The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
John Marks
Chapter 12. The Search for the Truth
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks12.htm
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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 unfavorable light. Among the fiasco's many
consequences was Gottlieb'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 reportedly 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 background,
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 Intelligence. 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 Directorate for Science and Technology.
Before then, the Technical Services Staff (TSS), although located in the
Clandestine Services, had been the Agency's largest scientific component.
McCone decided to strip TSS of its main research functions�including the
behavioral one�and let it concentrate solely on providing operational
support. In 1962 he approved a reorganization of TSS that brought in Seymour
Russell, a tough covert operator, as the new chief. "The idea was to get a
close interface with operations," recalls an ex-CIA man. Experienced TSS
technicians remained as deputies to the incoming field men, and the highest
deputyship in all TSS went to Sid Gottlieb, who became number-two man under
Russell. For Gottlieb, this was another significant promotion helped along
by his old friend Richard Helms, whom McCone had elevated to be head of the
Clandestine Services.
In his new job, Gottlieb kept control of MKULTRA. Yet, in order to
comply with McCone's command on research programs, Gottlieb had to preside
over the partial dismantling of his own program. The loss was not as
difficult as it might have been, because, after 10 years of exploring the
frontiers of the mind, Gottlieb had a clear idea of what worked and what did
not in the behavioral field. Those areas that still were in the research
stage tended to be extremely esoteric and technical, and Gottlieb must have
known that if the Science Directorate scored any breakthroughs, he would be
brought back into the picture immediately to apply the advances to covert
operations.
"Sid was not the kind of bureaucrat who wanted to hold on to everything
at all costs," recalls an admiring colleague. Gottlieb carefully pruned the
MKULTRA lists, turning over to the Science Directorate the exotic subjects
that showed no short-term operational promise and keeping for himself those
psychological, chemical, and biological programs that had already passed the
research stage. As previously stated, he moved John Gittinger and the
personality-assessment staff out of the Human Ecology Society and kept them
under TSS control in their own proprietary company.
While Gottlieb was effecting these changes, his programs were coming
under attack from another quarter. In 1963 the CIA Inspector General did the
study that led to the suspension of unwitting drug testing in the San
Francisco and New York safehouses. This was a blow to Gottlieb, who clearly
intended to hold on to this kind of research. At the same time, the
Inspector General also recommended that Agency officials draft a new charter
for the whole MKULTRA program, which still was exempt from most internal CIA
controls. He found that many of the MKULTRA subprojects were of
"insufficient sensitivity" to justify bypassing the Agency's normal
procedures for approving and storing records of highly classified programs.
Richard Helms, still the protector of unfettered behavioral research,
responded by agreeing that there should be a new charter�on the condition
that it be almost the same as the old one. "The basic reasons for requesting
waiver of standardized administrative controls over these sensitive
activities are as valid today as they were in April, 1953," Helms wrote.
Helms agreed to such changes as having the CIA Director briefed on the
programs twice a year, but he kept the approval process within his control
and made sure that all the files would be retained inside TSS. And as
government officials so often do when they do not wish to alter anything of
substance, he proposed a new name for the activity. In June 1964 MKULTRA
became MKSEARCH. [1]
Gottlieb acknowledged that security did not require transferring all the
surviving MKULTRA subprojects over to MKSEARCH. He moved 18 subprojects back
into regular Agency funding channels, including ones dealing with the
sneezing powders, stink bombs, and other "harassment substances." TSS
officials had encouraged the development of these as a way to make a target
physically uncomfortable and hence to cause short-range changes in his
behavior.
Other MKULTRA subprojects dealt with ways to maximize stress on whole
societies. Just as Gittinger's Personality Assessment System provided a
psychological road map for exploiting an individual's weaknesses, CIA
"destabilization" plans provided guidelines for destroying the internal
integrity of target countries like Castro's Cuba or Allende's Chile.
Control� whether of individuals or nations�has been the Agency's main
business, and TSS officials supplied tools for the "macro" as well as the
"micro" attacks.
