Poisoner in Chief

by Stephen Kinzer

  Student volunteers in these experiments: Ross, CIA Doctors, pp. 286–96.

  The paper’s principal author, Dr. James Hebb: Ibid., p. 36.

  The Office of Security issued a memo telling interrogators: Central Intelligence Agency, “Memorandum for the Record,” January 31, 1975, in Robert Clayton Buick, Assassination (Bloomington, IN: XLibris, 2012), p. 99.

  In 1955 the CIA mind control enthusiast Morse Allen: Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 117.

  That experiment, he wrote in reply, suggested: McCoy, A Question of Torture, pp. 37–38.

  In 1956 this remarkable physician, Ewen Cameron: Ibid., p. 43.

  “If we can succeed in inventing means”: Weinstein, Father, Son and CIA, p. 100.

  “not only a loss of the space-time image”: “MK-ULTRA Violence: How McGill Pioneered Psychological Torture,” McGill Daily, September 6, 2012.

  To cleanse unwanted thoughts from a patient’s mind: Alliance for Human Research Protection, “Dr. Ewen Cameron Destroyed Minds at Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal,” http://ahrp.org/1950s-1960s-dr-ewen-cameron-destroyed-minds-at-allan-memorial-hospital-in-montreal/; McCoy, Question of Torture, p. 44; McGill Daily, September 12, 2012; Weinstein, Father, Son and CIA, pp. 108–30.

  “the shock treatment turned the then-19-year-old honors student”: Alliance for Human Research Protection, “Dr. Ewen Cameron,” http://ahrp.org/1950s-1960s-dr-ewen-cameron-destroyed-minds-at-allan-memorial-hospital-in-montreal/.

  “Although the patient was prepared”: Sid Taylor, “A History of Secret CIA Mind Control Research,” Nexus, April–May 1992, http://all.net/journal/deception/MKULTRA/www.profreedom.free4all.co.uk/skeletons_1.html.

  Like many other MK-ULTRA collaborators: Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 231.

  Their contract specified what it would entail: McCoy, A Question of Torture, p. 43.

  “approximately one hundred patients”: Ibid., p. 44.

  “Dr. G made clear my job was to ensure”: Thomas, Secrets and Lies, p. 91.

  A review conducted decades later: Alliance for Human Research Protection, “Dr. Ewen Cameron.”

  While the experiments were underway: Streatfeild, Brainwash, pp. 212–15; Thomas, Secrets and Lies, pp. 86–93.

  “A chemist who is not a mystic”: Roman Katzer, “Albert Hofmann und sein LSD: We eine Droge unser Weltbild revolutionierte,” Newsage 2, 2012, https://www.newsage.de/2012/04/albert-hofmann-und-sein-lsd/.

  White plunged into his new assignment: Darien Cavanaugh, “The CIA’s Operation ‘Midnight Climax’ Was Exactly What It Sounded Like: Agents Lured Johns to Brothels for Drug-Laced Encounters,” War Is Boring, September 17, 2016, https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cias-operation-midnight-climax-was-exactly-what-it-sounded-like-fa63f84ad015; Channel 2 KTVU, 11 PM News (Oakland), https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R000200230006-5.pdf; Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” pp. 101–4; U.S. Senate, Joint Hearing, p. 48; Jim Wood, “CIA Chief Deplores CIA Brothels,” San Francisco Examiner, August 5, 1977.

  “was so wired that if you spilled a glass of water”: Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 84.

  “We had a comprehensive library on Chestnut Street”: Behmke Reporting and Video Services, Transcript of Consensually Monitored Conversation: Conversation Between Ike Feldman and Unidentified Speakers, Investigation No. C00-3940 MHP, January 26, 2003, pp. 66–67.

  among documents that the CIA later declassified: Black Vault, MKULTRA/Mind Control Collection, pp. 42–179, http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/mkultra4/DOC_0000017440/DOC_0000017440.pdf.

  He listed more than a hundred: Ibid., pp. 42–144.

  “Due to the highly unorthodox nature of these activities”: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 107.

