Introducing Dr. Gottlieb
Frank Olson’s fate was but a hint of the enormous secret CIA program of research into techniques of mind alteration and control. The whole enterprise was assigned the code-name MK-ULTRA and was run out of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, headed in the 1950s by Willis Gibbons, a former executive of the US Rubber Company. In the division’s laboratories and workshops researchers labored on poisons, gadgets designed to maim and kill, techniques of torture and implements to carry such techniques to agonizing fruition. Here also were developed surveillance equipment and kindred tools of the espionage trade. All of these activities made the Technical Services Division a vital partner of the covert operations wing of the Agency.
Within Technical Services MK-ULTRA projects came under the control of the Chemical Division, headed from 1951 to 1956 by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a New York Jew who received his doctorate in chemistry from California Tech. Born with a clubfoot and afflicted with a severe stammer, Gottlieb pushed himself with unremitting intensity. Despite his physical affliction he was an ardent square dancer and exponent of the polka, capering across many a dance floor and dragging visiting psychiatrists and chemists on terpsichorean trysts where appalling plans of mind control were ruminated amidst the blare of the bands.
Gottlieb and his wife, a fundamentalist Christian, lived on a farm in the Shenandoah Mountains in northern Virginia. Their house was a former slave quarters, and Gottlieb rose every morning before sunrise to milk his herd of goats.
As was demonstrated in the Olson affair, Gottlieb had powerful friends inside the Agency, notably Richard Helms, at that time deputy director for covert operations. MK-ULTRA was created on April 13, 1953, when CIA director Allen Dulles approved Helms’s proposal to develop the “covert use” of biological and chemical materials. The code-name ULTRA may have been an echo from Helms’s and Dulles’s OSS days, when ULTRA (the breaking of the primary German code) represented one of the biggest secrets of World War II.
Gottlieb himself said that the creation of MK-ULTRA was inspired by reports of mind-control work in the Soviet Union and China. He defined the mission as “an investigation into how individual behavior could be altered through covert means.” He gave this description in 1977 during the Kennedy hearings, testifying via remote speaker from another room. “It was felt to be mandatory,” Gottlieb went on, “and of the utmost urgency for our intelligence organization to establish what was possible in this field.”
The CIA had followed the trial of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in Budapest in 1949 and concluded that the Cardinal’s ultimate confession had been manipulated through “some unknown force.” Initially the belief was that Mindszenty had been hypnotized, and intrigued CIA officers conjectured that they might use the same techniques on people they were interrogating. The CIA’s Office of Security, headed at the time by Sheffield Edwards, developed a hypnosis project called Bluebird, whose object was to get an individual “to do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”
The first Bluebird operations were conducted in Japan in October 1950 and were reportedly witnessed by Richard Helms. Twenty-five North Korean prisoners of war were given alternating doses of depressants and stimulants. The POWs were shot up with barbiturates, allowing them to go to sleep, then abruptly awoken with injections of amphetamines, hypnotized, then questioned. This operation was in total contravention of international protocols on the treatment of POWs. These Bluebird interrogations continued throughout the Korean War.
Simultaneously, US POWs held in North Korea were being paraded by their captors, alleging that the US was using chemical and biological agents against the Koreans and the Chinese. An international commission in 1952 concluded that the charges had merit. But the CIA’s response was to leak to favored reporters at Time, the Chicago Tribune, and the Miami Herald stories to the effect that the American POWs had been brainwashed by their Communist captors. This had the double utility of squelching the charges of germ warfare and also of justifying the Bluebird program.
In fact, US military and intelligence agencies had been dabbling in mind control research for more than forty years. One of the early experimenters was George H. Estabrooks, a research psychologist who taught for years at Colgate College in upstate New York. Estabrooks was a Rhodes scholar who had trained in psychology at Harvard with Gardner Murphy. The psychologist, whose specialty was the use of hypnosis in intelligence operations, worked as a contractor for Naval Intelligence and was later to advise CIA researchers such as Martin Orne and Milton Erickson.
In 1971, Estabrooks gave a chilling portrait of his career in an article in Science Digest titled “Hypnosis Comes of Age.” “One of the most fascinating but dangerous applications of hypnosis is its use in military intelligence,” Estabrooks wrote. “This is a field with which I am familiar through formulating guidelines for the technique used by the US in two world wars. Communication in war is always a headache. Codes can be broken. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. Your own man may have unquestionable loyalty but his judgement is always open to question. The hypnotic courier, on the other hand, provides a unique solution.” Estabrooks related in matter-of-fact detail his role in hypnotizing intelligence officers for dangerous missions inside occupied Japan, describing how through hypnosis he had “locked” information inside the mind of unwitting soldiers, information that could only be retrieved by Estabrooks and other designated military psychologists.
