under the command of a Wall Street lawyer and
World War I military hero, General William "Wild Bill" Dono-
van. A burly, vigorous Republican millionaire with great intel-
lectual 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 orga-
nization 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 re-
WORLD WAR II 13
cruits. (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 al-
ready 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 adminis-
tration set up a costly, intertwining network of research pro-
grams to deal with everything from splitting the atom to pre-
venting mental breakdowns in combat. Donovan named Boston
industrialist Stanley Lovell to head OSS Research and Develop-
ment 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 un-
derhanded trick to use against the Germans and Japanese—
by our own people—but especially by the underground re-
sistance 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 Dono-
van, which he instantly received on being introduced to the
blustery, hyperactive OSS chief. Lovell had never met any-
14 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
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 in-
sights 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.* Langer pro-
tested that a study of Hitler based on available data would be
highly uncertain and that conventional psychiatric and psy-
choanalytic 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 known 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 pro-
ceeded to pick apart the Fuhrer'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 vul-
nerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Stanley Lovell
seized upon one of Langer's ideas—that Hitler might have fem-
inine tendencies—and got permission from the OSS hierarchy
to see if he could push the Fuhrer over the gender line. "The
'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.
tLanger 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
16 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice be-
come 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.*
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 associ-
ates 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 war-
time 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 popula-
tions. Like the world's other secret services, OSS individualized
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 sentimen-
tality, his emotionality, his occasional softness, and his weeping, even after he
became Chancellor, may be regarded as manifestations of a fundamental pat-
tern that undoubtedly had its origin in his relationship to his mother."
'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 Fuhrer's carrots, beets, or whatever." A
"quietus medicine" is a generic term for a lethal poison, of which carbamates
are one type.
CBW and made it into a way of selectively bu
rassing, disorienting, incapacitating, injuring, or
enemy.
As diversified as were Lovell's scientific duties
were narrow in comparison with those of his
in the CIA's postwar mind-control program, Dr.
lieb. Gottlieb would preside over investigations
from advanced research in amnesia by electrosho
searches through the jungles of Latin America f
and barks. Fully in the tradition of making
less, Gottlieb's office would devise a scheme to m
tro's beard fall out; like Lovell, Gottlieb would
vide operators with deadly poisons to a
leaders like the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and
equally at ease discussing possible applications
search in neurology. On a much greater scale
Gottlieb would track down every conceivable
might give one person leverage over another's
would preside over arcane fields from handwritin
stress creation, and he would rise through the
with his bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms.
Early in the war, General Donovan got another
British, whose psychologists and psychiatrists had
testing program to predict the performance of
Donovan thought such a program might help OS
the masses of recruits who were being rushed
To create an assessment system for Americans,
in Harvard psychology professor Henry "Harry"
1938 Murray had written Explorations of Person
ble book which laid out a whole battery of tests
used to size up the personalities of individuals.
tractive to loonies," states Murray. "Psychopaths,
ple who spend their lives making up stories, revel
The program's prime objective, according to Murra
ing out the crazies, as well as the "sloths, irrit
and free talkers."
Always in a hurry, Donovan gave Murray
guished group of colleagues only 15 days until
dates arrived to be assessed. In the interim, they
spacious estate outside Washington as their headq
series of hurried meetings, they put together an assessment
18 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
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 re-
search (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 strap-
ping its foreign agents—and eventually, its own employees—
into the "box." The polygraph measures physiological changes
that might show lying—heartbeat, blood pressure, perspira-
tion, 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 ma-
chine. 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.* Nevertheless, the polygraph cannot compel truth. Like
*While the regular polygraphing of CIA career employees apparently never
has turned up a penetration agent in the ranks, it almost certainly has a deter-
rent 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.
COLD WAR ON THE MIND 25
The men in the new CIA took this job quite seriously. "We felt
we were the first line of defense in the anticommunist cru-
sade," 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 some-
thing 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 des-
perate 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 Rus-
sians were up to. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the contem-
poraneous CIA documents almost three decades later indicates
that if the Russians were scoring breakthroughs in the behav-
ior-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."* Ap-
parently, 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
chiatrist 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 candi-
date's "ethics might be such that he might not care to cooperate
in certain more revolutionary phases of our project." This con-
sideration became explicit in Agency recruiting. During the
talent search, another CIA memo stated why another doctor
seemed suitable: "His ethics are such that he would be com-
pletely cooperative in any phase of our program, regardless of
how revolutionary it may be."
The matter was even more troublesome in the task of obtain-
ing 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 conve-
nient 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 experi-
ments 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 col-
leagues 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 particu-
larly 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 psy-
chologist observes that CIA operators did not have "a univer-
sal concept of mankind" and thus were willing to do things
to foreigners that they would have been reluctant to try on
32 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
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 show-
down—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 disclo-
sure 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 intelli-
gence, 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 Thomp-
son, a psychiatrist, physiologist, and pharmacologist who was
also a Navy commander.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT 35
ARTICHOKE trips into the field, the team was still working to
perfect the logistics of testing. It had reserved two CIA "safe-
houses" in the countryside not far from Frankfurt, and Ameri-
cans had been assigned to guard the experimental sites. Agency
managers had already completed the paperwork for the instal-
lation 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 obser-
vation 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 handcuffed him,
shackled his feet, and made him lie down on the floor of the
back seat. Agency officials described him as a suspected Rus-
sian agent, about 40 years old, who had a "Don Juan com-
plex." 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 confine-
ment, 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 morn-
ing 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 exam-
ine the subject, leaving the interrogation to the consultant. For
his part, the consultant had little success in extracting infor-
mation not already known to the CIA.
The third day was more of the same: Seconal with breakfast,
40 ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
"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.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT 45
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.
INTELLIGENCE OR
"WITCHES POTIONS"
And it seems to me perfectly in the cards
that there will be within the next genera-
tion or so a pharmacological method of
making people love their servitude, and
producing . . . a kind of painless concentra-
tion camp for entire societies, so that peo-
ple will in fact have their liberties taken
away from them but will rather enjoy it,
because they will be distracted from any
desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwash-
ing, or brainwashing enhanced by phar-
macological methods.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY, 1959.
4
LSD
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 investi-
gating in much greater depth the whole area of applying chem-
ical 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, ex-
plosive 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 sup-
plying 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 func-
tions 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 pro-
grams 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 handi-
caps, 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 Pres-
byterian 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
56 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
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 impor-
tant for us to get the idea than for him not to stutter." One idea
he got across was that the Agency should investigate the poten-
tial 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 ap-
preciated his qualities, Richard Helms. For two decades, Gott-
lieb 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 Col-
lege, could thread his way through complicated technical prob-
lems 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 clan-
destine 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 fan-
cied 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."
LSD 57
ing thing about it," says one of them, "was that such minute
quantities had such a terrific effect." Albert Hofman had gone
off into another world after swallowing less than 1/100,000 of
an ounce. Scientists had known about the mind-altering quali-
ties 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 incapacitat-
ing 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 under-
stood that LSD distorted a person's sense of reality, and they felt
compelled to learn whether it could alter someone's basic loyal-
ties. 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 clin-
ical studies, as had a few other places, including Boston Psy-
chopathic, 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, psychologi-
cal, 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 psy-
chiatry." Sandoz wanted the drug tested, for its own commer-
cial reasons, but beyond supplying it free to researchers, it
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."
LSD 59
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 con-
sent and without explaining it in detail." Hospital officials told
the volunteer subjects something about the nature of the ex-
periments but nothing about their origins or purpose. None of
the subjects had any idea that the CIA was paying for the prob-
ing of their minds and would use the results for its own pur-
poses; most of the staff was similarly ignorant.
Like Hyde, almost all the researchers tried LSD on them-
selves. 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 psy-
chiatrists, psychologists, and physiologists. As subjects, they
used each other, hospital patients, and volunteers—mostly stu-
dents—from the Boston area. They worked through a long se-
quence of experiments that served to isolate variable after vari-
able. 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 ques-
tion 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 any-
thing else, LSD tended to intensify the subject's existing char-
acteristics—often to extremes. A little suspicion could grow
into major paranoia, particularly in the company of people
perceived as threatening.
LSD 61
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.
64 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
gence was false for several years. There was an even greater
uproar in 1953 when more reports came in, again through mili-
tary 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 approach-
ing 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 1.5 ounces).* 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 com-
pany 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 vari-
ous 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 intelli-
gence 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 offi-
*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 attache 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.
LSD 67
*Military security agencies supported the LSD work of such well-known re-
searchers 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 Insti-
tute, 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 deriva-
tive 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.")
