MIND CONTROL
The highly secret CIA research project into the use of mind-altering drugs (code name: MKULTRA) ran from 1953 to 1963. The Soviets had been putting spies on the stand and getting them to confess openly, so the U.S. wanted to develop a similar "truth serum" as well as come up with a way for captured agents to induce amnesia. American spies normally carried a deadly fish toxin to take in case of capture, and the CIA wanted something better, something that would brainwash the captured agent to give the captors disinformation. They gave numerous agents, prostitutes, and civilians spiked cocktails in various safe houses in NYC and San Francisco to record their reactions. LSD was the primary drug experimented with.
Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's Technical Services Division, died recently. His obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post tended to focus on Gottlieb's testing of LSD on himself and other CIA officers, portraying him as a kind of Merry Prankster, the CIA's very own Ken Kesey.
In fact, with Gottlieb's death, America lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottlieb presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects. Gottlieb's passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought. Those who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years say that the chemist believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the entire program. Some speculate that Gottlieb may have been ready to spill the goods on a wide range of CIA programs.
Incredibly, neither the Times nor the Post obituaries mention Gottlieb's crucial role in the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who worked for the US Army's biological weapons center at Fort Detrick. At a CIA sponsored retreat in rural Maryland on November 18, 1953, Gottlieb gave the unwitting Olson a glass of Cointreau liberally spiked with LSD. Olson developed psychotic symptoms soon thereafter and within a few days had plunged to his death from an upper floor room at the New York Statler-Hilton. Olson was sharing the room with Gottlieb's number two, a CIA man called Robert Lashbrook, who had taken the deranged man to see a CIA-sponsored medic called Harold Abramson who ran an allergy clinic at Mount Sinai, funded by Gottlieb to research LSD.
The night Olson made his terminally abrupt descent from the hotel window the New York police asked Lashbrook to turn out his pockets. On a piece of paper were initials GW and MH, identified later as George White and Morgan Hall, White's alias. White was retained by Gottlieb to run a CIA safehouse at 81 Bedford St in Greenwich Village, in cooperation with Harry Anslinger's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, for which White had previously worked. Gottlieb's men fixed up the house with one-way mirrors listening devices and secret cameras. From the fall of 1953 to the spring of the following year White threw parties on Bedford St, dosing his guests with sodium pentothal, Nembutal and of course LSD. Later White moved the CIA operation to San Francisco, with the same sort of set-up. He hired prostitutes to dose the guests, in an exercise known as Operation Midnight Climax. The encounter were filmed, on the walls White, put photos of women being tortured and whipped. Gottlieb flew out to visit the safe house at 225 Chestnut Street several times a year. Another senior CIA man, John Gittinger would interview the hookers about their drugs and sex habits.
Gottlieb was a man of darkness. He sponsored research by the infamous Dr Ewen Cameron, a world famous shrink who had clinic in Montreal at McGill where he dosed unwitting subjects (who had entered voluntarily for psychiatric treatment) with huge jolts of electricity through their brains, plus drugs plus lobotomies. Many people had their lives thus destroyed in Cameron's research, financed by Gottlieb and also by the Rockefeller Foundation. Cameron invented a particularly ghastly process called "psychic driving" whereby drugged and shocked patients, whom Cameron believed he had wiped clean of their previous personalities, would have tapes played sixteen hours a day, dictating their new personalities.
From time to time the patients, given Thorazine, Nebutal and Seconal, would be hauled off, administered amphetamines as a wake-up call, then get ECT at voltages forty times greater than was considered safe at the time. Cameron died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967. Gottlieb had finessed Cameron $60,000 in the late Fifties for his experiments. Eventually the CIA settled with some of Cameron's victims.
Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell's center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell's patients.
Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell's research notes indicates that he gave the men "quadruple" the "normal" dosages. The doctor marveled at the men's apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that "this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type."
In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.
Gottlieb's research was never a case of pure science. He was a practical man. From the beginning, Gottlieb saw himself as part of the operational wing of the CIA. Even the forays into LSD research, Gottlieb saw a testing for a potential chemical warfare weapon. He arranged a contract with Eli Lily to produce synthetic LSD "in tonnage quantities." The aim was to have enough acid to incapacitate large populations and armies.
By the early 1960s Gottlieb's techniques and potions were being fully deployed in the field. Well-known is Gottlieb's journey to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumba's toothbrush. He also tried to manage Iraq's general Kassim with a handkerchief doctored with botulinum and there were the endless poisons directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela on November 22, 1963.
Even less well remembered is one mission in the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam in July of 1968. A team of CIA psychologists set up shop at Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon, where NLF suspects were being held after Phoenix Program round-ups. The psychologists performed a variety of experiments on the prisoners. In one, three prisoners were anaesthetized; their skulls were opened and electrodes implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains. The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the psychiatrists, who were covertly observing them. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. The experiments failed. The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned
John Stanley Faulder
On June 17, the state of Texas put to death by lethal injection John Stanley Faulder, a Canadian who had been convicted in 1977 of murdering Inez Phillips, an oil heiress. Faulder's case received more press attention than most executions these days, mainly because the Canadian government tried to intervene on his behalf and urged Texas governor George Bush to spare his life. Unmoved by arguments that after his arrest Faulder had been denied his right to consult with officials from the Canadian embassy, Bush sent him to the death chamber.