For example, under MKULTRA Subproject #143, the Agency gave Dr. Edward
Bennett of the University of Houston about $20,000 a year to develop
bacteria to sabotage petroleum products. Bennett found a substance that,
when added to oil, fouled or destroyed any engine into which it was poured.
CIA operators used exactly this kind of product in 1967 when they sent a
sabotage team made up of Cuban exiles into France to pollute a shipment of
lubricants bound for Cuba. The idea was that the tainted oil would "grind
out motors and cause breakdowns," says an Agency man directly involved. This
operation, which succeeded, was part of a worldwide CIA effort that lasted
through the 1960s into the 1970s to destroy the Cuban economy.
[2] Agency officials reasoned, at least in the first years, that it would
be easier to overthrow Castro if Cubans could be made unhappy with their
standard of living. "We wanted to keep bread out of the stores so people
were hungry," says the CIA man who was assigned to anti-Castro operations.
"We wanted to keep rationing in effect and keep leather out, so people got
only one pair of shoes every 18 months."
Leaving this broader sort of program out of the new structure, Gottlieb
regrouped the most sensitive behavioral activities under the MKSEARCH
umbrella. He chose to continue seven projects, and the ones he picked give a
good indication of those parts of MKULTRA that Gottlieb considered important
enough to save. These included none of the sociological studies, nor the
search for a truth drug. Gottlieb put the emphasis on chemical and
biological substances�not because he thought these could be used to turn men
into robots, but because he valued them for their predictable ability to
disorient, discredit, injure, or kill people. He kept active two private
labs to produce such substances, funded consultants who had secure ways to
test them and ready access to subjects, and maintained a funding conduit to
pass money on to these other contractors. Here are the seven surviving
MKSEARCH subprojects:
First on the TSS list was the safehouse program for drug testing run by
George White and others in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Even in 1964,
Gottlieb and Helms had not given up hope that unwitting experiments could be
resumed, and the Agency paid out $30,000 that year to keep the safehouses
open. In the meantime, something was going on at the "pad"�or at least
George White kept on sending the CIA vouchers for unorthodox expenses�$1,100
worth in February 1965 alone under the old euphemism for prostitutes,
"undercover agents for operations." What White was doing with or to these
agents cannot be said, but he kept the San Francisco operation active right
up until the time it finally closed in June. Gottlieb did not give up on the
New York safehouse until the following year.
[3]
MKSEARCH Subproject #2 involved continuing a $150,000a-year contract
with a Baltimore biological laboratory This lab, run by at least one former
CIA germ expert, gave TSS "a quick-delivery capability to meet anticipated
future operational needs," according to an Agency document. Among other
things, it provided a private place for "large-scale production of
microorganisms." The Agency was paying the Army Biological Laboratory at
Fort Detrick about $100,000 a year for the same services. With its more
complete facilities, Fort Detrick could be used to create and package more
esoteric bacteria, but Gottlieb seems to have kept the Baltimore facility
going in order to have a way of producing biological weapons without the
Army's germ warriors knowing about it. This secrecy-within-secrecy was not
unusual when TSS men were dealing with subjects as sensitive as infecting
targets with diseases. Except on the most general level, no written records
were kept on the subject. Whenever an operational unit in the Agency asked
TSS about obtaining a biological weapon, Gottlieb or his aides automatically
turned down the request unless the head of the Clandestine Services had
given his prior approval. Gottlieb handled these operational needs
personally, and during the early 1960s (when CIA assassination attempts
probably were at their peak) even Gottlieb's boss, the TSS chief, was not
told what was happening.
With his biological arsenal assured, Gottlieb also secured his chemical
flank in MKSEARCH. Another subproject continued a relationship set up in
1959 with a prominent industrialist who headed a complex of companies,
including one that custom-manufactured rare chemicals for pharmaceutical
producers. This man, whom on several occasions CIA officials gave $100 bills
to pay for his products, was able to perform specific lab jobs for the
Agency without consulting with his board of directors. In 1960 he supplied
the Agency with 3 kilos (6.6 pounds) of a deadly carbamate�the same poison
OSS's Stanley Lovell tried to use against Hitler.
