In one such experiment, three prisoners were anaesthetized; their skulls were then opened and electrodes were implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains. The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the CIA psychiatrists who were covertly observing them. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. The experiment failed. The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned. This rivaled anything in Dachau.
The CIA’s drug testing and adventures into mind control became the subject of four ground-breaking book-length investigations: John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979), Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control (1978), Alan Scheflin’s The Mind Manipulators (1978) and Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain’s Acid Dreams (1985). But aside from these pioneering works, how did the American press and historians of the CIA deal with this astonishing saga, in which a man such as Olson lost his life, thousands of people were involuntarily and unknowingly dosed with drugs so dangerous or untested that the CIA’s own chemists dared not try them? A story in which for more than twenty years the CIA paid for such illegal activities, protected criminals from arrest, let others suffer without intervention and tried to destroy all evidence of its crimes? When the saga did unfold before the Kennedy hearings in 1977, the Washington Post offered this laconic and dismissive headline, “The Gang that Couldn’t Spray Straight,” accompanied by a trivial story designed to downplay the whole MK-ULTRA scandal. Tom Powers, the biographer of MK-ULTRA’s patron and protector, Richard Helms, skips over the program in his 350-page book The Man Who Kept the Secrets.
“I thought in 1978 when our books were appearing, when we were doing media work all over the world, that we would finally get the story out, the vaults would be cleansed, the victims would learn their identities, the story would become part of history, and the people who had been injured could seek recompense,” recalled Alan Scheflin. “Instead, what happened was the great void. As soon as the story hit the paper it was yesterday’s news, and we waited and waited for real congressional hearings and we waited for the lists of people who were victims to be notified. And none of that happened.”
Sources
Nearly twenty years after its publication, John Marks’s book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate remains the most important and provocative work on the CIA’s development and use of methods to control human behavior. It provided much of the background for this chapter. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams was also an important source, particularly in placing the CIA’s experiments with hallucinogens in a cultural context. Much of the primary source material is contained in the reports and testimony from the Church hearings and the rather superficial hearings on CIA medical abuse and drug testing chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the MK-ULTRA files. What remain are brief project descriptions, contracts, memos and receipts. And these are only available because of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by John Marks. Marks’s files are available to researchers at the National Security Archives. The persistent digging by the family of Frank Olson has also helped to illuminate some of the darker corners in this wing of the CIA. The horrible account of medical torture of Vietnamese prisoners comes from Gordon Thomas’s chilling book, Journey into Madness.
Abramson, Harold. The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy. Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.
Alexander, John. “The New Military Battlefield.” Military Review, Dec. 1980.
Alexander, Leo. “Sociopsychologic Structures of the SS.” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, May 1948.
Anderson, Jack. “ ‘Voodoo Gap’ Looms as Latest Weapons Crisis.” Washington Post, April 24, 1984.
——. “US Still in Psychic Research.” Washington Post, Feb. 15, 1985.
——. “CIA Secrets and Customs Agent Firing.” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1995.
Biderman, Albert, and Herbert Zimmer, eds. The Manipulation of Human Behavior. John Wiley and Sons, 1961.
Bowart, Walter. Operation Mind Control. Dell, 1978.
Broad, William. “Pentagon Is Said to Focus on ESP for Wartime Use.” New York Times, Jan. 10, 1984.
Brennan, Patricia. “Solving Mysteries, Finding Felons.” Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1994.
Chavkin, Samuel. The Mind Stealers. Houghton Miflin, 1978.
Cohen, Sidney. The Beyond Within: The LSD Story. Atheneum, 1972.
Collins, Larry. “Mind Control.” Playboy, Jan. 1990.
Cookson, John, and Judith Nottingham. A Survey of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Monthly Review Press, 1969.
Corson, William. Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire. Dial Press, 1977.
Cox, Bob. “Brainwash Victims to Receive $100,000.” Canadian Press Wire Service. Nov. 18, 1992.
Ebon, Martin. Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Estabrooks, George. Hypnotism. EP Dutton & Company, 1945.
Estabrooks, George, and Richard Lockridge. Death in the Mind. EP Dutton & Company, 1946.
Hersh, Seymour M. Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal. Doubleday, 1969.
Hockstader, Lee. “Victims of 1950s Mind-Control Experiments Settle with CIA.” Washington Post, Oct. 5, 1988.
Lasby, Charles. Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War. Atheneum, 1971.
Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Schlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD. Grove Press, 1992.
Levine, Art, Steven Emerson and Charles Fenyvesi. “The Twilight Zone in Washington.” US News and World Report, Dec. 5, 1988.
Lilly, John. The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography. Lippincott, 1978.
London, Perry. Behavior Control. New American Library, 1977.
Lovell, Stanley. Of Spies and Strategems. Prentice Hall, 1963.
Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Times Books, 1979.
——. “The CIA Won’t Quite Go Public.” Rolling Stone, July 18, 1974.
McIntyre, Linden. “MK-ULTRA’s Dr. Ewen Cameron: Psychiatrist and Torturer.” Transcript. Fifth Estate. Canadian Broadcasting Company, Jan. 6, 1998.
