“I have personally reviewed the files from your office concerning the use of a drug on an unwitting group of individuals,” he wrote. “In recommending the unwitting application of the drug to your superior, you did not give sufficient emphasis to the necessity for medical collaboration and for proper consideration of the rights of the individual to whom it was being administered. This is to inform you that it is my opinion that you exercised poor judgment in this case.”
8
Operation Midnight Climax
Even at the CIA, employees gather for holiday parties. As the end of 1954 approached, some rinsed punch bowls while others worried about the world. The Office of Security had a special fear: that Sidney Gottlieb would spike the punch.
It had been a trying year. Communists in Vietnam had overthrown their French overlords and forced them to flee in defeat. China’s alliance with the Soviet Union intensified. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatened “massive retaliation” against any aggressor. Senator Joseph McCarthy declared that “twenty years of treason” had brought the United States to the brink of a Communist takeover, and when CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow broadcast a sharp reply, McCarthy called him “the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always at the throat of anyone who tries to expose individual Communists or traitors.” Congress passed the Communist Control Act, which defined the Communist Party of the United States as “a clear, present, and continuing danger to the security of the United States,” and stripped it of “all rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies.” Then it voted to create the Distant Early Warning line, a network of radar stations designed to alert Americans if the Soviets sent nuclear bombers over the Arctic. The CIA had managed to overthrow the Iranian and Guatemalan governments, but those successes seemed less than decisive amid the rush of scary news.
Many CIA officers believed they were all that stood between their country and devastation. They saw threats everywhere. As 1954 ended, they learned of a new one. On December 15 the ever vigilant Office of Security circulated a memo warning that rumors about certain officers using LSD, and testing it on unsuspecting subjects, should be taken seriously. It said that LSD, then largely unknown, could “produce serious insanity for periods of 8 to 18 hours and possibly longer.” Given its potency, and the unpredictable enthusiasms of officers who had access to it, the Office of Security said it would “not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at Christmas office parties.”
That memo reflected how widely rumors about Gottlieb, and the extremes to which he was pushing his mind control project, had spread through the CIA. After Frank Olson’s death, he had abandoned thoughts of leaving the Agency and resolved instead to intensify his commitment. An odd aura came to surround him. He was unique not just in character and background, but because of the nature of his work.
If any troubling thoughts crept into the consciences of MK-ULTRA scientists following Olson’s death, they were blown away by news of a breakthrough that came just a few weeks later. “Chemists of the Eli Lilly Company working for [the Technical Services Staff] have in the past few weeks succeeded in breaking the secret formula held by Sandoz for the manufacturing of Lysergic Acid, and have manufactured for the Agency a large quantity of Lysergic Acid, which is available for our experimentation,” Gottlieb’s deputy Robert Lashbrook wrote to his boss late in 1954. “This work is a closely guarded secret and should not be mentioned generally.”
Eli Lilly was now able to produce LSD in what it called “tonnage quantities.” The CIA was its main customer. Under what Gottlieb called Subproject 18, it paid Eli Lilly $400,000 for a mass purchase of LSD. This would be the costliest “subcontract” in MK-ULTRA’s decade-long existence. Assured of a steady supply, he devoted himself to conceiving research projects that might bring him closer to what he believed must be the drug’s inner secret. Ten of his first fifty “subprojects” were directly related to the production and study of LSD.
Any systematic study would require controlled experimentation. In the case of LSD, that meant administering it to human subjects in clinical settings where their reactions could be monitored. Neither Gottlieb nor his partners at Camp Detrick had facilities or professional staff for a research project on this scale. It would have to be subcontracted to established hospitals and medical centers. Most of the doctors and others conducting the experiments, however, could not be allowed to know that they were working for the CIA, much less that the ultimate purpose of their experiments was to give the U.S. government tools for mind control. Maintaining that secrecy required “cutouts”—front groups that would agree to funnel CIA money to selected researchers. Among the first were two philanthropic foundations, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research and the Josiah P. Macy Foundation. At the behest of the CIA, these foundations announced to hospitals and medical schools that they were interested in sponsoring controlled studies of LSD, which thanks to the Eli Lilly breakthrough they could now supply in bulk. With money suddenly available, there was no lack of takers.
“Almost overnight,” one survey of this period concludes, “a whole new market for grants in LSD research sprang into existence.”