[4] This company president also was useful to the Agency because he was a
ready source of information on what was going on in the chemical world. The
chemical services he offered, coupled with his biological counterpart, gave
the CIA the means to wage "instant" chemical and biological attacks�a
capability that was frequently used, judging by the large numbers of
receipts and invoices that the CIA released under the Freedom of Information
Act.
With new chemicals and drugs constantly coming to their attention
through their continuing relations with the major pharmaceutical companies,
TSS officials needed places to test them, particularly after the safehouses
closed. Dr. James Hamilton, the San Francisco psychiatrist who worked with
George White in the original OSS marijuana days, provided a way. He became
MKSEARCH Subproject #3.
Hamilton had joined MKULTRA in its earliest days and had been used as a
West Coast supervisor for Gottlieb and company. Hamilton was one of the
renaissance men of the program, working on everything from psychochemicals
to kinky sex to carbon-dioxide inhalation. By the early 1960s, he had
arranged to get access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at
Vacaville.
[5] Hamilton worked through a nonprofit research institute connected to the
Facility to carry out, as a document puts it, "clinical testing of
behavioral control materials" on inmates. Hamilton's job was to provide
"answers to specific questions and solutions to specific problems of direct
interest to the Agency." In a six-month span in 1967 and 1968, the
psychiatrist spent over $10,000 in CIA funds simply to pay volunteers� which
at normal rates meant he experimented on between 400 to 1,000 inmates in
that time period alone.
Another MKSEARCH subproject provided $20,000 to $25,000 a year to Dr.
Carl Pfeiffer. Pfeiflfer's Agency connection went back to 1951, when he
headed the Pharmacology Department at the University of Illinois Medical
School. He then moved to Emory University and tested LSD and other drugs on
inmates of the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta. From there, he moved to New
Jersey, where he continued drug experiments on the prisoners at the
Bordentown reformatory. An internationally known pharmacologist, Pfeiffer
provided the MKSEARCH program with data on the preparation, use, and effect
of drugs. He was readily available if Gottlieb or a colleague wanted a study
made of the properties of a particular substance, and like most of TSS's
contractors, he also was an intelligence source. Pfeiffer was useful in this
last capacity during the latter part of the 1960s because he sat on the Food
and Drug Administration committee that allocated LSD for scientific research
in the United States. By this time, LSD was so widely available on the black
market that the Federal Government had replaced the CIA's informal controls
of the 1950s with laws and procedures forbidding all but the most strictly
regulated research. With Pfeiffer on the governing committee, the CIA could
keep up its traditional role of monitoring above-ground LSD experimentation
around the United States.
To cover some of the more exotic behavioral fields, another MKSEARCH
program continued TSS's relationship with Dr. Maitland Baldwin, the brain
surgeon at the National Institutes of Health who had been so willing in 1955
to perform "terminal experiments" in sensory deprivation for Morse Allen and
the ARTICHOKE program. After Allen was pushed aside by the men from MKULTRA,
the new TSS team hired Baldwin as a consultant According to one of them, he
was full of bright ideas on how to control behavior, but they were wary of
him because he was such an "eager beaver" with an obvious streak of
"craziness." Under TSS auspices, Baldwin performed lobotomies on apes and
then put these simian subjects into sensory deprivation�presumably in the
same "box" he had built himself at NIH and then had to repair after a
desperate soldier kicked his way out.
There is no information available on whether Baldwin extended this work to
humans, although he did discuss with an outside consultant how lobotomized
patients reacted to prolonged isolation. Like Hamilton, Baldwin was a
jack-of-all trades who in one experiment beamed radio frequency energy
directly at the brain of a chimpanzee and in another cut off one monkey's
head and tried to transplant it to the decapitated body of another monkey.
Baldwin used $250 in Agency money to buy his own electroshock machine, and
he did some kind of unspecified work at a TSS safehouse that caused the CIA
to shell out $1450 to renovate and repair the place.
