Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  “We didn’t know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him,” one of the medical assistants later confessed.

  Gottlieb’s first eighteen months of experiments brought him no closer to understanding how hallucinogenic drugs could be used to control minds. On the contrary, they forced him to confront frustrating realities. These drugs were no “truth serum.” The visions they produced often hindered interrogations rather than helping them. Nor were they effective amnesiacs; subjects often realized they had been drugged and remembered the experience afterward. It seemed that another class of drugs could now be added to barbiturates, sedatives, cannabis extract, cocaine, and heroin on the list of those that cannot be reliably used to make people talk.

  This left Gottlieb to choose between two conclusions: either there is no such thing as a mind control drug or there is indeed such a thing and it is waiting to be discovered. He had been hired to explore, not to give up. That was also his nature. Like his Artichoke comrades, he believed he could find a way to control human minds. Before any of the others, he concluded that it lay within LSD. He recognized it as a highly complex substance, believed it might have decisive value in clandestine work, and was determined to study it further.

  Once Allen Dulles was installed as director of central intelligence, Gottlieb’s bureaucratic ambition grew. He knew Dulles would support any project he proposed. What would that be? This was a period when Gottlieb was conducting his own “self-experimentation” with LSD, so his imagination was fertile. He reflected on the broadening ambition of CIA mind control projects. This was the moment, he decided, to broaden it further.

  Gottlieb conceived the idea of a new project that would subsume Artichoke and give him authority over all CIA research into mind control. With this mandate, he would test every imaginable drug and technique, plus some not yet imagined. He would be free not only to experiment on “expendables” at secret prisons abroad, but also to feed LSD to witting and unwitting Americans. From there he would go on to test, study, and investigate every substance or method that might be used as a tool to control minds. All experiments would be conducted under the umbrella of a single program that he would run.

  Richard Helms, now chief of operations for the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, shared Gottlieb’s enthusiasm. Together they composed a memorandum for Dulles describing what this program would aim to do.

  Gottlieb was about to launch the most systematic and widest-ranging mind control project ever undertaken by any government. At the same time, he was assuming his other important role: poisoner in chief. They fit together well. Gottlieb was the CIA’s senior chemist. He had directed the application of unknowable quantities and varieties of drugs into living humans. As a result of those experiments, he knew as much as any American about the effects of toxins on the human body. If CIA officers or anyone else in the U.S. government needed poison, he was the logical person to produce it.

  On the evening of March 30, 1953, Allen Dulles sat down for dinner at his Georgetown home with one of his senior officers, James Kronthal. The two men had been OSS comrades in Europe and remained close. On this night, Dulles had most unpleasant news. He told Kronthal that CIA security officers—two of whom were eavesdropping at that moment—had discovered his awful secret. He was a pedophile who had been compromised on film and blackmailed into working as a double agent, first for the Nazis and then for the Soviets.

  Dulles spoke sadly about the ways personal compulsion can destroy careers. The two men parted around midnight. Security officers accompanied Kronthal home. Later that morning he was found dead in his second-floor bedroom. The CIA security director, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, wrote in his report that “an empty vial had been found by the body, and the presumption was that he had taken poison.” Years later, one of that era’s CIA security officers, Robert Crowley, surmised what had happened—and who had made the poison.

  “Allen probably had a special potion prepared that he gave to Kronthal,” Crowley said. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect.”

  While that dramatic episode was unfolding, Gottlieb and Helms were working on their memorandum proposing that the CIA launch a newly broadened mind control project. Helms sent it to Dulles on April 3—just four days after Dulles hosted Kronthal’s farewell dinner.

  A redacted version of this memo has been declassified. In it, Helms reports that an “extremely sensitive” research project “has been actively under way since the middle of 1952 and has gathered considerable momentum in the last few months.” He recommends that this project be expanded to include experiments of “such an ultra-sensitive nature that they cannot and should not be handled by means of contracts which would associate CIA or the Government with the work in question.” These experiments “lie entirely within two well-defined fields of endeavor.”

  (a) to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials. This area includes the production of various physiological conditions which could support present or future clandestine operations. Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemies [sic] theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. For example: we intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible non-toxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, implanting suggestion and other forms of mental control.

  (b) [redacted]

  On April 10, 1953, as Dulles was considering this proposal, he described it in a revealing speech to a group of his fellow Princeton University alumni gathered in Hot Springs, Virginia. He couched his revelations in an ingenious disguise, claiming to be speaking about a Soviet project rather than an American one. No one in the room could have cracked the code as he was speaking. From the perspective of history, however, it is clear that his words applied precisely to the experiments that CIA officers and Camp Detrick scientists were carrying out at that moment, and that were about to become even more intense.

