THE SEARCH FOR THE
"MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE"
THE CIA AND MIND CONTROL
John Marks
Allen Lane

Allen Lane
Penguin Books Ltd
17 Grosvenor Gardens
London SW1 OBD
First published in the U.S.A. by Times Books, a division of
Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., Inc., and
simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd, 1979
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1979
Copyright <£> John Marks, 1979
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
ISBN 07139 12790	jj
Printed in Great Britain by	f
Thomson Litho Ltd, East Kilbride, Scotland	J

For Barbara and Daniel

AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book has grown out of the 16,000 pages of documents that
the CIA released to me under the Freedom of Information Act.
Without these documents, the best investigative reporting in
the world could not have produced a book, and the secrets of
CIA mind-control work would have remained buried forever,
as the men who knew them had always intended. From the
documentary base, I was able to expand my knowledge through
interviews and readings in the behavioral sciences. Neverthe-
less, the final result is not the whole story of the CIA's attack on
the mind. Only a few insiders could have written that, and they
choose to remain silent. I have done the best I can to make the
book as accurate as possible, but I have been hampered by the
refusal of most of the principal characters to be interviewed
and by the CIA's destruction in 1973 of many of the key docu-
ments.
I want to extend special thanks to the congressional sponsors
of the Freedom of Information Act. I would like to think that
they had my kind of research in mind when they passed into
law the idea that information about the government belongs to
the people, not to the bureaucrats. I am also grateful to the CIA
officials who made what must have been a rather unpleasant
decision to release the documents and to those in the Agency
who worked on the actual mechanics of release. From my point
of view, the system has worked extremely well.
I must acknowledge that the system worked almost not at all
during the first six months of my three-year Freedom of Infor-

matlon Struggle. Then in late 1975, Joseph Petrilloand Timothy
Sullivan, two skilled and energetic lawyers with the firm of
Fried, Frank, Shriver, Harris and Kampelman, entered the
case. I had the distinct impression that the government attor-
neys took me much more seriously when my requests for docu-
ments started arriving on stationery with all those prominent
partners at the top. An author should not need lawyers to write
a book, but I would have had great difficulty without mine. I
greatly appreciate their assistance.
What an author does need is editors, a publisher, researchers,
consultants, and friends, and I have been particularly blessed
with good ones. My very dear friend Taylor Branch edited the
book, and I continue to be impressed with his great skill in
making my ideas and language coherent. Taylor has also
served as my agent, and in this capacity, too, he has done me
great service.
I had a wonderful research team, without which I never
could have sifted through the masses of material and run down
leads in so many places. I thank them all, and I want to ac-
knowledge their contributions. Diane St. Clair was the main-
stay of the group. She put together a system for filing and cross-
indexing that worked beyond all expectations. (Special thanks
to Newsday's Bob Greene, whose suggestions for organizing a
large investigation came to us through the auspices of Investi-
gative Reporters and Editors, Inc.) Not until a week before the
book was finally finished did I fail to find a document which I
needed; naturally, it was something I had misfiled myself.
Diane also contributed greatly to the Cold War chapter. Rich-
ard Sokolow made similar contributions to the Mushroom and
Safehouse chapters. His work was solid, and his energy bound-
less. Jay Peterzell delved deeply into Dr. Cameron's "depattern-
ing" work in Montreal and stayed with it when others might
have quit. Jay also did first-rate studies of brainwashing and
sensory deprivation. Jim Mintz and Ken Cummins provided
excellent assistance in the early research stage.
The Center for National Security Studies, under my good
friend Robert Borosage, provided physical support and re-
search aid, and I would like to express my appreciation. My
thanks also to Morton Halperin who continued the support
when he became director of the Center. I also appreciated the
help of Penny Bevis, Hannah Delaney, Florence Oliver, Aldora
Whitman, Nick Fiore, and Monica Andres.

