Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  When he lectured to our group in 1958, he was considered by all of us a strange person, someone who was beyond the pale, doing all sorts of strange things. I thought, “I hope I don’t have anything to do with this guy.” He was kind of dismissed as an oddball. They flipped off his name and laughed at it. It was kind of, “That crazy guy.” He was definitely not a mainstream operations officer. I made a decision of my own never to have anything to do with this guy. He was so far out in the things he was doing that by and large he was considered beyond the pale …

  You’re told that your country wants you to do this super-secret thing. It’s not your role to say whether it’s a good idea or not. Your job is to develop it. Gottlieb worked his way up in the ranks doing what he was told to do—not by questioning orders, but trying to figure out how to do what was asked … We knew there was something going on with LSD experiments. I can’t remember ever seeing a document, but it was something that just kind of filtered down.

  He was not an operator. He was a scientist, like the people who developed the atomic bomb. If they were told that the bomb was going to be dropped on a civilian population in Japan, at least some would have objected. But many of them thought they were just creating a capacity that might or might not be used. They soldiered on and did their technical work.

  He was so low key—a little grey man. An hour after his appearance before you, you’d have trouble recognizing him in a crowd. He was the sort of esoteric scientist so far removed from the practicalities of real life that you had trouble taking him seriously. But you couldn’t dismiss him entirely.

  Gottlieb worked at the Munich station for two years. In 1959 he returned to a new job at CIA headquarters, created for him: “scientific adviser” to Richard Bissell, the deputy director for plans. Bissell was looking for ways to use chemical and biological agents more effectively in covert operations. Gottlieb’s combination of technical expertise and field experience prepared him for the next phase in his career.

  As he was settling back into life in the United States, Gottlieb’s secret world was jolted by the appearance of a bestselling novel called The Manchurian Candidate. It tells the story of a group of American soldiers in Korea who are captured by Communists, brought to a secret base in Manchuria, “brainwashed,” and sent back to the United States to commit political murder. In this case fiction lagged behind reality. Gottlieb had found no evidence that post-hypnotic suggestion, induced amnesia, or any other form of “brainwashing” actually exists. Americans, however, had been told that ex-prisoners who praised Communism or confessed to dropping bio-weapons over North Korea and China had been “brainwashed.” That made The Manchurian Candidate sound terrifyingly real. It grabbed America’s Cold War imagination. Gottlieb and his mind control warriors had begun shaping the fictional world that once shaped them.

  * * *

  IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LONDON, a beautiful young artist’s model falls suddenly under the control of a scheming Jew who does not bathe. He seduces her away from her virtuous suitor, wipes away memories of her past life, turns her into a great singer although she could not sing before, and becomes her lover. His weapon is the transfixing power of his eyes.

  “There is nothing in your mind, nothing in your heart, nothing in your soul, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali,” he chants as she falls into a trance. Onlookers are amazed.

  “These fellows can make you do anything they want,” one marvels.

  “Aye,” replies another. “And then they kill you.”

  The tale of Svengali was first told in George du Maurier’s immensely popular novel Trilby, and then in various films including the riveting 1932 version starring John Barrymore. They were part of a wave of stories that introduced the idea of mind control to Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. It proved to be an endlessly appealing trope. So fully did Svengali personify the wicked mind-stealer that his name has entered the English language. Dictionaries define a “svengali” as a person who “manipulates or exerts excessive control over another,” “completely dominates another,” or “exercises a controlling or mesmeric influence on another, especially for a sinister purpose.”

  That was what Gottlieb wanted to be and do. He spent years trying to find the secret that allowed Svengali to take over a human mind. Fiction helped shape the belief, within the CIA and in popular culture, that mind control exists and can be mastered.

  Two traumatic historical episodes—the testimony of Cardinal Mindszenty during his 1949 trial in Hungary and the behavior of American prisoners in Korea several years later—convinced senior CIA officers that Communists had discovered the key to mind control. They hired Gottlieb to discover that same key. What led them to believe it existed? Part of the answer lies in the cultural conditioning that shaped them. They came of age in an era when mind control was a ubiquitous fantasy. Writers found it irresistible. So did many readers. Fiction led Americans to believe that there must be ways for one human being to capture the mind of another.

  The lineage of this fascination may be traced at least as far back as 1845, when Edgar Allan Poe published “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a story about mesmerism written as if it were the report of a true case. In it, a dying patient is placed into a trance and remains suspended for seven months, alive but without a pulse or heartbeat. The story caused a sensation. Poe finally admitted it was a hoax, but it struck a deep emotional chord. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote that Poe had made “horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar.”

  Ambrose Bierce was also drawn to the idea of mind control. In his 1890 story “The Realm of the Unreal,” a magician from Calcutta hypnotizes an entire audience in Baltimore. He claims to have discovered a method by which “a peculiarly susceptible subject may be kept in the realm of the unreal for weeks, months, and even years, dominated by whatever delusions and hallucinations the operator may from time to time suggest.” A few years later, Bierce wrote a first-person account, “The Hypnotist,” in which he reported that he had developed “unusual powers” and liked to “amuse myself with hypnotism, mind reading and … the mysterious force or agent known as hypnotic suggestion.”

