Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  “If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it ourselves,” one MK-ULTRA man said later, “we sent it to San Francisco.”

  No drug scared White, who had used more different sorts than almost any American then alive. He grabbed a share of whatever the CIA sent him. “He always wanted to try everything himself,” one of his partners said. “Whatever drugs they sent out, it didn’t matter, he wanted to see how they worked on him before he tried them on anyone else.”

  While his prostitutes and their clients had sex, White would watch through a one-way mirror, sitting on his portable toilet. Sometimes Feldman joined him. Their job was to observe the men’s reaction to various kinds of sex, and how they behaved when drugs and sex were combined. Feldman marveled at how freely men spoke when they were under the influence of this combination. He recognized it as an intriguing alternative to the old-fashioned interrogation techniques he had used in his military days.

  “If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer,” he explained. “If it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.”

  White, Feldman, and other agents who worked at the “pad” observed that after sex, a man will often speak to the woman next to him. They began assigning their prostitutes to stay with clients for several hours rather than leaving immediately. When combined with the effects of LSD, they hoped, this staged intimacy would lower a man’s inhibitions.

  “To find a prostitute who is willing to stay is a hell of a shock to anyone used to prostitutes,” one officer reported. “It has a tremendous effect on the guy. It’s a boost to his ego if she’s telling him he was really neat, and she wants to stay for a few more hours … Most of the time, he gets pretty vulnerable. What the hell’s he going to talk about? Not the sex, so he starts talking about his business. It’s at this time she can lead him gently.”

  Pleased with what he considered the success of his San Francisco operation, Gottlieb ordered it expanded. At his direction, White opened a second safe house outside city limits, in the Marin County town of Mill Valley, which offered the privacy necessary for experiments that went beyond sex and drugs. Among the compounds he fabricated and brought to White for testing were stink bombs, itching powder, sneezing powder, and diarrhea inducers. All were to be tested on men who had met prostitutes and expected nothing more than quick sex, or on groups that were invited to parties. Gottlieb also supplied devices for White to test, including a drug-laced swizzle stick, an ultra-thin hypodermic needle that could be used to poison a wine bottle through the cork, and glass capsules that would release noxious gases when they were crushed underfoot.

  Soon after the Marin County safe house opened, a couple of White’s agents spent several days in San Francisco finding men they could invite to a party there. Gottlieb wanted to see if he could dose a roomful of people with LSD sprayed from an aerosol can. He produced the can and delivered it to White. On the appointed day, however, according to one agent’s testimony years later, “the weather defeated us.” Guests arrived as planned, but the room was so hot that windows had to be kept open. That made the experiment impossible. Reverses like these did not discourage White. He remained immersed in his work and did everything Gottlieb asked, always with his special flair.

  “When he wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse, White would cruise the streets of San Francisco tracking down drug pushers for the Narcotics Bureau,” according to one survey of his career. “Sometimes after a tough day on the beat he invited his narco buddies up to one of the safe houses for a little ‘R and R.’ Occasionally they unzipped their inhibitions and partied on the premises—much to the chagrin of the neighbors, who began to complain about men with guns in shoulder straps chasing after women in various states of undress. Needless to say, there was always plenty of dope around, and the feds sampled everything from hashish to LSD … White had quite a scene going for a while. By day he fought to keep drugs out of circulation, and by night he dispensed them to strangers.”

  Only by Gottlieb’s unusual standards could White have been judged qualified to run Operation Midnight Climax. He knew the ways of the street, but he was not equipped to interpret people’s actions while they were unknowingly under the influence of drugs. He had no background in chemistry, medicine, or psychology. A psychiatrist who worked with the CIA, James Hamilton of Stanford University Medical School, occasionally dropped by the Telegraph Hill “pad,” but usually no health professional was available in case a victim became ill or uncontrollable. Even the chemists, hypnotists, and electro-shockers Gottlieb had dispatched to conduct experiments at overseas detention centers had some training, and at least a vague idea of what they were looking for. In San Francisco, no one was around except White himself and, occasionally, Feldman or another partner.

  Clients of prostitutes were not White’s only victims. At the end of 1957, a deputy federal marshal named Wayne Ritchie attended a Christmas party at the Federal Building, where White was based. After taking several drinks, he became disoriented. He raced to his locker, grabbed his two service revolvers, walked to a bar in the Fillmore District, pointed one of his pistols at the bartender, and demanded money. Someone knocked him unconscious from behind. Police officers were standing over him when he awoke.

  In court, Ritchie pleaded guilty to armed robbery but could offer no explanation for his momentary madness. A sympathetic judge, citing his sterling record—he was a Marine Corps veteran and had been a guard at Alcatraz—let him off without prison time. He spiraled into depression and never recovered. Only twenty-two years later, when he read Gottlieb’s obituary, did he come to suspect that he had been dosed with LSD. He sued the CIA. White had died by then, but his sidekick Ira Feldman admitted in a pre-trial deposition that he had surreptitiously drugged people in and around San Francisco. “I didn’t do any follow-up,” he said. “It wasn’t a very good thing to go and say ‘How do you feel today?’ You don’t give them a tip. You just back away and let them worry, like this nitwit Ritchie.” Ultimately a judge denied Ritchie’s claim for compensation, ruling that he had not conclusively proven he was drugged, but called the case “troubling” and added: “If Ritchie’s claims are indeed true, he has paid a terrible price in the name of national security.”

