07.01.12
Posted in Uncategorized
at 1:19 pm
by nemo
We had a number of discussions of MKUlTRA a while back, here and at Darwiniana. Here’s some good data from Lane’s book (he is the author of the classic Russ to Judgment)
Check out his most recent book
From Mark Lane’s The Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the murder of JFK
MKULTRA
The CIA’s Dark Secrets
129
During the war in Vietnam, while politicians and other experts in
this country were assuring us that American prisoners of war were
being uniquely mistreated, a CIA program was taking place in a prison
close to Saigon. It was devised and operated by a group of American
psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. During the
summer of 1968, at the Bien Hoa Prison, these men were involved in
experiments to force Vietnamese prisoners of war, who were suspects
not proven to be enemies, to reveal information that they may have
possessed. The prisoners, although tortured, did not respond adequately
either because they had no information or because they refused to
cooperate with those who were inflicting pain upon them. The CIA
psychologists then utilized massive doses of LSD, causing serious and
permanent damage but still not obtaining the results that were sought.
footnote
129.It is never pleasant to learn about the depravity of your fellow countrymen.
When the practice is organized, continued, and authorized at high levels of
government, it is necessary that we examine the facts and take steps to prevent
a reoccurrence. Our nation is indebted to John Marks for his scholarship
and courage in uncovering the CIA outrages referred to as MKULTRA. His
book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” sets forth many of the details.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, authors of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs
and the Press, have also contributed to our knowledge. (Senators Frank Church
and the Select Committee on Intelligence and Senator Edward Kennedy with
his Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research properly met the political
challenges.) This chapter has drawn many of the relevant facts from those efforts
————————-
>>page2>> Then the furious professionals engaged in techniques that
rivaled in barbarity if not in scope the work of the scientists who had
conducted experiments at concentration camps under Nazi auspices.
Prisoners were operated upon, and portions of their skulls were cut
away and their brains exposed. The scientists then implanted electrodes
into various portions of their brains.
The prisoners were then moved to a room where knives were
available. The CIA psychologists operated the electrodes while watching
the prisoners to see what effect their manipulations of the electrodes
had upon their subjects. The psychologists were hoping that they might
be able to force the prisoners to attack each other. They continued
this activity until it became apparent that they could not secure the
response that they were seeking. When it was clear that the effort had
failed, the electrodes were removed, the prisoners were then executed
and the CIA burned the bodies of their victims, likely so that no proof
of their conduct might exist. The experiments were part of the CIA’s
MKULTRA program.
In 1946, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, designed and began
to implement Operation Paperclip, a program to bring at least 1,000
former Nazi scientists to the United States, including doctors from
Dachau who had observed prisoners while they froze to death in
tubs of ice water, and chemical weapons engineers who had tested
poisonous gases on prisoners. Operation Paperclip then gave birth to
Project BLUEBIRD in 1950. Operation Bluebird focused on hypnosis,
using North Korean prisoners of war as their test subjects, giving them
high doses of amphetamines and barbiturates to see if it was possible
to hypnotize them into doing things against their wills. This dubious
pedigree of the willful use of human beings as guinea pigs led to
Dulles’s creation of MKULTRA, a program dedicated to researching
differing methods of mental manipulation and their effects on human
subjects. The U.S. Army inspector general described it as “concerned
with the research and development of chemical, biological, and
radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations
to control human behavior.l’P” Under the auspices of MKULTRA,
psychiatrists and other researchers used methods such as sensory
deprivation, electroshock therapy and psychotropic drugs. Lysergic
130.Memorandum from the CIA Inspector General to the Director, 7/26/63.
RETAIN?
acid diethylamide, or LSD-25, was the one most commonly used, often
on unwitting human beings. The rationalization of these unorthodox
and illegal methods to research mind control was to both create agents
whose actions could be controlled by outside forces, and to find ways
to make enemy agents divulge their secrets.