  Dulles began his speech by asking “whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become.” He avoided mentioning the techniques his men were using, but did refer to “endless interrogation by teams of brutal interrogators while the victims are being deprived of sleep.” The goal of this and other forms of abuse, he said, was “the perversion of the minds of selected individuals, who are subjected to such treatment that they are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts … Parrot-like, the individuals so conditioned can repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their mind by suggestion from outside. In effect, the brain under these circumstances becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius, over which he has no control.”

  We might call it, in its new form, “brain warfare.” The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside … The human mind is the most delicate of instruments. It is so finely adjusted, so susceptible to the impact of outside influences, that it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men. The Soviets are now using brain perversion as one of their main weapons in prosecuting the Cold War. Some of these techniques are so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.

  Dulles finished his speech with a plaintive lament. “We in the West are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare,” he said. “We have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.”

  The opposite was true. Dulles was claiming moral high ground by saying that he, the CIA, and the government of the United States
would never stoop to brutal experiments on unwilling human subjects. Through his Bluebird and Artichoke projects, however, he had been conducting such experiments for two years. Dulles never recoiled from the most extreme implications of “brain warfare.” The memo Helms had sent him proposed just the kind of no-holds-barred project he wanted to launch.

  “It was fashionable among that group to fancy that they were rather impersonal about dangers, risks, and human life,” one of the early CIA men, Ray Cline, said years later. “Helms would think it sentimental and foolish to be against something like this.”

  Under Gottlieb’s direction, with Dulles’s encouragement and Helms’s bureaucratic protection, Artichoke had become one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government. The time had come, Dulles now agreed, to intensify and systematize it. Gottlieb had proven himself. He was ready for a new responsibility, unique in American history. Only a handful of people knew he was assuming it.

  On April 13, 1953, Dulles formally approved the research project Helms had proposed ten days before. That made Gottlieb America’s mind control czar. He set to work with three assets: a starting budget of $300,000, not subject to financial controls; permission to launch research and conduct experiments at will, “without the signing of the usual contracts or other written agreements”; and a new cryptonym. Tradecraft dictates that cryptonyms should have no meaning, so that if discovered they provide no clue about the project they describe. Nonetheless Dulles could not resist giving this new project a name that reflected what he called its “ultra-sensitive nature.” Gottlieb’s project would be called MK-ULTRA.

  5

  Abolishing Consciousness

  Making the wrong friend in New York during the early 1950s led some people into psychic shock. They were brought to an apartment at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village and given drinks laced with LSD. As they careened through their hallucinogenic trips, CIA operatives monitored their reactions. These unfortunates were unwitting subjects in one of the first MK-ULTRA experiments.

  The man Sidney Gottlieb hired to direct this operation, George Hunter White, stands out even in the dazzling MK-ULTRA cast of obsessed chemists, coldhearted spymasters, grim torturers, hypnotists, electro-shockers, and Nazi doctors. He was a hard-charging narcotics detective who lived large in the twilight world of crime and drugs. When Gottlieb offered him a job running a CIA “safe house” where he would dose unsuspecting visitors with LSD and record the results, he jumped at the chance. He imagined that it would be another wild episode in his long series of undercover exploits. It was that and more.

  White stood five feet seven inches, weighed over two hundred pounds, and shaved his head. Writers have described him as “fat and bull-like,” a “vastly obese slab of a man” who looked like “an extremely menacing bowling ball.” His first wife, who divorced him in 1945, called him “a fat slob.” He regularly used illegal drugs, keeping for himself a share of whatever he confiscated. His consumption of alcohol—often a full bottle of gin with dinner—was legendary. His other appetite was sexual fetish, especially sadomasochism and high heels. He bought his second wife a closet full of boots, and patronized prostitutes who bound and whipped him. One of his few emotional bonds was with his pet canary. He loved to hold and stroke it. When the bird died, he was deeply pained. “Poor little bastard just couldn’t make it,” he wrote in his diary. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get another bird or pet. It’s tough on everyone when they die.”

  After several years as a crime reporter for the San Francisco Call Bulletin, White joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Quickly he became one of its crack agents. He made national headlines in 1937 by busting a Chinese American opium ring, supposedly after being initiated into the gang and agreeing to “death by fire” if he ever betrayed its secrets. The men’s magazine True lionized him in a stirring article headlined WHEN THE ROOKIE TOOK THE TONG. He cultivated his image and lost no chance to enhance it. Sometimes he invited reporters to accompany him on raids.

  Without quitting the narcotics bureau, White joined the Office of Strategic Services when World War II broke out. He was sent for paramilitary training at a secret base in Ontario called Camp X, which he later called a “school of murder and mayhem.” After completing the course, he became a trainer himself. Several of his trainees went on to long careers at the CIA, including Richard Helms, Frank Wisner, and James Jesus Angleton. Later he was posted to India, where he supposedly killed a Japanese spy with his own hands. He also helped direct OSS “truth serum” experiments in which prisoners were fed various drugs to test their value as aids to interrogation.