  “Before long, I get a call, this time from White”: Richard Stratton, “Altered States of America,” Spin, March 1994, http://mirror.macintosharchive.org/ca.cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/mind_control/MKULTRA/Stratton%20-%20Altered%20States%20of%20America%20(Spin%201994).pdf.

  He ran a sting operation in which he posed as a pimp: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 102; Stratton, “Altered States.”

  “One day, White calls me into his office”: Stratton, “Altered States.”

  The next time Gottlieb was in San Francisco: Behmke Reporting Services, Transcript of Consensually Monitored Conversation, pp. 22–25.

  Each time one of them brought a client: Alliance for Human Research Protection, “1953–1964: Operation Midnight Climax—CIA’s Lurid Ventures into Sex, Hookers and LSD,” http://ahrp.org/1953-1964-operation-midnight-climax-cias-lurid-ventures-into-sex-hookers-and-lsd/; Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 32; Stratton, “Altered States.”

  “I would go to various bars”: “Mind Control Murder,” YouTube video, 45:12, posted by Capitan Black, March 18, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ot9noqQUw.

  “We were interested in the combination of certain drugs with sex acts”: “The LSD Chronicles: George Hunter White,” http://thegipster.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-lsd-chronicles-george-hunter-white_1757.html.

  “certain individuals who covertly administered”: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 107.

  “If we were scared enough of a drug”: Ibid., p. 105.

  “He always wanted to try everything himself”: Stratton, “Altered States.”

  While his prostitutes and their clients had sex: Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 84.

  “If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer”: Stratton, “Altered States.”

  “To find a prostitute who is willing to stay”: “Mind Control Murder,” YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ot9noqQUw.

  a second safe house outside city limits: Jo Thomas, “CIA Sought to Spray Drug on Partygoers,” New York Times, September 21, 1977.

  Among the compounds he fabricated: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 107; U.S. Senate, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources: Human Drug Testing by the CIA (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 107–8.

  Gottlieb wanted to see if he could dose a roomful of people: U.S. Senate, Human Drug Testing, pp. 101, 107–8; Jo Thomas, “CIA Sought to Spray Drug.”

  “When he wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse”: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 33.

  At the end of 1957, a deputy federal marshal: Wolfe, “10 Real Victims.”

  “I didn’t do any follow-up”: U.S. District Court, District of California, San Francisco Division, Wayne A. Ritchie, Plaintiff, against United States of America, Defendant, Continued Videotaped Deposition of Ira Feldman, February 7, 2003, p. 428.

  Ultimately a judge denied Ritchie’s claim: U.S. District Court, District of California, San Francisco Division, Wayne Ritchie, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. United States of America et al., 451 F.3d 1019 (9th Cir. 2006), June 26, 2006, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/451/1019/627287/.

  “White was a son of a bitch”: Stratton, “Altered States.”

  “He was cock crazy”: U.S. District Court, Ritchie v. US, Continued Videotape Deposition of Ira Feldman, February 7, 2003, pp. 20, 26.

  “Anytime that fuck came to San Francisco”: Ibid., pp. 449–50.

  “Gottlieb was humping his wife”: Behmke Reporting and Video Services, Transcript of Consensually Monitored Conversation, Investigation No. C00-3940 MHP, pp. 21–25.

  In a memo to his superiors, he proposed: Central Intelligence Agency, Subproject 35 MKULTRA, https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0005.htm.

  “took it to President Eisenhower’s special committee”: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 217.

  Little is known about the experiments: U.S. Senate, Joint Hearing, pp. 40, 120, 126–33.

  Pressed for details two decades later: Ibid., p. 21.

  He liked to tell a story about the time: Nicholas M. Horrock, “Destruction of LSD Data Laid to C.I.A. Aide in ’73,
” New York Times, July 18, 1975.

  “For the past four years”: “Memorandum from Director of Central Intelligence Dulles to Secretary of Defense Wilson,” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d244.

  9. The Divine Mushroom

  “Because of the very nature of the Central Intelligence Agency”: Congressional Quarterly, “CIA ‘Watchdog’ Committee,” in CQ Almanac 1956, http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal56-1349665.

