Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

by Mark Lane

  “The United States is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to members of the armed forces sustained while on active duty and not on furlough and resulting from the negligence of others in the armed forces.”

  Both Justice William Brennan and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor referred to the Nuremberg Code in their dissents in United States v. Stanley. Brennan wrote:

  The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects. Its first principle was:

  “1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”

  Brennan continued:

  In the 1950’s, in defiance of this principle, military intelligence agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.

  O’Connor also recalled Nuremberg:

  No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States military played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, post, at 687, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the “voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential … to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts.”

  The Nuremberg Code, created in response to the reckless use of human life in experimentation, not only specifies the need for “voluntary consent” of the subjects; it is quite direct about who is responsible:

  The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

  Stanley Glickman was a young man who was pursuing his dream of being an artist in Paris. One night he met a group of Americans at a café. One of them, a man with a clubfoot whom Glickman later identified as Gottlieb, bought him a drink as a peace offering after an argument. Before he was halfway through the drink, he was having problems with reality. He left the café and found his way home, but he continued to have hallucinations. After two weeks, he went back to the same café, where he collapsed. He was taken to a hospital. There, as Glickman stated in an affidavit, he was given electroshock therapy through a catheter in his penis. He made his way back to America and to his family where he was told by psychiatrists that he was insane. His family set him up in a small apartment in the East Village where he became a mild and ineffectual neighborhood character. He never painted again. When he and his family heard of the CIA’s LSD operation, the family sued the government. Although Glickman died before the trial, his sister pursued it, but she was unsuccessful. The judge, Kimba Wood, dismissed the case.132 It was Gottlieb’s responsibility to make sure that Glickman knew about the experiment, consented to it, and was able to handle it; the court system failed to hold him accountable.

  Glickman may well have been specifically targeted for his unwilling involvement in the LSD experiments. He had been treated for hepatitis at the American hospital in Paris not long before his dosing. He was brought back to that same hospital when he collapsed at the café. There was some documentation in a report by the Swiss published in 1951 that the effects of LSD were exacerbated in people who had suffered from hepatitis. The CIA did its own report on a study on the effects of LSD on hepatics, a study that started in November of 1952, about the same time Glickman entered the hospital after his encounter with the drug.

  Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player, was hospitalized for depression after his divorce in 1953. During his hospitalization, he was given an injection of a “synthetic mescaline derivative.” There is some evidence that his physician sat and watched, taking notes as Blauer’s condition worsened and he finally died. In the subsequent court case, brought by Blauer’s ex-wife in April of 1953, it was discovered that the “mescaline derivative” was supplied by the Army Chemical Corps. The Church Committee Report stated:

  On January 8, 1953, Mr. Harold Blauer died of circulatory collapse and heart failure following an intravenous injection of a synthetic mescaline derivative while a subject of tests conducted by New York State Psychiatric Institute under a contract let by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. The Committee’s investigation into drug testing by U.S. intelligence agencies focused on the testing of LSD, however, the committee did receive a copy of the U.S. Army Inspector General’s Report, issued on October 1975, on the events and circumstances of Mr. Blauer’s death. His death was directly attributable to the administration of the synthetic mescaline derivative.

  Harold Blauer died as a result of experiments done to him by his own doctors, without his knowledge or consent, as a result of a contract between the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, a division of the same Special Operations Division involved in the death of Frank Olson. The program, known as Project Pelican, was a subproject of MKULTRA. Its principal leader was Dr. Paul Hoch, the director of experimental programs for the NYSPI, who became the Commissioner for Mental Hygiene for the State of New York. At the time I strongly opposed the actions of Hoch at the Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives and gained the support of The New York Times and the New York Post in that successful effort. Both newspapers joined me in proving and publishing the facts that demonstrated that the state had committed serious crimes at Wassaic. Under Hoch’s leadership, children were placed in restraining sheets for days, held in solitary confinement, beaten, provided with inadequate food, and denied books, all in violation of the laws of New York State. At least one child was murdered. Since most of the records were destroyed, the results of the union of MKULTRA and the State of New York’s psychiatric institutions remain unknown.

  The scope of the LSD experiments was huge. During the Church Committee hearings it was revealed that “44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities) and three penal institutions” were involved. Ken Kesey, who helped to glorify the drug, was introduced to it by the CIA in one of their studies.

  It is not possible to determine the long-term consequences of the use of the chemicals employed by the CIA upon its subjects. There were no adequate follow-up examinations and in an effort to avoid detection for the crimes they had committed whatever notes that had been made were burned. What is known is that the drugs were used to change the mindset and the minds of the subjects.

