The Inspector General’s report emerged in congressional hearings in 1975 in a highly edited form. It remains classified to this day. In 1976 the CIA told the Church committee that it had never used radiation. But this claim was undercut in 1991 when documents were unearthed on the Agency’s ARTICHOKE program. A CIA summary of ARTICHOKE says that “in addition to hypnosis, chemical and psychiatric research, the following fields have been explored … Other physical manifestations including heat, cold, atmospheric pressure, radiation.”
The 1994 presidential commission, set up by Department of Energy secretary Hazel O’Leary, followed this trail of evidence and reached the conclusion that the CIA did explore radiation as a possibility for the defensive and offensive use of brainwashing and other interrogation techniques. The commission’s final report cites CIA records showing that the Agency secretly funded the construction of a wing of Georgetown University Hospital in the 1950s. This was to become a haven for CIA-sponsored research on chemical and biological programs. The CIA’s money for this went via a pass-through to Dr. Charles F. Geschickter, who ran the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. The doctor was a Georgetown cancer researcher who made his name experimenting with high doses of radiation. In 1977 Dr. Geschickter testified that the CIA paid for his radio-isotope lab and equipment and closely monitored his research.
The CIA was a major player in a whole series of inter-agency government panels on human experimentation. For example, three CIA officers served on the Defense Department’s committee on medical sciences and these same officers were also key members on the joint panel on medical aspects of atomic warfare. This is the government committee that planned, funded and reviewed most human radiation experiments, including the placement of US troops in proximity to nuclear tests conducted in the 1940s and 1950s.
The CIA was also part of the armed forces’ medical intelligence organization, created in 1948, where the Agency was put in charge of “foreign, atomic, biological, and chemical intelligence, from medical science’s point of view.” Among the more bizarre chapters in this mission was the dispatch of a team of agents to engage in a form of body-snatching, as they tried to collect tissue and bone samples from corpses to determine levels of fallout after nuclear tests. To this end they sliced tissue from some 1,500 bodies – without the knowledge or consent of the relatives of the deceased. Further evidence of the Agency’s central role was its lead part in the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, the clearing house for intelligence on foreign nuclear programs. The CIA chaired the Scientific Intelligence Committee and its subsidiary, the Joint Medical Science Intelligence Committee. Both these bodies planned the radiation and human experimentation research for the Department of Defense.
This was by no means the full extent of the Agency’s role in experimenting on living people. As noted, in 1973 Richard Helms officially discontinued such work by the Agency and ordered all records destroyed, saying that he did not want the Agency’s associates in such work to be “embarrassed.” Thus officially ended the prolongation by the US Central Intelligence Agency of the labors of such Nazi “scientists” as Becker-Freyseng and Blome.
Sources
The story of the recruitment of Nazi scientists and warfare technicians by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency is told in two excellent but unjustly neglected books: Tom Bower’s The Paperclip Conspiracy and Linda Hunt’s Secret Agenda. Hunt’s reporting, in particular, is first rate. Using the Freedom of Information Act, she has opened up thousands of pages of documents from the Pentagon, State Department and CIA that should keep researchers occupied for years to come. The history of the experiments of the Nazi doctors comes largely from the trial record of the medical cases at the Nuremberg tribunal, Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke’s Doctors of Infamy, and Robert Proctor’s frightening account in Racial Hygiene. The US government’s research into biological warfare is admirably profiled in Jeanne McDermott’s book, The Killing Winds.
The best account of the US government’s role in developing and deploying chemical warfare agents remains Seymour Hersh’s book Chemical and Biological Warfare from the late 1960s. In an attempt to track down the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, Senator Jay Rockefeller held a series of remarkable hearings on human experimentation by the US government. The hearing record provided much of the information for the sections of this chapter dealing with unwitting experimentation on US citizens by the CIA and the US Army. Information on human radiation testing by the Atomic Energy Commission and cooperating agencies (including the CIA) comes largely from several GAO studies, from the massive report compiled by the Department of Energy in 1994 and from author interviews with four of the victims of the plutonium and sterilization experiments.
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Annas, G. J., and M. A. Grodin. Human Rights in Human Experimentation. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
Bar-Zohar, M. The Hunt for the German Scientists. Barker, 1967.
Bellant, Russ. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Reagan Administration. Political Research Associates, 1988.
Bernstein, Victor. “I Saw the Bodies of 3,000 Slaves Murdered by Nazis.” PM, April 17, 1945.
Beyerchen, A.D. Scientists Under Hitler. Yale Univ. Press, 1977.