AUTHOR'S NOTE  
My sister, Dr. Patricia Greenfield, did excellent work on (he
CIA's interface with academia and on the Personality Assess-
ment System. I want to acknowledge her contribution to the
book and express my thanks and love.
There has been a whole galaxy of people who have provided
specialized help, and I would like to thank them all. Jeff Kohan,
Eddie Becker, Sam Zuckerman, Matthew Messelson, Julian
Robinson, Milton Kline, Marty Lee, M. J. Conklin, Alan Sche-
flin, Bonnie Goldstein, Paul Avery, Bill Mills, John Lilly, Hum-
phrey Osmond, Julie Haggerty, Patrick Oster, Norman
Kempster, Bill Richards, Paul Magnusson, Andy Sommer,
Mark Cheshire, Sidney Cohen, Paul Altmeyer, Fred and Elsa
Kleiner, Dr. John Cavanagh, and Senator James Abourezk and
his staff.
I sent drafts of the first ten chapters to many of the people I
interviewed (and several who refused to be interviewed). My
aim was to have them correct any inaccuracies or point out
material taken out of context. The comments of those who re-
sponded aided me considerably in preparing the final book. My
thanks for their assistance to Albert Hofmann, Telford Taylor,
Leo Alexander, Walter Langer, John Stockwell, William Hood,
Samuel Thompson, Sidney Cohen, Milton Greenblatt, Gordon
Wasson, James Moore, Laurence Hinkle, Charles Osgood, John
Gittinger (for Chapter 10 only), and all the others who asked not
to be identified.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my pub-
lisher, Times Books, and especially to my editor John J. Simon.
John, Tom Lipscomb, Roger Jellinek, Gyorgyi Voros, and John
Gallagher all believed in this book from the beginning and
provided outstanding support. Thanks also go to Judith H.
McQuown, who copyedited the manuscript, and Rosalyn T.
Badalamenti, Times Books' Production Editor, who oversaw
the whole production process.
John Marks
Washington, D.C.
October 26, 1978

CONTENTS
part I   ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL	RESEARCH
1.	WORLD WAR II	3
2.	COLD WAR ON THE MIND	21
3.	THE PROFESSOR AND THE "a" TREATMENT	34
part ii   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
4.	lsd	53
5.	CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON	73
6.	THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES	87
7.	MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE	105
part iii   SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
8.	BRAINWASHING	125
9.	HUMAN ECOLOGY	147

10.	THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM	164
11.	HYPNOSIS	182
xi

xii    CONTENTS
part iv   CONCLUSIONS
12.  THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH	195
NOTES	215
INDEX	231

THE SEARCH FOR THE
"MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE"

PART
i
ORIGINS OF
MIND-CONTROL
RESEARCH
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite.	—william blake.
It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the
shade rubbing red pepper in a poor devil's
eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up
evidence.	—sir james stephens, 1883.
If both the past and the external world
exist only in the mind, and if the mind it-
self is controllable—what then?
—GEORGE ORWELL IN 1984.

1
CHAPTER
WORLD WAR II

On the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland, overlooking the Rhine,
lies the worldwide headquarters of the Sandoz drug and chemi-
cal empire. There, on the afternoon of April 16, 1943, Dr. Albert
Hofmann made an extraordinary discovery—by accident.
At 37, with close-cropped hair and rimless glasses, Hofmann
headed the company's research program to develop marketa-
ble drugs out of natural products. He was hard at work in his
laboratory that warm April day when a wave of dizziness sud-
denly overcame him. The strange sensation was not unpleas-
ant, and Hofmann felt almost as though he were drunk.
But he became quite restless. His nerves seemed to run off in
different directions. The inebriation was unlike anything he
had ever known before. Leaving work early, Hofmann
managed a wobbly bicycle-ride home. He lay down and closed
his eyes, still unable to shake the dizziness. Now the light of day
was disagreeably bright. With the external world shut out, his
mind raced along. He experienced what he would later de-
scribe as "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of ex-
traordinary plasticity and vividness. . . . accompanied by an
intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors."
These visions subsided after a few hours, and Hofmann, ever
the inquiring scientist, set out to find what caused them. He
presumed he had somehow ingested one of the drugs with
which he had been working that day, and his prime suspect
was d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, a substance that he
himself had first produced in the same lab five years earlier. As

4    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
part of his search for a circulation stimulant, Hofmann had
been examining derivatives of ergot, a fungus that attacks rye.
Ergot had a mysterious, contradictory reputation. In China
and some Arab countries, it was thought to have medicinal
powers, but in Europe it was associated with the horrible mal-
ady from the Middle Ages called St. Anthony's Fire, which
struck periodically like the plague. The disease turned fingers
and toes into blackened stumps and led to madness and death.
Hofmann guessed that he had absorbed some ergot deriva-
tive through his skin, perhaps while changing the filter paper
in a suction bottle. To test his theory, he spent three days mak-
ing up a fresh batch of LSD. Cautiously he swallowed 250 mi-
crograms (less than 1/100,000 of an ounce). Hofmann planned
to take more gradually through the day to obtain a result, since
no known drug had any effect on the human body in such
infinitesimal amounts. He had no way of knowing that because
of LSD's potency, he had already taken several times what
would later be termed an ordinary dose. Unexpectedly, this first
speck of LSD took hold after about 40 minutes, and Hofmann
was off on the first self-induced "trip" of modern times.*
Hofmann recalls he felt "horrific ... I was afraid. I feared I
was becoming crazy. I had the idea I was out of my body. I
thought I had died. I did not know how it would finish. If you
know you will come back from this very strange world, only
then can you enjoy it." Of course, Hofmann had no way of
knowing that he would return. While he had quickly recovered
from his accidental trip three days earlier, he did not know how
much LSD had caused it or whether the present dose was more
than his body could detoxify. His mind kept veering off into an
unknown dimension, but he was unable to appreciate much
beyond his own terror.
Less than 200 miles from Hofmann's laboratory, doctors con-
nected to the S.S. and Gestapo were doing experiments that led
to the testing of mescaline (a drug which has many of the
mind-changing qualities of LSD) on prisoners at Dachau. Ger-
many's secret policemen had the notion, completely alien to
Hofmann, that they could use drugs like mescaline to bring
unwilling people under their control. According to research
'While Hofmann specifically used the word "trip" in a 1977 interview to de-
scribe his consciousness-altering experience, the word obviously had no such
meaning in 1943 and is used here anachronistically.