  Dr. Henry Murray designed and conducted the “personality” study in which the subject was psychologically brutalized. The Murray procedure began with each person being required to write a personal, intimate essay focusing on his hopes and beliefs. This surprised the young men as they had been informed that they were merely going to debate philosophy with another classmate. The students were then strapped into a chair and connected to electrodes that recorded physiological responses.

  During 1958, one subject was a brilliant young man who had completed high school at the age of fifteen and entered Harvard the next year. At Harvard, Theodore John Kaczynski became a subject of the MKULTRA mind-altering program which took from its subjects the ability to act autonomously and required them to behave in a bizarre manner. Mr. Kaczynski was subjected to three years of that treatment. The initial examination disclosed that he was emotionally stable before being subjected to the “stress interviews.”

  A few years later Ted Kaczynski became known as the Unabomber. He created and planted sixteen bombs over a period of years killing three people and injuring twenty-three before he was arrested. In his manifesto he called for violent actions as the only method to confront a system “which has robbed contemporary humans of their autonomy … and forced them to behave in ways that are increasingly r
emote from the natural pattern of human behavior.”

  If one wonders why Kaczynski, with a grade of 98.9 percent, the highest in his class in a course taught at Harvard by the eminent logician Willard Van Orman Quine, would permit himself to be subjected to what appears to be unscientific torture, the answer may be found in the sterling and unquestioned reputation of men such as Murray and Hoch. It would have been difficult at that time to believe that both men were monsters.

  In 1927 Murray became the assistant director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Later he worked as a lieutenant colonel for the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was the predecessor to the CIA and provided many of its officers to the newly organized group. Murray returned to Harvard in 1947 where he taught for more than thirty years. He founded the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and when he achieved professor emeritus status he was given the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association and the Gold Medal Award for lifetime achievement by the American Psychological Foundation. His colleague Dr. Paul Hoch, a German-educated physician, served on the faculty of the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he directed the “brain research” division at the university. Murray and Hoch both worked for the CIA and both were respected by their peers. In New York, Hoch was responsible for the death of at least one patient, Harold Blauer, through CIA-supported experiments he had not disclosed to the patient and injury to many others. As the director of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene he was responsible for the suffering of thousands of his wards.

  It has become increasingly clear that the criminal mischief the CIA imposed upon its victims may continue to haunt us. Thus far, no one, except for the victims, has been indicted.

  Sidney Gottlieb also contracted with Harold Isbell, the head of the Center for Addiction Research, later the Addiction Research Center (ARC), in Lexington, Kentucky. The Center was on the grounds of a federal prison. Isbell used the patients in the ARC as his personal guinea pigs. He gave them morphine and heroin, and injected them with LSD. In one “experiment,” he injected black heroin addicts with LSD for seventy-seven straight days. Gottlieb believed that African American subjects were more vulnerable to the drug. There is even a record of one mental patient in Kentucky who was given LSD for 174 straight days.133 In some of the tests the subjects were told what was taking place; in most tests the subjects had no idea of what was happening, increasing their terror to the interest and amusement of doctors or assistants.

  Reverend Eugene St. Clair Callender, minister at the Mid-Harlem Community Parish, and I worked together to lessen the impact of heroin addictions upon the community. We opened an informal clinic at his church and raised funds so that those afflicted who wanted more professional treatment could travel to a federal treatment center in Lexington, Kentucky. We were bewildered by the fact that a higher percentage of those who had passed through our unsophisticated clinic remained drug-free than those returning from Lexington.

  Many years later we discovered the brutality of the treatment imposed upon the young men and women who had been used as guinea pigs in experiments at the federal facility that severely harmed them and had no scientific basis. Even efforts to restore them to an acceptable life were made impossible because adequate records were not maintained, and when word of the illegal venture became a subject for congressional review, those documents were destroyed.

  The United States government did act in one respect. United States attorneys and FBI agents visited our open clinic and then threatened Rev. Callender, me, and the nurses and doctors at our church-run clinic with arrest and prosecution and serious professional sanctions for running an unlicensed free clinic. Eventually we were forced to close the clinic to the dismay of many who sought treatment.

  At the same time the United States government, through the actions of the CIA’s MKULTRA program, was permitted, in fact, encouraged, to perform atrocities including murder at a federal facility in Kentucky and a state facility for damaged children in New York.

  Another of Gottlieb’s associates was Major General William Creasy, the chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps. Creasy was a zealous participant in MKULTRA’s testing program, although he was disappointed at the limited scale. Where the inspector general expressed concern about placing “rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy,” Creasy complained that he was unable to “test to see what would happen in subways, for example, when a cloud (of psychochemicals) was laid down on a city.” His experiment was denied, he said, for “reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me.”