  White was a lawman who made his own law. If he drugged unsuspecting citizens because it was a legal way to make people suffer, he was reprehensible. If he did it because he believed it would contribute to national security, he could be seen as morally strong. Whichever it was, his main qualification was his willingness to do whatever Gottlieb wished.

  “White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop—he made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew,” Feldman told an interviewer years later. “The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down: espionage, assassination, dirty tricks, drug experiments, sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.” The interviewer asked Feldman if he had ever met Gottlieb. That set off an extended recollection.

  Several times Sidney Gottlieb came out. I met Gottlieb at the pad, and at White’s office … Sidney was a nice guy. He was a fuckin’ nut. They were all nuts. I says, “You’re a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers?” He had this black bag with him. He says, “This is my bag of dirty tricks.” He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Beach. Sidney says, “Stop the car.” He pulls out a dart gun and shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, “Come back in two days and check this tree.” So we go back in two days, the tree was completely dead, not a leaf left on it … I went back and I saw White, and he says to me, “What do you think of Sidney?” I said, “I think he’s a fuckin’ nut.” White says, “Well, he may be a nut, but this is the program. This is what we do.”

 
Gottlieb’s visits to San Francisco were not for purely business purposes. Operation Midnight Climax gave him ready access to prostitutes. According to Ira Feldman, he took full advantage of this perquisite. “He was cock crazy,” Feldman said while free-associating about Gottlieb during a legal deposition near the end of his life. He recalled complaining to George Hunter White: “All he wants me to do is get him laid!”

  “Anytime that fuck came to San Francisco—‘Get me a girl,’” Feldman said. “He always needed a girl.”

  Feldman could not help adding, with a measure of pride, that every woman he supplied to Gottlieb serviced him free of charge. “All these girls I ever fixed Sidney up with,” he said, “they never took any money from him. It was a favor to me.”

  As if that were not startling enough, Feldman added that Gottlieb had also carried on an affair with White’s freewheeling wife, Albertine. “Gottlieb was humping his wife,” he said. “They were very good friends. I’d always pick him up. We’d go there. We’d sit. I don’t drink. Before you know it, White passed out in the bedroom. And Sidney was on the couch with the old lady, humping her brains out … George knew, but he—I think he loved her very much.”

  * * *

  IN 1955 GEORGETOWN University Hospital in Washington announced plans to construct a six-story, one-hundred-bed addition called Gorman Annex. Gottlieb took note. He was funding many of his MK-ULTRA “subprojects” through dummy foundations and had to take precautions to ensure that the scientists involved did not learn the true source of their funding. This restricted his freedom of action. He wanted his own research hospital—a medical “safe house” inside the United States where CIA scientists, not outsiders, could conduct experiments. The announcement from Georgetown gave him his chance.

  Gottlieb conceived the idea of secretly paying part of the $3 million cost of Gorman Annex in exchange for access to its medical facilities. In a memo to his superiors, he proposed that the CIA contribute $375,000 to the building project—which would be matched by other federal funds since it would be funneled through a “cutout” and appear to be a charitable donation. In exchange, he wrote, “one-sixth of the total space in the new hospital wing will be available to the Chemical Division of TSS, thereby providing laboratories and office space, technical assistance, equipment and experimental animals.” He listed four “justifications” for what would become MK-ULTRA Subproject 35: “(A) Agency employees would be able to participate in the work without the university or the hospital authorities being aware of Agency interest. (B) Agency sponsorship of sensitive research projects will be completely deniable. (C) Full professional cover will be provided for up to three bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division. (D) Human patients and volunteers for experimental use will be available under controlled clinical conditions.”

  “It is a relatively routine procedure to develop a drug to the point of human testing,” Gottlieb concluded. “Ordinarily, the drug houses depend upon the services of private physicians for the final clinical testing. The physicians are willing to assume the responsibility of such tests in order to advance the science of medicine. It is difficult and sometimes impossible for TSS/CD to offer such an inducement with respect to its products. In practice, it has been possible to use outside cleared contractors for the preliminary phases of this work. However, that part which involves human testing at effective dose levels presents security problems which cannot he handled by the ordinary contractor. The proposed facility [redacted] offers a unique opportunity for the secure handling of such clinical testing in addition to the many advantages outlined in the project proposal. The security problems mentioned above are eliminated by the fact that the responsibility for testing will rest completely upon the physician and the hospital … Excellent professional cover would be provided for up to three bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division of the TS. This would allow open attendance at scientific meetings, the advancement of personal standing in the scientific world, and as such, would constitute a major efficiency and morale booster.”