The last MKSEARCH subproject covered the work of Dr. Charles
Geschickter, who served TSS both as researcher and funding conduit. CIA
documents show that Geschickter tested powerful drugs on mental defectives
and terminal cancer patients, apparently at the Georgetown University
Hospital in Washington. In all, the Agency put $655,000 into Geschickter's
research on knockout drugs, stress-producing chemicals, and mind-altering
substances. Nevertheless, the doctor's principal service to TSS officials
seems to have been putting his family foundation at the disposal of the
CIA�both to channel funds and to serve as a source of cover to Agency
operators. About $2.1 million flowed through this tightly controlled
foundation to other researchers.[6] Under MKSEARCH, Geschickter continued to
provide TSS with a means to assess drugs rapidly, and he branched out into
trying to knock out monkeys with radar waves to the head (a technique which
worked but risked frying vital parts of the brain). The Geschickter Fund for
Medical Research remained available as a conduit until 1967. [7]
As part of the effort to keep finding new substances to test within
MKSEARCH, Agency officials continued their search for magic mushrooms,
leaves, roots, and barks. In 1966, with considerable CIA backing, J. C.
King, the former head of the Agency's Western Hemisphere Division who was
eased out after the Bay of Pigs, formed an ostensibly private firm called
Amazon Natural Drug Company. King, who loved to float down jungle rivers on
the deck of his houseboat with a glass of scotch in hand, searched the
backwaters of South America for plants of interest to the Agency and/or
medical science. To do the work, he hired Amazon men and women, plus at
least two CIA paramilitary operators who worked out of Amazon offices in
Iquitos, Peru. They shipped back to the United States finds that included
Chondodendron toxicoferum, a paralytic agent which is "absolutely lethal in
high doses," according to Dr. Timothy Plowman, a Harvard botanist who like
most of the staff was unwitting of the CIA involvement. Another plant that
was collected and grown by Amazon employees was the hallucinogen known as
yage, which author William Burroughs has described as "the final fix."
MKSEARCH went on through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, but with a
steadily decreasing budget. In 1964 it cost the Agency about $250,000. In
1972 it was down to four subprojects and $110,000. Gottlieb was a very busy
man by then, having taken over all TSS in 1967 when his patron, Richard
Helms finally made it to the top of the Agency. In June 1972 Gottlieb
decided to end MKSEARCH, thus bringing down the curtain on the quest he
himself had started two decades before. He wrote this epitaph for the
program:
As a final commentary, I would like to point out that, by means of Project
MKSEARCH, the Clandestine Service has been able to maintain contact with the
leading edge of developments in the field of biological and chemical control
of human behavior. It has become increasingly obvious over the last several
years that this general area had less and less relevance to current
clandestine operations. The reasons for this are many and complex, but two
of them are perhaps worth mentioning briefly. On the scientific side, it has
become very clear that these materials and techniques are too unpredictable
in their effect on individual human beings, under specific circumstances, to
be operationally useful. Our operations officers, particularly the emerging
group of new senior operations officers, have shown a discerning and perhaps
commendable distaste for utilizing these materials and techniques. They seem
to realize that, in addition to moral and ethical considerations, the
extreme sensitivity and security constraints of such operations effectively
rule them out.
About the time Gottlieb wrote these words, the Watergate break-in
occurred, setting in train forces that would alter his life and that of
Richard Helms. A few months later, Richard Nixon was reselected. Soon after
the election, Nixon, for reasons that have never been explained, decided to
purge Helms. Before leaving to become Ambassador to Iran, Helms presided
over a wholesale destruction of documents and tapes�presumably to minimize
information that might later be used against him. Sid Gottlieb decided to
follow Helms into retirement, and the two men mutually agreed to get rid of
all the documentary traces of MKULTRA. They had never kept files on the
safehouse testing or similarly sensitive operations in the first place, but
they were determined to erase the existing records of their search to
control human behavior.
