I went back outside. They were loading Ben onto a stretcher. His cigarettes lay on his shirt. Oh, what the hell. I reached out and grabbed them, tapped one from the pack, and lit up. On my phone I looked at the picture of Ernesto and me. Gave me pangs to think it was over. I flicked the card against the phone, then the thought came to me: maybe his wife would like the photo too.
THE EXPENDABLES
BY ROB ROBERGE
Wonder Valley
1981
Have you ever seen government agents feed radioactive cereal to a group of mentally ill children, just to study what would happen, and have them call it a medical experiment?
I have.
What happens when you poison mentally ill children with radiation? With dusts of plutonium? Any children, of course. We used the institutionalized. What happens? They die. Of radiation poisoning.
The ones who ingested the most, the luckiest, died fastest. The others died slowly and more painfully than you could possibly imagine unless you’ve ever witnessed it. There are the enormous skin blisters and burns down to red muscle and the white—with a subtle shade of light blue—bones exposed. The constant diarrhea and vomiting. Often, blood from every orifice. The organs break down and basically liquefy. The child dies a savage death.
And I thought then, and I still think: why in the world did you need that experiment to figure out what the results would be?
I’m hiding, even if you couldn’t tell by looking. I sit on my screen porch here in the high desert. An unforgiving burning sun that keeps most people away is perfect for me. You spend a summer out here, and you wonder why the people stopped here on their westward expansion. A hundred and twenty miles from Los Angeles. From paradise. But it wasn’t like that distance was easy back then. My guess is they rode until they dropped. And they probably got here in fall or spring, when the weather sits in the low nineties and loosens its grip on everybody when the nights are all seventy-five to eighty-five degrees.
I read and watch the clouds change the colors of the mountains to the north. From sharp grays, to, later in the day, a dark tint like on a car window, to a burst near sunset that looks like cotton candy might if it were the most beautiful purples and oranges and reds and whites you’ve ever seen. As colorful as an atom bomb’s mushroom. The place might hold a place of love in my heart, if I didn’t have to be here.
Out here, you never know the secrets of people’s lives. My secrets are more guarded than most—as they are murderous secrets I’ve been keeping since 1953. My actions were born in secrecy, and it’s what I’ve lived in ever since then. In the 1950s I participated in the CIA’s mind control experiments, known as MK-ULTRA. I worked in what were called “subprojects,” but they were all under the ULTRA umbrella. I told myself, at first—before I’d seen or known of the scope of it—that I was doing this as a patriot, knowing the Russians were doing the same experiments. And we in the agency could not allow them to be first. To be able to control people’s minds. Our soldiers. Our POWs. Our spies. Hell, possibly our president. And we did these experiments, I now regret deeply, so we could, with our rapid advancements, be able to control their minds. Any other enemies of the state, domestic and global.
A good man would have told the government and screamed it to the Times. A good man would have risked his life. But while it does nothing to ease my guilt, I have never thought that was an option. To want to quit made you a national security risk. If they didn’t kill you right away, they would torture you and destroy your mind until you were of no use. And then they’d kill you. Or, worse, leave what was left of you alive.
But still, the man I should have been would’ve known he couldn’t keep torturing and killing people and remain a human being.
If I’d become a true security risk by talking, maybe I could have saved thousands of lives by trading my own. Though sometimes I think one man’s word against the CIA’s worst is hopeless.
I became a monster with a useless conscience. What you think of yourself is nothing when you stand it next to what you actually do.
But I could easily be disappeared. People in the project were tortured and killed—though sometimes just killed—and nobody would figure out it was a murder. The CIA was built on the desire for no one to know what they were doing behind the scenes. It’s in the very DNA of the CIA’s birth. It is the CIA.
Even in the agency, though, we were a particularly evil—I think I can use that word sincerely—tributary off the already poison river.
In the previous eighteen months, I’ve leaked as much information about MK-ULTRA as I can. It’s probably what helped the agency find my trail again. When I was silent and on the run, they had better things to do. But now, it’s a matter of time. You can be very hard to find in this world. But never impossible to find.
My best chance is why I originally came to live out here—a hundred and twenty miles from Los Angeles, as I say, and northeast of Palm Springs, fifty miles into the empty high desert.
Wonder Valley is a world where you don’t have neighbors. Or want them. This valley is for people who don’t like or want people in their lives. No one gives a shit about you. The only places I go are the gas station seven miles into town, the grocery store near it, and a little crap bar called the Mouse Trap down Highway 62, away from town and even farther east than I am. It’s not really a bar—not in any legal sense. It’s in a converted garage. The owner Leo built a small bar, put in five mismatched stools. There’s only one beer on tap—whatever keg he got from the liquor store. And even with only five stools, the place is mostly empty during the day. I drink there when I’m sick of drinking alone. Sometimes the generator power shuts down and the swamp cooler stops. And there you are, left to drink in total darkness—opening the door would only bring more heat. Drinking quickly because out here even a cold keg can turn the temperature of a cup of tea in no time.
