Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Teams of Bluebird interrogators flew regularly to West Germany to conduct their experiments. Most often, they did their work at Camp King and the nearby “black site” at Villa Schuster. German researchers would later identify other secret prisons where Americans also carried out extreme experiments. One was in Mannheim, near the baroque palace from which princes once ruled the Palatinate. Reports have placed others in Berlin, Munich, and the outskirts of Stuttgart.

  At these secret prisons, Bluebird interrogators worked without any outside supervision. This set a precedent that marked a breakthrough for the CIA. By opening prisons, the Agency established its right not only to detain and imprison people in other countries, but to interrogate them harshly while they were in custody without regard for U.S. law.

  So successful was this network of prisons in West Germany that the CIA duplicated it in Japan. There, Bluebird interrogation teams injected captured North Korean soldiers with drugs including sodium amytal, a depressant that can have hypnotic effects, and with three potent stimulants: Benzedrine, which affects the central nervous system; Coramine, which acts on the lungs; and Picrotoxin, a convulsant that can cause seizures and respiratory paralysis. While they were in the weakened state of transition between the effects of depressants and stimulants, CIA experimenters subjected them to hypnosis, electroshock, and debilitating heat. Their goal, according to one report, was “to induce violent cathartic reactions, alternately putting subjects to sleep, then waking them up until they were sufficiently confused to be coerced into reliving an experience from their past.” CIA officials in Washington ordered the officers who carried out these experiments to keep their true nature secret even from the American military units with which they were working, and to say only that they were conducting “intensive polygraph work.”

  As the pace of these experiments intensified, scientists at Camp Detrick renewed their interest in Kurt Blome. Immediately after the war, they had declined his offer to come to the United States, but by the early 1950s his knowledge of poisons and hallucinogens seemed to qualify him as an ideal adviser to the Bluebird project. The CIA found him practicing medicine in Dortmund. On a spring day in 1951, an officer visited his office with a proposition. If he would agree to spill his secrets, the CIA would arrange for an “accelerated Paperclip contract” that would bring him to the United States.

  Blome was enjoying his new life, but admitted that he liked the idea of a “return to biological research.” Finally, drawn especially by the prospect of working once again with his former Nazi comrade Walter Schreiber, who had accepted a Paperclip contract and was at that moment preparing to board a ship for New York, he decided to accept the CIA’s offer. He sold his medical practice, listed his home with a real estate broker, and pulled his children out of school so they could concentrate on learning English.

  The timing was bad. Schreiber’s arrival in the United States set off a scandal. The newspaper columnist Drew Pearson published excerpts from testimony at Nuremberg that implicated him in war crimes, specifically the assigning of doctors to carry out experiments on concentration camp inmates. Much outcry followed. Schreiber’s American sponsors reluctantly decided to cancel his Paperclip contract. Rather than return to West Germany, he chose retirement in Argentina.

  This scandal erupted as the chief of U.S. Army intelligence in Berlin, Colonel Garrison Cloverdale, was reviewing Kurt Blome’s application for a Paperclip contract. He had rubber-stamped dozens of others, but this time he balked. The extent of Blome’s crimes, he decided, disqualified him from entry into the United States. In a memo to General Lucius Clay, the High Commissioner for Germany, he recommended that the “accelerated Paperclip contract” be rejected and that Blome be denied a visa. Clay agreed. Cloverdale sent a curt cable to the Camp Detrick scientists: “Suspend shpmt Dr. Kurt Blome—appears inadmissible in view of HICOG.”

  CIA officers working on the Bluebird project were furious. “Blome contract signed and approved Commander in Chief,” one of them wrote in an angry memo. “Subject completing preparations for shipment late November. Has already turned over private practice Dortmund to another doctor. In view of adverse publicity which might ensue and which may destroy entire program, this theatre recommend[s] subject be shipped.”

  The CIA’s appeal was unsuccessful. Admitting Blome to the United States threatened to focus unwanted attention not only on him, but also on the hundreds of other former Nazis who had been quietly brought to work at American military bases and research laboratories. Yet Bluebird operatives remained determined to tap his uniquely valuable store of knowledge.

  Fortunately, the ideal job had just become available. Walter Schreiber had been staff doctor at Camp King, and now that post was open. The CIA offered it to Blome. He would resume the work he pursued during his Nazi years: testing what one memo called “the use of drugs and chemicals in unconventional interrogations.” Since he would be based at Camp King rather than in the United States, he could help direct the interrogations as well. Blome accepted. His wife refused to move to Camp King with him, and the couple separated. “Doc Blome” was free to devote all of his time to his new work.

  * * *

  JUDGES AT NUREMBERG had condemned Nazi doctors for violating universal principles that must always govern experiments on human beings. In their verdict, they enumerated those principles, which became known as the Nuremberg Code, to justify the punishments they meted out and to set immutable laws for future generations.