What went entirely unmentioned by the American press was that 37 years ago Stanley Faulder had been the unwitting victim of medical experiments partially funded by the CIA. According to Faulder's sister, Pat Nicholl, who lives in Jaspar, Alberta, "At 15 Stanley was arrested for stealing a watch and sent to a boys' home for six months. At 17, another theft got him six months in jail. At 22 he was caught in a stolen car and sent to jail in New Westminster, B.C. for two years. There, he asked for psychiatric help and was put in an experimental drug program which involved doses of LSD".
Faulder was one of hundreds of Canadian prisoners who were experimented upon by psychiatrists in the 1960s and 1970s. The prison LSD program was run by Dr. George Scott, a staff psychiatrist for the Canadian Federal Corrections, who had served as director of the Canadian Army's psychological rehabilitation department during World War II. After the war, Scott teamed up with shrinks from Allan Memorial Institute, including the notorious Ewen Cameron, to launch a variety of drug, electroshock, sensory deprivation and pain tolerance experiments, using prisoners and patients at mental hospitals as guinea pigs. The LSD for some of the experiments as well as funding for the research was provided by the CIA and the Canadian Defense Department.
Scott, now 84, has been stripped of his license to practice medicine. The sanction was not for dosing prisoners with psychotropic drugs, but for emulating Sandor Ferenczi by making passes at female patients. Even here Scott used drugs and electroshock to aid his seduction. According to court records, Scott used a technique called "narcoanalysis" to manipulate one of the women into having sex with him. Narcoanalysis involves heavy doses of sodium pentathol and Ritalin. Scott used the pentathol, in combination with electroshock, to take his victim into a near comatose state, implanted erotic suggestions, and then roused her to consciousness with shots of ritalin. This continued for a period of five years. Scott even prescribed birth control pills for the woman.
In 1969, Robert Renaud, an inmate at the Kingston Penitentiary, claimed that Scott had given him ferocious jolts of electroshock as a punishment for not cooperating with the doctor. Like Faulder, Renaud was in jail for theft and was not considered violent. Scott dismissed Renaud's allegation, though films of the psychiatrist shocking prisoners from that time have recently surfaced. In response, Scott said he only performed electroshock once a week on prisoners who "were sick enough".
Scott is being sued by 24 women inmates who say they were subjected to his LSD experiments. One of the women bringing the suit is Dorothy Proctor, who was given LSD at the Kingston women's prison in 1961-the same year Faulder was drugged. Proctor was a 17-year-old black woman, serving a three-year sentence for robbery, when Scott diagnosed her as a sociopath and put her in his experimental program, which included sensory deprivation (a 52-day stint in the Hole), electroshock and mega-doses of LSD.
In a 1998 interview with the CBC program "This Morning" Proctor vividly described the first time she was offered LSD as she was in the middle of a long stint in solitary: "The prison psychiatrist comes down to the Hole, and he has a student with him, a lady psych student from Queen's University and she's to take notes. He pulls up a chair for her and him, and they are outside in the hallway section of the cell, talking through the bars. I am on the floor, no mattress just a blanket. Then I am taken out of the cell that has a commode. I am now in a cell with a hole in the floor for my toilet. It had backed up so I am also in my own waste and stench. So he comes out and presents me with this, you know, we want to help you so much. We want you to correct yourself and we want you to rehabilitate yourself. And I am your friend, and you are worth saving. So just cooperate with me. And I have a pill that just might help you. I am going to rescue you. That was the LSD. I don't think it was 15 or 20 minutes before Dante's Inferno. It was obvious. I am locked in. I can't get away. And the walls start to move in on me. And they melt. The bars turned to snakes and there was an awful vibration in my body. Just awful. And I just thought I had gone mad."
The women prisoners' suit will go to trial this fall. Scott has shrugged off the claims, telling the Ottawa Citizen in an interview two years ago that he has no regrets about his activities. "I am happy with myself. I don't give a shit."
Timothy Leary
On July 1 the Smoking Gun website put up 14 pages from more than 500 FBI transcripts and memoranda, showing that Leary was volunteering to snitch, then snitching to the feds about his knowledge of the Weather Underground and almost anyone else Leary thought the feds might be interested in, including his former wife Rosemary, his attorneys and the wife of one of his attorneys. This was 1974 when Leary was in Folsom prison in northeastern California, after convictions for a number of marijuana busts plus time for his jail break.
It's not entirely fresh news that the late Timothy Leary was a squealer and a snitch to the FBI. The snitching was well known at the time. The FBI was eager to leak the fact that Leary, high priest of LSD and potentate of the counterculture, was singing about his former associates.