  Gottlieb was not just an LSD pusher; he also operated as a pimp for the CIA. Operation Midnight Climax started as a way to further find out how unsuspecting people responded to LSD. An operative, often a drug-addicted prostitute, would go to a bar, pick up a customer, and bring them back to the safehouse. The safehouses were whorehouses established by the CIA under Gottlieb’s direction in New York and San Francisco. Once there, LSD would be administered to the subject. These safehouses were furnished with two-way mirrors and “recording equipment.” Cash transactions of $100, which the CIA admitted were for prostitutes, were found in the records.

  George Hunter White was a former OSS officer working with the narcotics bureau when he was recruited by Gottlieb to set up the safehouses. In his diaries, which his wife donated to the Electronics Museum at Foothill Junior College near San Francisco after his death, White spoke of his work with Gottlieb and the CIA: “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 blessing of the All-Highest?”

  Barbara Smithe was the young wife of one of White’s friends, and attended a party without her husband on one occasion, taking her very young daughter with her. White put some LSD in her drink. Mrs. Smithe left the party, child in tow, about two hours later at the peak of the experience and with no knowledge of what had happened to her. She became terribly depressed, her marriage subsequently crumbled, and she spent the next twenty years in and out of a mental institution. She died in 1978. It was only when her husband heard of the Senate proceedings about MKULTRA that he became aware of what had happened to his wife.

  LSD was not the only substance tested in MKULTRA. The Church Committee stated that “Over the ten-year life of the program, many ‘additional avenues to the control of human behavior’ were designated as appropriate for investigation under the MKULTRA charter. These include radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.”

  Although Gottlieb had hundreds of test subjects throughout the United States through contracts with colleges and various medical institutions, he also found a way to expand the program into Canada through Donald Ewen Cameron, a distinguished psychiatrist at the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University in Quebec. Dr. Cameron served as the president of the World Psychiatric Association and also as the president of the American and the Canadian Psychiatric Associations. Dr. Cameron had a theory that it was possible to clear the mind of all memories and start with a bank slate, thereby curing any mental illness. He called it the “psychic driving concept.”

  Gottlieb and the CIA found Dr. Cameron’s concept quite compelling. They were looking for ways to get enemy spies to talk, and Cameron’s work looked promising. Gottlieb, through Cameron, had found a method of psychological torture that could be very effective in extracting information. The Canadian government funded Cameron’s experiments while the CIA helped Cameron use potentially harmful, even lethal, pharmaceuticals on the citizens of one of the United States’ allies.

  Cameron’s method was to put the patient into a drug-induced stupor, although sometimes he would go too far and the patient would go into a coma. He would then waken his subjects two or three times a day and blast them with multiple electric shocks, sometimes using as much as thirty to forty times the acce
pted power. He experimented with keeping his test subjects asleep for weeks and then used either electricity or drugs, among them LSD and PCP, to clean their brains. He used these techniques on hundreds of patients, most of whom had come to him for help for minor complaints.

  Gail Kastner was nineteen years old, an honors student, when she went to the Allen Memorial Institute for mild depression. She was put into comas using insulin, among other drugs, and then given multiple electric shocks. At the end of her treatment, she sucked her thumb and used the floor instead of the toilet. Her family would no longer have anything to do with her and she languished in poverty.

  In 2004, a landmark decision by a federal court judge in Montreal awarded Ms. Kastner, then seventy, compensation. She was awarded $100,000 for the total loss of a promising life. Although the award was insufficient, the decision did open the door for hundreds of others who had been Cameron’s guinea pigs to sue the government. The Canadian government was kinder than our own to Gottlieb’s victims.

  When Sidney Gottlieb ordered the destruction of the MKULTRA records in 1973, he left behind a wealth of information existing in the human beings involved in the program. But we only see glimpses of a terrifying reality that will remain for the most part unknown. We do know that Sidney Gottlieb authorized the destruction of the lives of innumerable American citizens, as well as the citizens of other countries. In 1972 he described his work as useless. The CIA did not share his opinion; the agency awarded Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

  After his resignation from the TSD, Gottlieb said he devoted his life to good works, spending years looking for atonement. He worked for a time in a leper colony in India, and the last years of his life were spent working with dying patients in a hospice. I would like to believe that as he again surrounded himself with powerless and vulnerable people, it was for pure reasons. Clearly if his conscience wakened it was too late to help many thousands of his victims. Neither he nor any other person involved in the torture or murder of the victims has ever been prosecuted by our government.