Then Estabrooks described how he and other government doctors developed techniques to split personalities, using a combination of hypnosis and drugs. “The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish,” Estabrooks wrote. In one case, he claimed that he had created a new personality in a “normal” Marine. The new personality “talked Communist doctrine and meant it.” Estabrooks and the army contrived to have the Marine given a dishonorable discharge and encouraged him to penetrate the Communist Party. All along, Estabrooks said, the “deeper personality” was that of the Marine, which had been programmed to operate as a kind of “subconscious spy.” “I had a pipeline straight into the Communist camp. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. While there was no way for an enemy to expose Jones’s dual personality, they suspected it, and played the same trick on us later.”
The CIA’s Bluebird project, which investigated hypnosis and other techniques in the early 1950s, was headed by Morse Allen, a veteran of Naval Intelligence and a specialist in techniques of interrogation. Criminologists revere Allen as a pioneer in the use of the polygraph. Allen eventually became disappointed with the research into hypnosis, and developed a keen interest in the more robust fields of electro-shock therapy and psycho-surgery.
One of the CIA’s first grants to an outside contractor was to a psychiatrist who claimed that he could use electro-shock therapy to produce a state of total amnesia “or excruciating pain.” Another $100,000 CIA grant went to a neurologist who vouched for lobotomies and other types of brain surgery as useful tools in the art of interrogation. Both of these techniques would later become staples of the operations of one of MK-ULTRA’s most infamous contractors, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron.
In 1952, the codeword Bluebird was changed to Artichoke. A CIA report on the project says that, among other things, Artichoke was meant to investigate the theory that “agents might be given cover stories under hypnosis and not only learn them faultlessly, but actually believe them. Every detail could be made to sink in. The conviction and apparent sincerity with which an individual will defend a false given under post-hypnotic suggestion is almost unbelievable.”
In one experiment, a female CIA security officer was hypnotized and provided with a new identity. When she was later interrogated, the agent “defended it hotly, denying her true name and rationalizing with conviction the possession of identity cards made out to her real self.” Artichoke also explored using hypnosis to recruit high-level
political agents and unmask spies and double agents, a particular obsession of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief.
The CIA memos of the time are filled with complaints about the difficulties of finding suitable human subjects for experimental research. “Human subjects” were evoked in the tactful phrase “unique research material.” At first the CIA experimented mostly on prisoners, drug addicts and terminally sick destitutes. Details are scanty because Helms ordered all CIA records on the programs destroyed, but much of the “unique research material” came in the form of prisoners at California’s Vacaville prison, the Georgia state penitentiary and the Tennessee state prison system. There was a problem, however. In these instances a certain modicum of informed consent was often required. Prisoners could get reduced sentences for agreeing to participate in the experiments. Drug addicts would get cash, drugs or treatment. Informed consent was often a condition in any treatment of the terminally ill poor. For the CIA researchers any type of informed consent was antithetical to their research task, which was to make unwilling subjects talk and covertly elicit cooperation.
By 1952 the CIA’s scientists began to test their techniques on what a CIA memo described as “individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants, subjects having known reasons for deception.” As one CIA psychologist told John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a pioneering investigation into these activities in the late 1970s, “one did not put a high premium on the civil rights of a person who was treasonable to his own country.” One suspected double agent was taken to a “thoroughly isolated” CIA safehouse in rural Germany, “far removed from surrounding neighbors.” The man was told that he was to undergo a series of routine medical and psychological tests as condition of his employment. According to detailed account in the Artichoke files, the entire operation was conducted on the second floor of the safehouse, so as not to arouse the curiosity of “the household staff and security detail.”
The session was recorded with “a special device that is easily concealable” and was monitored by the CIA medical division and investigators from Angleton’s counterintelligence division. The subject was brought to the safehouse at about 10:30 p.m. and was given a casual interview that lasted about an hour. Then he was offered a glass of whiskey, which had been spiked with Nembutal. Over the next three days, the subject underwent intense interrogation, while CIA doctors gave him “intravenous infusions” of hallucinogens and placed him under hypnosis. The subject was also attached to a polygraph machine. The Artichoke scientists deemed the interrogation “profitable and successful.” They noted that post-hypnotic suggestion had left the subject “completely confused” with a “severe headache” and a “vague and faulty” memory of the interrogation.
Though Bluebird had begun in the CIA’s Security division, a contretemps at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Germany caused the transfer of these CIA researchers to the Covert Operations sector of the agency. In Frankfurt, where the CIA was ensconced in the former offices of IG Farben, a CIA civilian contractor – an American psychologist named Richard Wendt – was assigned the task of testing a cocktail of THC, Dexedrine and Seconal on five people under interrogation who were suspected of being double agents or bogus defectors. Wendt brought along his mistress to the Frankfurt sessions and was partying hard when his wife arrived. Amid the ensuing fracas, the CIA’s man fled up a cathedral tower and threatened to throw himself off it. Amid these security lapses, the Security branch lost control of research, which now passed to Covert Operations, and eventually into the hands of Dr. Gottlieb.
