Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

  Cameron used a variety of exotic drugs on his patients, once slipping LSD to an unsuspecting woman fourteen times over a two-month period. He also investigated the practical benefits of inducing paralysis in some of his patients by giving them injections of curare. Lobotomies were another area of intense interest for Dr. Cameron, who instructed his psycho-surgeons to perform their operations using only mild local anesthetics. He wanted the patients awake so that he could chart the minute changes in their consciousness the deeper the scalpel blade sliced into the frontal lobe.

  Nothing satisfied Cameron quite like the use of electro-shock therapy, which he believed could “wipe the mind clean,” allowing him to purge his patients of their disease. To this end Cameron developed a dire treatment. First, he put his patients into a prolonged sleep by injecting them with a daily mixture of Thorazine, Nembutal and Seconal. Using injections of amphetamines he brought patients out of their sleep three times a day when they would be forced to endure severe electro-shock treatments involving voltages forty times more intense than those considered safe and therapeutic at the time. This treatment would sometimes last two and half to three months. Then Cameron would begin his “psychic driving” experiment. This bizarre foray in behavioral conditioning consisted of the patients being assaulted by verbal messages played on a loop-feed tape player for sixteen hours a day; the speaker was often hidden under a pillow and was designed to deliver the messages subliminally while the patient slept.

  These experiments were conducted on more than 150 patients, one of whom was Robert Loguey. Loguey was sent to Cameron by his family doctor, who believed that a persistent pain Loguey complained about in his leg was psychosomatic. Loguey was duly diagnosed as a schizophrenic by Cameron, which rendered him immediately available as a guinea pig for Cameron’s CIA project. Loguey recalls that one of the negative messages Cameron piped into his room for twenty-three straight days was, “You killed your mother. You killed your mother.” When Loguey went home, he was shocked to discover that his mother was alive and apparently well.

  Linda McDonald was typical of Cameron’s victims, who tended to be women. McDonald was a 25-year-old mother of five young children. She was suffering from a modest case of post-partem depression and chronic back pains. Her physician advised her husband that he should take Linda to see Dr. Cameron at his clinic in Montreal. The doctor assured her husband that Cameron was “the best there was” and would have her back home and healthy in no time. “So we went,” Linda McDonald recalled in 1994 on the Canadian Broadcasting Company program, The Fifth Estate. “My medical file even says I took my guitar with me. And that was the end of my life.”

  After a few days of observation, Cameron had diagnosed McDonald as an acute schizophrenic and had her transferred to the medical torture chamber he called “the Sleep Room.” For the next eighty-six days, McDonald was kept in a near comatose state by the use of powerful narcotics, and awakened only for massive jolts from Cameron’s electro-shock machine. Over that period, McDonald received 102 electro-shock treatments.

  “The aim was to wipe out the patterns of thought and behavior which were detrimental to the patient and replace them with healthy patterns of thought and behavior,” said Dr. Peter Roper, a colleague of Cameron’s who still defends the experiments. “I think this was stimulated by the effects on the American troops of the war in Korea, how they seemed to have been brainwashed.”

  Linda McDonald emerged from Cameron’s care in a near infantile condition. “I had to be toilet trained,” McDonald said. “I was a vegetable. I had no identity, no memory. I had never existed in the world before. Like a baby.”

  Cameron was eased out of his post at Allan Memorial in 1964 and died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967 at the age of sixty-six. But that didn’t end the matter. After the MK-ULTRA program was exposed, McDonald, Loguey and six other Cameron victims filed suit against the CIA. The Agency eventually agreed to a settlement, paying out $750,000 – but the CIA still maintains it was not culpable for Cameron’s actions.