Gottlieb later told a Senate committee that he wanted to get rid of the
material because of a "burgeoning paper problem" within the Agency, because
the files were of "no constructive use" and might be "misunderstood," and
because he wanted to protect the reputations of the researchers with whom he
had collaborated on the assurance of secrecy. Gottlieb got in touch with the
men who had physical custody of the records, the Agency's archivists, who
proceeded to destroy what he and Helms thought were the only traces of the
program. They made a mistake, however�or the archivists did. Seven boxes of
substantive records and reports were incinerated, but seven more containing
invoices and financial records survived�apparently due to misfiling.
Nixon named James Schlesinger to be the new head of the Agency, a post
in which he stayed only a few months before the increasingly beleaguered
President moved him over to be Secretary of Defense at the height of
Watergate. During his short stop at CIA, Schlesinger sent an order to all
Agency employees asking them to let his office know about any instances
where Agency officials might have carried out any improper or illegal
actions. Somebody mentioned Frank Olson's suicide, and it was duly included
in the many hundreds of pages of misdeeds reported which became known within
the CIA as the "family jewels."
Schlesinger, an outsider to the career CIA operators, had opened a
Pandora's box that the professionals never managed to shut again. Samples of
the "family jewels" were slipped out to New York Times reporter Seymour
Hersh, who created a national furor in December 1974 when he wrote about the
CIA's illegal spying on domestic dissidents during the Johnson and Nixon
years. President Gerald Ford appointed a commission headed by Vice-President
Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the past CIA abuses�and to limit the
damage. Included in the final Rockefeller report was a section on how an
unnamed Department of the Army employee had jumped out of a New York hotel
window after Agency men had slipped him LSD.
That revelation made headlines around the country. The press seized upon the
sensational details and virtually ignored two even more revealing sentences
buried in the Rockefeller text: "The drug program was part of a much larger
CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other
studies explored the effects of radiation, electric-shock, psychology,
psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances."
At this point, I entered the story. I was intrigued by those two
sentences, and I filed a Freedom of Information request with the CIA to
obtain all the documents the Agency had furnished the Rockefeller Commission
on behavior control. Although the law requires a government agency to
respond within 10 days, it took the Agency more than a year to send me the
first 50 documents on the subject, which turned out to be heavily censored.
In the meantime, the committee headed by Senator Frank Church was
looking into the CIA, and it called in Sid Gottlieb, who was then spending
his retirement working as a volunteer in a hospital in India. Gottlieb
secretly testified about CIA assassination programs. (In describing his role
in its final report, the Church Committee used a false name, "Victor
Scheider.") Asked about the behavioral-control programs, Gottlieb apparently
could not�or would not�remember most of the details. The committee had
almost no documents to work with, since the main records had been destroyed
in 1973 and the financial files had not yet been found.
The issue lay dormant until 1977, when, about June 1, CIA officials
notified my lawyers that they had found the 7 boxes of MKULTRA financial
records and that they would send me the releasable portions over the
following months. As I waited, CIA Director Stansfield Turner notified
President Carter and then the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that
an Agency official had located the 7 boxes. Admiral Turner publicly
described MKULTRA as only a program of drug experimentation and not one
aimed at behavior control. On July 20 I held a press conference at which I
criticized Admiral Turner for his several distortions in describing the
MKULTRA program. To prove my various points, I released to the reporters a
score of the CIA documents that had already come to me and that gave the
flavor of the behavioral efforts. Perhaps it was a slow news day, or perhaps
people simply were interested in government attempts to tamper with the
mind. In any event, the documents set off a media bandwagon that had the
story reported on all three network television news shows and practically
everywhere else.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Senator Edward Kennedy's
Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research soon announced they would
hold public hearings on the subject. Both panels had looked into the secret
research in 1975 but had been hampered by the lack of documents and
forthcoming witnesses. At first the two committees agreed to work together,
and they held one joint hearing. Then, Senator Barry Goldwater brought
behind-the-scenes pressure to get the Intelligence panel, of which he was
vice-chairman, to drop out of the proceedings. He claimed, among other
things, that the committee was just rehashing old programs and that the time
had come to stop dumping on the CIA. Senator Kennedy plowed ahead anyway. He
was limited, however, by the small size of the staff he assigned to the
investigation, and his people were literally buried in paper by CIA
officials, who released 8,000 pages of documents in the weeks before the
hearings. As the hearings started, the staff still not had read
everything�let alone put it all in context.