Furnished with $300,000 from Allen Dulles, Gottlieb started farming out research to characters such as Harold Abramson, Olson’s nemesis. In 1953, Dr. Abramson was given $85,000. His grant proposal listed six areas of investigation: disturbance of memory, discrediting by aberrant behavior, alteration of sex patterns, eliciting of information, suggestibility and creation of dependency.
Another early recipient of Gottlieb’s money was Dr. Harris Isbell, who ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell’s center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the shape of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. Isbell developed a “points system” to secure their cooperation in his research. These people, supposedly being delivered from their drug habits, were awarded heroin and morphine in amounts relative to the nature of a particular research task. It was the normal habit of Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues back in Virginia to test all materials on themselves, but more than 800 different compounds were sent over to Isbell’s shop for the addicts to try first.
Perhaps the most infamous experiment in Louisville came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black male heroin addicts for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell’s research notes indicate “double,” “triple” and “quadruple” as he hiked the doses. Noting the apparent tolerance of the subjects to this incredible regimen of lysergic acid, Isbell explained in chilling tones that “this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type.” In another eerie reprise of the Nazi doctors’ Dachau experiments, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected with psilocybin, rectal thermometers inserted, lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and joints whacked to test neural reactions. The money for Isbell’s research was being funneled by the CIA through the National Institutes of Health.
Isbell also played a key role as the middleman for the CIA in getting supplies of narcotics and hallucinogens from drug companies. The Agency had two main concerns: the acquisition of supplies and new compounds, and veto power over sales of such materials to the Eastern bloc. To take one example, in 1953 the CIA became concerned that Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical firm for which Albert Hoffman had developed LSD, was planning to put the drug on the open market. So the Agency offered to buy Sandoz’s entire production run of LSD for $250,000. Ultimately, Sandoz agreed to supply the Agency with 100 grams a week, deny requests from the Soviet Union and China, and also to furnish the Agency with a regular list of its LSD customers.
In the meantime, the CIA helped underwrite Eli Lilly’s efforts to produce synthetic LSD. Lilly, the Indianapolis-based drug company, succeeded in this endeavor in 1954. Gottlieb hailed this triumph as a key breakthrough that would enable the CIA to buy the drug “in tonnage quantities.” Such large amounts were not of course required for interrogation: Gottlieb’s aim was instead to have the ability to incapacitate large populations and armies.
The MK-ULTRA projects were not limited to research on adults. The CIA funded a project at the Children’s International Summer Village. The objective was to research how children who spoke different languages were able to communicate. But CIA documents reveal that an ulterior motive was the identification of promising young foreign agents. The well-known psychiatrist Loretta Bender was also a recipient of MK-ULTRA funds. The author of the Bender-Gestalt used her CIA money to pump hallucinogens, including LSD, into children between the ages of seven and eleven. Many of the children were kept on the drugs for weeks at a time. In two cases, Dr. Bender’s “treatments” lasted, on and off, more than a year.
The CIA funneled large grants to the University of Oklahoma, home to Dr. Louis “Jolly” West. West would later go on to head the Violence Project at UCLA, where he and Dr. James Hamilton, an OSS colleague of George White and a recipient of CIA largesse, performed psychological research involving behavior modifications on inmates at Vacaville state prison in northern California. The MK-ULTRA funds pouring into the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s had a similar purpose: the study of the structure and dynamics of urban youth gangs. These studies indicate that from the CIA’s earliest days it has had a keen interest in developing methods of social control over potentially disruptive elements in American society.
Certainly one of the most nefarious of the MK-ULTRA projects was the “depatterning” research conducted by Scottish-born psychiatrist Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. Cameron was not hidden away in a dark closet: he was one of the most e
steemed psychiatrists of his time. He headed both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatry Association. He sat on numerous boards and was a contributing editor to dozens of journals. He also enjoyed a long relationship with US intelligence agencies dating back to World War II, having been brought to Nuremberg by Allen Dulles to help evaluate Nazi war criminals, most notably Rudolf Hess. While in Germany Cameron also lent his hand to the crafting of the Nuremberg Code on medical research.
After the war Cameron developed a near obsession with schizophrenia. He believed that he could cure the condition by first inducing a state of total amnesia in his patients and then reprogramming their consciousness through a process he termed “psychic driving.” Cameron’s base of operations was the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Through the early 1950s, Cameron’s work received the lavish support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Then in 1957 Cameron found a new stream of money, Gottlieb’s MK-ULTRA accounts. Over the next four years, the CIA gave Cameron more than $60,000 for his work in consciousness-alteration and mind control.
Using CIA and Rockefeller funds, Cameron pioneered research into the use of sensory deprivation techniques. He once locked a woman in a small white “box” for thirty-five days, where she was deprived of all light, smells and sounds. The CIA doctors back at Langley looked on with some amazement at this research, since its own experiments with a similar sensory deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological reactions in subjects locked up for less than forty hours.
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