  Anthropologists also got into the MK-ULTRA act. Richard Prince was given CIA money for research on “folk medicine and faith healing” among the Yoruba people in Nigeria. Gottlieb was interested in finding possible new drugs in Nigeria and in the mind-control techniques of Yoruba shamans. Margaret Mead sat with Ewen Cameron on the editorial board of a CIA-funded publication called the Research in Mental Health Newsletter, which discussed the use of psychedelic drugs to induce and treat schizophrenia. Mead’s former husband, medical anthropologist Gregory Bateson, was given CIA-procured LSD by Harold Abramson. Bateson, in turn, gave some to his friend, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It was also Bateson’s stash of LSD that eventually found its way to experiments being conducted on student volunteers by Dr. Leo Hollister. One of his subjects was a young creative writing student at Stanford, Ken Kesey, who would become the drug’s chief proponent in the sixties counterculture.

  In the early 1960s, the CIA even helped set up a company to scour the Amazon for potential new drugs, the Amazon Natural Drug Company. This nominally private enterprise was run by an old CIA hand named J. C. King, who had headed the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division during the Bay of Pigs and was officially moved out of the Agency shortly thereafter. Operating from his houseboat, King supervised a network of Amazon tribespeople, anthropologists and botanists to bring back new toxic compounds, including yage, the powerful hallucinogen used by the Yanomamo.

  In 1954, Gottlieb and his colleagues in the Technical Services Division concocted a plan to spike punchbowls with LSD at the Agency’s Christmas party, an amazing idea considering that only a year earlier a similar stunt had resulted in the death of Frank Olson. A more ambitious project was described in a CIA memo as follows: “We thought about the possibility of putting some [LSD] in a city water supply and having citizens wander around in a more or less happy state, not terribly interested in defending themselves.”

  This was certainly a hazardous time to be at any public function attended by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and his associates. In the midst of their MK-ULTRA researches, the CIA had concluded that since prisoners had lawyers who might turn ugly, it was probably not a good idea to use them as human guinea pigs. Initially they cut down the risk margin by administering the various hallucinogens to themselves, tripping regularly at CIA safehouses and institutions such as the CIA’s wing at Georgetown and at Dr. Abramson’s floor at Mount Sinai Hospital. The trips lacked the consciousness-heightening ambitions of the Leary generation, however. As John Marks put it, “the CIA experimenters did not trip for the experience itself, or to get high, or to sample new realities. They were testing a weapon; for their purposes, they might as well have been in a ballistics lab.” But the Olson disaster reduced their enthusiasm for self-testing, and so did another mishap that occurred when an unwitting CIA officer had a dose of LSD slipped into his coffee at the Agency’s offices on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The man dashed out the building, across the street, past the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, hallucinating that he was beset by monsters with huge eyes. Hotly pursued by CIA colleagues, he fled across a bridge over the Potomac and was finally cornered, crouching in a fetal position near Arlington National Cemetary.

  After these mishaps, Gottlieb became persuaded that the best course was simply to test the hallucinogens on a random basis at public gatherings, or to pick out street people and induce them to swallow a dram of whatever potion was under review that day.

  In late 1953, Gottlieb took his black bag to Europe, where at a political rally he primed the water glass of a speaker whom the CIA wanted to render ridiculous. The psycho-sabotage was apparently a rousing success, and greatly encouraged Gottlieb with the potential for similar dosing of charismatic left figures around the world. Gottlieb then gave the green light for CIA station officers in Manila and Atsugi, Japan, to begin the operational use of LSD.

  For continued experimentation, Gottlieb now decided to begin widespread testing on the urban poo
r: street people, prostitutes and other undesirables. He had two reasons: they were unlikely to complain, and there was, he believed, a higher potential that these people could handle untoward side-effects. To oversee this operation, Gottlieb turned to George Hunter White, whom we last encountered testing the marijuana truth drug on Mafia muscle man Augusto Del Gracio. White had now gone back to work at the Narcotics Bureau in New York. He was a somewhat bizarre-looking figure, 200 pounds, 5-feet-7-inches tall and bald. White claimed he was such an expert in physical combat that he had killed a Japanese agent in a hand-to-hand encounter. He was also a lusty drinker with a preference for straight gin.

