by Jim Marrs
By the mid-1950s, the CIA had managed to secure a monopoly on LSD. At first, the agency personnel tested LSD only on themselves, but later decided they would slip LSD into each other’s food or drinks without prior notice, to observe the effects. Such childish experimentation soon got out of hand. Nothing was done to stop this practice until rumors circulated that the annual CIA Christmas party punch was to be spiked with LSD.
By the end of the 1950s, CIA experimentation had grown, with funding running through such CIA fronts as the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. With the CIA funding masked by such foundations, drug experimentation reached down to university campuses and other public institutions across the United States.
Once again, the U.S. Public Health Service played a role. At the Public Health Service’s Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, drug addicts would be given morphine or heroin in exchange for participating in drug experiments there, including the ingestion of LSD.
One of the universities involved was Harvard, where Dr. Timothy Leary, along with Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, conducted a series of experiments with LSD and psilocybin. Leary had come to Harvard after serving as director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a “leader in health policy and communications,” was named for Henry J. Kaiser, a wealthy industrialist and ship builder who in 1946 began Kaiser Aluminum. According to foundation literature, “Kaiser campaigns are based on a new model of public service programming pioneered by the Foundation—direct partnerships with major media companies and a comprehensive ‘multiplatform’ communications strategy that goes far beyond traditional ‘PSAs’ [Public Service Announcements]. Current partners in the U.S. include MTV, BET, Univision, Viacom/CBS, and Fox. Together, Kaiser’s campaigns reach tens of millions of people annually, and have won multiple Emmy and Peabody awards in recent years.” It is no wonder that the aluminum waste product fluoride has received such favorable media attention over the years.
Many stories circulated around Harvard concerning LSD parties and undergraduates selling LSD-laced sugar cubes on and off campus. Leary was fired from the university in 1963, officially because he missed a committee meeting. Alpert, too, was dismissed, reportedly for violating an agreement not to supply LSD to undergraduates. This was the first time in the twentieth century that Harvard faculty members had been fired. Both Leary and Alpert began writing articles chastising Harvard and extolling the virtues of drugs. Leary became immortalized with his slogan “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
As the drug culture grew rapidly in the late 1960s, “it was widely observed that young people paid little or no attention to dire warnings against the hazards of marijuana-smoking, LSD-using, and other forms of drug use,” noted the editors of Consumer Reports. “When the evidence of their own experience contradicts adult propaganda, they (like sensible adults) rely on their own experience—and tend to distrust in the future a source of information which they had found unreliable in the past.”
After the major media began to report stridently on the campus drug scene, public interest grew, as did demand, and the campus drug revolution of the 1960s was off and running. Some researchers wondered whether the drug revolution was simply happenstance—or part of the fascist globalist plan to weaken the structure of American society.
Following hearings by a Senate committee on the testing of human subjects in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy referred to the infamous CIA mind-control experiments by stating, “The deputy director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an ‘extensive testing and experimentation’ program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign…. The intelligence community of this nation, which requires a shroud of secrecy in order to operate, has a very sacred trust from the American people. The CIA’s program of human experimentation of the fifties and sixties violated that trust. It was violated again on the day the bulk of the agency’s records were destroyed in 1973. It is violated each time a responsible official refuses to recollect the details of the program.”
One certain violation involved the death of a scientist working on mind control. According to the government, in 1953, Dr. Frank Olson, a biological and mind-control scientist working for the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was surreptitiously given an LSD-laced drink by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, while attending a conference at Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland. Some days later, a distraught and hallucinating Olson threw himself out of a high window of a New York hotel. It appeared to be either a drug-induced accident or a suicide. However, Olson’s close friends and family members still believe Olson was murdered to prevent him from speaking out against the MKULTRA program, which he had come to both regret and despise.
RESEARCH BASED ON Nazi pharmaceutical science even spread to more exotic attempts at mind control.
In 2005, at the Eighth Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference held at the Doubletree Hotel in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, one speaker was Carol Rutz, author of A Nation Betrayed. Rutz claimed to be the victim of government abuse and mind-control experiments. She mentioned an astounding connection. Referring to a woman who described “eye experiments” at a residential school where “they were trying to change our eye color from brown to blue,” Rutz stated, “This particularly caught my attention, since the change of eye color was a pet project of Auschwitz ‘Doctor’ Josef Mengele, aka Dr. Black, as I knew him, who I allege worked alongside Dr. Ewen Cameron, Sid Gottlieb, and others.”
Another seedy side to this experimentation on unwitting subjects involved a CIA contract agent named George Hunter White, who worked under the auspices of Dr. Gottlieb. White would bring unsuspecting men from local bars to a CIA-financed bordello in San Francisco, where he would give them LSD-spiked drinks and then watch the men have sex with prostitutes from behind a two-way mirror. The U.S. taxpayers paid for it all, as White would send bills for his “unorthodox expenses” to Dr. Gottlieb. White once said of this work, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
Indeed, where else but in an agency penetrated by displaced Nazis and their philosophies?
