by Mark Lane
Colby refused to answer questions about $1.7 billion, much of which had been allocated for the Phoenix Program and all of which was unaccounted for. He stated that he did not have the authority to reveal why Congress was not permitted to audit taxpayer funds. He was testifying before a committee of Congress charged with the oversight responsibility for the funding. Later Colby was rewarded for his loyalty: Richard Nixon appointed him director of the CIA.
In April 1973 Colby’s only daughter died; she had been painfully ill for sometime. His colleagues considered that her death caused him to rethink his responsibility for past actions. When called before the Church Committee, Colby offered important cooperation providing details of the CIA’s operations against the Allende government in Chile. CIA officials made it clear that he had betrayed them and the agency and were fearful of what he might do in the future. Much later, Colby, who was no longer with the CIA, died. The medical examiner said that he had died after he apparently had a heart attack, then collapsed and fell out of his canoe and drowned. Colby had been a strong swimmer. The medical examiner said that no blood clots were found that might have supported the heart attack theory, and speculated that they may have dissolved before his body was found lying facedown in a marshy riverbank near his home in Maryland.
The CIA, probably the greatest threat to American principles of democracy, remains unaccountable to the Congress or to the American people for its transgressions or the expenditure of its burgeoning budget. As the international war on terror continues, and continues to provide a basis for claims by the CIA and its well-rewarded media assets that its organization and methods are necessary, many, some in the United States and millions elsewhere, view it as a leading terrorist entity.
The CIA air force is presently carrying out its own independent bombing missions in Afghanistan and in its characteristic disregard for human life, causing many civilian deaths, resulting in demands by leaders in Afghanistan that the United States withdraw from its country. In many ways the agency has become too costly to continue to operate in a country that prides itself upon its commitment to democracy.
Every nation may be in need of an intelligence-gathering analytical organization of the nature President Truman envisioned. Totalitarian states may enjoy the fruits of specialized military units that are accountable to a dictator and carry out their illegal missions unknown to the people of their own country. The laws of the United States and the concept that our governance rests upon our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, preclude us from behaving in that manner.
Instead, a decent respect for our nation and our traditions compels us to examine the darkest areas of the CIA’s transgressions to determine the actions we are required to undertake. When we prosecuted others for war crimes, beginning at Nuremberg, we assured the international community that we as a nation would apply the same standards to our own leaders should their conduct ever warrant it—MKULTRA and the Phoenix Program are among those operations that should cause us to remember that.
MKULTRA
The CIA’s Dark Secrets129
During the war in Vietnam, while politicians and other experts in this country were assuring us that American prisoners of war were being uniquely mistreated, a CIA program was taking place in a prison close to Saigon. It was devised and operated by a group of American psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. During the summer of 1968, at the Bien Hoa Prison, these men were involved in experiments to force Vietnamese prisoners of war, who were suspects not proven to be enemies, to reveal information that they may have possessed. The prisoners, although tortured, did not respond adequately either because they had no information or because they refused to cooperate with those who were inflicting pain upon them. The CIA psychologists then utilized massive doses of LSD, causing serious and permanent damage but still not obtaining the results that were sought.
Then the furious professionals engaged in techniques that rivaled in barbarity if not in scope the work of the scientists who had conducted experiments at concentration camps under Nazi auspices. Prisoners were operated upon, and portions of their skulls were cut away and their brains exposed. The scientists then implanted electrodes into various portions of their brains.
The prisoners were then moved to a room where knives were available. The CIA psychologists operated the electrodes while watching the prisoners to see what effect their manipulations of the electrodes had upon their subjects. The psychologists were hoping that they might be able to force the prisoners to attack each other. They continued this activity until it became apparent that they could not secure the response that they were seeking. When it was clear that the effort had failed, the electrodes were removed, the prisoners were then executed and the CIA burned the bodies of their victims, likely so that no proof of their conduct might exist. The experiments were part of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
In 1946, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, designed and began to implement Operation Paperclip, a program to bring at least 1,000 former Nazi scientists to the United States, including doctors from Dachau who had observed prisoners while they froze to death in tubs of ice water, and chemical weapons engineers who had tested poisonous gases on prisoners. Operation Paperclip then gave birth to Project BLUEBIRD in 1950. Operation Bluebird focused on hypnosis, using North Korean prisoners of war as their test subjects, giving them high doses of amphetamines and barbiturates to see if it was possible to hypnotize them into doing things against their wills. This dubious pedigree of the willful use of human beings as guinea pigs led to Dulles’s creation of MKULTRA, a program dedicated to researching differing methods of mental manipulation and their effects on human subjects. The U.S. Army inspector general described it as “concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.”130 Under the auspices of MKULTRA, psychiatrists and other researchers used methods such as sensory deprivation, electroshock therapy and psychotropic drugs. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25, was the one most commonly used, often on unwitting human beings. The rationalization of these unorthodox and illegal methods to research mind control was to both create agents whose actions could be controlled by outside forces, and to find ways to make enemy agents divulge their secrets.
The man the CIA placed in charge of MKULTRA was Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was a chemist with a clubfoot and a stammer. He was dedicated to research, and was responsible for dosing people with LSD without their consent or even knowledge and devising poisons specifically designed to assassinate undesirable heads of state, that is those who did not share his ethical values. Gottlieb also was behind CIA experiments involving implanting electrodes into the exposed brains of subjects for the purposes of either controlling them or for simple observation. Gottlieb, who received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology, was chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) in the early fifties, and later the Technical Services Division (TSD). It has been speculated that the initials MK, used to identify several CIA clandestine programs, come from the German Mind Kontrolle, leading back to experiments performed in Nazi Concentration Camps by the very scientists recruited through Operation Paperclip. The etymology may or may not be accurate, but the similarities exist.