The news, the Bureau seemed to have reasoned, would spread fear and despondency and foster rifts. On April 4, 1974, the Chicago Tribune ran an FBI-inspired leak, headlined "Leary Will Sing"; and in the letters that Abbie Hoffman wrote in the mid-1970s, edited by wife Anita, To America With Love, vitriol was poured on Leary the Snitch. Himself on the run after his cocaine bust, Abbie wrote, "I'm digesting news of Herr Doktor Leary, the swine. It's obvious to me he talked his fucking, demented head off to the Gestapo... God, Leary is disgusting. It's not just a question of being a squealer, but a question of squealing on people who helped you. The curses crowd my mouth. Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold."
Leary's awfulness was somewhat forgotten by the time he'd become a staple of the Hollywood gossip columns, before his ashes were fired off into the space that he roamed so freely in his acid-sodden years. He began his career as a research psychologist at the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland, where he developed a personality test to help the authorities classify prisoners, allocating them to various levels of incarceration. (When Leary himself was convicted, he was handed the very test that he had devised years earlier, and thus was able to frame answers that put him in a minimum security facility in San Luis Obispo, from which he was sprung by the people he later ratted on.)
From Kaiser, Leary went on to become a lecturer at Harvard. It seems likely that the "Leary Test," as it was known, had attracted the attention of the chairman of the Dept. of Social Relations, Dr. Henry Murray, whose experiments on Ted Kaczynski are noted below. Murray's "Thematic Aptitude Test" was being used by the CIA, which then took up the "Leary Test," no doubt with handsome fees to Kaiser and to Leary. By the time Leary got to Harvard Murray already had contracts with the Pentagon and CIA to test student volunteers (including Kaczynski).
Leary took the drugs to be tested and sallied forth to the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum security prison, where he embarked on experiments designed, so he said, to see if LSD and psilocybin could be successful agents in behavior modification. As with all research on prisoners there were certainly other aspects Leary didn't publicly own up to, such as investigation into the properties of these psychotropic drugs in interrogation.
The CIA helped spring Leary from his prison in Algeria, where he'd been consigned by Eldridge Cleaver, who had instantly seen Leary for what he was.. At the time he put him in jail, the exiled information minister of the Black Panthers said, "There's something wrong with Leary's brain. We want people to gather their wits, sober up and get down to the serious business of destroying the Babylonian empire. To all those of you who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration and leadership, we want to say to you that your God is dead, because his mind has been blown by acid." Leary's wife Rosemary didn't want to deal with the CIA agent who sprang them from prison in Algeria. For once Leary was on the mark. "He's liberal CIA," Leary told Rosemary. "And that's the best mafia you can deal with in the 20th century."
Theodore Kaczynski
It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Michael Mello, author of the recently published book, "The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski," notes that at some point in his Harvard years--1958 to 1962--Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of "a psychological experiment". Mello identifies the chief researcher for these only as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988.
Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s, drawn to it through a fascination with Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which he gave to Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the whale was a father figure. After spending the 1930s developing personality theory, Murray was recruited to the OSS at the start of the war, applying his theories to the selection of agents and also presumably to interrogation.
As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, Murray zealously prosecuted the CIA's efforts to carry forward experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. The overall program was under the control of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's technical services division. Just as Harvard students were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners and many unwitting guinea pigs.
Sometimes the results were disastrous. A dram of LSD fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. army officer, Frank Olson, plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes, which culminated in Olson's fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. Gottlieb was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson's children but also by the sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated into psychosis after being unwittingly given a dose of LSD by Gottlieb.
What did Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment's long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber's homicidal rampages? The CIA's mind experiment program was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded, with the precipating agent never identified?
There are other human time bombs, primed in haste, ignorance or indifference to long-term consequences. Amid all the finger-pointing to causes prompting the recent wave of schoolyard killings, not nearly enough clamor has been raised about the fact that many of these teenagers suddenly exploding into mania were on a regimen of antidepressants. Eric Harris, one of the shooters at Columbine, was on Luvox. Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two students in Oregon, was on Prozac.
There are a number of other instances. Apropos possible linkage, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of books on Prozac and Ritalin, has said, "I have no doubt that Prozac can contribute to violence and suicide. I've seen many cases. In the recent clinical trial, 6% of the children became psychotic on Prozac. And manic psychosis can lead to violence."
A 15-year-old girl attending a ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast told us that 80% of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Ritalin or Dexedrine. The pretext used by the school authorities is attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, with a diagnosis made on the basis of questions such as: "Do you find yourself daydreaming or looking out the window?"
Ritalin is being given to about 2 million American schoolchildren. A 1986 article by Richard Scarnati in the International Journal of the Addictions lists more than a hundred adverse reactions to Ritalin, including paranoid delusions, paranoid psychosis, amphetamine-like psychosis and terror.
Meanwhile, uncertainty reigns on the precise nature of the complaint that Ritalin is supposed to be treating. One panel reviewing the proceedings at a conference on ADHD last year even doubted whether the disorder is a "valid" diagnosis of a broad range of children's behavior, and said there was little evidence Ritalin did any good. In 1996, the Drug Enforcement Administration denounced the use of Ritalin and concluded that "the dramatic increase in the use of [Ritalin] in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society."
INTERNET RESOURCES:
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