The man the CIA placed in charge of MKULTRA was Sidney
Gottlieb. Gottlieb was a chemist with a clubfoot and a stammer. He
was dedicated to research, and was responsible for dosing people with
LSD without their consent or even knowledge and devising poisons
specifically designed to assassinate undesirable heads of state, that is
those who did not share his ethical values. Gottlieb also was behind CIA
experiments involving implanting electrodes into the exposed brains
of subjects for the purposes of either controlling them or for simple
observation. Gottlieb, who received his PhD from the California Institute
of Technology, was chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical
Services Staff (TSS) in the early fifties, and later the Technical Services
Division (TSD). It has been speculated that the initials MK, used to
identify several CIA clandestine programs, come from the German Mind
Kontrolle, leading back to experiments performed in Nazi Concentration
Camps by the very scientists recruited through Operation Paperclip. The
etymology mayor may not be accurate, but the similarities exist.
Richard Helms, who was then the assistant deputy director for
plans for the CIA, known in the agency as the Dirty Tricks Department,
wrote the original proposal for MKULTRA in a memorandum to CIA
Director Allen Dulles in 1953. In it he outlined a program of:
research to develop a capability in the covert use of biological
and chemical materials. This area involves the production of
various physiological conditions which could support present
or future clandestine operations. Aside from the offensive
potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in
this field of covert chemical and biological warfare 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.
Mter even a cursory study of what Gottlieb and his confederates
unleashed on their subjects, it is difficult to imagine how much more
unrestrained our “foes” might be.
President Richard Nixon announced in 1972 that Helms would
be leaving his post at the CIA to become the ambassador to Iran.
Gottlieb decided to resign at the same time; he and Helms would leave
together. The fact that we have any information at all on MKULTRA
was a mistake. In 1972, Gottlieb, who remained head of the TSS, and
Helms, who had begome the director of the CIA in 1966, ordered
all material related to MKULTRA destroyed. All of the documentary
information we now possess regarding MKULTRA comes from seven
boxes of financial records found in the Retired Records Center of the
CIA, located outside of Washington, nc., that had escaped the purge.
Nixon replaced Richard Helms with James Schlesinger. Schlesinger,
who took the position in 1973, remained head of the CIA for a very
short time. While he was there, however, Schlesinger made some
unexpected decisions. He felt that the covert operations part of the
agency was too powerful and sent out a directive to all CIA employees:
I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to
report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or
might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to
be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct
every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on
any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-
employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information
should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me
about “activities outside the CIA’s charter.
This directive brought forth some startling information, resulting
in the creation of the Rockefeller Commission and the United States
Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, or the
Church Committee.
In 1977, the seven boxes were found as a result of a Freedom
of Information Act application filed by John Marks. Senator Edward
Kennedy and his Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research
joined forces with Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence to
investigate the dark corners of the CIA. The material that follows is the
result of those studies, as well as interviews by John Marks, published in
his book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate. JJ
In his 1953 proposal, Helms devised a covert method of funding
for MKULTRA, recognizing that the program would be unacceptable
for the American public. In a 1963 report, the Inspector General of the
Army, J. S. Earman, showed some discomfort with the nature of the
program:
a. Research in the manipulation of human behavior is
considered by many authorities in medicine and related
fields to be professionally unethical, therefore the reputation
of professional participants in the MKULTRA program
are on occasion in jeopardy.
b. Some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality
implicit in the original charter.
c. A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places
the rights and interests of U. S. citizens in jeopardy.
d. Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity
could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public
opinion as well as stimulate offensive and defensive action
in this field on the part of foreign intelligence services.
But in the early 1950s, no one was trying to temper the program,
or its multiple goals. One early document stated:
A portion of the Research and Development Program of
TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the
following materials and methods:
1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and
impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be
discredited in public.
2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and
perception.
3. Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating
effect of alcohol.
4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of
alcohol.
5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of
recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be
used for malingering, etc.
6. Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis
easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals
to withstand privation, torture and coercion during
interrogation and so-called “brain-washing.”
physical methods which will produce
amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over
extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as
paralysis of the ~egs, acute anemia, etc.
10. Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no
subsequent let-down.
11. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way
that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent
upon another person is enhanced.
12. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a
type that the individual under its influence will find it
difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
13. Substances which will lower the ambition and general
working efficiency of men when administered in
undetectable amounts.
14. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the
eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent
effects.
15. A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered
in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, ete., which will be
safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable
for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
16. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by
the above routes and which in very small amounts will
make it impossible for a man to perform any physical
activity whatsoever.
LSD fit the bill for many of these criteria, and as such became
the focus of much of the experimentation. The CIA had heard of
large doses of LSD that were available from the Sandoz Corporation
and made arrangements to procure it. The CIA then began a strange
relationship with the drug. According to the Church Committee
report, “projects involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to
unwitting nonvolunteer subjects ‘at all social levels, high and low, native
American and foreign’ were common.” Other sources reveal that many
of the “unwitting subjects” were other CIA agents, to the point where
spiked drinks were used regularly.
”
Dr. Frank Olson was a high-ranking and respected scientist with
the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Army Biological
Center at Camp Detrick, Maryland, where the army “assisted the CIA
in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery
systems for use against humans as well as against animals and crops/’P’
Olson, who had been the interim head of the SOD, specialized in the
delivery of biochemical weaponry through the air and through water
systems. He was one of three scientists from the SOD who were given
LSD at a conference at an isolated resort in Maryland in November
1953.Also at the conference were three scientists from theTSS,including
Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook. It was Lashbrook who
surreptitiously doctored Olson’s drink with LSD. Olson reacted very
badly. Before the conference everyone, including Robert Lashbrook,
agreed that Olson was a pleasant and absolutely normal man who was
devoted to his family and enjoyed a penchant for practical jokes. Mter
the conference Olson fell into a depression. He became paranoid and was
afraid to go home to his family for Thanksgiving because he was afraid
he would hurt his children. His colleagues from the agency took him
to see Dr. Harold Abramson in New York for treatment. Dr. Abramson
was not a psychiatrist; he was an immunologist with no training in
psychiatry. What he did have was an interest in how the brain works, and
funding from the CIA to experiment with LSD. Gottlieb and Lashbrook
thought he might be useful, as well as discreet. Eight days after taking
the drug, while Olson was in New York, ostensibly under treatment
from Abramson, Olson crashed through the glass of his tenth floor hotel
window and fell to his death. His death was ruled a suicide.
The CIA immediately made efforts to make sure Olson’s family
received death benefits in the form of a pension. Twenty-two years later
after the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations, headed by Senator Frank Church, discovered the real nature
of Dr. Olson’s death, an act of Congress granted the family $750,000.
Olson’s son had his father’s body exhumed in 1994, after his
mother’s death.At thtlt time, forensic studies found that Olson had been
knocked unconscious before he went through the window. Olson’s
son still firmly believes that his father was killed because Dr. Olson
was sickened by the work the SOD was doing for the CIA and was
thinking of exposing them. He sought to have U.S. attorneys bring an
action, but they declined to pursue the matter.
James Stanley was able to bring a case against the CIA. Stanley was
an army sergeant who was a volunteer in an LSD drug trial in 1958,
although he was unaware of the nature of the drug given to •him. He
became uncontrollably violent. He was unable to work and his family
life was irrevocably damaged. When he was asked to participate in a
follow-up study, he discovered that he had been given LSD, and he
filed a lawsuit against the United States. His case was dismissed in a 5-4
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The 1987 decision upheld the
“Feres Doctrine” that states:
“The United States is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act
for injuries to members of the armed forces sustained while on active
duty and not on furlough and resulting from the negligence of others
in the armed forces.”
Both Justice William Brennan and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
referred to the Nuremberg Code in their dissents in United States v.
