Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  This confusion led Gottlieb to decide that MK-ULTRA needed a reliable supply of LSD—and a pledge from Sandoz that it would not sell any to the Soviets. Sandoz was happy to cooperate. It did so not out of sympathy for CIA mind control projects, about which it knew nothing, but to rid itself of its “problem child.” A CIA officer who was sent to Basel reported that Sandoz was “sorry they had discovered this material, since it had been the source of many headaches and bother.” As soon as Gottlieb learned that Sandoz had no desire to protect LSD, he secretly began paying an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, to try to break its chemical code. The company’s scientists went to work immediately.

  With a scientist’s ordered mind, Gottlieb designed a system for organizing the multi-faceted research that was at the heart of MK-ULTRA. He called each of his contracts a “subproject” and assigned it a number. During 1953 he launched more than a dozen. The “safe house” in New York was Subproject 3. Paying scientists at Eli Lilly to break the chemical code of LSD was Subproject 6. Other early “subprojects” were aimed at studying non-chemical means of mind control, including by what one report called “social psychology, group psychology, psychotherapy, hypnosis, sudden religious conversion, and sleep and sensory deprivation.”

  From the earliest days of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb and his fellow scientists were tantalized by the potential of hypnosis. They saw it as holding out the promise of an exquisite refinement in the art of political murder. A hypnotized killer could carry out his crime and then forget who had ordered it—or even that he had committed it.

  Americans took hypnosis seriously during the early Cold War. In 1950 a Colgate University psychiatrist, George Estabrooks, asserted in the popular magazine Argosy that he had the ability to “hypnotize a man—without his knowledge or consent—into committing treason against the United States.” That attracted the CIA’s attention. After MK-ULTRA was launched, Estabrooks wrote a memo to the CIA saying he could create a “hypnotic messenger” who would be unable to betray a secret mission because “he has no conscious knowledge of what that mission may be.” He also offered to take a group of human subjects and “establish in them through the use of hypnotism, the condition of split personality.” The CIA officer who received this memo judged it “very important.” Estabrooks went on to become a CIA consultant.

  In 1953 Morse Allen, who also believed fervently in the potential of hypnosis, ordered the production of a short film called The Black Art, for showing to CIA employees only. It depicts an American intelligence officer drugging and hypnotizing an Asian diplomat. In a trance, the diplomat enters his embassy, removes documents from a safe, and turns them over to his handler. The film ends with a persuasive voice-over: “Could what you have just seen be accomplished without the individual’s knowledge? Yes. Against an individual’s will? Yes. How? Through the powers of suggestion and hypnosis.”

  This contradicted what many scientists believed. During World War II the OSS had consulted psychiatrists who studied hypnosis. One of them, Lawrence Kubie, who had worked with George Hunter White on “truth serum” experiments, replied that he was “skeptical that it will accomplish anything.” Two others, Karl and William Menninger, who ran a highly regarded psychiatric clinic in Kansas, were even more emphatic. “There is no evidence that supports post-hypnotic acts, especially when the individual’s mores and morals produce the slightest conflict within him,” they concluded. “A man to whom murder is repugnant and immoral cannot be made to override that personal taboo.”

  Those conclusions did not tell Gottlieb what he wanted to hear. He was determined to investigate the potential of hypnosis under clinical conditions. One of his first ventures was MK-ULTRA Subproject 5, under which a researcher at the University of Minnesota, Alden Sears, conducted a “carefully planned series” of hypnosis experiments on about one hundred subjects. Discretion was guaranteed since, as Gottlieb wrote in a memo, both Sears and his boss, the chairman of the Psychiatry Department, were “cleared through TOP SECRET and are aware of the real purposes of the project.” In the same memo, Gottlieb listed the areas he wanted Subproject 5 to investigate.

  Hypnotically induced anxieties;

  Hypnotically increasing the ability to learn and recall complex written matter;

  Polygraph response under hypnosis;

  Hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall a complex arrangement of physical objects;

  Relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis;

  Recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals.

  Despite his avid interest in hypnosis and other possible paths to mind control, Gottlieb never strayed far from his conviction that the most likely path lay through psychoactive drugs, especially LSD. After launching his first hypnosis “subproject,” he conceived the idea of another in which hypnotism, drugs, and sensory deprivation would be tested in combination. As his contractor he enlisted Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Oklahoma. West was researching ways to create “dissociative states” in which the human mind could be pulled from its moorings. In his proposal to Gottlieb, he reported that “experiments involving altered personality function as a result of environmental manipulation (chiefly sensory isolation) have yielded promising leads.” Gottlieb urged him to go further. The result was Subproject 43, in which West tested what he called “the actions of a variety of new drugs which alter the state of psychological functioning.” At least some of these tests were conducted in a “unique laboratory [with] a special chamber in which all psychologically significant aspects of the environment can be controlled … In this setting the various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated in a controlled fashion.” The CIA paid $20,800 to build the laboratory and support West’s research.