As Kennedy's staff prepared for the public sessions, the former men from
MKULTRA also got ready. According to one of them, they agreed among
themselves to "keep the inquiry within bounds that would satisfy the
committee." Specifically, he says that meant volunteering no more
information than the Kennedy panel already had. Charles Siragusa, the
narcotics agent who ran the New York safehouse, reports he got a telephone
call during this period from Ray Treichler, the Stanford Ph.D. who
specialized in chemical warfare for the MKULTRA program. "He wanted me to
deny knowing about the safehouse," says Siragusa.
"He didn't want me to admit that he was the guy.... I said there was no way
I could do that." Whether any other ex-TSS men also suborned perjury cannot
be said, but several of them appear to have committed perjury at the
hearings. [8] As previously noted, Robert Lashbrook denied firsthand
knowledge of the safehouse operation when, in fact, he had supervised one of
the "pads" and been present, according to George White's diary, at the time
of an "LSD surprise" experiment. Dr. Charles Geschickter testified he had
not tested stress-producing drugs on human subjects while both his own 1960
proposal to the Agency and the CIA's documents indicate the opposite.
Despite the presence of a key aide who constantly cued him during the
hearings, Senator Kennedy was not prepared to deal with these and other
inconsistencies. He took no action to follow up obviously perjured
testimony, and he seemed content to win headlines with reports of "The Gang
That Couldn't Spray Straight." Although that particular testimony had been
set up in advance by a Kennedy staffer, the Senator still managed to act
surprised when ex-MKULTRA official David Rhodes told of the ill-fated LSD
experiment at the Marin County safehouse.
The Kennedy hearings added little to the general state of knowledge on
the CIA's behavior-control programs. CIA officials, both past and present,
took the position that basically nothing of substance was learned during the
25-odd years of research, the bulk of which had ended in 1963, and they were
not challenged. That proposition is, on its face, ridiculous, but neither
Senator Kennedy nor any other investigator has yet put any real pressure on
the Agency to reveal the content of the research�what was actually
learned�as opposed to the experimental means of carrying it out. In this
book, I have tried to get at some of the substantive questions, but I have
had access to neither the scientific records, which Gottlieb and Helms
destroyed, nor the principal people involved. Gottlieb, for instance, who
moved from India to Santa Cruz, California and then to parts unknown, turned
down repeated requests to be interviewed. "I am interested in very different
matters than the subject of your book these days," he wrote, "and do not
have either the time or the inclination to reprocess matters that happened a
long time ago."
Faced with these obstacles, I have tried to weave together a
representative sample of what went on, but having dealt with a group of
people who regularly incorporated lying into their daily work, I cannot be
sure. I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control
people, despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit
defeated the manipulators. Only a congressional committee could compel
truthful testimony from people who have so far refused to be forthcoming,
and even Congress' record has not been good so far. A determined
investigative committee at least could make sure that the people being
probed do not determine the "bounds" of the inquiry.
A new investigation would probably not be worth the effort just to take
another stab at MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE. Despite my belief that there are some
skeletons hidden�literally �the public probably now knows the basic
parameters of these programs. Thefact is, however, that CIA officials
actively experimented with behavior-control methods for another decade after
Sid Gottlieb and company lost the research action. The Directorate of
Science and Technology�specifically its Office of Research and Development
(ORDfdid not remain idle after Director McCone transferred the behavioral
research function in 1962.
In ORD, Dr. Stephen Aldrich, a graduate of Amherst and Northwestern
Medical School, took over the role that Morse Allen and then Sid Gottlieb
had played before him. Aldrich had been the medical director of the Office
of Scientific Intelligence back in the days when that office was jockeying
with Morse Allen for control of ARTICHOKE, so he was no stranger to the
programs. Under his leadership, ORD officials kept probing for ways to
control human behavior, and they were doing so with space-age technology
that made the days of MKULTRA look like the horse-and-buggy era. If man
could get to the moon by the end of the 1960s, certainly the well-financed
scientists of ORD could make a good shot at conquering inner space.