Stanley. Brennan wrote:
The United States MilitaryTribunal established the Nuremberg
Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists
who experimented with human subjects. Its first principle
was:
“1. The voluntary consent if the human subject is absolutely
essential. JJ
Brennan continued:
In the 1950′s, in defiance of this principle, military intelligence
agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began
surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials,
including LSD.
Mark Lane • 263
O’Connor also recalled Nuremberg:
No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the
involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged
to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan
observes, the United States military played an instrumental
role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who
experimented with human subjects during the Second World
War, post, at 687, and the standards that the Nuremberg
Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the
defendants stated that the “voluntary consent of the human
subject is absolutely essential … to satisfy moral, ethical and
legal concepts.”
The Nuremberg Code, created in response to the reckless use
of human life in experimentation, not only specifies the need for
“voluntary consent” of the subjects; it is quite direct about who is
responsible:
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the
consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or
engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility
which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
Stanley Glickman was a young man who was pursuing his dream
of being an artist in Paris. One night he met a group of Americans
at a cafe. One of them, a man with a clubfoot whom Glickman later
identified as Gottlieb, bought him a drink as a peace offering after an
argument. Before he was halfway through the drink, he was having
problems with reality. He left the cafe and found his way home, but
he continued to have hallucinations. After two weeks, he went back to
the same cafe, where he collapsed. He was taken to a hospital. There,
as Glickman stated in an affidavit, he was given electroshock therapy
through a catheter in his penis. He made his way back to America and
to his family where he was told by psychiatrists that he was insane.
His family set him up in a small apartment in the East Village where
he became a mild and ineffectual neighborhood $aracter. He never
painted again.When he and his family heard of the CIA’s LSD operation,
the family sued the government. Although Glickman died before the
trial, his sister pursued it, but she was unsuccessful. The judge, Kimba
Wood, dismissed the case.132 It was Gottlieb’s responsibility to make sure
that Glickman knew about the experiment, consented to it, and was
able to handle it; the court system failed to hold him accountable.
Glickman may well have been specifically targeted for his unwilling
involvement in the LSD experiments. He had been treated for hepatitis
at the American hospital in Paris not long before his dosing. He was
brought back to that same hospital when he collapsed at the cafe. There
was some documentation in a report by the Swiss published in 1951 that
the effects of LSD were exacerbated in people who had suffered from
hepatitis. The CIA did its own report on a study on the effects of LSD on
hepatics, a study that started in November of 1952, about the same time
Glickman entered the hospital after his encounter with the drug.
Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, was hospitalized for
depression after his divorce in 1953. During his hospitalization, he was
given an injection of a “synthetic mescaline derivative.”There is some
evidence that his physician sat and watched, taking notes as Blauer’s
condition worsened and he finally died. In the subsequent court case,
brought by Blauer’s ex-wife in April of 1953, it was discovered that the
“mescaline derivative” was supplied by the Army Chemical Corps. The
Church Committee Report stated:
On January 8, 1953, Mr. Harold Blauer died of circulatory
collapse and heart failure following an intravenous injection of a
synthetic mescaline derivative while a subject oftests conducted
132. The court’s ruling engaged in sophistry. The court said that the Statute of
Limitations had run and therefore the case was time-barred. However, since
the government had concealed the facts, the statute was tolled until Glickman
learned about it.
Judge Wood stated that Glickman had a “suspicion” of his injury and its cause.
Remarkably, the judge felt that the suspicion demonstrated sufficient knowledge
of the facts, which the government was still concealing. A lawsuit based upon a
mere suspicion would have been dismissed by the court stating that Glickman had
not produced “specific facts indicating that a genuine factual issue existed.” In fact,
Judge Wood used that very language as a second grounds for dismissing the case
citing but not understanding Anderson v. Liberty Lobby Inc., 477 US. 242, 247-
50,106 S.Ct.2505, 91 L.Ed.2d 202 (1986). I fully grasp the significance of the
Liberty Lobby case since I argued it and won it before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, in fact, reversed the lower court’s dismissal and reinstated the
Liberty Lobby case, the opposite of the decision in the Glickman case.
by New York State Psychiatric Institute under a contract let by
the US.Army Chemical Corps.The Committee’s investigation
into drug testing by US. intelligence agencies focused on the
testing of LSD, however, the committee did receive a copy of
the US. Army Inspector General’s Report, issued on October
1975, on the events and circumstances of Mr. Blauer’s death.
