Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  This research attracted attention at the CIA. The Office of Security issued a memo telling interrogators that “total isolation” had proven to be “an operational tool of potential.” In 1955 the CIA mind control enthusiast Morse Allen sent a report to Maitland Baldwin, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, describing an experiment in which an army volunteer had been locked into a small isolation box and, after forty hours, began “crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion.” Baldwin was thrilled. That experiment, he wrote in reply, suggested that “the isolation technique could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed.”

  As CIA scientists looked more deeply into the work Hebb had done at McGill, they discovered that one of his colleagues was pushing his experiments further in the coercive direction that especially interested them. In 1956 this remarkable physician, Ewen Cameron, published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry describing his “adaptation of Hebb’s psychological isolation.” He reported experiments in which he enclosed patients in small cells, placed them in a “clinical coma” using hypnosis and drugs, including LSD, and then subjected them to endless repetition of simple recorded phrases. Most intriguingly, he compared his patients’ responses to “the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.”

  Cameron was born in Scotland, lived in upstate New York, and commuted to work at McGill, where he was chairman of the Department of Psychology and director of an affiliated psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute. Colleagues considered him a visionary. When Gottlieb recruited him, he was president of both the American Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. The focus of his research, the peculiar nature of his experiments, and the fact that he worked outside the United States combined to make him an ideal MK-ULTRA contractor.

  Many psychiatrists of that era considered “talk therapy” to be the most promising way to disrupt patterns that shape the human mind and human behavior, but Cameron rejected it as too slow and unreliable. In his experiments, he sought to learn whether it was possible to stun mentally disturbed patients out of their afflictions by exposing them to extreme heat, subjecting them to electroshock, and even, in one extended experiment, placing them under intense red light for eight hours a day over a period of months. He called this “re-patterning,” and believed it could create “brain pathways” by which he would be able to reshape his patients’ minds.

  “If we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs,” Cameron wrote, “we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs.”

  Most of Cameron’s patients suffered not from crippling mental disorders but from relatively minor ones like anxiety, family trouble, or post-partum depression. Once they made the fateful choice to come to the Allan Memorial Institute for help, they became his unwitting subjects. Some went on to suffer far greater physical and psychic pains than those they had come to cure.

  Cameron began his “treatments” with extreme sensory deprivation. He gave patients drugs that put them into a semi-comatose state for periods ranging from ten days to three months. This produced what he called “not only a loss of the space-time image but a loss of all feeling … In more advanced forms, [the patient] may be unable to walk without support, to feed himself, and he may show double incontinence.”

  To cleanse unwanted thoughts from a patient’s mind, Cameron used a technique he called “psychic driving,” in which he administered electroconvulsive shocks that reached thirty to forty times the strength other psychiatrists used. After days of this treatment, the patient was moved to a solitary ward. There he or she was fed LSD and given only minimal amounts of food, water, and oxygen. Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with earphones, into which he piped phrases or messages like “My mother hates me,” repeated hundreds of thousands of times.

  In professional papers and lab reports, Cameron reported that he had succeeded in destroying minds but had not found ways to replace them with new ones. After completing his treatment of one patient, he wrote with evident pride that “the shock treatment turned the then-19-year-old honors student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor.” Other patients disappointed him. “Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated de-patterning,” he wrote in one report, “and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained.”

  Gottlieb recognized Cameron as a potentially valuable research collaborator but did not want to make the approach himself. Nor did he send another CIA officer. Instead he dispatched Maitland Baldwin, whose position at the National Institute of Mental Health gave him an aura of professional eminence. In Montreal, Baldwin followed the recruiting script Gottlieb had given him. First he confirmed Gottlieb’s impression that Cameron would make a fine MK-ULTRA collaborator. Once assured that he had found the right man, he proposed a deal. He suggested that Cameron apply to the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology for funds to carry out more intense experiments. Cameron did so. His application was quickly approved, and he set off on what Gottlieb called Subproject 68.

  Like many other MK-ULTRA collaborators, Cameron was unaware—at least at the beginning—that he was working for the CIA. Gottlieb kept the Agency double-protected. First, he channeled money through what seemed to be a legitimate foundation. Second, he used Maitland Baldwin as his emissary, making it appear that Subproject 68 was civilian research. Their contract specified what it would entail.

  (1)  The breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks (de-patterning).

  (2)  The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6–7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.

  (3)  During the period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.

  (4)  Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7–10 days.

  Over the next several years, the CIA sent Cameron $69,000 to carry out these and other experiments, aimed at finding ways to wipe away memory and implant new thoughts into people’s brains. During this period, according to the historian Alfred McCoy, “approximately one hundred patients admitted to the Allan Institute with moderate emotional problems became unwitting or unwilling subjects in an extreme form of behavioral experimentation.” One day in 1955, the CIA officer who was Gottlieb’s liaison to Cameron wrote in his diary: “Dr. G made clear my job was to ensure acceptable deniability operates all times in Montreal.”