68 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
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 nega-
tive 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 applica-
tion 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-your-
houses 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
LSD 71
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 warn-
ing. 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. Some-
times 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, ihe CIA man came down by the end of the day. This was
72 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
not the first, last, or most tragic bad trip in the Agency's testing
program.*
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 protege 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 impres-
sive. 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 blan-
dishments to build a network of scientists and doctors whose
work they could direct and turn to their own use. All that re-
mained 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.
*TSS officials had long known that LSD could be quite dangerous. In 1952,
Harvard Medical School's Henry Beecher, who regularly gave the Agency in-
formation 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.
CONCERNI CHAPTER
NG THE
CASE
OF DR.
FRANK
OLSON
5
In November 1953, Sid Gottlieb decided to test
group of scientists from the Army Chemical
Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick
Maryland. Although the Clandestine Services
twice put TSS under strict notice not to use
permission from above, Gottlieb must have felt
the drug on SOD men was not so different from
his colleagues at the office. After all, officials
SOD worked intimately together, and they shared
darkest secrets of the Cold War: that the
maintained the capability—which it would use
kill or incapacitate selected people with bi
Only a handful of the highest CIA officials k
was paying SOD about $200,000 a year in re
tional systems to infect foes with disease.
Gottlieb planned to drop the LSD on the SOD
splendid isolation of a three-day working retreat.
the SOD and TSS men who collaborated on
joint program, held a planning session at a rem
they could brainstorm without interruption. On
1953, they gathered at Deep Creek Lodge, a log
woods of Western Maryland. It had been built as
camp 25 years earlier. Surrounded by the water
lake on three sides, with the peaks of the
looking down over the thick forest, the lodge was isolated
74 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
enough for even the most security conscious spy. Only an occa-
sional 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 tem-
porary 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 be-
fore 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 re-
search can be pieced together. It was this program that was
discussed during the fateful retreat.
Under MKNAOMI, the SOD men developed a whole arse-
nal 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.* 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 al-
lowed the killer time to separate himself from the deed.
Agency operators would later supply pills laced with this le-
thal food poison to its Mafia allies for inclusion in Fidel Cas-
tro's milkshake. If CIA officials wanted an assassination to
look like a death from natural causes, they could choose
*Toxins are chemical substances, not living organisms derived from biolog-
ical agents. While they can make people sick or dead, they cannot repro-
duce themselves like bacteria. Because of their biological origin, toxins
came under the responsibility of Fort Detrick rather than Edgewood Arse-
nal, the facility which handled the chemical side of America's chemical
and biological warfare (CBW) programs.
CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON 75
*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."
CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON 77
*Gottlieb stated just after Olson's death, at a time when he was trying to mini-
mize 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.
78 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
sion, 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.
THEM UNWITTING:
6
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 ca-
reer, 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
88 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
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 any-
way. 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 re-
turned 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 clandes-
tine 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,* White had broken CIA security regula-
*C1A 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."
90 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
tions 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 out-
spoken narcotics agent wrote to a friend in 1953. "I then learned
that a couple of crew-cut, 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 forgot-
ten 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 pri-
vately 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 long-
time crony. "They were too complicated, and they had other
people do their heavy stuff."
Unlike his CIA counterparts, White loved the glare of public-
ity. 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
THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES 91
*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 be-
cause 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."
92 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
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.
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 bed-
room. 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.*
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
*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."
THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES 97
*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.
100 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
*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 practi-
cal joke carried out badly by a bunch of bumblers.
^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."
#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.
THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES 101
of exposure and pointed out that many people both inside and
outside the Agency found "the concepts involved in manipulat-
ing 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 ap-
parent Soviet aggressiveness in the field of covertly adminis-
tered chemicals which are, to say the least, inexplicable and
disturbing," and he claimed the CIA's "positive operational ca-
pacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic
testing."* 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, steal, 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 experi-
*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."
102 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
mental 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 ma-
nipulation." 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.*
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
*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.
THEM UNWITTING. THE SAFEHOUSES 103
CIA days. "No. Particularly no. Had I been given that informa-
tion, 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 look-
out 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 ob-
session with these fungi, in all their glory, all over the globe.*
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 mush-
rooms were brought into being by lightning bolts. They discov-
ered that widely scattered peoples, including desert Arabs,
Siberians, Chinese, and Maoris of New Zealand, have shared
*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 car-
pet 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 excres-
cences the better. For her they were things of grace infinitely inviting to the
perceptive mind." In spite of his protests, Valentina gathered up the mush-
rooms and brought them back to the lodge where 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.
112 INTELLIGENCE OR ''WITCHES POTIONS"
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 mo-
bility 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.
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 Was-
son'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 dra-
matic 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 feel-
ing of ecstasy. You're raised to a height where you have not
been in everyday life—not ever." Moore, on the other hand,
MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE 115
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 hospi-
tal 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 bur-
geoning proportions. While Moore toiled in his lab, Roger Heim
in Paris unexpectedly pulled off the remarkable feat of grow-
ing 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 iso-
lated and chemically reproduced the active chemical ingredi-
ent. He named it psilocybin.
The dignified Swiss chemist had beaten out the CIA,* and the
men from MKULTRA found themselves trying to obtain for-
*Within two years, Albert Hofmann would scoop the CIA once again, with some
help from Gordon Wasson. In 1960 Hofmann broke down and chemically re-
created the active ingredient in hallucinatory ololiuqui seeds sent him by Was-
son before the Agency's contractor, William Boyd Cook of Montana State Uni-
versity, 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 Hof-
mann 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 unmis-
takable, "I don't think she said it with very much enthusiasm."
116 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
*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 experi-
ence 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."
120 INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
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 lowerclassmen." Calling this a
"trickle-down phenomenon," the authors seem to have cor-
rectly 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 Fre-
mont-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 off 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 Ger-
trude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Gins-
berg 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 re-
luctantly 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
MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE 121
SPELLS-
iii
ELECTRODES AND
HYPNOSIS
It is possible that a certain amount of brain
damage is of therapeutic value.
—DR. PAUL HOCH, 1948
BRAINWASHING
8
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 be-
came 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 Chi-
nese.
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 fa-
mous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at
which the Cardinal appeared zombielike, as though drugged
or hypnotized. Other defendants at Soviet "show trials" had
displayed similar symptoms as they recited unbelievable
confessions in dull, cliche-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 va-
126 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
rogation 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 harrow-
ing 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 evi-
dence 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 ran-
sacked 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 confes-
sion. 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 pris-
oner 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 usu-
ally were shot or sent to a labor camp after sentencing. Today,
Russian leaders seem much less insistent on exacting confes-
sions 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 re-educating
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
130 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
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
132 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
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.
Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all
through your single life. You let your mother check you up sexu-
ally after every date you had with a boy. You hadn't enough
determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for your-
self 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.
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.
*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). Never-
theless, 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.
140 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
ing the 1950s and early 1960s by its interest in such experi-
ments. 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 dis-
covered 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 continu-
ous 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 offi-
cials 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 sus-
picious.
Soon Lilly began to have trouble going to meetings and con-
ferences 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.* Lilly's
security clearance was withdrawn for review, then tangled up
"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.
wearing a face mask that provided air but cut
sound. Inevitably, intelligence officials swooped down
again, interested in the use of his tank as an
Could involuntary subjects be placed in the tank
down to the point where their belief systems
could be altered? BRAINWASHING 143
It was central to Lilly's ethic that he himself
subject
and misplaced—all of ofwhich heany took as experiment,
pressure to cooperate and, in the case of
ness-exploring
with the CIA. tank
Lilly, whose imagination work, no stimulation
needed he and one colleague w
to conjureones.
up picturesLilly of CIA agentsrealized
on deadlythat the
missions with intelligence agencies w
terested electrodes
remote-controlled in sensory implanted
strategically deprivation
in their because of its
and to withdraw
brains, decided he finally concluded
from that field of research. that
He says it was impossible for
at
he had decided thatthe
the physical National
intrusion of the Institutes
electrodes didof Health without c
too muchprinciples.
brain damage He quitfor in 1958.
him to tolerate.
Contrary
In 1954 Lilly began tryingtoto isolatemost the operationspeople's
of the intuitive expectations,
brain, freesensory deprivation
of outside stimulation, through sensoryto deprivation.
be a profoundly integra
He worked forin an office
himself next to Dr. personally.