His death was directly attributable to the administration of the
synthetic mescaline derivative.
Harold Blauer died as a result of experiments done to him by his
own doctors, without his knowledge or consent, as a result of a contract
between the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and the
US. Army Chemical Corps, a division of the same Special Operations
Division involved in the death of Frank Olson. The program, known as
Project Pelican, was a subproject ofMKULTRA. Its principal leader was
Dr. Paul Hoch, the director of experimental programs for the NYSPI,
who became the Commissioner for Mental Hygiene for the State of
New York. At the time I strongly opposed the actions of Hoch at the.
Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives and gained the support
of The New York Times and the New York Post in that successful effort.
Both newspapers joined me in proving and publishing the facts that
demonstrated that the state had committed serious crimes at Wassaic.
Under Hoch’s leadership, children were placed in restraining sheets for
days, held in solitary confinement, beaten, provided with inadequate
food, and denied books, all in violation of the laws of New York State.At
least one child was murdered. Since most of the records were destroyed,
the results of the union of MKULTRA and the State of New York’s
psychiatric institutions remain unknown.
The scope of the LSD experiments was huge. During the Church
Committee hearings it was revealed that” 44 colleges or universities,
15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and
the like, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with
universities) and three penal institutions” were involved. Ken Kesey,
who helped to glorify the drug, was introduced to it by the CIA in one
- of their studies.
It is not possible to determine the long-term consequences of the
use of the chemicals employed by the CIA upon its subjects. There
were no adequate follow-up examinations and in an effort to avoid
detection for the crimes they had committed whatever notes that had
been made were burned. What is known is that the drugs were used to
change the mindset and the minds of the subjects.
Dr. Henry Murray designed and conducted the “personality”
study in which the subject was psychologically brutalized. The Murray
procedure began with each person being required to write a personal,
intimate essay focusing on his hopes and beliefs. This surprised the young
men as they had been informed that they were merely going to debate
philosophy with another classmate. The students were then strapped into
a chair and connected to electrodes that recorded physiological responses.
During 1958, one subject was a brilliant young man who had
completed high school at the age of fifteen and entered Harvard the
next year. At Harvard, Theodore John Kaczynski became a subject of
the MKULTRA mind-altering program which took from its subjects
the ability to act autonomously and required them to behave in a bizarre
manner. Mr. Kaczynski was subjected to three years of that treatment.
The initial examination disclosed that he was emotionally stable before
being subjected to the “stress interviews.”
A few years later Ted Kaczynski became known as the Unabomber.
He created and planted sixteen bombs over a period of years killing
three people and injuring twenty-three before he was arrested. In
his manifesto he called for violent actions as the only method to
confront a system “which has robbed contemporary humans of their
autonomy … and forced them to behave in ways that are increasingly
remote from the natural pattern of human behavior.”
If one wonders why Kaczynski, with a grade of 98.9 percent, the
highest in his class in a course taught at Harvard by the eminent logician
WillardVan Orman Quine, would permit himself to be subjected to what
appears to be unscientific torture, the answer may be found in the sterling
and unquestioned reputation of men such as Murray and Hoch. It would
have been difficult at that time to believe that both men were monsters.
