Most Project MK-ULTRA LSD field tests on civilians were carried out by White while he was employed by the narcotics bureau and moonlighting as a contract agent for the CIA. For his agency assignment, George adopted an alternative identity as a risqué world traveler, sexual deviant, and struggling writer, for which he used the alias Morgan Hall. At 81 Bedford Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, he established a CIA-financed safe-house apartment and drug den with a hidden surveillance lair in an adjoining studio apartment. The apartment was made to resemble a playboy’s pad, circa 1955. Walls were decorated with Toulouse-Lautrec posters of cancan dancers; cabinets were stocked with S and M sex toys, pornography, and photos of manacled women in black fishnet stockings and studded leather halters. White had CIA’s technical services division install state-of-the-art bugging equipment, including microphones disguised as electrical outlets that were connected to tape recorders hidden behind a false wall. A framed, full-length, one-way mirror was installed in the wall separating the apartment and White’s observation post in the adjoining studio. This allowed him to view the action as an unseen voyeur while he recorded the results and compiled written notes of his observations for his CIA masters. George would sit behind the one-way mirror and sip martinis, his favorite refreshment, from a chilled pitcher. He perched his portly body on a portable toilet so he could relieve himself without having to leave his station. From that post he observed and made notes on the effects of massive doses of LSD slipped to unsuspecting hookers, pimps, and johns, as well as other criminals, unsuspecting denizens of the Village, and others, including CIA colleagues.
“Gloria gets the horrors . . . Janet sky high,” White dutifully recorded in notes sent to Dulles and Gottlieb. In another document, he wrote, “Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Street—Owen Winkle and the LSD surprise—can wash,” apparently referring to visits to the pad and LSD tests conducted on CIA employees. White assigned LSD the code-name “stormy,” by way of noting the often bizarre behavior brought on by the drug. According to an agency memo I found in the restricted files, the CIA feared Soviet agents might use psychedelics “to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity.” In an effort to school “enlightened operatives” for that eventuality, Dulles and Gottlieb instructed high-ranking agency personnel, including Gottlieb’s entire staff at TSS, to take LSD themselves and administer it to their colleagues with and without their knowledge.
“There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a firsthand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important to those of us who were involved in the program,” Gottlieb explained at a Senate subcommittee hearing years later, as recorded in a CIA memo. Apparently, CIA spooks and scientists were tripping their brains out. “I didn’t want to leave it,” one CIA agent reported of his first LSD trip. “I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn’t be able to hold on to this kind of beauty.” The intelligence community, indeed the world, would never be the same.
GEORGE WHITE IS dead; he died of a diseased liver due to his heavy consumption of gin, some say up to a quart a day. But while rifling through the prohibited MK-ULTRA files, I find the name of White’s right-hand man, a fellow named Ira “Ike” Feldman, who also worked undercover with the narcotics bureau. As George’s CIA procurer, while posing as a Mafia gangster named Joe Capone, Feldman would prowl New York and later San Francisco bars, strip joints, and massage parlors, pick up hookers, johns, and sometimes criminals George was hoping to debrief while they were tripping on acid and lure them back to the CIA’s safe house, where they would be given drinks spiked with massive doses of LSD.
As I read through the files, I suspect that Ike Feldman may still be alive since I can find no record of his death. If so, Ike might well be the only participant at the operational level of Project MK-ULTRA who is still living. Back in New York, I corner Charlie Kelley, who worked narcotics for the New York police department, and I ask him if he ever had any contact with a couple of federal drug agents named George White and Ike Feldman.
“Oh, Jesus, yeah,” Charlie says. “Those guys, they were both fucking nuts—particularly George. And balls? George didn’t give a fuck. He’d walk into a room full of heavily armed Corsican dope smugglers and tell ’em all to line up against the wall and empty their pockets. Then, if he didn’t find anything, he’d plant ’em and haul them all in for questioning. George was fearless. Ike was not as crazy. But George, that guy makes Popeye Doyle look like a Boy Scout. He had more stoolpigeons on his pad than any agent in New York.”
Does he think Ike might still be alive, I ask Charlie, and, if Ike is still among us, could Charlie see if he can locate him, get his address and phone number, and possibly reach out to Ike on my behalf?
“Yeah,” Charlie says, “I’ll check it out. But what d’you want to talk to Ike about?”
“LSD,” I say.
WHILE AT WORK on the screenplay, I meet and have lunch with Elizabeth Mitchell, the editor of Bob Guccione Jr.’s Spin magazine. When I tell her about the research I’m doing on the MK-ULTRA project, she’s intrigued and puts me in touch with Guccione. There has long been a rumor, most famously postulated by acid guru Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, that it was the CIA who introduced LSD to America. Guccione says that, if I am able to locate Ike Feldman or someone else who has firsthand information to prove that in fact it was the CIA that turned America on to acid, he would be happy to give me the assignment to write a feature article about MK-ULTRA for his magazine.