  No copy of the Nuremberg Code is known to have hung at Camp King or any other place where Bluebird teams experimented on prisoners. If it had, experimenters might have been drawn to its first and most essential principle: “Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.” Despite the clarity of that imperative, and despite the seven death sentences that had been pronounced on Nazi scientists who were judged to have violated it, the Nuremberg Code was never incorporated into United States law. It did not legally bind Bluebird researchers, experimenters, or interrogators as they set out to answer deep and ancient questions.

  What were those questions? After consulting with their new German and Japanese colleagues, CIA officers came up with a list. Answers to these questions, they asserted in a memo in early 1951, would be “of incredible value to this agency.”

  Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals?

  Can Agency personnel (or persons of interest to this agency) be conditioned to prevent any outside power from obtaining information from them by any known means?…

  Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?

  Can we “alter” a person’s personality? How long will it hold?

  Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents?…

  How can [drugs] be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum, water, common medicines, Coke, toothpaste?…

  Can we … extract complicated formulas from scientists, engineers, etc., if unwilling? Can we extract details of gun emplacements, landing fields, factories, mines?…

  Can we also have them make detailed drawing, sketches, plans?

  Could any of this be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?

  “Bluebird is not fully satisfied with results to date, but believes with continued work and study, remarkable results can be obtained,” this memo concluded. “Bluebird’s general problem is to get up, conduct and carry out research (practical—not theoretical) in this direction.”

  Three of the first CIA officers Dulles assigned to oversee Bluebird were part of the Agency’s inner core: James Jesus Angleton, chief of the counterintelligence staff; Frank Wisner, soon to become deputy director for plans; and Richard Helms, who twenty years later would rise to the top job, director of central intelligence. All were hyper-active and full of ideas. They realized, however, that they lacked the scientific ba
ckground to answer the multi-layered questions they were asking.

  Allen Dulles and his senior officers agreed that Bluebird needed to “get up.” Then they went a step further. They decided that Bluebird needed an infusion of expertise and vision from outside the CIA. Dulles and Helms set out to recruit an imaginative chemist with the drive to pursue forbidden knowledge, a character steely enough to direct experiments that might challenge the conscience of other scientists, and a willingness to ignore legal niceties in the service of national security. This would be the first person the United States government ever hired to find ways to control human minds.

  4

  The Secret That Was Going to Unlock the Universe

  Waves of damp heat enveloped Washington on the morning of July 13, 1951, when Sidney Gottlieb reported for his first day of work at the CIA. In retrospect, that Friday the thirteenth may be seen as a momentous date in America’s secret history. It marked the beginning of Gottlieb’s hallucinatory career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action.

  “Do you know why they recruited you?” Gottlieb was asked during a deposition decades later.

  “They needed someone with my background to organize a group of chemists to pursue the kind of work that the CIA thought they were interested in,” he replied.

  “Did they describe to you at that time what kind of work you would be doing?”

  “Very vaguely. They weren’t quite sure. It was a question of a new unit being organized there.”

  “What was your understanding of what your function would be?”

  “My understanding? I really didn’t have much of an understanding in my mind. I decided I would give it a try for six months.”

  Bluebird, the CIA’s mind control project, was in full flight by 1951. Teams of its officers were testing “special interrogation” techniques at secret prisons in Germany and Japan. They were studying the effects of various drugs, and of techniques like hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation. That was not enough, however, to satisfy the CIA’s deputy director for plans, Allen Dulles.

  Dulles considered Bluebird a project of the utmost importance—even one that could mean the difference between the survival and extinction of the United States. Yet as the program grew, it lost focus. Interrogators worked without coordination. No one was in charge. That set Dulles off on his search for a chemist to oversee all CIA research into mind control.

  The obvious place to begin the search was the Chemical Corps. Its commanders had remained in close contact with Ira Baldwin, whom they revered for his pioneering bio-warfare work during World War II. Although Baldwin had returned to the University of Wisconsin, he visited Washington regularly and remained influential as a member of the scientific advisory committee to the Chemical Corps. According to one study, he “continued his work from a new desk, without responsibility for day-to-day operations at Camp Detrick.”

  Several years earlier, Baldwin had guided one of his prize students, Frank Olson, a budding expert in aerobiology, into a covert government job that brought him to Camp Detrick’s inner sanctum, the Special Operations Division. He had also stayed in touch with another former student, a talented biochemist who worked in Washington, felt guilty for having been unable to serve in World War II, and dreamed of finding a special way to prove his patriotism. From Baldwin’s orbit emerged the man the CIA was seeking.

  The summer of 1951 was a fearful time for Americans. Tension in Berlin reached frightening levels. The Korean War, which at first seemed to offer the prospect of easy victory, had turned into an ugly stalemate, and when the American commander in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur, criticized President Truman’s handling of the war, Truman fired him for insubordination, setting off outraged protests and demands for Truman’s impeachment. At home, Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning that Communists had infiltrated the State Department.