  “Whether or not it could be employed by a bad man for an unworthy purpose,” Bierce concluded, “I am unable to say.”

  The advent of cinema brought mind control fantasies to a mass audience. One of the first great horror films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, tells the story of a diabolical performer who can make normal people commit murder. Later he is revealed to be the director of the local psychiatric clinic—a brilliant scientist who uses his knowledge for good or evil, as he chooses. Caligari has learned, as he writes in his diary at the end of the film, that a man “can be compelled to perform acts that, in a waking state, he would never commit.”

  The first great American film about mind control, Gaslight, released in 1944, won Ingrid Bergman an Academy Award for her portrayal of a woman whose husband takes control of her mind through what MK-ULTRA scientists would call sensory deprivation. The husband, played by Charles Boyer, breaks her will by forbidding her to leave home, isolating her from visitors, and arranging plots that make her doubt her sanity. This film also added a word to the lexicon of behavioral psychology, gaslighting, to take its place beside svengali. “Gaslighting is a form of persistent manipulation and brainwashing that causes the victim to doubt her or himself, and ultimately lose her or his own sense of perception, identity, and self-worth,” according to one text. “At its worst, pathological gaslighting constitutes a severe form of mind control and psychological abuse.”

  Another popular film released around this time, a Sherlock Holmes drama called The Woman in Green, depicts a different form of mind control. It presents an elaborate plot devised by Moriarty, the criminal genius who is Holmes’s nemesis. Moriarty kills women, cuts a finger off each corpse, places the fingers in the pockets of rich gentlemen, convinces them that this proves their guilt, and blackmails them to keep the secret. How does he make them believe that they
are murderers? Holmes is baffled for a time but suddenly hits upon the explanation: Moriarty has hypnotized his victims into believing they had committed crimes, thereby making them willing to pay blackmail. MK-ULTRA was looking for something different but related: a technique that would make spies, saboteurs, and assassins believe that they were innocent of crimes they had actually committed.

  Creatures who act at the command of others appear regularly in science fiction. Blood transfusions and garlic blooms are used to transform victims’ personalities in various versions of Dracula. The iconic monster in Frankenstein is controlled through electrodes implanted in his neck. Other stories depict mind control as a weapon wielded by invading extra-terrestrials. “That old bird just opened up my skull,” one victim marvels in a 1936 science-fiction novella called The Brain Stealers of Mars, “and poured a new set of brains in.”

  That was what Gottlieb and his MK-ULTRA comrades wanted to learn how to do. Exaggerated fears based on true events led them to believe that the human psyche can be controlled from outside. The stories they imbibed as children and adults made those fears seem real. Lost in the blurry borderland between the fantasy and truth of mind control, they could not bring themselves to recognize the fantasy as a product of creative imagination. What the imagination could conceive, they believed, the clandestine world could make real. MK-ULTRA was an attempt to invent a new reality.

  When Macbeth and Banquo meet the three prophetic witches at the opening of Shakespeare’s play, they wonder: “Have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” MK-ULTRA was no more or less than a search for that “insane root”—a drug, potion, or technique that would allow them to imprison reason. Science told them that no such pathway into the human psyche exists. Creative imagination suggested the opposite. Gottlieb and his chemical warriors believed they could transform a persistent legend into reality. Propelled by Cold War terrors, they fell under the spell of imagination.

  Public fascination with mind control and “brainwashing” reached a peak during the years MK-ULTRA was active. In the late 1950s, by one count, more than two hundred articles on these subjects appeared in Time, Life, and other popular magazines. Many were inspired by the work of the CIA-connected propagandist Edward Hunter. In books and articles, Hunter warned that Communists were preparing a psychic attack that would subject Americans to “unthinking discipline and robot-like enslavement.” Other pseudoscientists echoed this warning. Among them was William Sargant, the British psychologist to whom Frank Olson had confided his doubts about extreme experiments; his 1957 book Battle for the Mind chronicles his lifelong search for “the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s beliefs.” Writers with more serious credentials, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Arthur Koestler, had also produced works about aspects of mind control. Science and literature fed on each other to promote a terrifying fantasy.

  This fascination gripped a generation of writers in the United States and Britain. Jack Finney’s novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, published in 1954, depicts an attack by aliens who seek to take over Earth by replacing human beings with “pod people” who look and act like everyone else but are under hostile control. Two novels published in 1962 take the fantasy of mind control in other directions. The main character in A Clockwork Orange is a violent criminal who is taken to the Ministry of the Interior, given drugs, strapped to a chair with his eyes clamped open, and forced to watch films intended to change his behavior. In The Ipcress File, British diplomats are kidnapped by Soviet agents and subjected to tortures remarkably similar to the “psychic driving” that Ewen Cameron practiced as part of his MK-ULTRA experiments in Montreal. The file in this novel’s title is finally revealed to be based on an acronym. Ipcress stands for Induction of Psycho-Neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress.