  A review conducted decades later concluded that Cameron’s techniques had “no therapeutic validity whatsoever” and were “comparable to Nazi medical atrocities.” While the experiments were underway, however, Gottlieb found them irresistible. As soon as one was completed, he sent Cameron money to conduct more.

  * * *

  DURING THE YEARS Gottlieb was sponsoring experiments that pushed human subjects to the limit of endurance and beyond, he maintained a stable and happy family life. By all appearances he was a loving husband and good father to his four children. He adapted remarkably well to rural life, happily milking goats, collecting eggs, and helping to tend the family’s gardens. His life was strikingly bifurcated. By day he directed research that required the sustained infliction of intense mental and physical pain. On evenings and weekends, he was not only the model dad but also strikingly spiritual.

  Few Americans of Gottlieb’s generation, or any generation, had home lives so surrealistically different from their work lives. Gottlieb cannot have failed to see the Jekyll-and-Hyde contradiction. Yet he could reconcile it. He was an individualist who could tell himself that he was working to protect humanity against an enemy whose goal was to wipe away all possibility of individualistic life. By l
iving outside the suburban mainstream, cultivating his spirituality, and seeking closeness to nature, he was following a personal path that was strikingly unconventional. At work he was doing the same: rejecting the limits that circumscribed more conventional minds and daring to follow his endlessly fertile imagination.

  “A chemist who is not a mystic is not a real chemist,” the inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, said toward the end of his long life. “He doesn’t comprehend it.”

  * * *

  A JOB FOR a tough guy became vacant at the beginning of 1955: district supervisor at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics office in San Francisco. The bureau’s legendary director Harry Anslinger named his most flamboyant agent, George Hunter White, to fill it. That might have been a loss for MK-ULTRA, since White was then luring unsuspecting victims to his “safe house” in New York and dosing them with LSD or whatever other drug Gottlieb wanted him to test. Gottlieb, however, saw a way to take advantage of the transfer. He would hire White to set up a “safe house” in San Francisco where he could do everything he had done in New York and more. This became MK-ULTRA Subproject 42. White called it Operation Midnight Climax.

  This “subproject” had intertwined goals. The first was to feed drugs to unsuspecting civilians and observe their reactions, as had been done in New York. This time, though, sex would be added to the mix. At Gottlieb’s direction, White assembled a group of prostitutes whose job would be to bring clients to the “pad” and dose them with LSD while he watched and recorded their reactions.

  White plunged into his new assignment. He set up his “pad”—it was never called an apartment or a safe house—at 225 Chestnut Street, on Telegraph Hill. It was laid out in an L-shape and had a lovely view of San Francisco Bay. After renting it, White called a friend who owned an electronics shop and asked him to install surveillance equipment so he could monitor what happened inside. The friend wired four DD4 microphones disguised as wall outlets to two F-301 tape recorders that he installed in a “listening post” next door. A CIA officer who visited after the work was complete reported that the place “was so wired that if you spilled a glass of water, you’d probably electrocute yourself.”

  The San Francisco “pad” was decorated in a style that might be called bordello chic. Pictures of can-can dancers, along with framed Toulouse-Lautrec prints on black silk mats, decorated the walls. The bedroom featured red curtains and large mirrors. Some drawers were filled with tools of the trade, including sex toys and photos of manacled women in black stockings and studded leather halters. “We had a comprehensive library on Chestnut Street,” one agent who worked there later testified, “the most pornographic library I ever saw: dirty movies, pictures, everything. The CIA put it up there because of teaching these whores how to hump and how to—‘Turn to page 99 in the book, it’ll show you how and what.’”

  To accommodate his prostitutes, their clients, and himself, White kept the bar well stocked. Several of his associates said that he often watched the proceedings from next door while drinking from a pitcher of martinis and sitting on a portable toilet. Sure enough, among documents that the CIA later declassified is an expense report he filed on August 3, 1955, that includes this entry: “1 Portable toilet, $25; 24 disposal bags @ $.15 each, $3.60—$28.60.”

  Gottlieb took an all-or-nothing approach to documentation. So far as is known, he wrote nothing substantial about his years of experiments in secret prisons around the world. Yet in matters of expenses and office details he was meticulous. As the Operation Midnight Climax “pad” was being prepared in San Francisco, he composed a lengthy memo approving the purchase of each item used to furnish it. He listed more than a hundred, including drapes, pillows, lamps, ashtrays, an ice bucket, a box spring with mattress, a wastebasket, and a vacuum cleaner—along with more curious items including an easel and an “unfinished painting,” two busts, two statuettes, and a telescope. Gottlieb also sent White a detailed memo setting out, with his usual precision, “the mutual administrative responsibilities of the principal research investigator and the sponsor.” It stipulates that White must “maintain funds in a separate bank account, obtain a receipt or invoice wherever possible … periodically include a general statement of the use of liquor [and] note taxi expenses by date.” The only expenses Gottlieb did not want itemized were payments to prostitutes.

