The chemical Hofmann ingested was the twenty-fifth in a series of lysergic acid diethylamides he had compounded, so he named it LSD-25. During that spring week in 1943 he became the first person ever to use it. Within a generation it would shake the world.
In the months after his first inner voyages—only later would they be called acid trips—Hofmann tested LSD on volunteers drawn from among his colleagues at Sandoz. The results were astonishing. Hofmann reported what he called “the extraordinary activity of LSD on the human psyche,” and concluded that it was “by far the most active and most specific hallucinogen.”
The medical implications of this discovery were unclear. Hofmann thought LSD might open new avenues for research into the biochemical basis of mental illness. His experiments proceeded sporadically and inconclusively. News of them reached Washington at the end of 1949, when an officer of the Chemical Corps reported to L. Wilson Greene, technical director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal, that Sandoz chemists had discovered a new drug said to produce vivid hallucinations. Greene was riveted. He collected all the information he could find on the subject, then produced a long report entitled “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.” It concluded with a strong recommendation that the government begin systematically testing LSD, mescaline, and sixty other mind-altering compounds that might be weaponized for use against enemy populations.
“Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue,” Greene wrote. “The symptoms which are considered to be of value in strategic and tactical operations include the following: fits or seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania.”
Greene proposed that America’s military scientists be given a new mission. At the outer edge of imagination, he suggested, beyond artillery and tanks, beyond chemicals, beyond germs, beyond even nuclear bombs, might lie an unimagined cosmos of new weaponry: psychoactive drugs. Greene believed they could usher in a new era of humane warfare.
“Throughout recorded history, wars have been characterized by death, human misery, and the destruction of property, each major conflict being more catastrophic than the one preceding it,” he wrote in his report. “I am convinced that it is possible, by means of the techniques of psychochemical warfare, to conquer an enemy without wholesale killing of his people and the mass destruction of his property.”
This report electrified the few American officials allowed to read it. Among them was the director of central intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter. Seized by its revelations, he asked President Truman to authorize the drug research Greene proposed—and give the job to the CIA. Truman agreed. Hillenkoetter assigned a handful of CIA officers to begin working with Special Operations Division chemists at Camp Detrick.
Under this “informal agreement,” which took shape during 1950, two of the most secret covert teams in Cold War America became partners. Military scientists at Detrick could design and concoct all manner of drug combinations, but had no authority to use them in operations. The CIA, by contrast, is an action agency. Officers in its Technical Services Staff, which produced the tools of espionage, were looking for drugs that could be used to loosen tongues, weaken human resistance, open the mind to outside control, or kill people. Under the “informal agreement,” scientists who made psychoactive and convulsive drugs began working with CIA interrogators who applied them to prisoners. This joint program, later code-named MK-NAOMI—the prefix MK was for projects run by the Technical Services Staff—was given an immediate shot of cash.
“Under MK-NAOMI,” according to one investigator, “the SOD men developed a whole arsenal of toxic substances for CIA use. If Agency operators needed to kill someone in a few seconds with, say, a suicide pill, SOD provided super-deadly shellfish toxin … More useful for assassination, CIA and SOD men decided, was botulinum. With an incubation period of 8 to 12 hours, it allowed the killer to separate himself from the deed … When CIA operators merely wanted to be rid of somebody temporarily, SOD stockpiled for them about a dozen diseases and toxins of various strengths.”
Besides working in their laboratories at Camp Detrick, scientists assigned to MK-NAOMI carried out field tests to learn how biological agents might work in crowded environments. Some observed bio-weapons tests conducted by the British military, including one near the Caribbean island of Antigua in 1949 during which hundreds of animals died. That same year, six members of the Special Operations Division entered the Pentagon pretending to be air quality monitors and sprayed mock bacteria into air ducts. Afterward they calculated that if their attack had been real, at least half of those working in the building would have died.
Since some of these scientists were researching bio-warfare—how to wage it and how to defend against it—they wanted to learn how pathogens could be spread in a concentrated population, and what the effects of such an attack would be. In 1950 they decided to carry out a large-scale outdoor test in which harmless but traceable germs would be released into the air of a large American city. They chose San Francisco, not only because it has a coastline and tall buildings but also because its chronic fog would disguise germ clouds. The U.S. Navy supplied a minesweeper specially equipped with large aerosol hoses. Operation Sea Spray, as it was called, was classified as a military maneuver. Local officials were not notified.
For six days at the end of September, as their minesweeper drifted near San Francisco, scientists from Camp Detrick directed the spraying of a bacterium called Serratia marcescens into the coastal mist. They had chosen this substance because it has a red tint, making it easy to trace, and was not known to cause any ill effects. According to samples taken afterward at forty-three sites, the spraying reached all of San Francisco’s 800,000 residents and also affected people in Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito, and five other cities. Over the next couple of weeks, eleven people checked in to a hospital with urinary tract infections and were found to have red drops in their urine. One of them, who was recovering from prostate surgery, died. Doctors were mystified. Several of them later published a journal article reporting this “curious clinical observation,” for which they could find no explanation.
