Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Gottlieb spent these months shuttling back and forth between the United States and “safe houses” abroad. Many of his experiments served his focused interest in LSD. This was also the time when Stanley Glickman was drugged in Paris. Even these far-flung experiments, however, did not bring the results Gottlieb wanted. George Hunter White opened a new world. Soon after they met, Gottlieb asked if White would like to work with him. White was interested. Indiscreetly, he recorded the offer in his diary.

  “Gottlieb proposes I be a CIA consultant,” White wrote. “I agree.”

  Before Gottlieb could seal their partnership, he faced an unexpected problem. CIA officers in Washington delayed White’s application for security clearance. Part of the problem, as White suspected, was cultural. “A couple of crew-cut, pipe-smoking punks had either known me or heard of me during the OSS days, and had decided I was ‘too rough’ for their league and promptly blackballed me,” he wrote later. The delay also reflected Gottlieb’s bureaucratic challenge. He was assuming control of what was arguably the American government’s most important covert program. It was natural that others in the CIA would resist. The Office of Scientific Intelligence sought to establish control over some aspects of MK-ULTRA. So did the Office of Security. Morse Allen, who had helped run both the Bluebird and Artichoke projects, was in no mood to withdraw. Allen Dulles faithfully supported Gottlieb in these turf battles, but he could not ignore grumbling from senior officers who had reason to resent this newcomer’s growing power. They showed their unhappiness by taking a year to approve White’s security clearance.

  When approval finally came, Gottlieb traveled to New York to deliver the good news in person. He brought a check to cover start-up costs. White used the first $3,400 as a deposit for his lair at 81 Bedford Street.

  “CIA—got final clearance and sign contract as ‘consultant’—met Gottlieb,” White wrote in his diary on June 8, 1953.

  The Bedford Street complex was about to become something unique: a CIA “safe house” in the heart of New York to which unsuspecting citizens would be lured and surreptitiously drugged, with the goal of finding ways to fight Communism. It was comprised of two adjoining apartments. Surveillance equipment allowed observers in one to record what was happening in the other. Gottlieb already had “safe houses” abroad where he could drug people as he wished. Now he had one in New York.

  That fall, White began prowling Greenwich Village for people he could befriend and then secretly dose with LSD or other drugs. He invented an alias, Morgan Hall, and a couple of fake life stories. “He posed alternately as a merchant seaman or a bohemian artist, and consorted with a vast array of underworld characters, all of whom were involved in vice, including drugs, prostitution, gambling, and pornography,” according to one survey of White’s career. “It was under this assumed, bohemian artist persona that White would entrap most of his MK-ULTRA victims.”

  Some of the people White dosed with LSD were his friends, including one who ran Vixen Press, which specialized in fetish and lesbian pulp. Other victims included young women who had the misfortune to cross his path. His diary suggests how they reacted: “Gloria gets horror … Janet sky high.” White was sufficiently impressed with the power of LSD to begin calling it Stormy in his diary entries. Nonetheless he continued giving it to anyone he could lure into his den. “I was angry at George for that,” the Vixen Press publisher said years later. “It turned out to be a bad thing to do to people, but we didn’t realize it at the time.”

  White’s connections protected him from exposure. The victim of one of his experiments staggered into Lenox Hill Hospital afterward, claiming she had been drugged. After a couple of hours, she was told that she was probably mistaken and quietly discharged. Episodes like these were kept quiet because the CIA had, as one account put it, “arranged an accommodation with the medical department of the New York City Police Department to protect White from any hassles.”

  The opening of the “safe house” on Bedford Street contributed to festering tension between the CIA and FBI. Some CIA officers thought of the FBI as a haven for dumb cops and ham-fisted thugs. FBI agents, returning the favor, considered CIA men amateurish prima donnas and, as one put it, “mostly rich boys, trust fund snobs who thought they were God’s answer to all the world’s ills.” Allen Dulles and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, were fierce bureaucratic rivals. It would have been unlike Hoover to complain about the “safe house,” but also unlike him not to have learned of it. The news came in a report from his New York office just three weeks after White paid the deposit.