By the mid-1950s, Gottlieb was subsidizing research conducted by many of America’s leading behavioral psychologists and psycho-pharmacologists. Few knew that the CIA was the true source of their funding. Many conducted their CIA-sponsored “subprojects” at highly reputed institutions, among them Massachusetts General Hospital, the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, Ionia State Hospital, and Mount Sinai Hospital; the Universities of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Denver, Illinois, Oklahoma, Rochester, Texas, and Indiana; other universities, including Harvard, Berkeley, City College of New York, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Baylor, Emory, George Washington, Cornell, Florida State, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and Tulane; and medical schools at Wayne State University, Boston University, New York University, and the University of Maryland.
Some of these drug experiments required risking the health of participants, like one at the Walter E. Fernald School in Massachusetts in which mentally handicapped children were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium. Others, especially those involving LSD, were non-coercive and even attractive. Soon after Dr. Robert Hyde began giving LSD to student volunteers in Boston, doctors, nurses, and attendants who observed the results began signing up to try it themselves. The same thing happened at other research centers.
These LSD experiments were only part of what engaged Gottlieb in the early days of MK-ULTRA. The range of his ambition and imagination was literally mind-boggling. No intelligence officer in history ever searched so intently for ways to capture and manipulate human consciousness. Early in 1955 he wrote a memo listing the “materials and methods” he either was researching or wished to research.
1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
3. Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.
6. Materials which will render the indication of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brainwashing.”
8. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as
paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
11. Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.
12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
15. Substances which will promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
16. A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
17. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatever.
Years later, reviewing the projects that occupied Gottlieb and his Technical Services Staff comrades during the 1950s, the New York Times called them “a bizarre grope into the world of science fiction.”
“CIA investigators let their imaginations run,” the Times reported. “Was there … a knockout drug that could incapacitate an entire building full of people? A pill that would make a drunk man sober?… They worked on ways to achieve the ‘controlled production’ of headaches and earaches, twitches, jerks, and staggers. They wanted to reduce a man to a bewildered, self-doubting mass to ‘subvert his principles,’ a CIA document said. They wanted to direct him in ways that ‘may vary from rationalizing a disloyal act to construction of a new person’ … They wanted to be able to get away with murder without leaving a trace … They were aware that it was considered unethical to experiment on people with drugs without their knowledge, but they decided that ‘unwitting’ testing was essential if accurate information on LSD and other substances was to be obtained.”
Soon after Frank Olson died, Gottlieb departed for another of his periodic tours through East Asia. While he was there, he participated in interrogations during which subjects were dosed with LSD. “We did do LSD-related operations in the Far East in the period 1953 to 1954,” he later testified.
In 1955, Gottlieb was drafted into a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of China. A plane that was to take Zhou to the Asian-African Congress at Bandung, Indonesia, exploded in mid-air, but he had changed his plans and was on another flight. The next day China’s foreign ministry called the bombing “a murder by the special service organizations of the United States.” An investigation by the Indonesian authorities concluded that a time bomb had blown up on the plane, triggered by an American-made MK-7 detonator.
The next best option, CIA officers decided, was to poison Zhou while he was in Bandung. Gottlieb had provided the toxin that CIA turncoat James Kronthal used to kill himself two years earlier. He could come up with something suitable for Zhou.
The potion Gottlieb concocted was to be placed in a rice bowl from which Zhou would eat. Forty-eight hours later—after Zhou was back in China—he would take ill and die. Shortly before this attempt was to have been made, news of it reached General Lucian Truscott Jr., who was then a deputy director of the CIA. Truscott feared that the Agency’s role in assassinating Zhou would become clear and cause great trouble for the United States. His biographer wrote that he was “outraged [and] confronted Dulles, forcing him to cancel the operation.” Gottlieb’s deadly drops went unused.
* * *
A PLATOON OF U.S. Marines trudging along a mountain path in Korea came under sudden mortar attack one afternoon at the end of 1952. Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles, son of the director of central intelligence, was hit in the arm and back. Refusing evacuation, he led his men forward until another shell exploded near him. A piece of shrapnel tore into his skull and lodged in his brain. Close to death, he was taken to a hospital in Japan and then to the United States. He suffered permanent neurological damage, and although he went on to live a long life, all of it was spent in institutions or under the care of others.