Although the Serratia marcescens bacterium turned out not to have been as harmless as scientists from Camp Detrick had believed, they deemed their “vulnerability test” a success. It was conducted without detection and, by their reckoning, proved that cities were vulnerable to biological warfare. “It was noted that a successful BW attack on this area can be launched from the sea,” they wrote in their report, “and that effective dosages can be produced over relatively large areas.”
The CIA played only an observer’s role in Operation Sea Spray. Full-scale warfare was not its business. Its officers were more interested in the ways that chemical and biological agents could be used to control the minds of individuals. In 1950, Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter took the next step in this search. He decreed creation of a new program that would take the CIA’s quest for mind control techniques to its next level.
The program was code-named Bluebird, supposedly after someone at a planning meeting described its goal as finding ways to make prisoners “sing like a bird.” One of the first Bluebird memos decreed that experiments be “broad and comprehensive, involving both domestic and overseas activity.” Another noted that the best subjects would be prisoners, including “defectors, refugees, POWs [and] others.” Experiments would be aimed at, according to a third memo, “investigating the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques.”
Bluebird began amid great enthusiasm. Barely six months after it was launched, its officers asked permission to expand it, including “the establishment and training of four additional teams besides the two currently in use.” These teams, they said, would “conduct experiments and d
evelop techniques to determine the possibilities and practicability of the positive use of [Special Interrogation] on willing and unwilling subjects, for operational purposes. Positive use of SI would be for the purpose of operational control of individuals to perform specific tasks under post-hypnotic suggestion … This field, if it is found that the application of SI is possible and practicable, offers unlimited possibilities to operational officers.”
Around the time that report was written, a fateful change transformed the CIA. A new director, General Walter Bedell Smith, took over in October 1950. One of his first decisions was to hire the ambitious former OSS spymaster Allen Dulles. Although Dulles was in many ways a limited thinker, he liked to imagine himself on the cutting edge of espionage. During his war years in Switzerland he had met and come to admire the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By the time he began his long career at the CIA, he had become fascinated with the prospect that science could discover ways to manipulate the human psyche.
After six weeks of work at the CIA as a consultant, Dulles officially joined the Agency on January 2, 1951. His title, deputy director for plans, lightly disguised the fact that his job was to oversee the Agency’s covert operations—an enterprise that consumed most of its budget. From the beginning of his CIA career to the end, Dulles enthusiastically promoted mind control projects of every sort. He saw them as an indispensable part of the secret war against Communism that he was charged with waging.
Signs of that escalating war were plain to see. Less than a month after Dulles began full-time work at the CIA, the United States carried out its first nuclear test in the Nevada desert, giving Americans a terrifying look at the mushroom cloud that they had been told could engulf them at any moment. Soon afterward, eleven leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were ordered to prison after the Supreme Court upheld their convictions on charges of seeking to overthrow the government. Adding to those shocks was jarring news that two British intelligence officers, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had disappeared. They had been feeding Western secrets to the Soviet Union for years, and later turned up in Moscow.
These frightening developments intensified the sense of barely controlled panic that shaped the early CIA. Allen Dulles immediately focused on Bluebird. He had been on the job for only a few weeks when he sent a revealing memo to two of the senior officers he had assigned to help direct it, Frank Wisner and Richard Helms.
“In our conversation of 9 February 1951,” Dulles wrote, “I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science. The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared by my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.” Dulles added that this “augmenting” could only be carried out overseas because many of its aspects were “not permitted by the United States government (i.e., anthrax etc.).”
Other memos from this period contain equally revealing passages. One stipulates: “Bluebird teams are to include persons qualified in medicine, psychological interrogation, the use of the electroencephalograph, electric shock and the polygraph.” Another directs researchers to investigate ways that a person “can be made to commit acts useful to us under post-hypnotic suggestion,” along with ways to “condition our own people so they will not be subject to post-hypnotic suggestion.” A third asks: “Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?”
* * *
IN A SLEEPY German town called Oberursel, tucked into rolling hills north of Frankfurt, the Nazis had operated a transit camp for captured British and American pilots. The U.S. Army took it over in 1946 and named it Camp King, after an intelligence officer who had been killed a couple of years before. Since it was already configured with prison cells and interrogation rooms, it became the place where recalcitrant ex-Nazis and other prisoners were sent for “special interrogation.” Officially it was said to house the 7707th European Command Intelligence Center. That was not the whole story.
Camp King was home base for the “rough boys,” a handful of Counterintelligence Corps officers known for abusing prisoners. Some of their methods were traditional, like immersing victims in freezing water or forcing them to run through gauntlets of soldiers who beat them with baseball bats and other weapons. Others were pharmacological. They injected some victims with Metrazol, which was thought to loosen tongues but also causes violent contortions, and others with cocktails of mescaline, heroin, and amphetamines. Victims’ screams sometimes echoed through the base.