Borkin, Joseph. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. Andre Deutsch, 1979.
Bower, Tom. Blind Eye to Murder. Andre Deutsch, 1981.
——. The Paperclip Conspiracy. Michael Joseph Ltd., 1987.
Clay, Lucius. Decisions in Germany. Doubleday, 1950.
Cole, Leonard. “Risk and Biological Defense Program.” Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly, March 1992.
——. Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas. Row-man and Littlefield, 1988.
Corn, David. Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusaders. Simon and Schuster, 1994.
D’Antonio, Michael. Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America’s Nuclear Arsenal. Crown, 1993.
Dornberger, Walter. V-2. Viking, 1958.
DuBois, Josiah. The Devil’s Chemists. Beacon Press, 1952.
Ensign, Tod, and Glenn Alcalay. “Duck and Cover(up): US Radiation Testing on Humans.” Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1994.
Ferenscz, Benjamin. Less Than Slaves. Harvard Univ. Press, 1979.
Gallagher, Carole. American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. Random House, 1993.
Gimble, John. The American Occupation of Germany, Stanford Univ. Press, 1968.
——. “US on Policy German Scientists: The Early Cold War.” Political Science Quarterly, 101, 1986.
Goudsmit, Samuel. Alsos. Henry Schuman, 1947.
Herken, Gregg, and James David. “Doctors of Death.” New York Times, Jan. 13, 1994.
Hersh, Seymour. Chemical and Biological Warfare. Doubleday, 1969.
Hilts, Philip. “Medical Experts Testify on Tests Done Without Consent.” New York Times, June 3, 1991.
Hubner,. “The Americanization of Nazi Scientist.” West, Sept. 25, 1985.
——. “The Unmaking of a Hero.” West, Oct. 6, 1985.
Hunt, Linda. “US Coverup of Nazi Scientists.” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April, 1985.
——. “Arthur Rudolf, NASA and Dora.” Moment, April 1987.
——. “NASA’s Nazis.” Nation, May 23, 1987.
——. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Irving, David. The Virus House. Kimber, 1967.
——. The Mare’s Nest. Panther, 1985.
Kolata, Gina. “In Debate on Radiation Tests, Rush to Judgement Is Resisted.” New York Times, Jan. 1, 1994.
Lasby, Clarence. Project Paperclip. Atheneum, 1971.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books, 1986.
McDermott, Jeanne. The Killing Winds: The Menace of Biological Warfare. Arbor House, 1987
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Middlebrook, J. L. “Contributions of the US Army to Botulinum Toxin Research.” Botulinum and Tetanus Neurotoxins. B. R. Das Gupta, ed. Plenum Press, 1993.
Miller, Richard. Under the Cloud. The Free Press, 1986.
Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Fred Mielke. Doctors of Infamy. Schuman, 1949.
Nishimi, Robyn. Research Involving Human Subjects. US Office of Technology Assessment, 1994.
Nuremberg Military Tribunals. United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. (The Medical Case). Government Printing Office, 1947.
Pash, Boris. The Alsos Mission. Award House, 1969.
Pechura, C. M. and D. P. Rall, eds. Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite. National Academy Press, 1993.
Piller, C., and K. R. Yamamoto. Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies. Beech Tree Books, 1988.
Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard Univ. Press, 1988.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon and Schuster, 1986.
——. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Rodal, Alti. Nazi War Criminals in Canada. Canadian Government Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986.
St. Clair, Jeffrey. “Germ War: The US Record.” CounterPunch, April 1–15, 1998.
St. Clair, Jeffrey, and Alexander Cockburn. “Meet Harold Bibeau: Human Guinea Pig.” CounterPunch, Dec. 1–15, 1997.
Schneider, Keith. “Cold War Tests on Humans to Undergo a Congressional Review.” New York Times, April 11, 1994.
Schoemaker, Lloyd. The Escape Factory. St. Martinis Press, 1990.
Simon, Leslie. German Research in World War II. Wiley, 1947.
Simpson, Christopher. Blowback. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.
Somani, S.M. Chemical Warfare Agents. Academic Press, 1992.
Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.
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US Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services. Military Hallucinogenic Experiments. Goverment Printing Office, 1976.
——. Committee on the Judiciary. Alleged Nazi War Criminals. Government Printing Office, 1977.
——. Subcommittee on Energy of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Human Radiation Experimentation and Gene Therapy. Government Printing Office, 1994.
——. Subcommittee on Conservation and Natural Resources of the Committee on Government Operations. Environmental Dangers of Open-Air Testing of Lethal Chemicals. Government Printing Office, 1969.
——. Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Relations of the Committee on the Judiciary. “Statement of David Gries, Director, Center for the Study of Human Intelligence, CIA.” Government-Sponsored Tests on Humans and Possible Compensation for People Harmed in the Tests. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1994.
——. Senate. Committee on Veterans Affairs (Rockefeller Committee). Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ Health? Lessons Spanning Half a Century. Committee Print, Dec. 8, 1994.
——. Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources. Human Drug Testing by the CIA: Testimony of Sidney Gottlieb. Government Printing Office, 1977.
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——. History of AAF Participation in Project Paperclip, May 1945–March 1947. Air Materiel Command, Wright Air Force Base, 1948.
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7
Klaus Barbie and the Cocaine Coup
By the time he went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, Klaus Barbie had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. He sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo office in Lyons, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin). After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before the Allies moved into Germany.
Yet the career of this frightful war criminal scarcely missed a beat before he was securely on the US payroll in postwar Germany, then was shipped out by his new paymasters along the ratline to Bolivia. There he began a new life remarkably like his old one, working for the secret police and for drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking. His old skills as a torturer were frequently in demand. By the early 1960s he was once again working with the CIA to put a US-backed thug in power. In the years that followed he became a major player in the US-inspired Condor Program to suppress popular insurgencies and keep US-backed dictators in power throughout Latin America. He helped orchestrate the so-called “cocaine coup” of 1980, when a junta of Bolivian generals seized power, slaughtering their leftist opponents and reaping billions in the cocaine boom, in which Bolivia was a prime supplier.
All this time Klaus Barbie was one of the most wanted men on the planet. But he flourished until 1983, when he was finally returned to France to face trial for his crimes. In the whole sordid history of collusion between US intelligence agencies, fascists and criminals, no one more vividly represents the evils of such partnerships than Klaus Barbie.
On August 18, 1947, three men sat over drinks in a cafe in Memmingen in American-occupied Germany. One was Kurt Merck, a former officer in Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency, the Abwehr. Merck had worked in France during the war and was now on the payroll of American intelligence. The second man was Lieutenant Robert Taylor, an American officer in the Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps (CIC). The third man was Klaus Barbie, at that time on the run and number three on a US/British list of wanted SS men. Barbie had already been interrogated by the British and had not cared for the experience.
Merck was an old friend of Barbie’s. Despite interservice rivalries between the Gestapo and the Abwehr, the two had worked together in France and had gotten along well. Merck was more than willing to vouch to the American officer that Barbie would be a good hire. Merck had been recruited by the Counter-intelligence Corps in 1946, at a time when several US intelligence agencies were trying to pick up Nazi talent. CIC’s cover
story for this unwholesome head-hunting was the need to root out and suppress a supposed network of Hitler Youth, whose fanatical detachments were pledged to fight on, no matter what official terms of surrender had been signed. But CIC’s interest in Barbie had nothing to do with the so-called Werewolves of the Hitler Youth. His hiring as an agent of the CIC was contingent on Barbie’s willingness to impart information about British techniques of interrogation and about the identity of SS men the British might have tried to recruit. Barbie was only too happy to comply, particularly as this enthusiastic torturer had been slightly roughed up when he was questioned by the British.
For the next four years, the third most wanted SS man in Germany worked for the Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps. The Americans set Barbie up in a hotel in Memmingen, brought his family from Kassel and partly paid him in commodities – cigarettes, medicines, sugar and gasoline – that he could trade for a handsome price on the black market. After initial debriefings about the intentions and techniques of the British, Barbie’s main assignment, as described in a CIC memo, was to file reports on “French intelligence activities in the French zone and their agents operating in the US zone.”
By 1948, the French government had information that Barbie was living under the protection of the US somewhere in Germany. They were more eager than ever to get their hands on Barbie, who had already been sentenced to death in absentia for his war crimes. Barbie was needed to testify in the upcoming trial of René Hardy, the Resistance man who saved himself from Barbie’s torture by turning in Jean Moulin. But the CIC had no intention of giving its catch to the French, even on loan for the Hardy trial. Barbie’s handlers at CIC, who saw the French as allies of Stalin, had nightmares about Barbie spilling the beans about his American employers. Eugene Kolb, the US Army Intelligence officer who had worked with Barbie for a year, said that the Gestapo man couldn’t be given to the French because he “knew too much about our agents in Europe and the French intelligence agency was saturated with communists.” Kolb’s opinion is backed up by CIC memos which suggest that the French Sûreté’s intention was to “kidnap Barbie, reveal his CIC connections and embarrass the US.”
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