  Gottlieb asked White to establish a CIA safehouse in New York, invite suitable subjects to party there, drug them covertly and then review their behavior. White rented two adjoining apartments at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. The cooperation of the Narcotics Bureau was secured by a deal whereby the bureau could use the apartments for drug stings during CIA downtime. White was guaranteed an unceasing flow of drink, all of it paid for by Gottlieb. The safehouse became a working lab for the CIA’s Technical Services Division, fitted out with two-way mirrors, listening devices and concealed cameras. Indeed, the house became a model for subsequent CIA interrogation facilities.

  From the fall of 1953 to the late spring of the following year, White hosted a string of parties, inviting a stream of unsuspecting CIA subjects to Bedford Street, spiking their food and drink with chemicals such as sodium pentothal, Nembutal, THC and, of course, what White referred to as “the LSD surprise.” White’s immediate supervisor in New York was Richard Lashbrook, the man who shared Frank Olson’s room on the latter’s last night on earth.

  White’s diary records that Lashbrook visited the apartment on numerous occasions, delivering drugs and watching the human guinea pigs through the two-way mirror. Connoisseurs of CIA denials should study Lashbrook’s performance in 1977, when he was questioned during Ted Kennedy’s senatorial probe. Despite the fact that Kennedy’s subcommittee had White’s records, which documented Lashbrook’s visits to Bedford Street, Lashbrook received no challenge from the subcommittee when he insisted that he had never gone anywhere near the CIA safehouse. And not only did the subcommittee have White’s diary, it also had Lashbrook’s signature on receipts for White’s substantial expenses in New York.

  In 1955 the Narcotics Bureau transferred White to San Francisco. This didn’t end his role as an agent for MK-ULTRA. He simply continued his researches in Baghdad-by-the-Bay. He rented a new safehouse on Telegraph Hill and had it wired with state-of-the-art equipment from Technical Services. This time White’s surveillance post was a small bathroom, with a two-way mirror allowing him to peer into the main room. White would sit on the lavatory, martini in hand, watching prostitutes give CIA designer drugs to their unsuspecting clients. White called this enterprise Operation Midnight Climax. He assembled a string of whores, many of them black heroin addicts whom he paid in drugs, to lure their clients to the CIA-sponsored drug and sex sessions. The women, who were known by the San Francisco police as George’s Girls, were protected from arrest.

  To further the scientific work, Gottlieb sent out the Agency’s chief psychologist, John Gittinger, to evaluate the prostitutes through personality tests and, since part of the research was to evaluate the use of sex as a means of eliciting information, to instruct the women in interviewing techniques. Unsurprisingly, it was soon discovered that the clients were more likely to talk after sexual activity. The content of their conversations often centered on family and work problems – something the prostitutes probably could have told the CIA without any investment of taxpayer money.

  All of these San Francisco sessions were filmed and tape-recorded, in another eerie parallel with Nazi research: Himmler had recommended to the doctors conducting the Dachau experiments in cold water immersion that perhaps the subjects be revived by “animal warmth,” meaning sex with prostitutes held in a special building at Dachau. The therapeutic sessions were filmed and passed along for viewing by Himmler.

  It wasn’t long before the CIA researchers carried their investigations beyond the safehouse on Telegraph Hill. CIA men would often go down to the Tenderloin district, visit bars and slip hallucinogens into patrons’ drinks. They would also hand out doctored cigarettes. Hundreds of people were thus unknowingly dosed, and there is no way of knowing how many psychological and physical traumas the CIA was responsible for. The CIA did know of several test victims who took themselves or were taken to hospitals in the San Francisco area. But it never assisted in diagnosis or paid any hospital bills, or in any other way took the slightest responsibility for what it had done. In fact it was in the Agency’s self-interest that these people be diagnosed as drug addicts or as psychotics. Some of the drugs being thus furtively administered were extremely dangerous. One of the men in the CIA’s Technical Services Division later told Marks, “If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it on ourselves we sent it to San Francisco.”