  Whether directing experiments with drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, or combinations of all three, Gottlieb was searching for a kind of magic. All of his “subprojects” were aimed at finding potions or techniques that could be used to disorient, confuse, and control people. That led him to MK-ULTRA Subproject 4: bringing magic to the CIA.

  6

  Any Effort to Tamper with This Project, MK-ULTRA, Is Not Permitted

  A birdcage disappears into thin air, along with the bird inside. Wilted flowers burst into bloom. A paper napkin is ripped into pieces, the pieces are scattered, and as they float toward the floor they join back together. Olives are transformed into lumps of sugar. Rarer feats follow: the Cantonese Card Trick, the Curious Handkerchief Trick, the Multiplying Thimble Trick.

  John Mulholland mystified and amazed crowds in dozens of countries. Following the death of Harry Houdini, his mentor, Mulholland became America’s most celebrated magician. Throngs packed grand auditoriums like Radio City Music Hall to watch him do the impossible. Society grandees hired him to astonish guests at private parties. His circle of friends and admirers included Orson Welles, Jean Harlow, Dorothy Parker, Harold Lloyd, Jimmy Durante, and Eddie Cantor. For more than twenty years he edited the Sphinx, a professional journal for conjurers, illusionists, and prestidigitators. His library on these and related subjects contained more than six thousand volumes. After his death, the magician David Copperfield bought it.

  Mulholland wrote nearly a dozen books himself, with titles like The Art of Illusion and Quicker Than the Eye. He performed for the king of Romania, the sultan of Sulu, and Eleanor Roosevelt. When not writing or performing, he devoted himself to unmasking fraudulent spiritualists and psychics, often by dramatically revealing their tricks. His mastery of technique and movement was unsurpassed in the world of magic.

  The thousands who paid Mulholland to baffle and delight them were not his only admirers. On April 13, 1953—the day MK-ULTRA was formally set into motion—Sidney Gottlieb was in New York to meet him. Theirs was a wonderfully conceived collaboration. Gottlieb’s team knew how to compound poisons and concentrate them into pills, capsules, sprays, powders, a
nd drops. Intrepid CIA officers or their agents could bring one of these poisons into the close proximity of a target. The final challenge remained: training officers to administer the poison.

  Mulholland was a master of what he called “the psychology of deception.” He was also haunted by the fact that rheumatic fever had disqualified him from military service in World War I. Among his writings are profiles of magicians who used their skills to serve their countries, including Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who helped suppress an uprising in Algeria by persuading tribesmen that French magic was stronger than theirs, and Jasper Maskelyne, who designed large-scale illusions to disguise British troop positions in North Africa during World War II. Mulholland was yearning for a way to do patriotic service. Gottlieb gave it to him.

  “John was an American and he loved his country, and the fact that he worked for an intelligence agency run by our government made him very proud,” a friend recalled years later. “He said yes because his government asked him to.”

  During his meeting with Gottlieb, Mulholland agreed to teach CIA officers how to distract victims’ attention so drugs could be given to them without anyone’s noticing. “Our interest was in sleight-of-hand practices, in the art of surreptitious delivery or removal,” Gottlieb said later. “Those that were trained became pretty good at it. In some ways, the training was a welcomed relief from more serious matters.”

  Gottlieb also asked Mulholland to consider writing a manual in which “sleight-of-hand practices” would be codified for officers unable to attend training sessions in New York or Washington. A few days later, Mulholland wrote that he had “given the subjects we discussed considerable thought” and wanted to proceed.

  In this and other reports to Gottlieb, Mulholland used a series of euphemisms. CIA officers were “performers” or “operators,” the toxins they were to handle were “material,” the victim a “spectator,” and the act of poisoning a “procedure” or “trick.” His manual would adapt a magician’s stage show, devised to fool audiences who paid to be fooled, to the world of covert action, where deception was for darker purposes.

  Upon receiving this letter, Gottlieb wrote a memo for his file describing the deal he had struck. Mulholland would produce, “in the form of a concise manual, as much pertinent information as possible in the fields of magic as it applies to covert activities … Mr. Mulholland seems well qualified to execute this study. He had been a successful performer of all forms of prestidigitation [and] has further studied the psychology of deception.”

  One item in Mulholland’s personal background might have led to suspicion of “deviancy” and prevented his employment. In 1932 he married a woman he had been courting for eight years, but on the condition that she accept his continuing relationship with another longtime girlfriend. She agreed, explaining afterward that Mulholland “was so much a man, one woman’s love could not satisfy him.” Few at the CIA were that open-minded. Paul Gaynor, director of the Security Research Staff, wrote a memo warning of Mulholland’s “sexual proclivities.” Had he not been so uniquely qualified for his proposed job, his unorthodox marital arrangement, which he made no attempt to hide, might have led security officers to block his hiring. Under the circumstances, however, Gottlieb and Allen Dulles—one a quintessential outsider with unusual personal habits of his own, the other a relentless adulterer—chose to overlook it.