  Gottlieb’s proposal to create a secret CIA laboratory inside an established Washington hospital, to be used for experiments on human subjects, was extraordinary even by MK-ULTRA standards. Richard Helms, his unofficial boss, passed the decision up to Allen Dulles. Even more extraordinary, Dulles, according to the researcher John Marks, “took it to President Eisenhower’s special committee to review covert operations. The committee also gave its assent [and] the CIA money was forthcoming.” This was, Marks wrote, “the only time in a whole quarter-century of Agency behavior-control activities when the documents show that CIA officials went to the White House for approval of anything.”

  Little is known about the experiments that CIA scientists conducted at Gorman Annex, although the Agency later confirmed that terminally ill patients were among the subjects. Pressed for details two decades later, Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner replied, “There is no factual evidence of what went on. It is just missing. It is not that it didn’t happen.”

  Almost no one, even in the highest reaches of government, knew of Gottlieb’s work or even of his existence. At the CIA, however, a handful of senior officers knew enough to connect him to LSD. Gottlieb took a certain pride in this. He liked to tell a story about the time he was walking down the aisle of a plane carrying a cocktail. To his shock, one passenger asked quietly as he passed by, “Is that LSD you’re drinking?” He turned and saw that the inquirer was Allen Dulles.

  At the end of 1955, Dulles decided it was time to share broad outlines of the CIA’s ultra-secret with someone else. He composed a modestly revealing report and sent it to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. Whether he was genuinely seeking to keep a senior colleague informed, or simply wanted to limit his liability in case things went wrong, his report is among the few CIA documents to describe MK-ULTRA while it was still underway.

  For the past four years the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in research on a group of powerful chemicals affecting the human mind called psychochemicals. We have developed extensive professional contacts, experience and a considerable amount of information on many psychochemicals including in particular a material known as LSD. This Agency is continuing its interest in this field, and in the light of its accumulated experience offers its cooperation and assistance to research and development programs which the Department of Defense is considering at this time …

  Since 1951 this Agency has carried out a program of research which has provided important information on the nature of the abnormal behavior produced by LSD and the way this effect varies with such factors as size of dose, differences in the individual and environment. The behavioral effects of repeated doses given over a long time has been studied. We have established that individuals may develop a tolerance to LSD. A search for possible antidotes is being made. It has been found that LSD produces remarkable mental effects when taken in exceedingly small doses. The foregoing became increasingly interesting when it was recently discovered that LSD could be synthesized in quantity. There are many characteristics of LSD and other psychochemicals which either have not been studied or require further study.

  This degree of candor was as far as Dulles is known to have gone, at least on paper. He fully understood that MK-ULTRA could function only in absolute secrecy. The “special interrogation” sessions that its officers were conducting at clandestine prisons abroad, the extreme experiments it was sponsoring in hospitals and prisons, the “national security whorehouse” that was at the center of Operation Midnight Climax, the secret financing of Gorman Annex, and the panoply of Gottlieb’s other “subprojects” were among the American government’s most highly classified programs. If any of them became public, the result might have been not just public outrage, but the end of MK-ULTRA and possibly even the CIA itself. One potential threat had died with Frank Olson. In the months that followed, a new one emerged. It came from an unexpected quarter: the United States Congress.

  9

>   The Divine Mushroom

  When Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana rose to address his colleagues on April 9, 1956, he was courtly as always. Some in Washington, though, were horrified by what he proposed.

  “Because of the very nature of the Central Intelligence Agency, I think it is important that a joint congressional committee be established for the purposes of making continued studies of the activities of the Agency,” Mansfield told his colleagues. “The CIA should, as a matter of law, keep that committee as fully and as currently informed as possible with respect to its activities. Allen Dulles, Director of CIA, may make no mistakes in assessing intelligence, but he should not be the lone judge.”

  Mansfield proposed to create a twelve-member congressional committee that would “make continuing studies of the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency”; require the CIA to “keep the joint committee fully and currently informed with respect to its activities”; and, most ominously, give the committee power “to require, by subpoena or otherwise, the attendance of such witnesses and the production of such books, papers, and documents … as it deems advisable.” This was the gravest threat the CIA had yet faced. Its officers had adjusted to the threat of nuclear annihilation, but Mansfield’s proposal seemed a dagger to the heart.

  In its eight and a half years of existence, the CIA had operated with no effective supervision, other than that exercised directly—and rarely—by the president. It did not take kindly to the idea of cooperating with a congressional committee, especially one with subpoena power. All understood that such a committee would probably uncover unsavory operations that the CIA was conducting in various parts of the world. In his Senate speech, Mansfield mentioned reports that the Agency had funded neo-Nazis in Germany, organized military raids inside China, sent agents to “start a revolution” in Guatemala, tapped the telephone of President José Figueres of Costa Rica, and illegally detained “a Japanese citizen” for eight months. Each of those reports later turned out to be true.