  All three of these novels were made into highly successful movies, but none of them had anything near the impact of Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate. Though its literary value is debatable, its timing was perfect. It became one of the bestselling books of 1959. One reviewer called it “a wild, vigorous, curiously readable mélange.” It was that and more: the most widely read novel about “brainwashing” ever published in the United States. If anyone doubted the terrible potential of this weapon—or doubted its existence—The Manchurian Candidate was the ideal antidote.

  The book’s plot is simple but gripping. An infantry platoon fighting in Korea is captured and taken to a laboratory where Communist scientists conduct mind control experiments. There the soldiers are made to believe that their sergeant saved their lives during combat. When they return to the United States, their glowing reports earn him a Medal of Honor. What they do not know is that Communists have programmed him to become an assassin. His assignment, embedded so deeply in his psyche that he cannot remember it, is to respond to any order that comes from someone who shows him a Queen of Diamonds playing card. When the order finally comes, it is horrifying: murder a presidential candidate so a pro-Communist dictator can take over the United States.

  Americans had been reading stories about “brainwashing” for years before The Manchurian Candidate appeared. In serious works like The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man, social scientists had suggested that important features of American life, including advertising or psychiatry, were forms of attempted mind control. No one outside the CIA had yet heard of MK-ULTRA, but the belief that hidden conspiracies lie below the surface of national life had already begun to spread. That helps explain what the critic Timothy Melley called “the central place of The Manchurian Candidate in the fiction of mind control.”

  “Postwar conspiracy theory is deeply influenced by the growth of the covert sphere,” Melley wrote. “US foreign policy during the Cold War developed around a fundamental contradiction: the public advocacy of democracy versus the deployment of covert strategies and institutions operating outside the purview and control of the democratic public sphere. The incongruity in this strategy—the open secret that US policy relied increasingly on undemocratic, secret means—contributed significantly to suspicion of government, and redirected brainwashing fears toward homegrown targets.”

  A movie of The Manchurian Candidate, starring Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra, appeared in 1962 and intensified those fears. The handful of people who were truly immersed in mind control research, though, realized that it had come too late. At the very moment when masses of Americans were finally coming to believe that “brainwashing” was not only real but an imminent threat, Sidney Gottlieb and his MK-ULTRA comrades were reaching the opposite conclusion. “By 1961, 1962, it was at least proven to my satisfaction that ‘brainwashing,’ so-called—as some kind of esoteric device where drugs or mind-altering kinds of conditions and so forth were used—did not exist,” the CIA psychologist John Gittinger said later. “The Manchurian Candidate, as a movie, really set us back a long time, because it made something impossible look plausible … But by 1962 and 1963, the general idea that we were able to come up with is that ‘brainwashing’ was largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out of contact, putting him under long stress in relationship to interviewing and interrogation—and that they could produce any change that way, without having to resort to any kind of esoteric means.”

  Fiction anticipated and nourished MK-ULTRA. Stories about “brainwashing,” unfettered by science or anything else other than the limits of creative fantasy, caught the American imagination. They ran far beyond anything that CIA scientists were able to discover. Yet the very existence of MK-ULTRA was proof that even many of the wildest fantasies about secret government research into mind control were close to reality. That made the paranoid mind-set seem ever more rational.

  10

  Health Alteration Committee

  Thirteen miles above the Ural Mountains, a blinding orange flash lit up the sky on a spring morning in 1960. A Soviet anti-aircraft missile had found its target. The plane it was aimed at began tumbling wildly. Both wings
blew off. Miraculously, the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, managed to eject and open his parachute. Powers was on one of the CIA’s most secret missions. He was flying a spy plane, the U-2, that almost no one knew existed. As he floated down, he later wrote, he imagined the “tortures and unknown horrors” that might await him in captivity. Fortunately he had a way out. Around his neck, like a good luck charm, hung a silver dollar he had been given before takeoff. Hidden inside was a pin coated with poison. It was a gift from Sidney Gottlieb and friends.

  During the 1950s, as part of MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb had sent agents to search the world for natural poisons. They studied reports of toxic plants and animals, determined where they might be found, consulted with indigenous people, and came home with promising samples. Gottlieb, always fascinated by new chemicals, sent the samples to his partners at what had been Camp Detrick—now renamed Fort Detrick because it had been deemed a permanent installation. Several of them proved to be deadly.

  Gottlieb had risen to a new post: chief of research and development for the Technical Services Staff. He had an unmatched knowledge of poisons. That made him the ideal candidate for a delicate mission.

  The CIA’s deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, who ran the U-2 project, believed that since his planes would fly at improbably high altitudes, Soviet air defense systems would not be able to shoot them down or even track them by radar. Nonetheless he planned for the possibility that something might go wrong. The existence of the U-2 squadron and the nature of its mission—to photograph Soviet military installations—were among the most highly classified American secrets. If a plane was somehow lost and its pilot fell into enemy hands, much trouble would follow. Bissell asked the Technical Services Staff to provide his pilots with a way to commit suicide if they were captured.