  The CIA men organized a weekend party at another Agency safehouse in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The plan was to invite a crowd of party-goers and then spray the rooms with an aerosol formulation of LSD concocted in Gottlieb’s shop. But it turned out to be an exceedingly hot day and the party-goers kept the windows open, allowing breezes off the Pacific to swirl through the room, thus dispersing the LSD. In frustration, Gittinger, the CIA psychologist, locked himself in the bathroom, sprayed furiously and inhaled as deeply as possible.

  The LSD safehouse program continued in both New York and San Francisco until 1963, when the CIA’s new Inspector General, John Earman, stumbled across the enterprise. Earman was particularly galled by the itemized list of expenses, including $44 for a telescope, $1,000 for a few days of White’s liquor bill and $31 to pay off a local lady whose car White had rammed. Earman probed deeper, unearthing what he swiftly concluded was an illegal, indeed criminal, venture. He gathered his findings and confronted Gottlieb and Helms.

  Helms knew he was in a spot of trouble. He had not told new agency director John McCone about the program, and he double-crossed Earman on a promise to do so. Eventually Earman wrote a 24-page report for McCone in which he harshly denounced the drug-testing program, which he said “put the rights and interests of all Americans in jeopardy.” Helms and Gottlieb fiercely defended MK-ULTRA to McCone, with Helms raising the spectre of a Soviet chemical gap, claiming that widespread testing was necessary to keep pace with Soviet advances. Helms told McCone that “positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing.”

  McCone put a freeze on CIA-sponsored testing at the safe-houses, but they remained open for George White’s use – with the CIA paying the bills – until 1966, when White retired. As he headed off toward eventual death from cirrhosis of the liver, White wrote an envoi to his old sponsor Sidney Gottlieb: “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 bidding of the All-Highest.”

  Gottlieb’s colleagues at Army Intelligence were conducting their own experiments with LSD, called Operation Third Chance. In 1961, James Thornwell, a black US Army sergeant who worked at a NATO office in Orleans, France, came under suspicion of stealing classified documents. He was interrogated, hypnotized, and given a polygraph and truth serum. All these attempts to coerce a confession from him failed, but the Army Intelligence men remained convinced of his guilt. They even concocted a bizarre scenario involving the French police, who pulled over Thornwell’s car, drew their guns and opened fire as he sped away.

  The officers also told colleagues of Thornwell that the black man had been sleeping with their wives and girlfriends: several of these men beat up Thornwell in a jealous rage. Eventually Thornwell turned to the intelligence officers for help in escaping this harassment. They duly offered to put the sergeant in protective custody in an abandoned millhouse. There Thornwell wa
s secretly given LSD over a period of several days by army and CIA interrogators, during which he was forced to undergo extremely aggressive questioning, replete with racial slurs. At one point his interrogators threatened “to extend the state indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insanity.” They consummated this promise. Thornwell experienced a major mental crisis from which he never recovered. In 1982 he was found drowned in his swimming pool in Maryland. There was never any evidence that Thornwell had anything to do with the missing NATO papers.

  MK-ULTRA was never designed to be pure research. It was always intended as an operational program, and by the early 1960s these techniques were being fully deployed in the field, sometimes in situations so vile that they rivaled in evil the efforts of the Nazi scientists in German concentration camps. Well-known is the journey of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumba’s toothbrush. Less well-known is the handkerchief laced with botulinum that was to sent to an Iraqi colonel. Then there are the endless potions directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela in Paris on November 22, 1963.

  And even less well remembered is one mission in the Agency’s Phoenix operation in Vietnam in the late 1960s. In July 1968 a team of CIA psychologists set up shop at Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon, where NLF suspects were being held after Phoenix Program round-ups. The CIA had become increasingly frustrated with its inability to break down suspected NLF leaders by using traditional means of interrogation and torture. They had doped up NLF officers with LSD, hoping that by inducing irrational behavior, the seemingly unbreakable solidarity of their captives could be broken and that the other inmates would then begin to talk. These experiments ended in failure, leaving the prisoners to became little more than lab material for experiments.