Maitland Baldwin, He who the considered himself to b
followingwhoyear agreed subjectively
to perform terminal explored the
sensory deprivation far wanderings of t
experimentsa for ARTICHOKE'S
series ofMorse Allen
private experiments,
but who never told he pushed hims
complete
Lilly he was working in the unknown by
field. While Baldwin injecting
experimented pure Sandoz LSD in
with his before climbing into the
sensory-deprivation sensory-deprivation
"box," Lilly invented atank.*specialWhen the
"tank." Subjects floated in a tank of body-temperature water,
*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 uni-
144 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
verse, that they are valuable in themselves and, above all, valuable when
incorporated into our world-picture and acted upon [in] normal life."
*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 deep-
diver 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.
^After 1963 the Agency's Science and Technology Directorate continued brain
research with unknown results. See Chapter 12.
Cameron's that they could create "vegetables," but
served no operational use. People could be torture
anything, but no science could guarantee that the
the truth.
The impotency of brainwashing techniques left
in a difficult spot when Yuri Nosenko defected
States in February 1964. A ranking official of the
Nosenko brought with him stunning information. H
Russians had bugged the American embassy in
turned out to be true. He named some Russian
West. And he said that he had personally inspected
of Lee Harvey Oswald, who only a few months e
murdered before he could be brought to trial for
tion of President Kennedy. Nosenko said he lear
KGB had had no interest in Oswald.
Was Nosenko telling the truth, or was he a KG
to throw the United States off track about Osw
information about penetration correct, or was
the penetration? Was he acting in good faith? W
within the CIA who believed he was acting in go
selves acting in good faith? These and a thousan
tions made up the classical trick deck for
having "true" on one side and "false" on the other.
Top CIA officials felt a desperate need to resolve
Nosenko's legitimacy. With numerous Agency
gence operations hanging in the balance, Richard
as Deputy Director and then as Director, allowed
to work Nosenko over with the interrogation meth
Helms apparently had the most faith. It turned out to
truth serum or electroshock depatterning program
else from the Agency's brainwashing search.
Nosenko put through the tried-and-true Soviet
the prisoner, deaden his senses, break him. For m
years—1,277 days, to be exact—Agency officers kept
solitary confinement. As if they were using
study as their instruction manual and the Car
case as their success story, the CIA men had gua
Nosenko day and night, giving him not a mome
A light bulb burned continuously in his cell. He
nothing to read—not even the labels on toothpaste
he tried to distract himself by making a chess s
of lint in his cell, the guards discovered his game and swept the
146 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
HUMAN ECOLOGY
9
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, medi-
cine, 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 offi-
cials. 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 opera-
tional use. It was a time when knowledge itself seemed bounti-
ful 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
148 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
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 im-
pressive 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 for-
got 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 be-
cause 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 inter-
rogator." Both would be trying to put their subject back in har-
mony with his environment whether the problem was head-
ache 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 dep-
rivation. He told the Agency that sensory-deprivation cham-
bers had "valid medical reason" as part of a treatment that
relieved migraine symptoms and made the patient "more re-
ceptive 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
HUMAN ECOLOGY 149
*In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund, but for
convenience sake it will be called the Society throughout the book.
150 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
money it put into Cornell in 1955) and supplied the study group
with 100 Chinese refugees to work with. Nearly all these sub-
jects had been studying in the United States when the commu-
nists took over the mainland in 1949, so they tended to be dis-
located people in their thirties.
On the Agency side, the main concern, as expressed by one
ARTICHOKE man, was the "security hazard" of bringing to-
gether 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 recog-
nized the operational advantage that insight into Chinese be-
havior 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 produc-
ing" situations. The idea was to find out about their personali-
ties, 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 Ameri-
can 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 interroga-
tion 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 psy-
chological 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
HUMAN ECOLOGY 151
lied to her about where the money came from. "It was a func-
tion 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 respect-
ful. 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 aca-
demic 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, anticommunist
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-con-
trol 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 com-
pany. The new crew even made some effort (largely unsuccess-
ful) to attract non-CIA funds. The biggest change, however, was
the Cornell professors now had to deal with Agency representa-
tives 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 accept-
152 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
banks of the Grand River in the rolling farm country 120 miles
northwest of Detroit. This project had an interesting hypothe-
sis: 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 con-
nected 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 hyp-
nosis. 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 de-
pendence 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 con-
flicts. One CIA official wrote that the Society "must be given
more established stature in the research community to be effec-
tive 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 con-
nection 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 For-
est Hills, Queens, which was an inappropriate neighborhood
for a well-connected foundation.* Agency officials hired a staff
of four led by Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe, who had
*By 1961 the CIA staff had tired of Queens and moved the Society back into
Manhattan to 201 East 57th Street. In 1965, as the Agency was closing down the
front, it switched its headquarters to 1834 Connecticut Avenue N.W. in Wash-
ington, the same building owned by Dr. Charles Geschickter that housed an-
other MKULTRA conduit, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research.
156 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
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 So-
ciety 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 en-
terprise while playing essentially figurehead roles. In 1957 the
other board members were John Whitehorn, chairman of the
psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, Carl Ro-
gers, 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.* 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 backscratching 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
*Other establishment figures who would grace the Human Ecology board over
the years included Leonard Carmichael, head of the Smithsonian Institution,
Barnaby Keeney, president of Brown University, and George A. Kelly, psychol-
ogy professor and Society fund recipient at Ohio State University.
for his service. According to colleague Hinkle,
Wolff as one the great grantsman of his time,
that the Agency "would support our research and
their consultants." Wolif bluntly informed the CIA
his work would have no direct use "except that
hances our value ... as consultants and advi
words, Wolff felt that his worth to the CIA inc
tion to his professional accomplishments a
which in turn depended partly on the resou
manded. The Agency men understood, and over the
the 1950s, they were happy to contribute almo
Wolff's own research on the brain and central
In turn, Wolff and his reputation helped them
other leading lights in the academic world.
Another person who benefited from Human
was Carl Rogers, whom Wolff had also asked to
board. Rogers, who later would become famous
rective, nonauthoritarian approach to psyc
spected Wolffs work, and he had no objection
CIA. Although he says he would have nothing to
Agency activities today, he asks for understanding
the climate of the 1950s. "We really did regard
enemy," declares Rogers, "and we were trying
things to make sure the Russians did not get
Rogers received an important professional reward
the Society board. Executive Director James M
him know that, once he agreed to serve, he
receive a Society grant. "That appealed to me
having trouble getting funded," says Rogers.
that grant [about $30,000 over three years], it
to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH
feels grateful to the Society for helping him est
"track record," but he emphasizes that the Age
any effect on his research.
Although MKULTRA psychologist John Git
that Rogers' work on psychotherapy might provid
interrogation methods, the Society did not give
because of the content of his work. The grant
vices as a consultant, if desired, and, according to
ment, "free access" to his project. But above all,
lowed the Agency to use Rogers' name. His
academic community contributed to the layer of cover around
158 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
the Society that Agency officials felt was crucial to mask their
involvement.
Professor Charles Osgood's status in psychology also im-
proved 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 for-
ward 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 co-
vert activities. They believed they could transfer Osgood's
knowledge of "hidden values and cues" in the way people com-
municate 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 partic-
ular 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 cul-
tures. 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 prog-
ress 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." Os-
good had started studying cross-cultural meaning well before
he received the Human Ecology money, but the Society's sup-
port 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
HUMAN ECOLOGY 159
*According to Dr. Carolyn Sherif, who says she and her husband did not share
the Cold War consensus and would never have knowingly taken CIA funds,
Human Ecology executive director James Monroe lied directly about the source
of the Society's money, claiming it came from rich New York doctors and Texas
millionaires who gave it for tax purposes. Monroe used this standard cover
story with other grantees.
760 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
THE GITTINGER
10
ASSESSMENT SYSTEM
colleagues, who all seem to have views of him that range from
great respect to pure idolatry. For all his willingness to share
the PAS, Gittinger was never able to show anyone how to use
the system as skillfully as he did. Not that he did not try; he
simply was a more talented natural assessor than any of the
others. Moreover, his system was full of interrelations and vari-
ables that he instinctively understood but had not bothered to
articulate. As a result, he could look at Wechsler scores and
pick out behavior patterns which would be valid and which no
one else had seen. Even after Agency officials spent a small
fortune trying to computerize the PAS, they found, as one psy-
chologist puts it, the machine "couldn't tie down all the varia-
bles" that Gittinger was carrying around in his head.