  Mansfield proposed to create a twelve-member congressional committee: Congressional Record—Senate, April 9, 1956, p. 5930.

  The headline over one Washington Star article: Richard Fryklund, “CIA Leaders Are Cool to Watchdog Proposal,” Washington Star, February 20, 1956.

  “over my dead body”: James Reston, “Washington: File and Forget?,” New York Times, July 22, 1987.

  “If there is one agency of the government”: Central Intelligence Agency, “How Intelligence-Sharing with Congress Has Evolved,” March 19, 2007, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/sharing-secrets-with-lawmakers-congress-as-a-user-of-intelligence/1.htm#rft4.

  “As a member of the Armed Services and Appropriations committees”: Congressional Record—Senate, April 9, 1956, pp. 5923–24.

  Senator Russell asserted in a speech: Congressional Quarterly, “CIA ‘Watchdog’ Committee.”

  “I am beginning to feel like David facing Goliath”: Congressional Record—Senate, April 11, 1956, p. 5939.

  “Let’s get into the technology of assassinations”: Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, p. 323.

  Morse Allen learned of a Mexican plant: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” pp. 114–16; Streatfeild, Brainwash, pp. 77–78.

  “Very early accounts of the ceremonies”: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 115.

  “If I had thought I was participating”: Ibid., p. 117.

  On their honeymoon, Valentina shocked him: Jan Irvin, “R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth,” in John Rush, ed., Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2013), pp. 565–616.

  led them to the home of a Mazatec woman: R. Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life, June 10, 1957, http://www.imaginaria.org/wasson/life.htm.

  “I am the woman who shepherds the immense”: “María Sabina Documental,” YouTube video, 1:20:47, posted by Soy Eus, July 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30s3ZCF7E3A.

  “We were never more wide awake”: Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.”

  A deal was struck: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 122; Streatfeild, Brainwash, pp. 80–81.

  The mushrooms, he wrote afterward: Marks, Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” p. 123.

  Gottlieb cautioned, however, that research: Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 83.

  The result was a seventeen-page spread: Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.”

  “Throughout the 1950s and for some time beyond”: H. P. Albarelli and Jeffrey Kaye, “Cries from the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes,” Truthout, May 23, 2010, https://truthout.org/articles/cries-from-the-past-tortures-ugly-echoes/.

  A report on his MK-ULTRA work: Streatfeild, Brainwash, p. 86; Orlikow v. United States, U.S. District Court, September 12, 1988, p. 5, http://breggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/civilDOrlikowPretrialstatmnt.pdf.

  “Gottlieb had wanted to apply his black arts”: Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (New York: MJF, 2001), p. 195. “I went into training to go overseas in the spring of 1957. I actually went overseas—I think we departed these shores in about August or September,” US District Court for the District of Columbia, “Deposition of Sidney Gottlieb,” April 19, 1983, p. 77; “When did you return to Washington from overseas?” “In 1959,” Ibid., p. 172; “What were your duties there?” “I am not at liberty to say that,” Ibid., p. 15.

  a Ukrainian exile leader … collapsed and died: Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 362.

  “When it came to spying”: John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim (New York: Ballantine, 2008), p. 132.

  “without the knowledge of German authorities”: Klaus Wiegrefe, “Das Geheimnis der Villa im Taunus,” Der Spiegel, December 12, 2015, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-140390016.html.

  “For two years he worked under cover”: Gup, “Coldest Warrior.”

  “When he lectured to our group”: Author’s interview with retired CIA officer “BD.”

  Dictionaries define a “svengali”: Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/svengali; Merriam-Webster, https://twitter.com/merriamwebster/status/404308437888421888; Oxford Living Dictionaries, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/svengali.

  “horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar”: John Henry Ingram, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (CreateSpace, 2017), p. 144.

  “Gaslighting is a form of persistent manipulation”: Preston Ni, “8 Signs That Someone Is in a Relationship with a Gaslighter,” Psychology Today, February 15, 2017.

  more than two hundred articles on these subjects: Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 148.