In 1927 Murray became the assistant director of the Harvard
Psychological Clinic. Later he worked as a lieutenant colonel for the
Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was the predecessor to the CIA
and provided many of its officers to the newly organized group. Murray
returned to Harvard in 1947 where he taught for more than thirty
years. He founded the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and when he
achieved professor emeritus status he was given the Distinguished
Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological
Association and the Gold Medal Award for lifetime achievement by
the American Psychological Foundation. His colleague Dr. Paul Hoch,
a German-educated physician, served on the faculty of the University
of Gottingen, Germany, where he directed the “brain research” division
at the university. Murray and Hoch both worked for the CIA and both
were respected by their peers. In New York, Hoch was responsible for
the death of at least one patient, Harold Blauer, through CIA-supported
experiments he had not disclosed to the patient and injury to many
others. As the director of the New York State Department of Mental
Hygiene he was responsible for the suffering of thousands of his wards.
It has become increasingly clear that the criminal mischief the
CIA imposed upon its victims may continue to haunt us. Thus far, no
one, except for the victims, has been indicted.
Sidney Gottlieb also contracted with Harold Isbell, the head of the
Center for Addiction Research, later the Addiction Research Center
(ARC), in Lexington, Kentucky. The Center was on the grounds of
a federal prison. Isbell used the patients in the ARC as his personal
• guinea pigs. He gave them morphine and heroin, and injected them
with LSD. In one “experiment,” he injected black heroin addicts with
LSD for seventy-seven straight days. Gottlieb believed that African
American subjects were more vulnerable to the drug. There is even
a record of one mental patient in Kentucky who was given LSD for
174 straight days.133 In some of the tests the subjects were told what
was taking place; in most tests the subjects had no idea of what was
happening, increasing their terror to the interest and amusement of
doctors or assistants.
Reverend Eugene St. Clair Callender, minister at the Mid-Harlem
Community Parish, and I worked together to lessen the impact of
heroin addictions upon the community. We opened an informal clinic
at his church and raised funds so that those afflicted who wanted more
professional treatment could travel to a federal treatment center in
Lexington, Kentucky. We were bewildered by the fact that a higher
percentage of those who had passed through our unsophisticated clinic
remained drug-free than those returning from Lexington.
Many years later we discovered the brutality of the treatment
imposed upon the young men and women who had been used as
guinea pigs in experiments at the federal facility that severely harmed
them and had no scientific basis. Even efforts to restore them to an
acceptable life were made impossible because adequate records were
not maintained, and when word of the illegal venture became a subject
for congressional review, those documents were destroyed.
The United States government did act in one respect. United States
attorneys and FBI agents visited our open clinic and then threatened
Rev. Callender, me, and the nurses and doctors at our church-run
clinic with arrest and prosecution and serious professional sanctions for
running an unlicensed free clinic. Eventually we were forced to close
the clinic to the dismay of many who sought treatment.
At the same time the United States government, through the
actions of the CIA’s MKULTRA program, was permitted, in fact,
encouraged, to perform atrocities including murder at a federal facility
in Kentucky and a state facility for damaged children in New York.
Another of Gottlieb’s associates was Major General William
Creasy, the chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps. Creasy was a
zealous participant in MKULTRA’s testing program, although he was
disappointed at the limited scale. Where the inspector general expressed
concern about placing “rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy,”
Creasy complained that he was unable to~’test to see what would happen
in subways, for example, when a cloud (of psycho chemicals) was laid
down on a city.” His experiment was denied, he said, for “reasons that
always seemed a little absurd to me.”
Gottlieb was not just an LSD pusher; he also operated as a pimp for
the CIA. Operation Midnight Climax started as a way to further find
out how unsuspecting people responded to LSD. An operative, often a
drug-addicted prostitute, would go to a bar, pick up a customer, and
bring them back to the safehouse. The safehouses were whorehouses
established by the CIA under Gottlieb’s direction in New York and
San Francisco. Once there, LSD would be administered to the subject.
These safehouses were furnished with two-way mirrors and “recording
equipment.” Cash transactions of $100, which the CIA admitted were
for prostitutes, were found in the records.
George Hunter White was a former OSS officer working with
the narcotics bureau when he was recruited by Gottlieb to set up the
safehouses. In his diaries, which his wife donated to the Electronics
Museum at Foothill Junior College near San Francisco after his
death, White spoke of his work with Gottlieb and the CIA: “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?”