Some Human Ecology grantees, like psychiatrist Robert
Hyde, were so impressed with Gittinger's system that they
made the PAS a major part of their own research. Hyde rou-
tinely gave Wechslers to his subjects before plying them with
liquor, as part of the Agency's efforts to find out how people
react to alcohol. In 1957 Hyde moved his research team from
Boston Psychopathic Hospital, where he had been America's
first LSD tripper, to Butler Health Center in Providence. There,
with Agency funds, Hyde built an experimental party room in
the hospital, complete with pinball machine, dartboard, and
bamboo bar stools. From behind a two-way mirror, psycholo-
gists watched the subjects get tipsy and made careful notes on
their reaction to alcohol. Not surprisingly, the observers found
that pure Internalizers became more withdrawn after several
drinks, and that uncompensated Es were more likely to become
garrulous—in essence, sloppy drunks. Thus Gittinger was able
to make generalizations about the different ways an I or an E
responded to alcohol.* Simply by knowing how people scored
on the Wechsler digit-span test, he could predict how they
would react to liquor. Hyde and Harold Abramson at Mount
Sinai Hospital made the same kind of observations for LSD,
finding, among other things, that an E was more likely than an
I to have a bad trip. (Apparently, an I is more accustomed than
*As with most of the descriptions of the PAS made in the book, this is an
oversimplification of a more complicated process. The system, as Gittinger
used it, yielded millions of distinct personality types. His observations on alco-
hol were based on much more than a straight I and E comparison. For the most
complete description of the PAS in the open literature, see the article by Git-
tinger and Winne cited in the chapter notes.
170 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
an E to "being into his own head" and losing touch with exter-
nal reality.)
At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave
the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent
him the scores. He was building a unique data base on all
phases of human behavior, and he needed samples of as many
distinct groups as possible. By getting the scores of actors, he
could make generalizations about what sort of people made
good role-players. Martin Orne at Harvard sent in scores of
hypnosis subjects, so Gittinger could separate the personality
patterns of those who easily went into a trance from those who
could not be hypnotized. Gittinger collected Wechslers of busi-
nessmen, students, high-priced fashion models, doctors, and
just about any other discrete group he could find a way to have
tested. In huge numbers, the Wechslers came flowing in—29,-
000 sets in all by the early 1970s—each one accompanied by
biographic data. With the 10 subtests he used and at least 10
possible scores on each of those, no two Wechsler results in the
whole sample ever looked exactly the same. Gittinger kept a
computer printout of all 29,000 on his desk, and he would fiddle
with them almost every day—looking constantly for new truths
that could be drawn out of them.
John Gittinger was interested in all facets of personality, but
because he worked for the CIA, he emphasized deviant forms.
He particularly sought out Wechslers of people who had re-
jected the values of their society or who had some vice—hidden
or otherwise—that caused others to reject them. By studying
the scores of the defectors who had come over to the West,
Gittinger hoped to identify common characteristics of men
who had become traitors to their governments. If there were
identifiable traits, Agency operators could look for them in pro-
spective spies. Harris Isbell, who ran the MKULTRA drug-test-
ing program at the Lexington, Kentucky detention hospital,
sent in the scores of heroin addicts. Gittinger wanted to know
what to look for in people susceptible to drugs. The Human
Ecology project at Ionia State Hospital in Michigan furnished
Wechslers of sexual psychopaths. These scores showed that
people with uncontrollable urges have different personality
patterns than so-called normals. Gittinger himself journeyed to
the West Coast to test homosexuals, lesbians, and the prosti-
tutes he interviewed under George White's auspices in the San
THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT S YSTEM 171
I had to see if she could sleep with him over a period of time
and not get involved emotionally. Boy, was she tough!" Keehner
noted that he became disgusted with entrapment techniques,
especially after watching a film of an agent in bed with a "re-
cruitment target." He pointed out that Agency case officers,
many of whom "got their jollies" from such work, used a hid-
den camera to get their shots. The sexual technology developed
in the MKULTRA safehouses in New York and San Francisco
had been put to work. The operation worked no better in the
1960s, however, than TSS officials predicted such activities
would a decade earlier. "You don't really recruit agents with
sexual blackmail," Keehner concluded. "That's why I couldn't
even take reading the files after a while. I was sickened at
seeing people take pleasure in other people's inadequacies.
First of all, I thought it was just dumb. For all the money going
out, nothing ever came back."
Keehner became disgusted by the picking-at-scabs aspect of
TSS assessment work. Once the PAS had identified a target as
having potential mental instabilities, staff members some-
times suggested ways to break him down, reasoning that by
using a ratchetlike approach to put him under increased pres-
sure, they might be able to break the lines that tied him to his
country, if not to his sanity. Keehner stated, "I was sent to deal
with the most negative aspects of the human condition. It was
planned destructiveness. First, you'd check to see if you could
destroy a man's marriage. If you could, then that would be
enough to put a lot of stress on the individual, to break him
down. Then you might start a minor rumor campaign against
him. Harass him constantly. Bump his car in traffic. A lot of it
is ridiculous, but it may have a cumulative effect." Agency case
officers might also use this same sort of stress-producing cam-
paign against a particularly effective enemy intelligence
officer whom they knew they could never recruit but whom
they hoped to neutralize.
Most operations—including most recruitments—did not rely
on such nasty methods. The case officer still benefited from the
TSS staffs assessment, but he usually wanted to minimize
stress rather than accentuate it. CIA operators tended to agree
that the best way to recruit an agent was to make the relation-
ship as productive and satisfying as possible for him, operating
from the old adage about catching more flies with honey than
vinegar. "You pick the thing most fearful to him—the things
ercise had anything to do with personality but
"aptitude" test—which it also is. The assessmen
Washington then analyzed the results. As with
graph, the PAS helped tell if the agent were
often delve deeper than surface concepts of tr
The THE GITTINGER
PAS might
ASSESSMENT show
SYSTEM that 175 the agent's motivati
in line with his behavior. In that case, if the
which wouldgreat, the case
cause him thedeception—resulting officer
most doubt," says the source. "If could his expect to run up
erable
greatest fear is that tendencies.
he can't trust you to protect him and his either from espionage
family, youpsychotic
overload
The your
TSS pitchstaff
with yourassessors
ability to do it.sent
Other a report back to the
people need structure,
best way so you tell
to them exactly
deal what
with they will
the new agent and the
need to do.means
If you leave to it open-ended, they'll be him.
exploit scared you'llThey would recommend
ask them to do thingsofficer
case they're incapable shouldof."* treat to spyhim sternly or permis
Soon after the
agent successfulwere recruitment an of a foreigner
Externalizer who needed cons
for the CIA, either a CIA
ionship, the staff member
assessorsor a specially
might trainedsuggest that the case
case officer normally as
spend sat down with the new
much time agent and gave him
with as possible.^ They
him the full
bly battery
recommend of Wechsler
against subtests—a
sending this E process
agent on a that
long mission
took several hours. The tester never mentioned that the ex-
*This source reports that case officers usually used this sort of nonthreatening
approach and switched to the rougher stuff if the target decided he did not want
to spy for the CIA. In that case, says the ex-CIA man, "you don't want the person
to say no and run off and tattle. You lose an asset that way—not in the sense
of the case officer being shot, but by being nullified." The spurned operator
might then offer not to reveal that the target was cheating on his wife or had
had a homosexual affair, in return for the target not disclosing the recruitment
attempt to his own intelligence service.
^While Agency officials might also have used the PAS to select the right case
officer to deal with the E agent—one who would be able to sustain the agent's
need for a close relationship over a long period of time—they almost never used
the system with this degree of precision. An Agency office outside TSS did keep
Wechslers and other test scores on file for most case officers, but the Clandes-
tine Services management was not willing to turn over the selection of Ameri-
can personnel to the psychologists.
176 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
With the PAS, CIA officials had a handy tool for social engineer-
ing. The Gittinger staff found one use for it in the sensitive area
of selecting members of foreign police and intelligence agen-
cies. All over the globe, Agency operators have frequently
maintained intimate working relations with security services
that have consistently mistreated their own citizens. The as-
sessments staff played a key role in choosing members of the
secret police in at least two countries whose human-rights rec-
ords are among the world's worst.
In 1961, according to TSS psychologist John Winne, the CIA
and the Korean government worked together to establish the
newly created Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The
American CIA station in Seoul asked headquarters to send out
an assessor to "select the initial cadre" of the KCIA. Off went
Winne on temporary duty. "I set up an office with two transla-
tors," he recalls, "and used a Korean version of the Wechsler."
The Agency psychologist gave the tests to 25 to 30 police and
military officers and wrote up a half-page report on each, list-
ing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know
about each candidate's "ability to follow orders, creativity, lack
of personality disorders, motivation—why he wanted out of his
current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the
civilians." The test results went to the Korean authorities,
whom Winne believes made the personnel decisions "in con-
junction with our operational people."