They brought their technology to bear on subjects like the electric
stimulation of the brain. John Lilly had done extensive work in this field a
decade earlier, before concluding that to maintain his integrity he must
find another field. CIA men had no such qualms, however. They actively
experimented with placing electrodes in the brain of animals and�probably�
men. Then they used electric and radio signals to move their subjects
around. The field went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms, as Lilly had done.
In the CIA itself, Sid Gottlieb and the MKULTRA crew had made some
preliminary studies of it.
They started in 1960 by having a contractor search all the available
literature, and then they had mapped out the parts of animals' brains that
produced reactions when stimulated. By April 1961 the head of TSS was able
to report "we now have a 'production capability' " in brain stimulation and
"we are close to having debugged a prototype system whereby dogs can be
guided along specific courses." Six months later, a CIA document noted, "The
feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals
has been demonstrated.... Special investigations and evaluations will be
conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to
man."
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
project was designed instead for the delivery of chemical and biological
agents or for "executive action-type operations," according to a document.
"Executive action" was the CIA's euphemism for assassination.
With the brain electrode technology at this level, Steve Aldrich 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 researcher, 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 prisoners 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 todevelop 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 version 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 technical 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 scientists who were allowed to carry on their own
independent research as long as it met Institute standards. These scientists
were available to consult with frequent visitors from Washington, and they
were encouraged to take long lunches in the Institute's dining room where
they mixed with the physical scientists and brainstormed about virtually
everything. One veteran recalls a colleague joking, "If you could find the
natural radio frequency of a person's sphincter, you could make him run out
of the room real fast." Turning serious, the veteran states the technique
was "plausible," and he notes that many of the crazy ideas bandied about at
lunch developed into concrete projects.
Some of these projects may have been worked on at the Institute's own
several hundred-acre farm located in the Massachusetts countryside. But of
the several dozen people contacted in an effort to find out what the
Institute did, the most anyone would say about experiments at the farm was
that one involved stimulating the pleasure centers of crows' brains in order
to control their behavior. Presumably, ORD men did other things at their
isolated rural lab.
Just as the MKULTRA program had been years ahead of the scientific
community, ORD activities were similarly advanced. "We looked at the
manipulation of genes," states one of the researchers. "We were interested
in gene splintering. The rest of the world didn't ask until 1976 the type of
questions we were facing in 1965.... Everybody was afraid of building the
supersoldier who would take orders without questioning, like the kamikaze
pilot. Creating a subservient society was not out of sight." Another
Institute man describes the work of a colleague who bombarded bacteria with
ultraviolet radiation in order to create deviant strains.
ORD also sponsored work in parapsychology. Along with the military services,
Agency officials wanted to know whether psychics could read minds or control
them from afar (telepathy), if they could gain information about distant
places or people (clairvoyance or remote viewing), if they could predict the
future (precognition), or influence the movement of physical objects or even
the human mind (photokinesis). The last could have incredibly destructive
applications, if it worked. For instance, switches setting off nuclear bombs
would have to be moved only a few inches to launch a holocaust. Or, enemy
psychics, with minds honed to laser-beam sharpness, could launch attacks to
burn out the brains of American nuclear scientists. Any or all of these
techniques have numerous applications to the spy trade.
While ORD officials apparently left much of the drug work to Gottlieb,
they could not keep their hands totally out of this field. In 1968 they set
up a joint program, called Project OFTEN, with the Army Chemical Corps at
Edgewood, Maryland to study the effects of various drugs on animals and
humans. The Army helped the Agency put together a computerized data base for
drug testing and supplied military volunteers for some of the experiments.
In one case, with a particularly effective incapacitiating agent, the Army
arranged for inmate volunteers at the Holmesburg State Prison in
Philadelphia. Project OFTEN had both offensive and defensive sides,
according to an ORD man who described it in a memorandum. He cited as an
example of what he and his coworkers hoped to find "a compound that could
simulate a heart attack or a stroke in the targeted individual." In January
1973, just as Richard Helms was leaving the Agency and James Schlesinger was
coming in, Project OFTEN was abruptly canceled.