Through Charlie Kelley, I contact Ike Feldman and set up a meeting. We meet at a hotel on Long Island. The interview turns out to be more than I could ever have imagined. Ike waddles in looking like the Penguin from the Batman movies. Not only does he go into detail about the acid tests, he proffers a handful of football shaped ampoules containing pure Sandoz LSD-25, and demonstrates how he and George would snap off the top of the ampoule and squirt a mega-dose of acid into some unsuspecting test subjects’ drink.
“I always wanted to be a gangster,” Feldman tells me. “So I was good at it. Before long, I had half a dozen girls working for me. One day, White calls me into his office. ‘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 these mind-bending drugs.’ I said, ‘Why the hell do you want to test mind-bending drugs?’ He said, ‘Have you ever heard of The Manchurian Candidate?’ I know about The Manchurian Candidate. In fact, I read the book. ‘Well,’ White said, ‘that’s why we have to test these drugs, to find out if they can be used to brainwash people.’ He says, ‘If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.’”
AS COVERT LSD experiments proliferated, things down at CIA headquarters began to get out of hand. “LSD favors the prepared mind,” wrote Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and early LSD devotee. Nondrug factors such as set and setting—a person’s mental state going into the experience and the surroundings in which the drug is taken—can make all the difference in reactions to a dose of LSD. It can be, as in the words of one agent on acid, a beautiful experience one never wants to end, or it can be the opposite, the classic bad trip one fears will never end.
Frank Olson was a civilian biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. In a subproject of MK-ULTRA code-named MK-NAOMI, the CIA had bankrolled SOD to produce and maintain vicious mutant germ strains capable of killing or incapacitating victims. Olson’s specialty at Fort Detrick was delivering deadly diseases in sprays and aerosol emulsions.
Just before Thanksgiving in 1953, at a CIA retreat for a conference on biological warfare, Sidney Gottlieb slipped Frank Olson and the other scientists a huge dose of LSD in an after-dinner liqueur. When Gottlieb revealed to the uproarious group of scientists now tripping their brains out that he’
d laced the Cointreau, Olson suffered a psychotic snap. “You’re all a bunch of thespians!” Olson shouted at his fellow acid trippers, then spent a long night wandering around babbling to himself. Back at Fort Detrick, Olson lapsed in and out of depression, he began to have grave misgivings about his work, and he believed the agency was out to get him for indiscreet comments he had made to nonagency civilians about his work for the CIA. Ten days after he was dosed, Olson crashed through a closed tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York and plummeted to his death on the sidewalk below.
“White had been testing the stuff in New York when that guy Olson went out the window and died,” Feldman said. “I don’t know if he jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped, but I heard he was thrown out. Anyway, that’s when they shut down the New York operation and moved it to San Francisco.”
The CIA successfully covered up the Olson affair for more than twenty years. White, who had been instrumental in the cover-up, was promoted to West Coast District Supervisor, and transferred to San Francisco.
Unfazed by the death of their colleague, the CIA’s acid enthusiasts were, in fact, more convinced of the value of their experiments. They would now focus on LSD as a potent new agent for offensive unconventional warfare. The drug-testing program resumed in the Bay Area under the cryptonym Operation Midnight Climax.
Ike takes offense at how his work has been characterized by former cops who knew him. “I was no pimp,” Feldman insists. Yet he freely admits that his role in Midnight Climax was to supply whores. “These cunts all thought I was a racketeer,” Feldman explains. He paid the girls fifty to one hundred dollars a night to lure johns to a safe house apartment White set up on Telegraph Hill with funds provided by the CIA. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested.
“As George White once told me, ‘Ike, your best information outside comes from the whores and the junkies. If you treat a whore nice, she’ll treat you nice. If you treat a junkie nice, he’ll treat you nice.’ But sometimes, when people had information, there was only one way you could get it. If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer. 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.”
It wasn’t just acid the CIA wanted White to test. “We tested this stuff they called the Sextender,” Feldman says. “There was this Russian ship in the harbor at San Francisco. I had a couple of my girls pick up these Russian sailors and bring ’em back to the pad. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they weren’t talking. So we had the girls slip ’em this sex drug. It gets your dick up like a rat. Stays up for two hours. These guys went crazy. They fucked these poor girls until they couldn’t walk straight. The girls were complaining they couldn’t take any more screwing. But White found out what he wanted to know. Now this drug, what they call the Sextender, I understand it’s being sold as Viagra to guys who can’t get a hard-on.”
Feldman claims we have the CIA to thank for these and other medical breakthroughs.
“White always wanted to try everything himself,” Feldman remembers. “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. He always said he never felt a goddamn thing. He thought it was all bullshit. White drank so much, he couldn’t feel his own cock.