"We would do a job like this and never get feedback, so we
were never sure we'd done a good job," Winne complains. Six-
teen years after the end of his mission to Seoul and after news
of KCIA repression at home and bribes to American congress-
men abroad, Winne feels that his best efforts had "boomer-
anged." He states that Tongsun Park was not one of the KCIA
men he tested.
In 1966 CIA staffers, including Gittinger himself, took part in
selecting members of an equally controversial police unit in
Uruguay—the anti-terrorist section that fought the Tupamaro
urban guerrillas. According to John Cassidy, the CIA's deputy
station chief there at the time, Agency operators worked to set
up this special force together with the Agency for International
Development's Public Safety Mission (whose members in-
cluded Dan Mitrione, later kidnapped and killed by the
Tupamaros). The CIA-assisted police claimed they were in a
life-and-death struggle against the guerrillas, and they used
THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM 179
11
HYPNOSIS
*Sears still maintains the fiction that he thought he was dealing only with a
private foundation, the Geschickter Fund, and that he knew nothing of the CIA
involvement in funding his work. Yet a CIA document in his MKULTRA suh-
project says he was "aware of the real purpose" of the project." Moreover, Sid
Gottlieb brought him to Washington in 1954 to demonstrate hypnosis to a select
group of Agency officials.
188 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
ment was never carried out. "I still like to think we were
human beings enough that this was not something we played
with," says Gittinger. Such an experiment could have been per-
formed, as Allen suggested, by friendly police in a country like
Taiwan or Paraguay. CIA men did at least discuss joint work in
hypnosis with a foreign secret service in 1962.* Whether they
went further simply cannot be said.
Assuming the amnesia would hold, the MKULTRA veteran
says the problem was how to trigger it. Perhaps the Russian
phrase meaning "You're under arrest" could be used as a pre-
programmed cue, but what if the police did not use these words
as they captured the collector? Perhaps the physical sensation
of handcuffs being snapped on could do it, but a metal watch-
band could have the same effect. According to the veteran, in
the abstract, the scheme sounded fine, but in practicality, a
foolproof way of triggering the amnesia could not be found.
"You had to accept that when someone is caught, they're going
to tell some things," he says.
MKULTRA officials, including Gittinger, did recommend the
use of hypnosis in operational experiments on at least one occa-
sion. In 1959 an important double agent, operating outside his
homeland, told his Agency case officer that he was afraid to go
home again because he did not think he could withstand the
tough interrogation that his government used on returning
overseas agents. In Washington, the operators approached the
TSS men about using hypnosis, backed up with drugs, to
change the agent's attitude. They hoped they could instill in
him the "ability or the necessary will" to hold up under ques-
tioning.
An MKULTRA official—almost certainly Gittinger—held a
series of meetings over a two-week period with the operators
and wrote that the agent was "a better than average" hypnotic
subject, but that his goal was to get out of intelligence work:
The agent "probably can be motivated to make at least one
return visit to his homeland by application of any one of a
in, you lose control. To the extent you let the agent choose, you
don't have control." He admits that he and his colleagues spent
hours running the arguments on the Manchurian Candidate
back and forth. "Castro was naturally our discussion point," he
declares. "Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they
would go in and get him?" In the end, he states, they decided
there were more reliable ways to kill people. "You can get ex-
actly the same thing from people who are hypnotizable by
many other ways, and you can't get anything out of people who
are not hypnotizable, so it has no use," says Gittinger.
The only real gain in employing a hypnotized killer would be,
in theory, that he would not remember who ordered him to pull
the trigger. Yet, at least in the Castro case, the Cuban leader
already knew who was after him. Moreover, there were plenty
of people around willing to take on the Castro contract. "A
well-trained person could do it without all this mumbo-jumbo,"
says the MKULTRA veteran. By going to the Mafia for hitmen,
CIA officials in any case found killers who had a built-in amne-
sia mechanism that had nothing to do with hypnosis.*
The MKULTRA veteran gives many reasons why he believes
the CIA never actually tried a Manchurian Candidate opera-
tion, but he acknowledges that he does not know.^ If the ulti-
mate experiments were performed, they would have been han-
dled with incredible secrecy. It would seem, however, that the
same kind of reasoning that impelled Sid Gottlieb to recom-
mend testing powerful drugs on unwitting subjects would have
led to experimentation along such lines, if not to create the
Manchurian Candidate itself, on some of the building blocks,
*Referring to this CIA-mob relationship, author Robert Sam Anson has writ-
ten, "It was inevitable: Gentlemen wishing to be killers gravitated to killers
wishing to be gentlemen."
^The veteran admits that none of the arguments he uses against a conditioned
assassin would apply to a programmed "patsy" whom a hypnotist could walk
through a series of seemingly unrelated events—a visit to a store, a conversa-
tion with a mailman, picking a fight at a political rally. The subject would
remember everything that happened to him and be amnesic only for the fact
the hypnotist ordered him to do these things. There would be no gaping incon-
sistency in his life of the sort that can ruin an attempt by a hypnotist to create
a second personality. The purpose of this exercise is to leave a circumstantial
trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular
crime. The weakness might well be that the amnesia would not hold up under
police interrogation, but that would not matter if the police did not believe his
preposterous story about being hypnotized or if he were shot resisting arrest.
Hypnosis expert Milton Kline says he could create a patsy in three months; an
assassin would take him six.
192 SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
IV
CONCLUSIONS
I'm a professional and I just don't talk
about these things. Lots of things are not fit
for the public. This has nothing to do with
democracy. It has to do with common
sense. —GRATION H. YASETEVITCH,
1978
(explaining why he did not want to be
interviewed for this book)
To hope that the power that is being made
available by the behavioral sciences will
be exercised by the scientists, or by a be-
nevolent group, seems to me to be a hope
little supported by either recent or distant
history. It seems far more likely that be-
havioral scientists, holding their present
attitudes, will be in the position of the Ger-
man rocket scientists specializing in
guided missiles. First they worked devot-
edly for Hitler to destroy the USSR and the
United States. Now, depending on who cap-
tured them they work devotedly for the
USSR in the interest of destroying the
United States, or devotedly for the United
States in the interest of destroying the
USSR. If behavioral scientists are con-
cerned solely with advancing their science,
it seems most probable that they will serve
the purpose of whatever group has the
power. —CARL ROGERS, 1961
CHAPTER
12
THE SEARCH
FOR THE TRUTH
Sid Gottlieb was one of many CIA officials who tried to find a
way to assassinate Fidel Castro. Castro survived, of course, and
his victory over the Agency in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs put
the Agency in the headlines for the first time, in a very unfavor-
able light. Among the fiasco's many consequences was Gott-
lieb's loss of the research part of the CIA's behavior-control
programs. Still, he and the others kept trying to kill Castro.
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy re-
portedly vowed to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces. In
the end, he settled for firing Allen Dulles and his top deputies.
To head the Agency, which lost none of its power, Kennedy
brought in John McCone, a defense contractor and former head
of the Atomic Energy Commission. With no operational back-
ground, McCone had a different notion than Dulles of how to
manage the CIA, particularly in the scientific area. "McCone
never felt akin to the covert way of doing things," recalls Ray
Cline, whom the new Director made his Deputy for Intelli-
gence. McCone apparently believed that science should be in
the hands of the scientists, not the clandestine operators, and
he brought in a fellow Californian, an aerospace "whiz kid"
named Albert "Bud" Wheelon to head a new Agency Director-
ate for Science and Technology.
Before then, the Technical Services Staff (TSS), although
located in the Clandestine Services, had been the Agency's larg-
196 CONCLUSIONS
*At 1977 Senate hearings, CIA Director Stansfield Turner summed up some of
MKULTRA's accomplishments over its 11-year existence: The program con-
tracted out work to 80 institutions, which included 44 colleges or universities,
15 research facilities or private companies, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal
institutions. I estimate that MKULTRA cost the taxpayers somewhere in the
neighborhood of $10 million.
198 CONCLUSIONS
*In 1967 a Senate committee chaired by Senator Edward Long was inquiring
into wiretapping by government agencies, including the Narcotics Bureau. The
Commissioner of Narcotics, then Harry Giordano told a senior TSS man—
almost certainly Gottlieb—that if CIA officials were "concerned" about its deal-
ings with the Bureau involving the safehouses coming out during the hearings,
the most "helpful thing" they could do would be to "turn the Long committee
off." How the CIA men reacted to this not very subtle blackmail attempt is
unclear from the documents, but what does come out is that the TSS man and
another top-level CIA officer misled and lied to the top echelon of the Treasury
Department (the Narcotics Bureau's parent organization) about the safehouses
and how they were used.