Much of the drug experimentation was centered at secret facilities at the Edgewood Arsenal, located on Chesapeake Bay northeast of Baltimore. In 1955, thanks to the influx of Nazi chemists, a new drug-testing program was instituted at Edgewood. “Volunteer soldiers were recruited, but not told what drugs they would be given, nor that men had died as the result of similar experiments. They were told they would only suffer temporary discomfort,” wrote mind-control researcher and author Walter H. Bowart. “Seven thousand soldiers underwent the Edgewood Arsenal tests. Five hundred eighty-five men were given LSD; the rest were administered other unspecified drugs.”
Carol Rutz produced a letter she received from a U.S. soldier who underwent experimentation at Edgewood Arsenal: “I can see where you don’t believe anything coming out of the government. I don’t. I am one of the 6,720 enlisted soldiers used at Edgewood in 1955–1975. I was there in ’74, when they had just got their brand-new lab. I am glad Congress investigated it in ’75 and the army shut the program down—at least they won’t do it openly anymore. I was young and stupid when I volunteered; I was eighteen. I am now forty-nine and totally disabled, I have the body of a seventy-year-old, and the VA says the army didn’t do anything to me. I don’t believe them.”
Despite a congressional investigation in the 1970s and a lawsuit by one of the soldier victims, Master Sergeant James Stanley, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986, the work at Edgewood never reached the public. “For all this, the secre
t Paperclip connections at the base remain unexposed. The fact that Paperclip scientists worked at Edgewood at various times between 1947 and 1966 has been kept a closely guarded secret,” wrote Linda Hunt.
For example, Kurt Rahr, who “should be considered an absolute security threat to the United States,” according to an early report by the Public Safety Branch of the Office of Military Government U.S. (OMGUS), nevertheless was hired under Paperclip and set to work at Edgewood. Rahr was deported back to Germany in 1948 after another scientist, Hans Trurnit, accused him of being a communist.
Other Edgewood scientists included Theodor Wagner-Jauregg and Friedrich Hoffman. These men initially studied the Nazi poison gasses, tabun and sarin, the most deadly agents the U.S. military had ever encountered. U.S. soldiers were exposed to tabun and mustard gas in an Edgewood gas chamber reminiscent of those in the Nazi death camps.
“In 1949, the direction of Edgewood’s work abruptly changed,” noted Hunt. “A consultant of the Chemical Division at [European Command] sent information about an amazing drug, LSD, that caused hallucinations and suicidal tendencies in humans. As a result, Edgewood’s [scientific director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories Dr.] L. Wilson Greene seized the idea of conducting ‘psychochemical warfare.’ He then suggested that $50,000 be set aside in the 1950 budget to study psychochemicals.”
Friedrich Hoffmann, another Paperclip chemist, traveled the world in search of exotic and new psychochemicals. He used the University of Delaware’s chemistry department as a cover to prevent anyone from connecting him to Edgewood Arsenal. This subterfuge was easy enough to maintain, because both the department chairman William Mosher and Professor James Moore were heavily involved in the MKULTRA program. “We were all being paid by the CIA,” Moore told Linda Hunt.
SS Brigadefuehrer, or brigadier general, Walter Paul Emil Schreiber, whom one U.S. Army officer described as “the prototype of an ardent and convinced Nazi who used the party to further his own ambitions,” worked for more than a decade for the chemical division of the U.S. European Command. His attempt to join Paperclip scientists in America was thwarted when counterintelligence connected Schreiber to hiding SS officers and unexplained business dealings with both the French and the Soviets.
According to Gordon Thomas, author of Mindfield: The Untold Story Behind CIA Experiments with MKULTRA & Germ Warfare, “Walter Schreiber had been the paymaster for all the doctors working the Nazi biochemical warfare programs. Under the cover of Paperclip he was brought to the United States. By 1951 he was working at the Air Force School of Medicine in Texas.” A year later, Schreiber, fearing that the media might discover his background, obtained a visa and found a job in Argentina, where his daughter was living. There in 1952, he met his old friend, Dr. Josef Mengele.
“U.S. laws governing the American zone of Germany forbade the Germans from doing research on chemical warfare,” noted Hunt. “But that did not stop the Army Chemical Corps or the High Commissioner of Germany [John J. McCloy], the U.S. organization that replaced OMGUS, from hiring chemical warfare experts as ‘consultants’ or funding German industries to produce chemical warfare materials for the United States.”
Hunt may not have noticed the interconnectedness of the personalities and business interests in both Germany and America before, during, and just after the war. But one person who did notice that funny business was taking place within the CIA was John K. Vance, a graduate of Columbia University who had served as a military translator at the Nuremberg trials. Vance stumbled upon MKULTRA in the spring of 1963 while working on an inspector general’s survey of the CIA’s technical services division. A resulting inspector general’s report concluded, “The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the agency to be distasteful and unethical.” As the result of Vance’s discovery and the inspector general’s report, the agency began scaling back the project, which was eventually said to have ended in the late 1960s.
The MKULTRA program, which used patients in psychiatric hospitals, and other unwitting subjects, to develop mind-control techniques, became public knowledge in 1977, during hearings conducted by a Senate committee on intelligence chaired by Senator Frank Church. Some of the most distinguished figures in psychiatry participated in MKULTRA, including Dr. Ewen Cameron, the man whom Allen Dulles sent to study Rudolf Hess and who later served as president of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations as well as the World Psychiatric Association.
Any in-depth study of MKULTRA shows that the CIA, in addition to seeking a truth serum, also was highly interested in the ability to program individuals to act in accordance with someone else’s will. The 1962 Frank Sinatra film The Manchurian Candidate portrayed a programmed assassin ordered to kill a ranking political figure. This movie came out at the same time the CIA was actively working on just such a program, thanks in great part to the groundwork laid down years earlier by Nazi mind-control experts.
In the words of Kathleen Ann Sullivan, who claimed to have been part of the MKULTRA program as reported by Gordon Thomas, author of Mind Field: “I am a survivor of the MKULTRA program. It was run by the CIA and designed to control a subject’s mind and will to the point where he or she would become an assassin. To achieve this I was forced to undergo extensive drugging, electroshock, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, partake in pornographic films, act as a prostitute, and much else. I finally have realized I cannot keep hiding that it has left me only a shell of life to live. In going public I want to end the fear all survivors of MKULTRA live with.”
Hunt noted: “That both the Army and CIA MKULTRA experiments stemmed from Nazi science was certainly relevant to understanding the early history of those secret projects.”
A full accounting of the Nazi-inspired mind-control experiments—whether failures or successes—will never be known, because in 1973, on orders of Helms, Gottlieb destroyed all MKULTRA files before leaving the agency.
CHAPTER 9
BUSINESS AS USUAL
WITH THE U.S. MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX PENETRATED BY unrepentant Nazis and their ideology, the globalists’ attention to business and politics remained unabated.
In the war’s aftermath, some of the same personalities who helped place Hitler in power came back into play. John J. McCloy, wartime assistant secretary of war, close friend to Deutsche Bank chairman Dr. Hermann Josef Abs, and attorney for I. G. Farben, was appointed America’s high commissioner in Germany. As such, he pardoned more than seventy thousand Nazis accused of war crimes. One example of McCloy’s magnanimity came after forty-three SS officers, including their leader, Obersturmbannfuehrer Joachim Peiper, were condemned to death in 1946 for the massacre of more than a one hundred American prisoners near Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. As historian William L. Shirer wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, “In March 1948, 39 of the death sentences were commuted; in April, General Lucius D. Clay reduced the death sentences from 121 to six; and in January 1951, under a general amnesty, John J. McCloy, the American high commissioner, commuted all the remaining death sentences to life imprisonment. At the time of writing [1959], all have been released.” Once again, hidden from public scrutiny, high U.S. officials had moved to free convicted Nazis.
According to former U.S. attorney John Loftus, about three hundred ranking Nazi sympathizers from the Belarus region of the Soviet Union were brought to the United States after the war in hopes they could provide intelligence on the motives and abilities of the Soviets. In tracking the activities of such collaborators, Loftus uncovered a secret unit within the State Department, called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which he said was hidden away from normal government operations and answerable only to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal and “the Dulles faction in the State Department.” Loftus found that the OPC had recruited Nazi collaborators to fight against communism. When it was discovered that their work was ineffectual, these Nazis were allowed to immigrate to the United State
s, their former activities concealed.
Such men included former Belarusan president Radislaw Ostrowsky, who was offered immunity from prosecution for war crimes; Franz Kushel, an SS general who commanded the Belarus Brigade and was responsible for the execution of more than forty thousand Jews; Stanislaw Stankievich, who organized the execution of seven thousand Jews; and Emanuel Jasiuk, who, as the wartime mayor of Kletsk, supervised the execution of more than five thousand Jews in just one day. Both Ostrowsky and Jasiuk are buried in a South River, New Jersey, cemetery near a monument to Belarusan war veterans, which is topped by the image of an Iron Cross.
In 1948, soon-to-be CIA director Allen Dulles, who had been on hand in 1921 for the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, authorized Frank Wisner to use false paperwork to maintain the Vatican “ratlines” for escaping Nazis. Within a year, Wisner’s Nazis were working for CIA propaganda fronts such as Radio Liberty and the Voice of America.
Dulles had encouraged the choice of Wisner as head of the OPC, which undertook active operations against the Soviet Union as the Cold War developed. Although OPC agents in Europe wore U.S. military uniforms, they were paid by the CIA. According to Loftus, “OPC’s program emanated almost entirely from the State Department’s policy and planning staff, headed by George Kennan.”