Barbara Smithe was the young wife of one ofWhite’s friends, and
attended a party without her husband on one occasion, taking her
very young daughter with her. White put some LSD in her drink. Mrs.
Smithe left the party, child in tow, about two hours later at the peak of
the experience and with no knowledge of what had happened to her.
She became terribly depressed, her marriage subsequently crumbled,
and she spent the next twenty years in and out of a mental institution.
She died in 1978. It was only when her husband heard of the Senate
proceedings about MKULTRA that he became aware of what had
happened to his wife.
LSD was not the only substance tested in MKULTRA.The Church
Committee stated that “Over the ten-year life of the program, many
‘additional avenues to the control of human behavior’ were designated
as appropriate for investigation under the MKULTRA charter. These
include radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry,
sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and
‘paramilitary devices and materials.”
Although Gottlieb had hundreds of test subjects throughout the
United States through contracts with colleges and various medical
institutions, he also found a way to expand the program into Canada
through Donald Ewen Cameron, a distinguished psychiatrist at
the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University in Quebec. Dr.
Cameron served as the president of the World Psychiatric Association
and also as the president of the American and the Canadian Psychiatric
Associations. Dr. Cameron had a theory that it was possible to clear the
mind of all memories and start with a bank slate, thereby curing any
mental illness. He called it the “psychic driving concept.”
Gottlieb and the CIA found Dr. Cameron’s concept quite compelling.
They were looking for ways to get enemy spies to talk, and Cameron’s
work looked promising. Gottlieb, through Cameron, had found a method
of psychological torture that could be very effective in extracting
information. The Canadian government funded Cameron’s experiments
while the CIA helped Cameron use potentially harmful, even lethal,
pharmaceuticals on the citizens of one of the United States’ allies.
Cameron’s method was to put the patient into a drug-induced
stupor, although sometimes he would go too far and the patient would
go into a coma. He would then waken his subjects two or three times
a day and blast them with multiple electric shocks, sometimes using as
much as thirty to forty times the accepted power. He experimented
with keeping his test subjects asleep for weeks and then used either
electricity or drugs, among them LSD and PCp, to clean their brains ..
He used these techniques on hundreds of patients, most of whom had
come to him for help for minor complaints.
Gail Kastner was nineteen years old, an honors student, when she
went to the Allen Memorial Institute for mild depression. She was put
into comas using insulin, among other drugs, and then given multiple
electric shocks. At the end of her treatment, she sucked her thumb and
used the floor instead of the toilet. Her family would no longer have
anything to do with her and she languished in poverty.
In 2004, a landmark decision by a federal court judge in Montreal
awarded Ms. Kastner, then seventy, compensation. She was awarded
$100,000 for the total loss of a promising life. Although the award was
insufficient, the decision did open the door for hundreds of others who
had been Cameron’s guinea pigs to sue the government. The Canadian
government was kinder than our own to Gottlieb’s victims.
When Sidney Gottlieb ordered the destruction of the MKULTRA
records in 1973, he left behind a wealth of information existing in the
human beings involved in the program. But we only see glimpses of a
terrifying reality that will remain for the most part unknown. We do
know that Sidney Gottlieb authorized the destruction of the lives of
innumerable American citizens, as well as the citizens of other countries.
In 1972 he described his work as useless. The CIA did not share his
opinion; the agency awarded Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence
Medal.
Mter his resignation from the TSD, Gottlieb said he devoted his life
to good works, spending years looking for atonement. He worked for a
time in a leper colony in India, and the last years of his life were spent
working with dying patients in a hospice. I would like to believe that
as he again surrounded himself with powerless and vulnerable people,
it was for pure reasons. Clearly if his conscience wakened it was too
late to help many thousands of his victims. Neither he nor any other
person involved in the torture or murder of the victims has ever been
prosecuted by our government.
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