Leo and I talk. We talk but we don’t communicate. Who does? Neither of us knows anything about each other’s lives. I’ll never know his story, and he’ll never know that I spend my time sending the secrets of the agency to the world in hopes they will be read and heard.
When I started writing all this information down—when I started releasing this information—I signed my death warrant.
More than 90 percent of the ULTRA files were destroyed in 1973 by the director of the CIA, on the order of my old boss, Sidney Gottlieb. Nothing we did was legal, according our government, the CIA, or the Nuremberg Code. If any other country were outed for doing this, our president would call them war criminals. Instead, Eisenhower knew about it and let it go on. After my time, Kennedy endorsed it. Nixon. It seems impossible to me that it’s stopped at all since. There is permanence to the subterranean horror that lies hidden from this nation.
They only ended the Tuskegee Airmen Syphilis Study in 1972, after more than forty years. Did it end because someone with a shred of ethics came to power? No. It ended because it was uncovered.
The people will only ever know—if they find out at all—long after the damage has been done. Long after what’s being done and will be done in the future.
If people knew the truth about the scope of this shadow world, they would realize what a fragile endeavor society actually is.
My death? The agency may torture me—but electroshock and isolation aren’t practical for a portable assassination. LSD or another drug would be too unpredictable, even if quickly administered by IV. There’s no twenty-story hotel to toss me off. I’m guessing a beating with a bat. I only hope it’s not a sniper. I need to see the assassin’s fear when they walk in the door and realize I’m not the only dead man in the room.
1953
I was hired because I was an expert in biochemical developments, and I was excited to have funding for what I thought I was there for—national security. Over time, I would collaborate with major advancements, but all of them were meant for defense, as far as I knew.
Very soon after being recruited and receiving my security clearance—w
hich I was granted despite being a Jew who’d attended, after I’d immigrated to save my life, communist meetings with a girlfriend in the 1930s. She was more possessed with a revolutionary spirit than I was. I thought the American government could be trusted to a degree. Certainly more than the Germany which I’d fled. But I learned painfully and relentlessly that there was not an honest or benevolent government in the world. Savage men run everything. Everywhere.
As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband: All men would be tyrants if they could.
Yet, at the time, I was still a patriot. No one is more in love with this country than the immigrant. I wanted to spend my life in service to the ideals, the promise, of my new home. The agency taught me early that the ways to reach closer to that perfect American ideal were as far as you could get from those ideals. A lie in service to the greater truth, a colleague said. No matter how much that truth went against everything people thought the country stood for. They didn’t even have a country. They just never knew.
1981
You do have to understand it was a different time, which excuses the fear, but not the experimenting with human subjects. The agency—the whole government—was terrified at how advanced the Russians might be at controlling a person’s mind. We had no idea and, as people tend to do when they don’t know anything, we feared the worst. And, as is always the reaction, we acted with blind rage over what we didn’t know. So, this was mainly about beating the enemy to discovering the secrets of mind control. And it made for what should have been strange bedfellows.
First came Operation Paperclip. The agency brought over Nazi space engineers, rocket scientists, chemists—anyone who could give them an edge in the Cold War.
And there were doctors. Nazi doctors—mostly Nazis, anyway—who performed experiments on human beings. The Nazi doctors and chemists and others experimenting on prisoners from the camps. POWs. Several of the Nazis who had tortured people to death, reduced others to permanent vegetative states, exposed them to poisons and illnesses, were given one of the great moral mulligans of all time. Some of these men were about to be sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials.
Project Artichoke would protect those guilty of war crimes and, in trade for their knowledge from inhumane studies, the US government brought them to America to share their information with the CIA. The other, perhaps main, reason they did this was to keep the doctors and scientists and biochemists away from the Soviet Union.
My first mentor was a Nazi. Hans Krieger. My family had fled Poland in the thirties and would almost assuredly be dead had we stayed. I studied how to experiment on human beings from this man. I never could reconcile that our national security meant we had to protect war criminals and put them in positions of power.
If Nazis taught me my first lessons in how to destroy the human mind, what does that make me?
People think there’s nothing to see in the desert. No life to speak of. But it’s all here. You just have to know where to look. Lizards hide under any shelter they can find so the birds of prey don’t get them. Sidewinder rattlesnakes that move in a way that will always creep me out. I’m not afraid of death. But I’m still afraid of that damn snake.
Mesquite trees. When it rains, the whole desert smells of ozone. There’s nothing quite like it.
The bones left to the elements out here? Some of them easy to identify as human, for someone who knows too much about remains. They turn whiter than other bones. They fracture up and down their sides. Somehow, they are the loneliest bones I’ve known. Stories behind all of them.
1953
After any training, the way Sidney Gottlieb trapped you into silence was to bring you in. The moments you were in a room where these experiences took place was when you became one of them forever.