Richard Helms, who was then the assistant deputy director for plans for the CIA, known in the agency as the Dirty Tricks Department, wrote the original proposal for MKULTRA in a memorandum to CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1953. In it he outlined a program of:
research to develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials. This area involves the production of various physiological conditions which could support present or future clandestine operations. Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential, thus enabling u
s to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are.
After even a cursory study of what Gottlieb and his confederates unleashed on their subjects, it is difficult to imagine how much more unrestrained our “foes” might be.
President Richard Nixon announced in 1972 that Helms would be leaving his post at the CIA to become the ambassador to Iran. Gottlieb decided to resign at the same time; he and Helms would leave together. The fact that we have any information at all on MKULTRA was a mistake. In 1972, Gottlieb, who remained head of the TSS, and Helms, who had become the director of the CIA in 1966, ordered all material related to MKULTRA destroyed. All of the documentary information we now possess regarding MKULTRA comes from seven boxes of financial records found in the Retired Records Center of the CIA, located outside of Washington, D.C., that had escaped the purge.
Nixon replaced Richard Helms with James Schlesinger. Schlesinger, who took the position in 1973, remained head of the CIA for a very short time. While he was there, however, Schlesinger made some unexpected decisions. He felt that the covert operations part of the agency was too powerful and sent out a directive to all CIA employees:
I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter.
This directive brought forth some startling information, resulting in the creation of the Rockefeller Commission and the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, or the Church Committee.
In 1977, the seven boxes were found as a result of a Freedom of Information Act application filed by John Marks. Senator Edward Kennedy and his Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research joined forces with Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate the dark corners of the CIA. The material that follows is the result of those studies, as well as interviews by John Marks, published in his book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.”
In his 1953 proposal, Helms devised a covert method of funding for MKULTRA, recognizing that the program would be unacceptable for the American public. In a 1963 report, the Inspector General of the Army, J. S. Earman, showed some discomfort with the nature of the program:
a. Research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical, therefore the reputation of professional participants in the MKULTRA program are on occasion in jeopardy.
b. Some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality implicit in the original charter.
c. A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
d. Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion as well as stimulate offensive and defensive action in this field on the part of foreign intelligence services.
But in the early 1950s, no one was trying to temper the program, or its multiple goals. One early document stated:
A portion of the Research and Development Program of TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:
1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
3. Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.
6. Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing.”
8. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
11. Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.
12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
15. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
16. A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
17. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.
LSD fit the bill for many of these criteria, and as such became the focus of much of the experimentation. The CIA had heard of large doses of LSD that were available from the Sandoz Corporation and made arrangements to procure it. The CIA then began a strange relationship with the drug. According to the Church Committee report, “projects involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting nonvolunteer subjects ‘at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign’ were common.” Other sources reveal that many of the “unwitting subjects” were other CIA agents, to the point where spiked drinks were used regularly.
Dr. Frank Olson was a high-ranking and respected scientist with the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Army Biological Center at Camp Detrick, Maryland, where the army “assisted the CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems for use against humans as well as against animals and crops.”131 Olson, who had been the interim head of the SOD, specialized in the delivery of biochemical weaponry through the air and through water systems. He was one of three scientists from the SOD who were given LSD at a conference at an isolated resort in Maryland in November 1953. Also at the conference were three scientists from the TSS, including Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook. It was Lashbrook who surreptitiously doctored Olson’s drink with LSD. Olson reacted very badly. Before the conference everyone, including Robert Lashbrook, agreed that Olson was a pleasant and absolutely normal man who was devoted to his family and enjoyed a penchant for practical jokes. After the conference Olson fell into a depression. He became paranoid and was afraid to go home to his family for Thanksgiving because he was afraid he would hurt his children. His colleagues from the agency took him to see Dr. Harold Abramson in New York for treatment. Dr. Abramson was not a psychiatrist; he was an immunologist with no training in psychiatry. What he did have was an interest in how the brain works, and funding from the CIA to experiment with LSD. Gottlieb and Lashbrook thought he might be useful, as well as discreet. Eight days after taking the drug, while Olson was in New York, ostensibly under treatment from Abramson, Olson crashed through the glass of his tenth floor hotel window and fell to his death. His death was ruled a suicide.
The CIA immediately made efforts to make sure Olson�
�s family received death benefits in the form of a pension. Twenty-two years later, after the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, headed by Senator Frank Church, discovered the real nature of Dr. Olson’s death, an act of Congress granted the family $750,000.
Olson’s son had his father’s body exhumed in 1994, after his mother’s death. At that time, forensic studies found that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he went through the window. Olson’s son still firmly believes that his father was killed because Dr. Olson was sickened by the work the SOD was doing for the CIA and was thinking of exposing them. He sought to have U.S. attorneys bring an action, but they declined to pursue the matter.
James Stanley was able to bring a case against the CIA. Stanley was an army sergeant who was a volunteer in an LSD drug trial in 1958, although he was unaware of the nature of the drug given to him. He became uncontrollably violent. He was unable to work and his family life was irrevocably damaged. When he was asked to participate in a follow-up study, he discovered that he had been given LSD, and he filed a lawsuit against the United States. His case was dismissed in a 5–4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The 1987 decision upheld the “Feres Doctrine” that states: