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American intelligence officers took a professional interest in Dr. Plotner’s reports. OSS, Naval Intelligence and security personnel on the Manhattan Project had long been conducting their own investigations into what was known as TD, or “truth drug.” As will be recalled from the description in Chapter 5 of OSS officer George Hunter White’s use of THC on the Mafioso Augusto Del Gracio, they had been experimenting with TDs beginning in 1942. Some of the first subjects were people working on the Manhattan Project. The THC doses were administered to targets within the Manhattan Project in varied ways, with a liquid THC solution being injected into food and drinks, or saturated on a paper tissue. “TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern the individual’s discretion and caution” the Manhattan security team excitedly reported in an internal memo. “It accentuates the senses and makes manifest any strong characteristic of the individual.”
But there was a problem. The doses of THC made the subjects throw up and the interrogators could never get the scientists to divulge any information, even with extra concentrations of the drug.
Reading Dr. Plotner’s reports the US Naval Intelligence officers discovered he had experimented with some success with mescalin as a speech- and even truth-inducing drug, enabling interrogators to extract “even the most intimate secrets from the subject when questions were cleverly put.” Plotner also reported researches into mescalin’s potential as an agent of behavioral modification or mind control.
This information was of particular interest to Boris Pash, one of the more sinister figures in the CIA cast of characters in this early phase. Pash was a Russian émigré to the United States who had gone through the revolutionary years at the birth of the Soviet Union. In World War II he ended up working for OSS overseeing security for the Manhattan Project, where, among other activities, he supervised the investigation into Robert Oppenheimer and was the prime interrogator of the famous atomic scientist when the latter was under suspicion of helping leak secrets to the Soviet Union.
In his capacity as head of security Pash had supervised OSS officer George Hunter White’s use of THC on Manhattan Project scientists. In 1944 Pash was picked by Donovan to head up what was called the Alsos Mission, designed to scoop up German scientists who had been involved in atomic, chemical and biological weapons research. Pash set up shop at the house of an old prewar friend, Dr. Eugene von Haagen, a professor at the University of Strasburg, where many Nazi scientists had been faculty members. Pash had met von Haagen when the doctor was on sabbatical at Rockefeller University in New York, researching tropical viruses. When von Haagen returned to Germany in the late 1930s he and Kurt Blome became joint heads of the Nazis’ biological weapons unit. Von Haagen spent much of the war infecting Jewish inmates at the Natzweiler concentration camp with diseases including spotted fever. Undeterred by the wartime activities of his old friend, Pash immediately put von Haagen into the Paperclip program, where he worked for the US government for five years providing expertise in germ weapons research.
Von Haagen put Pash in touch with his former colleague Blome, who was also speedily enlisted in the Paperclip program. There was an inconvenient hiatus when Blome was arrested and tried at Nuremberg for medical war crimes, including the deliberate infecting of hundreds of prisoners from the Polish underground with TB and bubonic plague. But fortunately for the Nazi man of science, US Army Intelligence and the OSS withheld incriminating documents they had acquired through their interrogation. The evidence would not only have demonstrated Blome’s guilt but also his supervising role in constructing a German CBW lab to test chemical and biological weapons for use on Allied troops. Blome got off.
In 1954, two months after Blome’s acquittal, US intelligence officers journeyed to Germany to interview him. In a memo to his superiors, H. W. Batchelor described the purpose of this pilgrimage: “We have friends in Germany, scientific friends, and this is an opportunity to enjoy meeting them to discuss our various problems.” At the session Blome gave Batchelor a list of the biological weapons researchers who had worked for him during the war and discussed promising new avenues of research into weapons of mass destruction. Blome was soon signed to a new Paperclip contract for $6,000 a year and flew to the United States, where he took up his duties at Camp King, an army base outside Washington, D.C. In 1951 von Haagen was picked up by the French authorities. Despite the tireless efforts of his protectors in US intelligence, the doctor was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
From the Paperclip assignment, Pash, now in the new-born CIA, went on to become head of Program Branch/7, where his ongoing interest in techniques of interrogation was given ample employment. The mission of Program Branch/7, which came to light only in Senator Frank Church’s 1976 hearings, was responsibility for CIA kidnappings, interrogations and killings of suspected CIA double agents. Pash pored over the work of the Nazi doctors at Dachau for useful leads in the most efficient methods of extracting information, including speech-inducing drugs, electro-shock, hypnosis and psycho-surgery. During the time Pash headed up PB/7 the CIA began pouring money into Project Bluebird, an effort to duplicate and extend the Dachau research. But instead of mescalin the CIA turned to LSD, which had been developed by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman.
The first CIA Bluebird test of LSD was administered to twelve subjects, the majority of whom were black, and, as the CIA psychiatrist-emulators of the Nazis doctors at Dachau noted, “of not too high mentality.” The subjects were told they were being given a new drug. In the words of a CIA Bluebird memo, CIA doctors, well aware that LSD experiments had induced schizophrenia, assured them that “nothing serious or dangerous would happen to them.” The CIA doctors gave the twelve 150 micrograms of LSD and then subjected them to hostile interrogation.
After these trial runs, the CIA and the US Army embarked on widespread testing at the Edgewood Chemical Arsenal in Maryland starting in 1949 and extending over the next decade. More than 7,000 US soldiers were the unwitting objects of this medical experimentation. The men would be ordered to ride exercise cycles with oxygen masks on their faces, into which a variety of hallucinogenic drugs had been sprayed, including LSD, mescalin, BZ (a hallucinogen) and SNA (sernyl, a relative of PCP, otherwise known on the street as angel dust). One of the aims of this research was to induce a state of total amnesia. This objective was attained in the case of several subjects. More than one thousand of the soldiers who enlisted in the experiments emerged with serious psychological afflictions and epilepsy: dozens attempted suicide.
One such was Lloyd Gamble, a black man who had enlisted in the air force. In 1957 Gamble was enticed to participate in a Department of Defense/CIA drug-testing program. Gamble was led to believe that he was testing new military clothing. As an inducement to participate in the program he was offered extended leave, private living quarters and more frequent conjugal visits. For three weeks Gamble put on and took off different types of uniform and each day in the midst of such exertions was given, on his recollection, two to three glasses of water-like liquid, which was in fact LSD. Gamble suffered terrible hallucinations and tried to kill himself. He learned the truth some nineteen years later when the Church hearings disclosed the existence of the program. Even then the Department of Defense denied that Gamble had been involved, and the coverup collapsed only when an old Department of Defense public relations photograph surfaced, proudly featuring Gamble and a dozen others as “volunteering for a program that was in the highest national security interest.”
Few examples of the readiness of US intelligence agencies to experiment on unknowing subjects are more vivid than the foray of the national security establishment into researches on the effects of radiation exposure. There were three different types of experiments. One involved thousands of American military personnel and civilians who were directly exposed to radioactive fallout from US nuclear testing in the American Southwest and South Pacific. Many have heard of the black men who were the victims of four
decades’ worth of federally funded studies of syphilis in which some victims were given placebos so that doctors could monitor the progress of the disease. In the case of the Marshall Islanders, US scientists first devised the H-test – a thousand times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb – then failed to warn the inhabitants of the nearby atoll of Rongelap of the dangers of the radiation and then, with precisely the equanimity of the Nazi scientists (not surprising, since Nazi veterans of the German radiation experiments rescued by CIA officer Boris Pash were now on the US team), observed how they fared.
Initially the Marshall Islanders were allowed to remain on their atoll for two days, exposed to radiation. Then they were evacuated. Two years later Dr. G. Faill, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission’s committee on biology and medicine, requested that the Rongelap Islanders be returned to their atoll “for a useful genetic study of the effects on these people.” His request was granted. In 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense signed a directive bringing the US government into compliance with the Nuremberg code on medical research. But that directive was classified as top secret, and its existence was kept secret from researchers, subjects and policy makers for twenty-two years. The policy was succinctly summed up by the Atomic Energy Commission’s Colonel O. G. Haywood, who formalized his directive thus: “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans. This might have adverse effects on the public or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified secret.”
Among such fieldwork thus classified as secret were five different experiments overseen by the CIA, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense involving the injection of plutonium into at least eighteen people, mainly black and poor, without informed consent. There were thirteen deliberate releases of radioactive material over US and Canadian cities between 1948 and 1952 to study fallout patterns and the decay of radioactive particles. There were dozens of experiments funded by the CIA and Atomic Energy Commission, often conducted by scientists at UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt and MIT, which exposed more than 2,000 unknowing people to radiation scans.
The case of Elmer Allen is typical. In 1947 this 36-year-old black railroad worker went to a hospital in Chicago with pains in his legs. The doctors diagnosed his illness as apparently a case of bone cancer. They injected his left leg with huge doses of plutonium over the next two days. On the third day, the doctors amputated his leg and sent it to the Atomic Energy Commission’s physiologist to research how the plutonium had dispersed through the tissue. Twenty-six years later, in 1973, they brought Allen back to the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, where they gave him a full body radiation scan, then took urine, fecal and blood samples to assess the plutonium residue in his body from the 1947 experiment.
In 1994 Patricia Durbin, who worked at the Lawrence Livermore labs on plutonium experiments, recalled, “We were always on the lookout for somebody who had some kind of terminal disease who was going to undergo an amputation. These things were not done to plague people or make them sick or miserable. They were not done to kill people. They were done to gain potentially valuable information. The fact that they were injected and provided this valuable data should almost be a sort of memorial rather than something to be ashamed of. It doesn’t bother me to talk about the plutonium injectees because of the value of the information they provided.” The only problem with this misty-eyed account is that Elmer Allen seems to have had nothing seriously wrong with him when he went to the hospital with leg pain and was never told of the researches conducted on his body.
In 1949 parents of mentally retarded boys at the Fernald School in Massachusetts were asked to give consent for their children to join the school’s “science club.” Those boys who did join the club were unwitting objects of experiments in which the Atomic Energy Commission in partnership with the Quaker Oats company gave them radioactive oatmeal. The researchers wanted to see if the chemical preservatives in cereal prevented the body from absorbing vitamins and minerals, with the radioactive materials acting as tracers. They also wanted to assess the effects of radioactive materials on the kids.
Aping the Nazis’ methods, the covert medical experiments of the US government sought out the most vulnerable and captive of subjects: the mentally retarded, terminally ill, and, unsurprisingly, prisoners. In 1963 133 prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their scrotums and testicles exposed to 600 roentgens of radiation. One of the subjects was Harold Bibeau. These days he’s a 55-year-old draftsman who lives in Troutdale, Oregon. Since 1994 Bibeau has been waging a one-man battle against the US Department of Energy, the Oregon Department of Corrections, the Battelle Pacific Northwest Labs and the Oregon Health Sciences University. Because he’s an ex-con he has not, thus far, obtained much satisfaction.
In 1963 Bibeau was convicted of killing a man who had tried to molest him sexually. Bibeau got twelve years for voluntary manslaughter. While in prison another inmate told him of a way he might get some time knocked off his sentence and make a small amount of money. Bibeau could do this by joining a medical research project supposedly managed by the Oregon Health Sciences University, the state’s medical school. Bibeau says that though he did sign an agreement to be part of the research project, he was never told that there might be dangerous consequences for his health. The experiments on Bibeau and other inmates (all told, 133 prisoners in Oregon and Washington) proved damaging in the extreme. The research involved the study of the effects of radiation on human sperm and gonadal cell development.
Bibeau and his fellows were doused with 650 rads of radiation. This is a very hefty dose. One chest X-ray today involves about 1 rad. But this wasn’t all. Over the next few years in prison Bibeau says he was subjected to numerous injections of other drugs, of a nature unknown to him. He had biopsies and other surgeries. He claims that after he was released from prison he was never contacted again for monitoring.
The Oregon experiments were done for the Atomic Energy Commission, with the CIA as a cooperating agency. In charge of the Oregon tests was Dr. Carl Heller. But the actual X-rays on Bibeau and the other prisoners were done by entirely unqualified people, in the form of other prison inmates. Bibeau got no time off his sentence and was paid $5 a month and $25 for each biopsy performed on his testicles. Many of the prisoners in the experiments in the Oregon and Washington state prisons were given vasectomies or were surgically castrated. The doctor who performed the sterilization operations told the prisoners the sterilizations were necessary to “keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants.”
In defending the sterilization experiments, Dr. Victor Bond, a physician at the Brookhaven nuclear lab, said, “It’s useful to know what dose of radiation sterilizes. It’s useful to know what different doses of radiation will do to human beings.” One of Bond’s colleagues, Dr. Joseph Hamilton of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, said more candidly that the radiation experiments (which he had helped oversee) “had a little of the Buchenwald touch.”
From 1960 to 1971 Dr. Eugene Sanger and his colleagues at the University of Cincinnati performed “whole body radiation experiments” on 88 subjects who were black, poor and suffering from cancer and other diseases. The subjects were exposed to 100 rads of radiation – the equivalent of 7,500 chest X-rays. The experiments often caused intense pain, vomiting and bleeding from the nose and ears. All but one of the patients died. In the mid-1970s a congressional committee discovered that Sanger had forged consent forms for these experiments.
Between 1946 and 1963 more than 200,000 US soldiers were forced to observe, at dangerously close range, atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific and Nevada. One such participant, a US Army private named Jim O’Connor, recalled in 1994, “There was a guy with a mannikin look, who had apparently crawled behind a bunker. Something like wires were attached to his arms, and his face was bloody. I smelled an odor like burning flesh. The rota
ry camera I’d seen was going zoom zoom zoom and the guy kept trying to get up.” O’Connor himself fled the blast area but was picked up by the Atomic Energy Commission patrols and given prolonged tests to measure his exposure. O’Connor said in 1994 that ever since the test he had experienced many health problems.
Up in the state of Washington, at the nuclear reservation at Hanford, the Atomic Energy Commission engaged in the largest intentional release of radioactive chemicals to date in December 1949. The test did not involve a nuclear explosion but the emission of thousands of curies of radioactive iodine in a plume that extended hundreds of miles south and west as far as Seattle, Portland and the California–Oregon border, irradiating hundreds of thousands of people. So far from being alerted to the test at the time, the civilian population learned of it only in the late 1970s, although there had been persistent suspicions because of the clusters of thyroid cancers occurring among the communities downwind.
In 1997 the National Cancer Institute found that millions of American children had been exposed to high-levels of radioactive iodine known to cause thyroid cancer. Most of this exposure was due to drinking milk contaminated with fallout from above-ground nuclear testing carried out between 1951 and 1962. The institute conservatively estimated that this was enough radiation to cause 50,000 thyroid cancers. The total releases of radiation were estimated to be ten times larger than those released by the explosion in the Soviet Chernobyl reactor in 1986.
A presidential commission in 1995 began looking into radiation experiments on humans and requested the CIA to turn over all of its records. The Agency responded with a terse claim that “it had no records or other information on such experiments.” One reason the CIA may have felt confidence in this brusque stonewalling was that in 1973, CIA director Richard Helms had used the last moments before he retired to order that all records of CIA experiments on humans be destroyed. A 1963 report from the CIA’s Inspector General indicates that for more than a decade previously the Agency had been engaged in “research and development of chemical, biological and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior. The 1963 report went on to say that CIA director Allen Dulles had approved various forms of human experimentation as “avenues to the control of human behavior” including “radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology, graphology, harassment studies and paramilitary devices and materials.”