“The unit took great pride in their nicknames, the ‘rough boys’ and the ‘kraut gauntlet,’ and didn’t hold back with any drug or technique,” one veteran of the Counterintelligence Corps later recalled. “You name it, they used it.”
The “rough boys” at Camp King gave Allen Dulles all the muscle he needed for torture of the traditional sort. Most appealingly, as one CIA officer in Frankfurt put it, “disposal of body would be no problem.” Dulles, though, was looking beyond traditional methods of interrogation. He resolved to take advantage of Camp King’s assets, but in a way that would allow him to test forms of persuasion more sophisticated than what the “rough boys” doled out.
Senior CIA officers saw Bluebird as a portal that might lead them toward an undiscovered world. At Camp King they had a site where they could test any drug or coercive technique. They had a ready supply of human subjects. If any died, disposing of their bodies would be “no problem.” Best of all, since their work would be in American-occupied West Germany, they were beyond the reach of law.
Rather than rely on the thuggish “rough boys,” the CIA began sending Bluebird teams to Camp King to carry out interrogations. Then it went a step further. Bluebird work was so secret that even a secure army base was not secure enough. Behind tightly closed doors, a far-reaching plan took shape. The CIA would open its own secret prison where captured enemy agents could be used as subjects in mind control experiments. It would be under the formal control of Camp King but located outside the base perimeter and run by the CIA. To put it another way: a CIA “safe house” under the protection of the U.S. Army.
A few miles from Camp King, in the village of Kronberg, a gabled villa stands at the end of what was once a country lane. Over the heavy wooden doors is chiseled the date it was built: 1906. For a generation it was known as Villa Schuster, after the Jewish family that built and owned it. The family was forced to sell during the Nazi era. In early 1951, Americans from the CIA and the Special Operations Division who were looking for a “black site” drove up the lane and found it.
From the outside, Villa Schuster—also known as Haus Waldhof, after the name of the lane that leads to it—looks almost regal, a calm survivor of history’s tempests. It is spacious, with an elegant entryway and sturdy beams. The grand living room has a high ceiling, leaded windows, and an imposing fireplace. On the two upper floors are a dozen bedrooms. The basement is a complex of bricked-in storerooms, easily configured as sealed cells.
With the coming of the Cold War in the late 1940s, a different sort of prisoner began arriving at Camp King. Many were from Eastern Europe, including East Germany. Some were captured Soviet agents. Others claimed to be refugees but had been judged unreliable. The guilty were mixed with the simply unfortunate. All were what the CIA called “expendable,” meaning that if they disappeared, no one would inquire too closely. The especially expendable, along with those believed to be guarding especially valuable secrets, were sent to Villa Schuster. In its basement, doctors and scientists conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that had ever been carried out by officers of the United States government.
“This villa on the edge of Kronberg became the CIA’s torture house,” a German television documentary concluded decades later.
CIA officers who conducted Bluebird interrogations at Camp King and Villa Schuster counted on guidance from “Doc Fisher,” a German
physician who had worked at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington and spoke good English. “Doc Fisher” was General Walter Schreiber, the former surgeon general of the Nazi army. During the war he had approved experiments at the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau concentration camps in which inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored. According to one American researcher, his experiments “usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.” After the war Schreiber was arrested by the Soviets and imprisoned at the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Finally he persuaded his jailers to allow him to accept a professorship in East Berlin. Once there, he slipped across to West Berlin and presented himself to officers of the Counterintelligence Corps. As soon as they confirmed his identity, they sent him to Camp King. There he was welcomed like an admired colleague.
“The former chief physician of the German army, who had been responsible for overseeing many concentration camp experiments, sat for weeks of questioning,” according to one report. “But these were not the kind of questions an accused prisoner would be asked about crimes against humanity. They spoke as scientists and colleagues, about their knowledge and experiences.”
Within a few months after his arrival, Schreiber rose to become Camp King’s staff doctor. Part of his job was to advise members of visiting Bluebird teams in techniques of “special interrogation.” One CIA-connected researcher, a Harvard Medical School professor named Henry Beecher, spent a long evening with him at Villa Schuster. In retrospect it seems a chilling scene: sitting in an elegant salon, probably sipping good drinks, almost certainly with a fire blazing, these two mutual admirers, one a former Nazi doctor and the other a Harvard professor who worked with the CIA, talked shop. They were among the world’s few true experts on the subject of psychoactive drugs and had much to discuss. Directly below their feet were stone cells where “expendables” were kept for use as subjects in Bluebird experiments. Beecher wrote afterward that he found Schreiber “intelligent and cooperative.” He enjoyed their “exchange of ideas.”
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