  “A confidential informant of this office advised on July 1st that his former supervisor in the Bureau of Narcotics, George White … has become associated with the CIA in an ‘ultra-secret’ assignment as a consultant,” the report said. “White and CIA have rented dual apartments at 81 Bedford Street, New York City. In one of these apartments has been set up a bar and quarters for entertainment, while the other apartment is being used by the CIA for the purpose of taking motion pictures through an x-ray mirror of the activities in the former apartment.”

  Gottlieb closely supervised this operation. He and White met regularly, in Washington and in New York. Their personal bond grew. White had taken up leatherworking as a hobby, and when Gottlieb celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday on August 3, 1954, White gave him a handcrafted belt as a gift.

  Folk dancing had become one of Gottlieb’s passions, and he sometimes invited colleagues to try a few steps with him. Not all were willing. White was. Gottlieb taught him to dance a jig, and they delighted friends by showing it off. These partners, one clubfooted and the other obese, danced together as they were launching their covert LSD experiments. White’s expense reports for the “safe house” at 81 Bedford Street, meticulously submitted to the Technical Services Staff, bear a clearly legible counter-signature: “Sidney Gottlieb, Chief / Chemical Division TSS.”

  * * *

  GOTTLIEB AND HIS CIA comrades were hardly the only Americans who believed during 1953 that the world was facing apocalypse. Many others agreed. MK-ULTRA was conceived and launched as Americans were succumbing to deep fears.

  “That period, up until about 1954, was a wild and woolly time at the CIA,” one retired CIA officer recalled decades later. “It was the old OSS mentality: ‘Go out and do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good or bad idea, go do it. We’re at war, so anything is justified. We’re smarter than most people, we operate in secret, we have access to intelligence, and we know what the real threats are. No one else does.’”

  The espionage saga of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg reached its climax during those months. Their trial and conviction on charges of stealing nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union shook the nation. Early in 1953 they appealed for stays of execution. President Eisenhower refused. So did the Supreme Court. The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19. Their case fed a terrifying sense that enemies had penetrated America’s inner sanctums.

  At the same time, new dangers were said to be emerging abroad. Americans were told that their country was battling the Soviet Union for survival, and that the battle was not going well. “You can look around the whole circle of the world,” John Foster Dulles asserted shortly before taking office as secretary of state in 1953, “and you find one spot after another after another after another where the question is: Are we going to lose this part of the world?” The new Eisenhower administration, guided by the Dulles brothers, saw urgent threats emerging from the defiant “third world.” A leftist government had been elected in Guatemala. Rebels in Vietnam were intensifying their campaign against the French colonial regime. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran had nationalized his country’s oil reserves. These challenges to Western power were portrayed in the United States not as symptoms of rising nationalism in the developing world, but as coordinated salvoes in Moscow’s war of global conquest.

  As the crises in Guatemala, Vietnam, and Iran intensified, an anti-Communist uprising broke out in East Berlin. Workers seized gove
rnment buildings. When local police refused to intervene, Soviet tanks did the dirty work. Leaders of the uprising were arrested, tried, and executed. Americans were told that this could be their fate if Communism continued its march.

  Another episode that shocked the CIA was kept secret. In late 1952, two CIA aviators, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, were captured after being shot down while on a clandestine mission over China. The “Red Chinese” offered to release them if the United States would admit publicly that they had been working for the CIA. Eisenhower refused, and the two aviators languished in prison until President Richard Nixon finally admitted the truth two decades later. At the CIA, minds ran wild as officers imagined the exotic tortures to which Chinese interrogators must be subjecting the two prisoners. They falsely presumed that the Chinese were doing what they themselves were doing: using prisoners as subjects for grotesque drug and mind control experiments.