What�if any�success the ORD men had in creating heart attacks or in any
of their other behavioral experiments simply cannot be said. Like Sid
Gottlieb, Steve Aldrich is not saying, and his colleagues seem even more
closemouthed than Gottlieb's. In December 1977, having gotten wind of the
ORD programs, I filed a Freedom of Information request for access to ORD
files "on behavioral research, including but not limited to any research or
operational activities related to bio-electrics, electric or radio
stimulation of the brain, electronic destruction of memory, stereotaxic
surgery, psychosurgery, hypnotism, parapsychology, radiation, microwaves,
and ultrasonics." I also asked for documentation on behavioral testing in
U.S. penal institutions, and I later added a request for all available files
on amnesia. The Agency wrote back six months later that ORD had "identified
130 boxes (approximately 130 cubic feet) of material that are reasonably
expected to contain behavioral research documents."
Considering that Admiral Turner and other CIA officials had tried to
leave the impression with Congress and the public that behavioral research
had almost all ended in 1963 with the phaseout of MKULTRA, this was an
amazing admission. The sheer volume of material was staggering. This book is
based on the 7 boxes of heavily censored MKULTRA financial records plus
another 3 or so of ARTICHOKE documents, supplemented by interviews. It has
taken me over a year, with significant research help, to digest this much
smaller bulk. Clearly, greater resources than an individual writer can bring
to bear will be needed to get to the bottom of the ORD programs.
A free society's best defense against unethical behavior modification is
public disclosure and awareness. The more people understand
consciousness-altering technology, the more likely they are to recognize its
application, and the less likely it will be used. When behavioral research
is carried out in secret, it can be turned against the government's enemies,
both foreign and domestic. No matter how pure or defense-oriented the
motives of the researchers, once the technology exists, the decision to use
it is out of their hands. Who can doubt that if the Nixon administration or
J. Edgar Hoover had had some foolproof way to control people, they would not
have used the technique against their political foes, just as the CIA for
years tried to use similar tactics overseas?
As with the Agency's secrets, it is now too late to put behavioral
technology back in the box. Researchers are bound to keep making advances.
The technology has already spread to our schools, prisons, and mental
hospitals, not to mention the advertising community, and it has also been
picked up by police forces around the world. Placing hoods over the heads of
political prisoners�a modified form of sensory deprivation�has become a
standard tactic around the world, from Northern Ireland to Chile. The Soviet
Union has consistently used psychiatric treatment as an instrument of
repression. Such methods violate basic human rights just as much as physical
abuse, even if they leave no marks on the body.
Totalitarian regimes will probably continue, as they have in the past,
to search secretly for ways to manipulate the mind, no matter what the
United States does. The prospect of being able to control people seems too
enticing for most tyrants to give up. Yet, we as a country can defend
ourselves without sending our own scientists�mad or otherwise�into a hidden
war that violates our basic ethical and constitutional principles. After
all, we created the Nuremberg Code to show there were limits on scientific
research and its application. Admittedly, American intelligence officials
have violated our own standard, but the U.S. Government has now officially
declared violations will no longer be permitted. The time has come for the
United States to lead by example in voluntarily renouncing secret government
behavioral research. Other countries might even follow suit, particularly if
we were to propose an international agreement which provides them with a
framework to do so.
Tampering with the mind is much too dangerous to be left to the spies.
Nor should it be the exclusive province of the behavioral scientists, who
have given us cause for suspicion. Take this statement by their most famous
member, B. F. Skinner: "My image in some places is of a monster of some kind
who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further
from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated
more effectively." Such notions are much more acceptable in prestigious
circles than people tend to think: D. Ewen Cameron read papers about
"depatterning" with electroshock before meetings of his fellow
psychiatrists, and they elected him their president. Human behavior is so
important that it must concern us all. The more vigilant we and our
representatives are, the less chance we will be unwitting victims.
Notes
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