200 CONCLUSIONS
research program in the building would provide cover for up to three TSS staff
members. Allen Dulles personally approved the contribution and then, to make
sure, he took it to President Eisenhower's special committee to review covert
operations. The committee also gave its assent, with the understanding that
Geschickter could provide "a reasonable expectation" that the Agency would
indeed have use of the space he promised. He obviously did, because the CIA
money was forthcoming. (This, incidentally, was the only time in a whole
quarter-century of Agency behavior-control activities when the documents
show that CIA officials went to the White House for approval of anything. The
Church committee found no evidence that either the executive branch or Con-
gress was informed of the programs.)
*In 1967, after Ramparts magazine exposed secret CIA funding of the National
Student Association and numerous nonprofit organizations, President Johnson
forbade CIA support of foundations or educational institutions. Inside the
Agency there was no notion that this order meant ending relationships, such
as the one with Geschickter. In his case, the agile CIA men simply transferred
the funding from the foundation to a private company, of which his son was
the secretary-treasurer.
204 CONCLUSIONS
*Lying to Congress followed the pattern of lying to the press that some MKUL-
TRA veterans adopted after the first revelations came out. For example, former
Human Ecology Society director James Monroe told The New York Times on
August 2, 1977 that "only about 25 to 30 percent" of the Society's budget came
from the CIA—a statement he knew to be false since the actual figure was well
over 90 percent. His untruth allowed some other grantees to claim that their
particular project was funded out of the non-Agency part of the Society.
208 CONCLUSIONS
Another six months later, TSS officials had found a use for
electric stimulation: this time putting electrodes in the brains
of cold-blooded animals—presumably reptiles. While much of
the experimentation with dogs and cats was to find a way of
wiring the animal and then directing it by remote control into,
say, the office of the Soviet ambassador, this cold-blooded pro-
ject was designed instead for the delivery of chemical and bio-
logical agents or for "executive action-type operations," ac-
cording to a document. "Executive action" was the CIA's
euphemism for assassination.
With the brain electrode technology at this level, Steve Al-
drich and ORD took over the research function from TSS. What
the ORD men found cannot be said, but the open literature
would indicate that the field progressed considerably during
the 1960s. Can the human brain be wired and controlled by a
big enough computer? Aldrich certainly tried to find out.
Creating amnesia remained a "big goal" for the ORD re-
searcher, states an ex-CIA man. Advances in brain surgery,
such as the development of three-dimensional, "stereotaxic"
techniques, made psychosurgery a much simpler matter and
created the possibility that a precisely placed electrode probe
could be used to cut the link between past memory and present
recall. As for subjects to be used in behavioral experiments of
this sort, the ex-CIA man states that ORD had access to prison-
ers in at least one American penal institution. A former Army
doctor stationed at the Edgewood chemical laboratory states
that the lab worked with CIA men to develop a drug that could
be used to help program in new memories into the mind of an
amnesic subject. How far did the Agency take this research? I
don't know.
The men from ORD tried to create their own latter-day ver-
sion of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
Located outside Boston, it was called the Scientific Engineering
Institute, and Agency officials had set it up originally in 1956 as
a proprietary company to do research on radar and other tech-
nical matters that had nothing to do with human behavior. Its
president, who says he was a "figurehead," was Dr. Edwin
Land, the founder of Polaroid. In the early 1960s, ORD officials
decided to bring it into the behavioral field and built a new
wing to the Institute's modernistic building for the "life
sciences." They hired a group of behavioral and medical scien-
tists who were allowed to carry on their own independent re-
THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH 211
CHAPTER 1
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 Investiga-
tions 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 Medi-
cal 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 tne 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 Alex-
ander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke (New York: H. Schuman, 1949),
interviews with prosecution team members Telford Taylor, Leo Alex-
ander, 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 inter-
views 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
216 NOTES
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 inter-
views with his son Richard, a perusal of his remaining papers, inter-
views with George Kistiakowsky and several OSS veterans, and from
"Science in World War II, the Office of Scientific Research and Devel-
opment" 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. Mur-
ray'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 col-
leagues, and Dr. Milton Kline.
CHAPTER 2
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 (trans-
mittal 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 Octo-
ber 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) pro-
vided useful background.
NOTES 217
CHAPTER 3
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 Septem-
ber 1952, Subject: Field Trip of ARTICHOKE team, 20 August-Septem-
ber 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, Sub-
ject: 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 consider-
able background on Wendt's Rochester testing program was found in
the Rochester Times-Union, January 28, 1955. The CIA quote on her-
oin 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 Janu-
ary 1952 memo, Subject: BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE, Proposed Re-
search; 7 March 1951, Subject: Informal Discussion with Chief [de-
leted] Regarding "Disposal"; 1 May 1951, Subject: Recommendation
for Disposal of Maximum Custody Defectors; and # A/B, I, 75/13, un-
dated, 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.
CHAPTER 4
The description of Robert Hyde's first trip came from interviews with
Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Dr. J. Herbert DeShon, and a talk by Max Rin-
218 NOTES
CHAPTER 5
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 Inves-
tigation 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 Assassi-
nation Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," pp. 20-21. The Church com-
mittee 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
220 NOTES
CHAPTER 6
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,
"dry-runs" 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 inter-
viewed William Hawkins and provided assistance on the details of
the San Francisco safehouse and George White's background. Addi-
tional information on White came from interviews with his widow,
NOTES 221
CHAPTER 7
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 Decem-
ber 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 mush-
room-growing capital was described in Document [number illegible],
25 June 1953, Subject: Trip to Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania. The fail-
ure 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 Au-
gust 1956, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 51-B; 52-94, 20 February
1963, Subject: (BB) Chemical and Physical Manipulants; 52-19, 20 De-
cember 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—Nar-
cotic 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 docu-
ment # 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-pro-
duced in four copies and called Psychedelic Theory: Working Papers
from the Harvard IFIFPsychedelic 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 Greg-
ory Bateson came from the proceedings of a conference on LSD spon-
NOTES 223
sored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation on April 22, 23, and 24, 1959,
pp. 8-22.
CHAPTER 8
Edward Hunter's article " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into
Ranks of Communist Party" appeared in the Miami News on Septem-
ber 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 Re-
garding 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 Wolffs study on brainwashing appeared in clas-
sified form on 2 April 1956 as a Technical Services Division publica-
tion called Communist Control Techniques and in substantially the
same form but unclassified as "Communist Interrogation and Indoc-
trination of 'Enemies of the State'—An Analysis of Methods Used by
the Communist State Police." AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychi-
atry, August, 1956, Vol. 76.
Allen Dulles spoke on "Brain Warfare" before the Alumni Confer-
ence 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. JohnCavanagh of Washington, D.C. provided background on
224 NOTES
CHAPTER 9
MKULTRA subprojects 48 and 60 provided the basic documents on the
Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. These were supple-
mented by the three biennial reports of the Society that could be
found: 1957,1961, and 1961-1963. WoLTs own research work is MKUL-
TRA subproject 61. Wolffs proposals to the Agency are in #A/B, II,
NOTES 225
The quote from John Gittinger came from an interview with him
conducted by Dr. Patricia Greenfield. Dr. Greenfield also interviewed
Jay Schulman, Carl Rogers, and Charles Osgood for an article in the
December 1977 issue of the American Psychological Association Mon-
itor, from which my quotes of Schulman's comments are taken. She
discussed Erving Goffman's role in a presentation to a panel of the
American Psychological Association convention in Toronto in August
1978. The talk was titled "CIA Support of Basic Research in Psychol-
ogy: Policy Implications."
CHAPTER 10
The material on the Gittinger Personality Assessment System (PAS)
comes from "An Introduction to the Personality Assessment System"
by John Winne and John Gittinger, Monograph Supplement No. 38,
Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc. 1973; an interview with John
Winne; interviews with three other former CIA psychologists; 1974
interviews with John Gittinger by the author; and an extended inter-
view with Gittinger by Dr. Patricia Greenfield, Associate Professor of
Psychology at UCLA. Some of the material was used first in a Rolling
Stone article, July 18, 1974, "The CIA Won't Quite Go Public." Robert
Hyde's alcohol research at Butler Health Center was MKULTRA Sub-
project 66. See especially 66-17, 27 August, 1958. Subject: Proposed
Alcohol Study—1958-1959 and 66-5. undated, Subject: Equipment-
Ecology Laboratory.