  These frightening events confirmed the existential dread that led Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Sidney Gottlieb to justify the extremes of MK-ULTRA. The narrative of encirclement and imminent danger that Americans were fed was distant from reality, but it seized hearts in Washington and had profound effects. It allowed the CIA to convince itself that it was waging a purely defensive war. In its collective mind-set, nothing it did was aggressive. It justified all of its projects, even those that caused immense pain to individuals and nations, as necessary to block Communism’s relentless expansion.

  At the time Allen Dulles set MK-ULTRA in motion, he was also preparing several other covert operations that would have earth-shattering effects. He sent the chief of his Tehran station $1 million for use “in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh,” and by August his men had deposed the Iranian prime minister in the first CIA coup. Immediately he began planning to duplicate the feat in Guatemala. He also expanded the CIA station in Vietnam and intensified operations aimed at fomenting anti-Soviet uprisings in Eastern Europe. In his mind, these projects all fit together. MK-ULTRA was just as integral a part of Dulles’s secret world war as any plot against a foreign government.

  Even as mind control experiments reached new extremes, and as their human toll began to rise, none of the CIA officers familiar with MK-ULTRA is known to have raised any objection. The CIA’s partners in the Special Operations Division, however, were part of the Chemical Corps and therefore under army command. Senior officers at the Pentagon were intensely interested in LSD and other chemicals that they believed could become weapons of war. They had no more desire to limit or curtail experiments than did their CIA counterparts. Worthwhile results, they told Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson in one memo, “could not be obtained unless human volunteers were utilized.” Wilson came from a civilian background—he had run General Motors before taking over the Pentagon—and sought restraint. He wanted assurances that human subjects in drug experiments were truly volunteers who had given informed consent, as required by the Nuremberg Code. In mid-1953 he issued a secret directive requiring that before any military unit conducted an experiment on human beings, both the secretary of defense and the secretary of the relevant service must be informed in writing. This rule was more honored in the breach than the observance. Some military units were told of it only orally. Others never heard of it. During the early 1950s, the secretary of the army received at least six requests to authorize experiments on human volunteers. During that same period, however, the army’s Special Operations Division was working with Gottlieb on many other experiments that, under the “Wilson Memorandum,” should have been reported. So far as is known, none was.

  The Special Operations Division was an invaluable MK-ULTRA partner. Its scientists compounded chemicals that CIA officers administered to prisoners in “special interrogation” sessions at secret prisons around the world. Some of them also worked with the CIA’s Technical Services Staff to develop gadgets that field agents could use to carry out drug attacks. Much of the science behind them came from experiments on human subjects.

  “SOD developed darts coated with biological agents, and pills containing several different biological agents which could remain potent for weeks or months,” Senate investigators later reported. “SOD also developed a special gun for firing darts coated with a chemical which could allow CIA agents to incapacitate a guard dog, enter an installation secretly, and return the dog to consciousness when leaving. SOD scientists were unable to develop a similar incapacitant for humans.”

  * * *

  AMERICANS SHOULD HAVE been able to celebrate the release of 7,200 soldiers from Communist prisons after an armistice ended the fighting in Korea in July 1953. Instead they recoiled in shock. Many prisoners, it turned out, had written statements criticizing the United States or praising Communism. Some had confessed to committing war crimes. Twenty-one chose to stay behind in North Korea or China. The Pentagon announced that they were considered deserters and would be executed if found.

  Most astonishing of all, several pilots among the released prisoners asserted that they had dropped bio-weapons from their warplanes—contradicting Washington’s fierce insistence that it had never deployed such weapons. “The most-used germ bomb was a 500-pounder,” one pilot reported. “Each had several compartments to hold different kinds of germs. Insects like fleas and spiders were kept separate from rats and voles.” These allegations set off a new burst of denials from Washington. Gottlieb, as chief of the Chemical Division, was commissioned to prepare a “press pack” to refute them. In it, two “acknowledged independent experts,” both of whom were Gottlieb’s friends, wrote that believing the Americans had used germ warfare in Korea was equivalent to believing that “flying saucers have landed.”