  During the post-war years, White found a new kind of notoriety by leading the narcotics bureau’s campaign against jazz in New York City. He spied on musicians he suspected of using drugs, entrapped them, arrested them, and arranged for them to lose the cabaret cards they needed to perform in New York. In 1949 he made national headlines by arresting Billie Holiday for possession of opium. She insisted that she had been clean for a year and accused White of planting evidence. A jury acquitted her, but the ordeal and White’s relentless pressure helped fuel her decline toward early death.

  In 1950, White went to work for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee investigating supposed Communist influence in the State Department. From there he moved to another committee, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, that was investigating organized crime. He proved reckless, leaking allegations that both President Truman and Governor Thomas Dewey of New York were tied to the Mafia. Kefauver fired him after less than a year. He was ready for a new adventure when Gottlieb called.

  These two Americans, both masters of covert power, could hardly have been more different. White was an adrenaline-driven libertine with a sadistic streak who was rarely sober and reveled in life at the violent fringes of society. Gottlieb was a scientist who ate yogurt. At this moment, though, they fit together well. Gottlieb was looking for someone with street smarts who knew how to bend and break the law while seeming to enforce it. White knew that and more.

  White’s circle of dubious acquaintances gave him a rich pool of potential subjects for drug experiments. He was accustomed to treating people roughly. He could be relied upon to keep secrets. Since he was still on the payroll of the narcotics bureau, the CIA could deny any connection to him if something went wrong. These qualities made him an ideal partner.

  Gottlieb had already tested LSD on volunteers and unsuspecting victims. He was about to begin distributing it to hospitals and medical schools for controlled experiments. In order to learn more about how ordinary people would react to it, he decided to open a “safe house” inside the United States. The subjects would be a new kind of “expendable.” Many of those White brought to his “safe house” at 81 Bedford Street were drug users, petty criminals, and others who could be relied upon not to complain about what had happened to them.

  The few people who knew about MK-ULTRA considered it crucial to America’s survival. Limiting its scope out of concern for a few lives—or even for a few hundred or more—would have seemed to them not simply absurd but treasonous. The “safe house” in New York epitomized this moral bargain.

  Allen Dulles had given Gottlieb an almost laughably daunting assignment: discover a wonder drug to defeat freedom’s enemies and save the world. It was a supreme challenge to the scientific imagination. Gottlieb was as ready for it as any American.

  In May 1952, soon after hearing of White from a colleague at the Technical Services Staff, Gottlieb invited him to Washington for a chat. They talked about the OSS—both its “truth serum” experiments and its fabled Division 19, the gadget shop where artisans crafted silent pistols, poison dart guns, and other tools of the trade. Then the conversation turned to LSD. Gottlieb was surprised to hear how much White knew about it, reflecting the extent of the narcotics bureau’s secret experimentation.

  White offered to show Gottlieb how he worked. The two of them drove to New Haven, Connecticut,
where White was building a case against a businessman who he suspected was a heroin wholesaler. The trip, Gottlieb recalled later, “really gave us a chance to discuss matters of interest.” It exposed him to a new world and left him smitten. White, he said, “was always armed to the teeth with all sort of weapons; he could be gruff and loutish, vulgar even, but then turn urbane to a point of eloquence.” The CIA did not normally employ people like him.

  “We were Ivy League, white, middle class,” one of Gottlieb’s colleagues later explained. “We were naïve, totally naïve about this, and he felt pretty expert. He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs … He was a pretty wild man.”

  White married his vivacious second wife, Albertine, in 1951. She shared many of his interests and joined him in group sex, fetish scenes involving leather boots, and the drugging of their friends and other unwitting subjects. By one account she “turned a blind eye to her husband’s deviant behavior” and “thoroughly enjoyed the fast company her husband kept.” Decades later, a researcher confronted her with the report of a woman who had a mental breakdown after the Whites apparently fed her LSD at their Greenwich Village apartment. He reported that Albertine “descended into a string of expletives that would have embarrassed a sailor. Her tirade left this writer with the firm impression that she was thoroughly capable of having been White’s accomplice in his dirty work.”

  In 1952 the Whites hosted a Thanksgiving dinner party for the CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, who a decade earlier had been George’s student at the OSS “school for mayhem and murder” in Ontario. The next evening the two men met again, this time to drink gin and tonics laced with LSD. They took a taxi to a Chinese restaurant. After they were served, according to White’s diary, they began “laughing about something I can’t remember now” and “never got around to eating a bite.”