McRae, Ronald. Mind Wars: The True Story of Government Research into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons. St. Martin’s Press, 1984.
Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Fred Mielke. Doctors of Infamy. Schuman, 1949.
Mooar, Brian. “1953 CIA Death Draws Scrutiny.” Washington Post, Sept. 8, 1997.
Morris, Wayne, interviewer. “Mind Control Series: Interviews with Walter Bowart, Alan Scheflin and Randy Noblitt.” Transcript. CKLN-FM Radio. 1995.
Orth, Maureen. “Memoirs of a CIA Psychiatrist.” New Times, June 23, 1975.
Reuters. “Carter Says Psychic Found Lost Plane for CIA.” The Oregonian, Sept. 20, 1995.
Roth, Melissa. “Frank Olson File: The CIA’s Bad Trip.” George, Oct. 1997.
Ross, Colin. Multiple Personality Disorder. Wiley, 1989.
——. “The CIA and Military Mind Control Research.” Lecture at 9th Annual Western Clinical Conference on Trauma and Dissociation, April 18, 1996.
Scheflin, Alan W., and Edward M. Opton, Jr. The Mind Manipulators. Paddington Press, 1978.
Schnable, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. Dell Publishing, 1997.
Schrag, Peter. Mind Control. Pantheon, 1978.
Schwartz, Stephen. “Deep Quest.” Omni, March 1979.
Squires, Sally. “The Pentagon’s Twilight Zone.” Washington Post, April 17, 1988.
Thomas, Gordon. Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse. Bantam, 1989.
US Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities. Communist Psychological Warfare (Thought Control). Government Printing Office, 1958.
——. Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The CIA and the Media. Government Printing Office, 1978.
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e. Select Committee (Church Committee) to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report. Government Printing Office, 1975.
——. Select Committee (Church Committee) to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Ninety-fourth Congress. Final Report. Government Printing Office, 1976.
——. Joint Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare and the Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure of the Committee on the Judiciary. Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Government Printing Office, 1975.
——. Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources. Human Drug Testing by the CIA. Government Printing Office, 1977.
——. Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources. Project MK-ULTRA: The CIA’s Research in Behavior Modification. Government Printing Office, 1977.
——. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents. Government Printing Office, 1975.
US, Executive Office of the President, Commission on CIA Activities. The Rockefeller Report to the President on CIA Activities. Government Printing Office, 1975.
West, Louis Jolyon. “Dissociative Reaction.” Chapter in Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. Williams and Wilkins, 1967.
Wilhelm, John. “Psychic Spying.” Washington Post, August 2, 1977.
9
The US Opium Wars: China, Burma and the CIA
You won’t find a star of remembrance for him on the wall of fallen heroes at CIA HQ in Langley, but one of the Agency’s first casualties in its covert war against Mao’s China was a man named Jack Killam. He was a pilot for the CIA’s proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport, forerunner to the notorious Air America which figured so largely in the Agency’s activities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Killam’s job was to fly weapons and supplies from the CIA’s base in Bangkok, Thailand, to the mountain camps of General Li Mi in the Shan States of Burma. Li Mi, Chinese in origin, was the leader of 10,000 Chinese troops still loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who had been driven off the Chinese mainland by Mao’s forces and was now ensconced on Taiwan.
Under the direction of the CIA, Li Mi’s army was plotting a strike across Burma’s northern border into China’s Hunan province. But Li Mi’s troops were not just warriors in Chiang’s cause: they had also taken control of the largest opium poppy fields in Asia. The CAT pilots working for the CIA carried loads of Li Mi’s opium on their return flights to Bangkok, where it was delivered to General Phao Siyanan, head of the Thai secret police and a long-time CIA asset.
Jack Killam was murdered in 1951 when one of these arms-and-drugs round trips went bad. His body was buried in an unmarked grave by Sherman Joost, the CIA’s station chief in Bangkok.
The exiled Kuomintang (KMT) army of Li Mi was as much a proprietary of the Central Intelligence Agency as Civil Air Transport. Installed in Burma, this army was armed by the CIA, fed by the CIA, and paid by the CIA. In later operations in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam the CIA used it as a labor pool. Under this patronage and protection the KMT was able to build up its opium operations in the area of Southeast Asia known as the Golden Triangle.
As a result, the KMT became a pivotal force in the Asian opium trade. Using the infrastructure of remote airstrips and airplanes set in place by the CIA, the KMT was able to export its opium crop from the Shan States of Burma and the mountains of Laos to international wholesalers. For its part, the CIA was more than pleased to see the KMT forces sustained by a stable flow of opium revenue impervious to the whims of Congress or new arrivals in the White House. By the mid-1970s the KMT controlled more than 80 percent of the Golden Triangle opium market. It was a situation that put the newly created Drug Enforcement Agency at odds with the CIA’s opium warlords. Invariably, the DEA emerged defeated from these conflicts.
In 1988, a newspaper reporter named Elaine Shannon interviewed dozens of DEA agents for a book, Desperados, on the international narcotics trade. The agents told her that the drug smugglers of Southeast Asia and the CIA were “natural allies.” Shannon wrote that “DEA agents who served in south east Asia in the late 1970s and 1980s said they frequently discovered that they were tracking heroin smugglers who were on the CIA payroll.”