  Most Americans could do little more than worry about the ominous state of the world. Allen Dulles had more options. His career had taught him, rightly or wrongly, that covert action can change the course of history. By the early 1950s he had concluded that mind control could be the decisive weapon of the coming age. Any nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psyche, he believed, could rule the world. He hired Sidney Gottlieb to lead the CIA’s search for that grail.

  It was a promising choice. Gottlieb had worked for nearly a decade in government laboratories and was known as an energetic researcher. Like many Americans of his generation, he had been shaped by the trauma of World War II—and because he had been unable to fight, this trauma had left him with a store of pent-up patriotic fervor. His focused energy fit well with the compulsive activism and ethical elasticity that shaped the officers of the early CIA.

  Culturally, though, those men were distant from Gottlieb. They were polished products of the American aristocracy. Many knew one another through family webs and prep schools, Ivy League colleges, clubs, investment banks, law firms, and the eternally bonding experience of wartime service in the Office of Strategic Services. The CIA officers who took the greatest interest in mind control projects, Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, were exemplars of that elite. Dulles had risen to his post by way of Princeton and the globally powerful Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. His trusted aide Helms was born in Philadelphia and attended prep school in Switzerland. Yet when they set out to hire their master magician of the mind, these patricians chose someone utterly unlike themselves: a thirty-three-year-old Jew from an immigrant family in the Bronx who limped and stuttered.

  The gap between them extended to private life. Dulles and Helms were gregarious fixtures on the Georgetown cocktail party circuit, as men of their station were expected to be. Gottlieb was strangely, even startlingly different. He and his family lived in an isolated cabin and grew much of their own food. “It’s pretty amazing,” one of his former colleagues later mused. “In many ways Sid was at the forefront of the so-called counterculture before anybody knew there was going to be one.”

  Gottlieb’s unusual style of life was not the end of his oddness. He confessed to the CIA psychologist assigned to screen him, John Gittinger, that he had been a socialist in college. Gittinger assured him that a youthful flirtation with the left would not disqualify him. Their interview then turned to more personal matters. Gottlieb mentioned the search for inner meaning that was already beginning to shape his life. Afterward Gittinger wrote that the young scientist “had a real problem to find a spiritual focus, having gone away from Jewishness.”

  The director of central intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, had the final say on Gottlieb’s hiring, but as in many matters related to covert operations he deferred to Dulles. When the time came for Dulles to choose the American scientist best qualified to shape his mind control program, he reached far beyond his social and economic class. Yet he could not miss the fact that fate had dealt him and Gottlieb one similar blow.

  Dulles had also been born with a clubfoot. His condition was not as serious as Gottlieb’s. It had required only one operation, carried out in secret because such handicaps were considered shameful in his family’s elevated circle. Yet both men wore prosthetic shoes for most of their lives. Neither ever walked normally. Although they were separated by background and experience, this shared handicap became what one writer called “a strong but never mentioned bond between them.” Over the next decade they would stumble together through undiscovered frontiers.

  * * *

  GOTTLIEB’S FIRST ASSIGNMENT at the CIA was to take a three-month course in intelligence tradecraft, with what he later called “some historical backgrounds of intelligence thrown in.” After completing it, he set out to educate himself further. He learned all he could about CIA research into chemical techniques of mind control, which he found promising but scattered. Dulles and Helms were impressed. They saw in Gottlieb precisely the combination of zeal and creative imagination that they considered essential if Bluebird was to realize its full potential. Soon after hiring him,
they rewarded him with an official title: chief of the newly formed Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff. The TSS was responsible for developing, testing, and building the tools of espionage. Its Chemical Division was Gottlieb’s to shape as he wished.

  Dulles gave Gottlieb more than a title that summer. He had already concluded that Bluebird was not wide-ranging or comprehensive enough. Now, in Gottlieb, he had someone able to invigorate it. On August 20, 1951, he directed that Bluebird be expanded, intensified, and centralized. He also gave it a new name: Artichoke. Supposedly he chose that name because artichokes were his favorite vegetable; some later researchers guessed that it actually referred to a colorfully murderous New York gangster known as the Artichoke King. Whatever the source of its name, Artichoke quickly subsumed its predecessor projects and became Gottlieb’s power base.

  Dulles acted from a position of growing strength. Just three days after launching Artichoke, he was promoted to the second-ranking job at the CIA, deputy director of central intelligence. That assured protection and support for mind control experiments at the highest level of American power.

  The first directives sent to Artichoke teams suggest the project’s extreme nature. One recommends that interrogations be carried out “in a safe house or safe area,” with an adjoining room for “recording devices, transformers, etc.” and a bathroom because “occasionally the ‘Artichoke’ technique produces nausea, vomiting, or other conditions which make bathroom facilities essential.” Another says that “Artichoke techniques” may be used at any stage of interrogation, either as “a starting point for the obtaining of information [or] as a last resort when all or nearly all the attempts at obtaining information have failed or when a subject is completely recalcitrant or particularly stubborn.”