  “Due to the highly unorthodox nature of these activities and the considerable risk incurred by these individuals,” he wrote, “it is impossible to require that they provide a receipt for these payments or that they indicate the precise manner in which the funds were spent.”

  Although White had been deeply immersed in the New York demimonde, he was a newcomer to San Francisco. For help he turned to a former military intelligence officer named Ira “Ike” Feldman, who had done bare-knuckle work in Europe and Korea. Feldman had retired to California with the vague idea of running a chicken farm.

  “Before long, I get a call, this time from White,” he recalled years later. “‘We understand you’re back in the States,’ he says. ‘I want you to come in to the Bureau of Narcotics.’ This was ’54 or ’55. White was district supervisor in San Francisco. I went in. I go to Room 144 of the Federal Building, and this is the first time I meet George White. He was a big, powerful man with a completely bald head. Not tall, but big. Fat. He shaved his head and had the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen. ‘Ike,’ he says, ‘we want you as an agent.’”

  Feldman took the job. For the next several months he did undercover work for the narcotics bureau. He ran a sting operation in which he posed as a pimp and, as he later testified, “had half a dozen girls working for me.” In another, he used a drug-addicted prostitute to entrap drug users, paying her with doses of heroin. White was impressed.

  “One day, White calls me into his office,” he recalled. “‘Ike,’ he says, ‘you’ve been doing one hell of a job as an undercover man. Now I’m gonna give you another assignment. We want you to test mind-bending drugs … If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.’”

  Few former intelligence officers could resist such a patriotic pitch, especially at the height of the Cold War. The next time Gottlieb was in San Francisco, Feldman met with him. Gottlieb began by opening his briefcase, pulling out a small glass vial, and laying it on the table in front of him.

  “You know what this is?” he asked Feldman.

  “Jeez, I don’t know what the hell it is.”

  “It’s LSD. We want you and your contacts—we know you got all the broads in San Francisco and you got all the hookers—and we want you to start putting this in people’s drinks.”

  “What are you, crazy? I mean, I could get arrested or something.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Well, we got about 50 different things we’re going to try. This particular stuff here will drive a guy nuts or a woman nuts. It’s out of this world.”

  “I don’t know, Sidney. I’ll do intelligence work, but I’m not doing that fucking bullshit.”

  Gottlieb then pulled out the argument that he knew would resolve Feldman’s doubts, just as it had resolved his own. “If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country,” he said. “It’s a matter of national security. If we can get something that will bend these guys’ minds and make them talk, make them go crazy, this will do a lot to save our prisoners and things like that.”

  That persuaded Feldman to return to his country’s covert service. His first assignment was to recruit the prostitutes who would work as unwitting MK-ULTRA contractors. Each time one of them brought a client to 225 Chestnut Street, she would be paid $50 to $100. As a bonus, she would be given a “get-out-of-jail-free card” with White’s phone number; the next time she was arrested, she could give the number to the police and White would arrange for her release.

  “I would go to various bars, various massage parlors, and t
hese cunts all thought that I was a racketeer,” Feldman later told an interviewer. He might, for example, want to see whether a subject working on a covert aviation program would reveal its secrets. “I says, ‘Honey, I want you to do a favor for me,’ and I says, ‘I want you to pick up Joe Blow, take him to the apartment and give him a blow job. And while he’s there, I want you to ask him, ‘Hey, you know that airplane? How high does it fly?’”

  Intelligence agencies have for centuries used female agents to seduce men in order to learn their secrets. Gottlieb wanted to systematize the study of how sex, especially in combination with drugs, could loosen men’s tongues. He found remarkably little published work to guide him. Most of the research that Dr. Alfred Kinsey reported in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was too clinical to be of much use. It would be another decade before Masters and Johnson published their groundbreaking study Human Sexual Response, and still longer before frank works like The Happy Hooker and The Hite Report on Male Sexuality would appear. Gottlieb decided that the CIA should conduct its own research into how people behave during and after sex. He was already deeply engaged in drug experiments. Operation Midnight Climax gave those experiments a new overlay.

  “We were interested in the combination of certain drugs with sex acts,” the CIA psychologist John Gittinger testified years later. “We looked at the various pleasure positions used by prostitutes and others … This was well before anything like the Kama Sutra had become widely popular. Some of the women—the professionals—we used were very adept at these practices.”

  White opened the San Francisco “pad” in late 1955. His street agents were the prostitutes Feldman had recruited. Gottlieb, in the dry prose he favored, called them “certain individuals who covertly administered the material to other people.” Usually the “material” was LSD, though from time to time Gottlieb brought some new concoction about whose effect he was curious.