“This thing”—Feldman holds up a fountain pen gas gun—“the boys in Washington sent it out and told us to test the gas. White says to me, ‘C’mon, Ike. Let’s go outside. I’ll shoot you with it, then you shoot me.’ ‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘You ain’t gonna shoot me with that crap.’ So we went outside and I shot George White with the gas. He coughed, his face turned red, his eyes started watering. He was choking. Turned out, that stuff was the prototype for Mace.”
I ask Feldman if he ever met Sidney Gottlieb, the elusive scientist who was the brains behind MK-ULTRA. “Yeah, I knew Sidney. Several times Gottlieb came out to Frisco,” Feldman assures me. “I met Gottlieb at the pad, and at White’s office. White used to send me to the airport to pick up Sidney and this other wacko, John Gittinger, the psychologist. Sidney was a nice guy. He was a fuckin’ nut. They were all nuts. I say, ‘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 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. Now that was the forerunner of Agent Orange.
“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.’ White thought they were all assholes. He said, ‘These guys are running our intelligence? They’re all crazy.’ But they sent George two thousand dollars a month for the pad, and as long as they paid the bills, we went along with the program.
“Another time, I come back to the pad and the whole joint is littered with these pipe cleaners,” Feldman goes on. “I said, ‘Who’s smokin’ a pipe?’ Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls, my whores. He had ’em explaining all these different sex acts, the different positions they knew for humping. Now he has them making these little figurines out of the pipe cleaners—men and women screwing in all these different positions. He was taking pictures of the figurines and writing a history of each one. These pipe cleaner histories were sent back to Washington.”
A stated goal of Project MK-ULTRA and its offshoots, MK-NAOMI, ZRRIFLE, and other top secret CIA projects was to determine “if an individual can be trained to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily” while under the influence of various mind-control techniques and then have no memory of the event later. Feldman tells me that in the early 1960s, after the MK-ULTRA program had been around for over a decade, he was summoned to George White’s office. White and CIA director Allen Dulles were there.
“They wanted George to arrange to hit Fidel Castro,” Feldman said. “They were gonna soak his cigars with LSD and drive him crazy. George called me in because I had this whore, a Cuban girl, and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.”
Dick Russell, author of a book on the Kennedy assassination titled The Man Who Knew Too Much, uncovered evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of MK-ULTRA. One of the CIA’s overseas locations for LSD and mind-control experiments was Atsugi naval air base in Japan, where Oswald served as a marine radar technician. Russell says that after his book was published, a former CIA counterintelligence expert called him and said Oswald had been “viewed by the CIA as fitting the psychological profile of someone they were looking for in their MK-ULTRA program” and that he had been mind-conditioned to defect to the USSR.
Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, while working as a horse trainer at the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles, was introduced to hypnosis and the occult by a fellow groom with shadowy connections. Sirhan has always maintained he has no memory of the night he shot Kennedy.
One of the CIA’s mob contacts long suspected of involvement in John Kennedy’s assassination was the Los Angeles–based Mafioso John Roselli. Roselli had risen to prominence in the mob by taking over the Annenberg-Ragen wire service at Santa Anita where Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, sold a handicapper’s tip sheet with information for horse race bettors. Ike Feldman tells me that Roselli was one of George White’s many informants.
“On more than one occasion, White sent me to the airport to pick up Johnny Roselli and bring him to the office or to the pad,” says Feldman. Roselli and White were close. Roselli had
lived for most of his life in Chicago, where White had served as district supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1945 through 1947. Following a big opium bust in 1947, Jack Ruby was picked up and hauled in for interrogation, then later let off the hook by none other than George White. Federal Bureau of Narcotics files indicate that Ruby was yet another of White’s legion of stool pigeons.
The connection between MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments, the proliferation of the drug subculture, Mob/CIA assassination plots, and the emergence of new, lethal viruses goes on and on. Fort Detrick in Maryland where Frank Olson worked experimenting with viral strains (such as the deadly microbes Sidney Gottlieb personally carried to Africa in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba) was the locale of a near disaster involving an outbreak of a newly emerged virus. The event was chronicled in a lengthy article, “Going Viral,” by David E. Hoffman, published in the January 23, 2011, issue of The New Yorker.
Though the New Yorker writer did not make the connection between Fort Detrick, the army SOD, Frank Olson, and MK-NAOMI, he told of a number of monkeys who had all died of a highly infectious virus known as Ebola that first appeared in fifty-five African villages in 1976, killing nine out of ten of its victims. Some epidemiologists believe AIDS originated in Africa. Feldman claims the CIA used Africa as a staging ground to test germ warfare because “nobody gave a goddamn about any of this crap over there.”
The MK-ULTRA program, then the largest domestic operation mounted by the CIA, went on well into the seventies under its various new codenames. According to Feldman and other CIA experts, it still continues today under an alphabet soup of different cryptonyms. Indeed, one ex-agent told me it would be foolish to think that a program as successful and fruitful as MK-ULTRA would be discontinued. When an agency operation comes under scrutiny, it simply changes the name of the program and continues unabated.
In the World Page 17