  “a wild, vigorous, curiously readable mélange”: Frederick Morton, “One Thing Led to Another,” New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1959.

  “Postwar conspiracy theory is deeply influenced”: Timothy Melley, “Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Postwar United States,” New German Critique 103 (Winter 2008), https://www.jstor.org/stable/27669224?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

  “By 1961, 1962, it was at least proven”: U.S. Senate, Joint Hearing, p. 62.

  10. Health Alteration Committee

  Thirteen miles above the Ural Mountains: Christopher Moran, Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs and the CIA (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), pp. 89–90; Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry, Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident (Lincoln, NE: Potomac, 2003), pp. 61–63; Villon Films, “Counterpoint: The U-2 Story,” http://www.villonfilms.ca/counterpoint-the-u-2-story/.

  “tortures and unknown horrors”: Michael Dobbs, “Gary Powers Kept a Secret Diary with Him After He Was Captured by the Soviets,” Smithsonian, October 15, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/gary-powers-secret-diary-soviet-capture-180956939/.

  One of those pilots, Carmine Vito: Norman Polmar, Spyplane: The U-2 History Declassified (Minneapolis: Zenith, 2001), pp. 103–4.

  “Inside the dollar was what appeared to be”: Powers and Gentry, Operation Overflight, p. 50.

  Powers later testified: Dobbs, “Gary Powers Kept a Secret Diary.”

  “There was absolutely no—N-O, no”: Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations from 1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), p. 94.

  “To cover up the tracks of the crime”: Union of Journalists of the USSR, “Aggressors Must Be Sent to the Pillory: The Truth about the Provocative Intrusion of the American Plane into the Air Space of the USSR” [CIA Translation], https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A074400420001-9.pdf.

  “If the assignments received by Powers”: Powers and Gentry, Operation Overflight, p. 152.

  “The following was established during the investigation of the pin”: Francis Gary Powers, The Trial of the U2: Exclusive Authorized Account of the Court Proceedings of the Case of Francis Gary Powers (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2011), p. 93; Powers and Gentry, Operation Overflight, p. 151.

  “surpass by many times such known substances”: Neil Edwards, “Saxitoxin: From Food Poisoning to Chemical Warfare,” The Chemical Laboratories (University of Sussex at Brighton), http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/stx/saxi1.htm; Vladyslav V. Goncha
ruk, Drinking Water: Physics, Chemistry and Biology (New York: Springer, 2014), p. 13.

  “performed his duty in a very dangerous mission”: Powers and Gentry, Operation Overflight, p. 296.

  “Will announce himself as Joe from Paris”: Loch Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden Side of Government (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), p. 209.

  “He was a senior officer, a highly respected chemist”: Larry Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), p. 95.

  During this period he was also part: Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: Dial, 1978), p. 459; David Wise, “The CIA, Licensed to Kill,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2009.

  At mid-morning on August 18, 1960: The President’s Appointments, July–December, 1960, President’s Daily Appointment Schedules: Dwight D. Eisenhower: Records as President, 1953–1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

  “Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing”: William H. Worger et al., Africa and the West: A Documentary History, vol. 2, From Colonialism to Independence, 1875 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 136.

  “There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds”: Martin Kettle, “President ‘Ordered Murder’ of Congo Leader,” Guardian, August 9, 2000.

  “hunting good here when light is right”: Johnson, Strategic Intelligence, p. 219.

  “Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect”: Regis, Biology of Doom, p. 183.

  “Jesus H. Christ!”: Devlin, Chief of Station, p. 95.

  “anything he could get to his mouth”: U.S. Senate, An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 25.

  “normal traces found in people who die of certain diseases”: Ibid.

  “act as inside man”: Ibid., p. 27.

  “certain items of continuing usefulness”: Ibid., p. 29.

  On January 17, 1961, a squad of six Congolese: Brian Urquhart, “The Tragedy of Lumumba,” New York Review of Books, October 4, 2001.

  “my mind was racing”: Devlin, Station Chief, pp. 96–97.