Gottlieb had me present to study their mind control and interrogation techniques so that I might have a better idea of what they were looking for from my field of expertise. I designed nothing for the test. I didn’t administer any of the tests—I was later put on strategies for assassination of foreign leaders, including Castro.
At the experiments, I was sickened by what I saw. Nothing in my imagination prepared me for any of it.
I witnessed how a man responds to interrogation while he’s sealed in a low-pressure chamber. The pain builds. The body is stressed beyond belief. What did I learn about how a man responds to a high-pressure chamber while he’s being interrogated? I learned that his eyes pop out of his sockets while he’s still alive and screaming and begging to die, which he does.
At first, all the experiments were in Europe. Then Gottlieb managed to start them in the US and Canada—at hospitals and institutions. All of the unwitting test subjects were known, casually and on the paperwork, as expendables.
Some of the other techniques I saw were tests in how a man reacts to hypothermia while interrogated. He freezes to death. How he reacts to 130-degree heat until he, too, can no longer speak and slips into a coma and dies.
Other expendables? Prisoners. Heroin addicts. Children. Mentally ill children and adults. Anyone in a mental institution, no matter how minor the reason they were admitted. It didn’t matter if you were white, so long as you were expendable. But you mattered even less if you were black.
1981
There was a saying in the agency. It’s good to have someone you can trust to have your back; it’s better to trust no one.
Along with an elaborate system of getting information to various destinations, I trusted my mentor, Dr. Hans Krieger. The Nazi. I wouldn’t call it true trust, however. I figured, if I had secrets, his were worse. If the agency taught me nothing else, it was to always have the most leverage in any situation. I didn’t trust Hans. But I trusted Hans to keep his mouth shut for fear that I’d expose him.
If anything happens to me, I’ve left paper trails all over.
1953
I’ve seen the lifeless eyes of a woman who entered a hospital for postpartum depression and then had ten times the normal electroshock dose twice a day for forty-three days in a row. The hope was to empty a person’s mind and then implant thoughts that would make them helpless to protest, or even reflect on, the agency’s commands. They weren’t supposed to be people anymore. They were only vessels for orders. They could be used to do anything, no matter the person they used to be. The goal behind this was to create unwitting assassins. The result, in this case, was a woman with no history. No knowledge of a millisecond of her life. With the cognitive skills of a child. Destroyed.
I’ve seen expendables driven insane, given massive doses of LSD for fifty days or greater in a row.
I’ve seen pregnant women intentionally infected with malaria to see if their babies are born with it. Almost always black women and children.
I have seen people put to sleep for 172 days and played the same recorded sentence every second of it. A command that would replace one’s mind.
I have been, as with the entire inner circle, experimented on.
1981
Hans contacts me via a PO Box in Palm Springs. Over an hour away, but a PO Box in Twentynine Palms would only be useful if you lived a hundred miles away, let alone fewer than five miles from my cabin. Everything is a code. We haven’t spoken or written a word to each other in almost thirty years. If we don’t truly have trust, we share an enlightened self-interest in staying alive.
But with the information I’ve already released, the agency has known for a while that I’m responsible. Hans has told me this much. I have no idea what else he’s told them. Among all the deaths, secrets, double lives, the actual scope of the information could only be from the inner circle. And I am the weak link.
Though I have no idea if they’ve already reached Hans and let him live the rest of his anonymous life in trade for the end of mine.
1953
In my first two months on the job, I was invited to a meeting with Gottlieb and much of the inner circle.
After dinner, the seven of us retired to a large living room with boo
ks lining the walls. Every chair some dark wood with deep leather seats, looking as deep and ominous as a Bacon painting.
Gottlieb and a man I didn’t know poured drinks from a carafe. This was used for just five of the drinks—emptied, and then he poured mine.
I had no idea I was given LSD. A dose that was twenty times what would later become a common recreational dose. I lost clear vision. Everything became exaggerated and looked like a funhouse mirror on every side of me. I remember the laughing. Then the menace of two men approaching me, taking me to another room with only a simple chair in the center. It was the brightest-lit room I had ever been in.
I was ordered to strip.
They tied me to the chair. I opened my eyes and saw an enormous mirror on the wall to my right. I’d seen enough sub-projects to know, even in my compromised state, that it was a one-way mirror and I was being observed. There had to be an audio recorder, as well. I tried to prepare to die and prayed the torture wouldn’t last long. I couldn’t fathom what I had done. A man I recognized—Thomas Somebody, or Somebody Thomas—from the chemical studies came in, bent down, and gave me a shot at the base of my penis. It burned immediately and my penis swelled beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Enormous pressure, like my blood was trying to escape through my increasingly pained skin. It felt like it could split open at any time.
Then, a different shot, this one rough, as they tied off my bound left arm with rubber, and injected into my vein, after trying many times. I realized I should be feeling pain with the needle’s crude hunt, but I felt nothing. Just fingers and the pressure of the needle.
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