Like many men of his class and generation, the CIA director had distant relationships with his children. Nonetheless his son’s traumatic injury deeply affected him. He took the same interest in alternative treatments that any father would. Desperate for a way to bring his son back to a semblance of normality, he corresponded with specialists at psychiatric clinics in the United States and Europe. By early 1954, the wounded warrior was at Cornell Medical Center in New York City, under the care of a neurologist named Harold Wolff. Soon after treatment began, Dulles summoned Wolff to Washington to discuss the medical case at hand. As their conversation continued, the two men found much in common. Wolff shared Dulles’s fascination with the idea of mind control. He had developed a theory, woven from various disciplines, that a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation could wipe the mind clean and then open it to reprogramming. He called this “human ecology.” Dulles thought Wolff might be useful to the CIA and sent him to Gottlieb.
Wolff was eager for CIA sponsorship. He wrote several research proposals for Gottlieb. In one, he proposed placing people in isolation chambers until they became “receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist,” showed “an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure,” and broke down to the point where doctors could “create psychological reactions within them.” In another, he offered to test “special methods” of interrogation, including “threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing,’ ‘black psychiatry,’ hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents.” Gottlieb was intrigued—all the more so because Wolff had access to a steady flow of patients and made clear that he was willing to use them as unwitting subjects. He approved every proposal Wolff submitted. The experiments proceeded for several years at Cornell Medical Center, at a cost to the CIA of nearly $140,000. Patients were told that the drugs they were given and the procedures they underwent were essential to their treatment. Wolff’s chillingly ambiguous purpose was to study “changes in behavior due to stress brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissues.”
Other researchers were conducting equally harsh experiments for Gottlieb, but he and Wolff forged a special partnership. In 1955 they conceived the idea of creating a research foundation that would pose as independent but actually be a conduit through which MK-ULTRA money could be given to physicians, psychologists, chemists, and other scientists. Gottlieb had already used established foundations as conduits, but with his empire of “subprojects” expanding so quickly, he wanted one of his own. It emerged as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, with Wolff as founding president. All of its funds came from the CIA. It made a few small grants to support projects of no apparent intelligence value, but those were intended only to preserve deniability. Every major project it sponsored was Gottlieb’s.
Soon after establishing this bogus foundation, Wolff reported that he was using it to fund “experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence … Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested.” Gottlieb and one of his close colleagues, John Gittinger, the chief CIA psychologist, shaped the foundation’s research agenda. Gittinger later said that the experiments it funded were in “the areas of influencing human behavior, interrogation, and brainwashing.”
One of the first “subprojects” the society commissioned was an intensive study of one hundred Chinese refugees, who were lured to participate with the promise of “fellowships” but were actually being tested to see if they could be programmed to return home and commit acts of sabotage. After the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary, the society funded a se
ries of interviews and tests among Hungarian refugees to determine the factors that lead people to rebel against their government. Later it paid for a study of how sexual psychopaths repress secrets, and how they can be made to reveal them. The range of its other projects reflects Gottlieb’s unflagging imagination: studies of the Mongoloid skull, the effect of owning a fallout shelter on foreign policy views, and the emotional impact of circumcision on Turkish boys; tests to determine whether interrogators could use “isolation, anxiety, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger” to produce “profound disturbances of mood [and] excruciating pain”; and research into trance states and “activation of the human organism by remote electronic means.” As MK-ULTRA reached its peak, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology became the principal portal through which Gottlieb lured talented scientists into his “subproject” netherworld.
* * *
WHEN THE AMERICAN Psychological Association convened for its 1954 convention—at the Statler Hotel in New York, where Frank Olson had spent the last night of his life a year before—one of Gottlieb’s officers was circulating through the crowd. He reported back that of the several hundred papers the attending scientists presented, one seemed potentially valuable to MK-ULTRA. That paper, and a talk that the author gave in presenting it, described a series of experiments aimed at testing the “effects of radical isolation upon intellectual function.” Student volunteers in these experiments—paid for by the Canadian army and conducted at McGill University in Montreal—were blindfolded, fitted with earplugs, and had their hands and feet bound into foam-rubber mitts. Each was sealed into a small soundproof chamber. Within hours, they became unable to follow trains of thought. Most broke down within a few days. None lasted more than a week. The paper’s principal author, Dr. James Hebb, asserted that these experiments provided “direct evidence of a kind of dependence on the environment that has not been previously recognized.”
Poisoner in Chief Page 16