The 1963 Inspector General's report on TSS, as first released under
the Freedom of Information Act, did not include the section on person-
ality assessment quoted from in the chapter. An undated, untitled
document, which was obviously this section, was made available in
one of the CIA's last releases.
MKULTRA subproject 83 dealt with graphology research, as did
part of Subproject 60, which covered the whole Human Ecology Soci-
ety. See especially 83-7, December 11, 1959, Subject: [deleted] Grapho-
logical Review and 60-28, undated, Subject [deleted] Activities Report,
May, 1959-April, 1960.
Information on the psychological profile of Ferdinand Marcos came
from a U.S. Government source who had read it. Information on the
profile of the Shah of Iran came from a column by Jack Anderson and
Les Whitten "CIA Study Finds Shah Insecure," Washington Post, July
11, 1975.
The quotes from James Keehner came from an article in New Times
by Maureen Orth, "Memoirs of a CIA Psychologist," June 25, 1975.
For related reports on the CIA's role in training foreign police and
its activities in Uruguay, see an article by Taylor Branch and John
NOTES 227
Marks, "Tracking the CIA," Harper's Weekly, January 25, 1975 and
Philip Agee's book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London: Penguin;
1975).
The quote from Martin Orne was taken from Patricia Greenfield's
APA Monitor article cited in the last chapter's notes.
Gittinger's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelli-
gence and the Kennedy subcommittee on August 3, 1977 appeared on
pages 50-63. David Rhodes' testimony on Gittinger's role in the abort-
ive San Francisco LSD spraying appeared in hearings before the
Kennedy subcommittee, September 20, 1977, pp. 100-110.
CHAPTER 11
Morse Allen's training in hypnosis was described in Document # A/B,
V, 28/1, 9 July 1951, Subject [Deleted]. His hypnosis experiments in the
office are described in a long series of memos. See especially # A/B, III,
2/18, 10 February 1954, Hypnotic Experimentation and Research and
#A/B, II, 10/71, 19 August 1954, Subject: Operational/Security [de-
leted] and unnumbered document, 5 May 1955, Subject: Hypnotism
and Covert Operations.
The quote on U.S. prisoners passing through Manchuria came from
document # 19, 18 June 1953, ARTICHOKE Conference.
Alden Sears' hypnosis work was the subject of MKULTRA sub-
projects 5, 25, 29, and 49. See especially 49-28, undated, Proposal for
Research in Hypnosis at the [deleted], June 1, 1956 to May 31, 1957,
49-34, undated, Proposals for Research in Hypnosis at the [deleted],
June 1, 1956 to May 31, 1957; 5-11, 28 May 1953, Project MKULTRA,
Subproject 5 and 5-13, 20 April 1954, Subject: [deleted]. See also Patrick
Osier's article in the Chicago Sun-Times, September 4, 1977, "How
CIA 'Hid' Hypnosis Research."
General background on hypnosis came from interviews with Alden
Sears, Martin Orne, Milton Kline, Ernest Hilgard, Herbert Spiegel,
William Kroger, Jack Tracktir, John Watkins, and Harold Crasilneck.
See Orne's chapter on hypnosis in The Manipulation of Human Be-
havior, edited by Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer (New York:
John Wiley & Sons; 1961), pp. 169-215.
The contemplated use of hypnosis in an operation involving a for-
eign intelligence service is referred to in the Affidavit by Eloise R.
Page, in the case John D. Marks v. Central Intelligence Agency et al.
Civil Action no. 76-2073.
The 1959 proposed use of hypnosis that was approved by TSS is
described in documents #433, 21 August 1959, Possible Use of Drugs
and Hypnosis in [deleted] Operational Case; #434, 27 August 1959,
Comments on [deleted]; and #435, 15 September 1959, Possible Use of
228 NOTES
CHAPTER 12
The reorganization of TSS was described in document #59, 26 July
1963, Report of the Inspection of MKULTRA and in interviews with
Ray Cline, Herbert Scoville, and several other former CIA officials.
Richard Helms' recommendations for a new MKULTRA charter
were described in document #450, 9 June, 1964, Sensitive Research
Programs (MKULTRA).
Admiral Stansfield Turner's statement on the MKULTRA program
was made before a joint session of the Kennedy subcommittee and the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, August 3, 1977, pp. 4-8.
MKSEARCH programs and their origins in MKULTRA are de-
scribed in documents #449, 8 April 1964, Revision of Project MKUL-
TRA and #S-l-7, untitled, undated.
Dr. Edward Bennett's work is the subject of MKULTRA subprojects
104 and 143. See especially 143-23,11 December 1962, Subject: MKUL-
TRA Subproject 143. Other information* on the CIA's economic sabo-
tage program against Cuba came from interviews with Major General
Edward Lansdale, Ray Cline, William Colby, Lincoln Gordon, Covey
Oliver, Charles Meyer, Richard Goodwin, Roger Morris, several for-
mer CIA and State Department officials, and Cuban government offi-
cials.
The continued safehouse operation is MKSEARCH subproject 4. See
especially S-12-1, bank statements and receipts of safehouse. The
CIA's dealings with the Treasury Department over the Long commit-
tee's investigations of wiretaps are detailed in documents #451, 30
January 1967, A Report on a Series of Meetings with Department of the
Treasury officials and #452, undated, Meeting with Department of
Treasury Official.
The biological laboratory is the subject of MKULTRA subprojects 78
and 110 and MKSEARCH 2. See especially Documents 78-28, Septem-
ber 28, 1962, Subject: PM Support and Biological [deleted] and S-5-6, 8
September 1965, Subject: Hiring by Chief TSD/BB of [deleted], Former
Staff Employee in a Consultant Capacity on an Agency Contract. The
costs of the Fort Detrick operations came from p. 18 and p. 204 of the
NOTES 229
106 and 142. See especially 106-1, undated, Subject: Proposal; 142-14,
22 May 1962, Subject: Project MKULTRA, Subproject No. 142; and
document #76 (MKDELTA release), 21 April 1961, Subject: "Guided
Animal" Studies.
The list of parapsychology goals was taken from an excellent article
by John Wilhelm in the August 2, 1977 Washington Post: "Psychic
Spying?"
Project OFTEN information was taken from document #455,6 May
1974, Subject: Project OFTEN and Memorandum for the Secretary of
Defense from Deanne P. Siemer, September 20, 1977, Subject: Ex-
perimentation Programs Conducted by the Department of Defense
That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the
Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-con-
trol or Behavior-modification Purposes.
The quote from B. F. Skinner was taken from Peter Schrag's book,
Mind Control (New York: Pantheon, 1978) p. 10.