  On May 5, Mulholland received a neatly typed letter informing him that his book proposal had been accepted. The letterhead said “Chemrophyl Associates,” listed a post office box as its address, and was signed by one Sherman Grifford. This was a modest disguise, certainly one that Mulholland could penetrate. The name of the fictitious company was easily decipherable: Chemrophyl Associates. So was Gottlieb’s pseudonym, for which he used his own initials.

  “The project you outlined in your letter of April 20 has been approved by us, and you are hereby authorized to spend up to $3,000 in the next six months in the execution of this work,” he wrote. “Please sign the enclosed receipt and return it to me.”

  After these formalities were completed, Mulholland was asked to sign a pledge acknowledging that he was entering into a “confidential relationship” and that he would “never divulge, publish, nor reveal either by word, conduct, or by any other means such information or knowledge, as indicated above, unless specifically authorized to do so.” He agreed. The pledge was countersigned by Gottlieb’s deputy, a chemist named Robert Lashbrook.

  Mulholland began canceling appointments and postponing freelance writing assignments. He even gave up his longtime job as editor of the Sphinx. That allowed him to concentrate on turning his mastery of magic into a tool for spies.

  As his deadline approached, Mulholland submitted a draft of his manual along with a letter to “Sherman Grifford” saying that he wished to refine it further.

  “Dear Sherman,” he wrote, “This is a memo in regard to extension of the manual on trickery. The manual as it now stands consists of the following five sections: 1. Underlying bases for the successful performance of tricks and the background of the psychological principles by which they operate. 2. Tricks with pills. 3. Tricks with loose solids. 4. Tricks with liquids. 5. Tricks whereby small objects can be obtained secretly … The manual requires two further sections … I believe that properly to devise the required techniques and devices and to describe them in writing would require 12 working weeks.”

  Gottlieb replied that these ideas “sound excellent to us.” Then he wrote a memo to his titular superior, Willis “Gib” Gibbons, chief of the Technical Services Staff, reporting that “under a previous subproject (Subproject 4), a manual was prepared by Mr. Mulholland dealing with the application of the magician’s art to covert activities such as the delivery of various materials to unwilling subjects … Subproject 19 will involve the preparation of two additional sections to the manual. These are (1) Modified or different methods and techniques for use if the performer is a woman, and (2) Methods and techniques that can be used where two or more people can work in collaboration.”

  Over the next year Mulholland produced several drafts of his manual, which he called Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception. “The purpose of this paper is to instruct the reader so he may be able to perform a variety of acts secretly and indetectably,” he wrote in the introduction. “In short, here are instructions in deception.”

  This manual was presumed to be lost or destroyed. A copy unexpectedly surfaced in 2007, making it the only full-length MK-ULTRA document known to have survived intact. It was published with an apt title: The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. As with everything Mulholland wrote for the CIA, it is presented in stage language, so that even if it fell into the wrong hands, it might appear to be a manual for performers, not poisoners.

  In his manual, and at training sessions for CIA officers, Mulholland stressed one principle. Contrary to the popular cliché, he insisted, the hand is not quicker than the eye. Mulholland taught that the key to magic tricks is not to move the hand quickly, but to distract attention so the hand can do its work. Once a “performer” understood this principle, he or she could learn to administer poison without detection.

  Mulholland’s manual explains the use of “misdirection,” including ways an agent can flick a pill into a victim’s drink while distracting him by lighting his cigarette. It tells how capsules can be hidden in and then ejected from wallets, notebooks, or paper pads; how venom can be concealed in a ring; how toxic powders can be dispensed from the eraser cavity of a lead pencil; how female agents can hide poison in brocade beads and “use the handkerchief as a mask for a liquid container”; and how, thanks to advancing aerosol technology, it had become possible “to spray the liquid on a solid such as bread without either the action or the result being noticed.”

  Gottlieb had assembled an impressive array of poisons. With this manual, Mulholland gave him ways to deliver them. He turned highly developed techniques of stage magic into tools for covert actio
n.

  “The fact that he was asked to contemplate such things is emblematic of a unique moment in American history,” wrote John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who was himself an amateur magician, in an introduction to The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. “American leaders during the early Cold War felt the nation existentially threatened by an adversary who appeared to have no scruples. Mulholland’s writing on delivery of pills, potions, and powders was just one example of research carried out back then in fields as diverse as brainwashing and paranormal psychology. Many such efforts that seem bizarre today are understandable only in the context of those times.”

  * * *

  HOW MUCH LSD can a human being take? Gottlieb wanted to know. Could there be a breaking point, he wondered, a dose so massive that it would shatter the mind and blast away consciousness, leaving a void into which new impulses or even a new personality could be implanted?

  Finding the answer would require intense experiments. Soon after launching MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb found a physician to conduct them: Harris Isbell, director of research at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Officially this center was a hospital, but it functioned more like a prison. The Bureau of Prisons co-administered it with the Public Health Service. Most inmates were African Americans from the margins of society. They were unlikely to complain if abused. That made them fine subjects for clandestine drug experiments.