By the 1970s Nixon was staking more political capital on his War on Drugs and the CIA had to adjust to the new situation. Rather than allow the KMT to use its planes to ship opium out, the Agency bought 26 tons of opium at a cost of $1 million and destroyed it. This was a mere fraction of the KMT’s total output, but the purchase had the advantage of deflecting criticism from other agencies and putting US taxpayers’ money into the pockets of its mercenaries. In the mid-1970s the DEA suggested that the US government could buy Burma’s entire opium crop for $12 million. This time the US State Department and the CIA intervened, claiming that such a buy-out program might put money into the hands of “Communist insurgencies against the friendly governments of Burma and Thailand” and successfully opposed the plan. Later the CIA and State Department used the War on Drugs as a rationale for funneling even more weapons into the hands of Burma’s military dictatorship. These weapons were used to quell internal opposition, and the herbicides supposedly destined for the poppy fields were instead employed by Burma’s dictatorship against rural opponents, along with their food crops. By 1997 Burma reigned supreme as the world’s top producer of raw opium and high-grade heroin.
The opium poppy was not native to Southeast Asia but was introduced by Arab traders in the seventh century AD. The habit of opium smoking didn’t take hold till the seventeenth century, when it was spread by the Spanish and Dutch, who used opium as a treatment for malaria. The Portuguese became the first to profit from the importing of opium into China from the poppy fields in its colonies in India. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company took over the opium monopoly and soon found it to be an irresistible source of profit. By 1772 the new British governor, Warren Hastings, was auctioning off opium-trading concessions and encouraging opium exports to China. Such exports were already generating £500,000 a year despite the strenuous objections of the Chinese imperial government. As early as 1729 the Chinese emperor Yung Cheng had issued an edict outlawing opium smoking. The sanctions for repeat offenders were stern: many had their lips slit. In 1789 the Chinese outlawed both the import and domestic cultivation of opium, and invoked the death penalty for violators. It did little good.
Inside China these prohibitions merely drove the opium trade underground, making it a target of opportunity for Chinese secret societies such as the powerful Green Circles Gang, from whose ranks Chiang Kai-shek was later to emerge. These bans did not deter the British, who continued shipping opium by the ton into the ports of Canton and Shanghai, using what was to become a well-worn rationale: “It is evident that the Chinese could not exist without the use of opium, and if we do not supply their necessary wants, foreigners will.”
Between 1800 and 1840 British opium exports to China increased from 350 tons to more than 2,000 tons a year. In 1839 the Chinese Emperor Tao Kwang sent his trade commissioner Lin Tze-su to Canton to close the port to British opium ships. Lin took his assignment seriously, destroying tons of British opium on the docks in Canton, thus igniting the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856. In these bloody campaigns the British forced China open to the opium trade, meanwhile slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Chinese, a slaughter assisted by the fact by 1840 there were 15 million opium addicts in China, 27 percent of the adult male population, including much of the Chinese military. After the first Opium War, as part of the treaty of Nanking China had to pay the British government £6 million in compensation for the opium destroyed by Lin in Canton. In all essential respects Shanghai thereafter became a western colony. In 1858 China of
ficially legalized sales and consumption of opium. The British hiked their Indian opium exports to China, which by 1880 reached 6,500 tons, an immensely profitable business that established the fortunes of such famous Hong Kong trading houses as Jardine, Matheson.
Meanwhile, the Chinese gangs embarked on a program of import substitution, growing their poppy crops particularly in Szechwan and Hunan provinces. Labor was plentiful and the poppies were easy to grow and cheap to transport – and the flowers were also three times more valuable as a cash crop than rice or wheat. The British did not take kindly to this homegrown challenge to their Indian shipments, and after the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 they forced the Chinese government to start a program to eradicate the domestic crop, a program that by 1906 had finished off opium cultivation in the whole of Hunan province.
It was at this point that the Chinese gangs shifted their opium cultivation southward into the Shan States of Burma and into Indochina, making the necessary arrangements with the French colonial administration, which held the monopoly on opium growing there. Hill tribes in Indochina and Burma were conscripted to the task of cultivation, with the gangs handling trafficking and distribution.
The suppression campaign run by the Chinese government had the effect of increasing the demand for processed opium products such as morphine and heroin. Morphine had recently been introduced to the Chinese mainland by Christian missionaries, who used the drug to win converts and gratefully referred to their morphine as Jesus opium. There was also a distinct economic advantage to be realized from the sale of heroin and morphine, which were cheap to produce and thus had much higher profit margins than opium.
Despite mounting international outrage, the British government continued to dump opium into China well into the first two decades of the twentieth century. Defenders of the traffic argued that opium smoking was “less deleterious” to the health of Chinese addicts than morphine, which was being pressed on China, the officials noted pointedly, by German and Japanese drug firms. The British opium magnates also recruited scientific studies to back up their claims. One paper, written by Dr. H. Moissan and Dr. F. Browne, purported to show that opium smoking produced “only a trifling amount of morphia” and was no more injurious than the inhalation of tobacco smoke.
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