INDEX
China
credited with brainwashing, 125-
126,131,150
use of drugs in, 130
political re-education programs
in, 128-130
Chondodendron toxicoferum 203
Church, Sen. Frank, 206
Committee. See U.S. Senate
Circumcision, effect on Turkish
boys, 159
City College (College of the City of
NewYork,CCNY),56
Civil Service Commission, 23
Clandestine Services, 74-76
Health Alteration Committee, 76n
Clark, Lincoln, 119n
Claudius, 106
Cleghorn, Dr. Robert, 140
Cline, Ray, 28, 56, 176, 198n
Cocaine, 57n
Cohen, Sidney, ix, 119n
Cointreau, 77
Colby, William, 76, 176,198n
Cold War, viii, 9, 11, 125, 128, 148
hysteria, 27
influence on mind-control
experiments, 26-27, 57
use of hypnotism in, 182
Colgate University, 19
College Board exams, 168
Columbia College, 12
Law School, 12
University, 59
Commissioner of Narcotics, 36
Conant, James, 14
Condon, Richard, 9n, 192
Congo, 17,75
Conklin, M. J., ix
Cook, William Boyd, 115n
Cooper, Gary, 34
Cornell University, 13, 127
Medical School, 33, 127-128,
147-153, 154-156
patients used in experiments, 149
Cortez, 107
Corynanthine, 61
Counter-intelligence, 48
"Cover grants," 158
Cuba, 197, 198
missile crisis, 164
Cummins, Ken, viii
Cunningham, Hugh, 28
Curandera (shaman), 112, 115n,
117
Curare, 109, 139
Dachau, 4-6,8-11
Day of the Dolphin, The, 144
"Dead drops," 187
Death in the Mind, 20
Deep Creek Lodge, Md., 73-74, 79
deFlorez, Adm. Luis, 84
Del Gracio, August, 6-7, 88, 93
Delaney, Hannah, viii
Democrat and Chronicle
(Rochester, N.Y.),36n
Department of the Army, 205
"Depatterning," viii, 133-136, 214
DeShon, H. Jackson, 54, 60
Destruction of memory, 212
Dewey, Gov. Thomas, 7n, 90, 93
Dexamyl, 38
Dexedrine, 38, 39, 40, 42
Diarrhea inducers, 99
"Differential amnesia," 133
Dille, James, 67n
Dishwashers, 165-166
D-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)
CIA experiments with, 61-73,
119-122,169,180
accidental, 70-72
CIA funding of research, 58-59
CIA interest peak, 55-58
CIA testing, 73-86, 87-97, 99-104,
105, 154-155, 164
Corynanthine as possible
antidote, 61
discovery of, 3-4, 8-9
effects on Siamese fighting fish
and snails documented, 61
fear of Russian possession, 65
importation to U.S., 54
Kauders' lecture on in Boston, 53
Lilly manufacture of, 66-67
Military services' interest, 59
National Institute of Mental
Health interest, 59
paranoia from, 54
Pfeiffer's test with, 201
practical joke with, 77, 86
dose to Dr. Frank Olson called
"therapeutic," 83
radioactive marker for, 118
reaction of schizophrenics to, 60
scientists' reports published, 61
studies at Lexington Federal drug
hospital, 62-64
use in covert operations, 61
DMT, 110
Dolphins, 144
Donovan, Gen. William "Wild Bill,"
12-18,27, 171
INDEX 235
Doors of Perception, The, 117 Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 7, 36,
Drugs 88,89-90,91, 92-93, 199
CIA use of, 21-33, 34-44, and Dangerous Drugs, 119-120
memory destroying, 41 Feldman, Ira "Ike," 94, 98
testing, 180 Fiore, Nick, viii
Drum, James "Trapper," 83-84 Flagrante delicto, 92
Dulles, Allen, 27, 48, 56-57, 66-67, "Flexible" (F), 166-167
72, 82, 84,87, 127, 131, Flowers, Eddie, 63-64
147-148, 156, 186, 195, 203n Foothills College, 7n
Food and Drug Administration,
Eagleton, Thomas, 103 67-68, 201
Earman, John, 98, 100 Ford, Pres. Gerald, 85n-86n, 205
Edgewood Arsenal (Md.), 74n Forest Hills, Queens, N.Y., 155
chemical laboratory, 210 Fort Detrick, Md., 57, 73-79, 85,
Educational Testing Service, 168 199-200
Edwards, Sheffield, 221 Frankenstein, Dr. 9, 121
EEC tests, 26, 168 Freedom and Dignity, 160
Ehrlichman, John, 172 Freedom of Information Act, vii-viii,
Einstein, Albert, 8, 9 7n, 188n, 200,206, 212
Eisenhower, Pres. Dwight D., 14, Fremont-Smith, Frank, 120
203n Fried, Frank, Shriver, Harris and
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The, 121 Kampelman (law firm), viii
Electric stimulation, 212
Electrodes Gallagher, John, ix
experiments with, 142-143,210 "Gang that Couldn't Spray Straight,"
"Electro-sleep" machine 100n,180, 208
danger of temporary brain Gardner, John, 18
damage, 25 Gaynor, Paul, 25, 38
Electroshock, 133, 134, 140, 145, Georgetown University Hospital, 202
202,214 Germ warfare, 125-126
amnesia from, 25 Geschickter, Dr. Charles, 59, 155n,
battery driven, 26 202, 207
continued treatments, 25-26 Geschickter Fund for Medical
EEC tests to determine effects, 26 Research, 59, 110, 114, 118,
"excruciating pain," 25 155n, 187n, 202-203
in CIA behavioral research, 164 Gestapo, 4, 19
"Page-Russell" method, 135 Gibbons, Willis, 57, 83-84
Reiter machine, 25 Ginsberg, Allen, 120-121
sleep-, 135 Giordano, Harry, 199n
Ellsberg, Daniel, 172-173 Gittinger, John, ix, 18, 20, 94, 100,
Emory University, 201 130, 157, 160, 186, 187, 188,
Epidemics, 77 190, 191
Ergot, 4, 66, 105 Personality Assessment System
Estabrooks, George "Esty," 19-20 (PAS), 164-181,196-197
"Executive action," 210 "God's Flesh," 107-111, 112, 114, 115
Explorations of Personality, 17 See also Teonanactl
EXPLOSIVE, 41-42 Goethe, Johann von, 179
Explosive seashells, 55 Goffman, Erwin, 160
"Externalizer" (E), 166-167,168, Goldwater, Sen. Barry, 207
169, 172, 175-176 Goodwin, Richard, 198n
Eysenck, H. J., 159-160 "Goofball." See Dexamyl
Goldstein, Bonnie, ix
False papers, 55 Goring, Hermann, 10
Faust, 179 Gottlieb, Dr. Sidney, 17, 20, 55-72,
Federal Bureau of Investigation 73-75, 97-98, 100-103, 108,
(FBI),8,30 110, 115,151-162,167,186-
236 INDEX
Kennedy, Sen. Edward, 93n, lOOn, McGill University, 132, 138, 159
180, 206-208 psychology department, 137
Kennedy, Pres. John F., 14, 100, 145, Macy, Josiah J., Foundation, 59,
195, 198n 64-65, 118, 120-121
Kesey, Ken, 120-121 McQuown, Judith H., ix
KGB, 96, 129, 145-146 Madeleine, 136
Khrushchev, Nikita, 161, 164 Mafia, 7, 22, 74
King, J. C., 203 CIA-Mafia assassination plots,
Kirkpatrick, Gen. Lyman, 82-83, 85, 100, 191
lOOn,102n Magnusson, Paul, ix
Kistiakowsky, Dr. George, 14 Malott, Deane W., 127
Klee, Gerald, 67n Manchuria, Japanese use of biologi-
Kleiner, Elsa, ix cal warfare in, 77n
Kleiner, Fred, ix Manchurian Candidate
Kline, Milton, ix, 187, 191n, 195 defined, 9, 9n
Knockout drops, 89, 93 hypnosis to create, 183, 186-187,
Kohan, Jeff, ix 189,191
Korean Central Intelligence Agency Mandala, Tibetan, 121
(KCIA), 178, 179-180 Manhattan Project, 109, 131
Korean War, 23, 26, 28, 34, 43, 57, involvement with OSS drug
125-127 experiments, 6-8, 88
Kubie, Dr. Lawrence, 19 MaoTse-tung, 130
Marchetti, Victor, 189
Langer, Walter, ix, 15-16, 15-16n, Marcos, Ferdinand, 172n
18, 171 Maria Sabina, 112-114, 115n
Langer, William, 15 Marijuana, 6-8, 38, 40, 42, 88, 91,
Land, Dr. Edwin, 210 154
Lashbrook, Robert, 74, 79-83, 85-86, "Mexican grown" in Project
93, 207 CHATTER, 36
Latham, Aaron, 189 Marin County, 99, 208
Lauren G., 131-135 Marines, 24
Leary, Timothy, 105, 117-118, 122 Marrazzi, Amedeo, 67n
Lee, Marty, ix Marx, C., 138-139
Lenzner, Terry, 63n Marx, Karl, 130
LeRosey, 13 Massachusetts General Hospital,
Lesbians, 170 67n,119n
Levittown, L.I.,N.Y., 158 Massachusetts Mental Health
Lexington, Kentucky, Federal drug Center, 53n
hospital, 62-64, 89,116,170 Mata Hari, 96
Life magazine, 116-117, 118 Mead, Margaret, 65, 120,159
Lifton, Robert Jay, 128n Me and Juliet, 81
Lilly, Eli & Company, 66-68 Medicine, 147
Lilly, Dr. John, ix, 62, 142-144, 209 Menninger, Karl, 19
Lipscomb, Tom, ix Menninger, William, 19
"Lisetin," 109 Menopause, 139
Long, Sen. Edward, 199n Mescaline, 4-6, 11, 58, 106, 111
Lovell, Stanley, 13-17, 55, 75, 88, 200 forced injections of derivatives,
LSD. See D-lysergic acid diethyla- 67n
mide Messelson, Matthew, ix
Luciano, Charles "Lucky," 7n, 88, 93 Miami News, 125
Lumumba, Patrice, 17, 75 "Microbioinoculator, non-
Luther, 79 discernible," 77
Microphones, 92, 94
McCarthy, Sen. Joseph, 26, 69 Microwaves, 212
McCone, John, 100-101, 195, 196, Migraine headaches, 127, 148
198n,209 Mills, Bill, ix
238 INDEX