  How could American soldiers have turned their back on duty and sullied their country’s honor? A stunned nation struggled for explanations. Time examined the defectors’ backgrounds and concluded that poor upbringing or emotional problems explained their behavior. Newsweek described them as “shifty-eyed and groveling,” and said they had betrayed their country in exchange for better treatment, because they had fallen in love with Asian women, or because of the appeal of “homosexualism.” Several commentators warned that they represented the weakening of American masculinity and its replacement by a generation of “pampered kids” and “mama’s boys.”

  Beyond the nation’s spiritual decline and the feminization of its men, another theory quickly emerged: “brainwashing.” In the three years since the propagandist Edward Hunter had invented the term, it had become the last-resort explanation for everything inexplicable. In the minds of most Americans, nothing was more inexplicable than for any of their strapping young men to decide that living under Communism could be better than living in the United States. “Brainwashing” was the easiest and most obvious explanation. The headline over an article in the New Republic crystallized American fears: COMMUNIST BRAINWASHING—ARE WE PREPARED?

  The shocking behavior of American prisoners convinced many Americans that “brainwashing” existed and had become part of the Communist arsenal. Another aspect of the prisoners’ return, which was not made public, intensified fears within the CIA. “Interrogations of the individuals who had come out of North Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom recently had apparently a ‘blank’ period or period of disorientation while passing through a special zone in Manchuria,” a CIA officer wrote in a memo to the Special Operations Division. “This had occurred to all individuals in the party after they had had their first full meal and first coffee … Drugging was indicated.”

  There was no more evidence of this than there was of “brainwashing.” Inside the CIA and other security agencies in Washington, however, these reports were taken as further proof that Communist scientists were ahead of their Western counterparts in the race to discover and deploy psychoactive drugs. They also, for the first time, connected the name Manchuria with mind control—a connection that would soon burst into public consciousness.

  In the years after fighting ended in Korea
, most of the American defectors trickled home. Several spoke about their captivity. None reported that they had been subjected to any pressure that could be described as “brainwashing.” Their decisions to defect were the result of individual combinations of anger at the inequalities of American life, desire for adventure, and traditional forms of coercion. In the conformist America of that era, though, “brainwashing” was a magnificently convenient explanation for every form of human behavior that people did not understand.

  The CIA fell hard for this fantasy. “There is ample evidence in the reports of innumerable interrogations that the Communists were utilizing drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and possibly hypnosis against their enemies,” the chief of the CIA’s medical staff wrote in a memo that reflected the panic of that moment. “With such evidence it is difficult not to keep from becoming rabid about our apparent laxity. We are forced by this mounting evidence to assume a more aggressive role in the development of these techniques.”

  * * *

  AS SIDNEY GOTTLIEB began spreading money to the researchers he had contracted to study LSD, he encountered a predictable problem: supply. Sandoz held the patent, but it was a Swiss company and beyond CIA control. Intelligence reports suggested that Sandoz was already selling large quantities to the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. These reports were false, but they sent shock waves through the CIA.

  “[It] is awfully hard in this day and age to reproduce how frightening all of this was to us at the time,” one CIA officer testified decades later. “But we were literally terrified, because this was the one material that we had been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly.”

  In mid-1953 a CIA officer was dispatched to Basel to solve this problem. He returned with a report asserting that Sandoz had ten kilograms of LSD on hand, which he correctly called “a fantastically large amount.” Dulles approved the expenditure of $240,000 to buy it all—the world’s entire supply. The two officers he sent to pick it up, however, quickly discovered that their colleague had confused kilograms with grams. Sandoz had manufactured a total of less than forty grams, of which ten were still in stock.