WORLD WAR II   5
team member Walter Neff, the goal of the Dachau experiments
was "to eliminate the will of the person examined."
At Dachau, Nazis took the search for scientific knowledge of
military value to its most awful extreme. There, in a closely
guarded, fenced-off part of the camp, S.S. doctors studied such
questions as the amount of time a downed airman could sur-
vive in the North Atlantic in February. Information of this sort
was considered important to German security, since skilled
pilots were in relatively short supply. So, at Heinrich
Himmler's personal order, the doctors at Dachau simply sat by
huge tubs of ice water with stopwatches and timed how long it
took immersed prisoners to die. In other experiments, under
the cover of "aviation medicine," inmates were crushed to
death in high-altitude pressure chambers (to learn how high
pilots could safely fly), and prisoners were shot, so that special
blood coagulants could be tested on their wounds.
The mescaline tests at Dachau run by Dr. Kurt Plotner were
not nearly so lethal as the others in the "aviation" series, but
the drug could still cause grave damage, particularly to anyone
who already had some degree of mental instability. The danger
was increased by the fact that the mescaline was administered
covertly by S.S. men who spiked the prisoners' drinks. Unlike
Dr. Hofmann, the subjects had no idea that a drug was causing
their extreme disorientation. Many must have feared they had
gone stark mad all on their own. Always, the subjects of these
experiments were Jews, gypsies, Russians, and other groups on
whose lives the Nazis placed little or no value. In no way were
any of them true volunteers, although some may have come
forward under the delusion that they would receive better
treatment.
After the war, Neff told American investigators that the sub-
jects showed a wide variety of reactions. Some became furious;
others were melancholy or gay, as if they were drunk. Not
surprisingly, "sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed
in every case." Neff noted that the drug caused certain people
to reveal their "most intimate secrets." Still, the Germans were
not ready to accept mescaline as a substitute for their more
physical methods of interrogation. They went on to try hypno-
sis in combination with the drug, but they apparently never felt
confident that they had found a way to assume command of
their victim's mind.
Even as the S.S. doctors were carrying on their experiments

6    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
at Dachau, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's
wartime intelligence agency, set up a "truth drug" committee
under Dr. Winfred Overholser, head of St. Elizabeth's Hospital
in Washington. The committee quickly tried and rejected mes-
caline, several barbiturates, and scopolamine. Then, during
the spring of 1943, the committee decided that cannabis indica
—or marijuana—showed the most promise, and it started a
testing program in cooperation with the Manhattan Project,
the TOP SECRET effort to build an atomic bomb. It is not clear
why OSS turned to the bomb makers for help, except that, as
one former Project official puts it, "Our secret was so great, I
guess we were safer than anyone else." Apparently, top Project
leaders, who went to incredible lengths to preserve security,
saw no danger in trying out drugs on their personnel.
The Manhattan Project supplied the first dozen test subjects,
who were asked to swallow a concentrated, liquid form of mari-
juana that an American pharmaceutical company furnished in
small glass vials. A Project man who was present recalls: "It
didn't work the way we wanted. Apparently the human system
would not take it all at once orally. The subjects would lean
over and vomit." What is more, they disclosed no secrets, and
one subject wound up in the hospital.
Back to the drawing board went the OSS experts. They de-
cided that the best way to administer the marijuana was inha-
lation of its fumes. Attempts were made to pour the solution on
burning charcoal, and an OSS officer named George White
(who had already succeeded in knocking himself out with an
overdose of the relatively potent substance) tried out the vapor,
without sufficient effect, at St. Elizabeth's. Finally, the OSS
group discovered a delivery system which had been known for
years to jazz musicians and other users: the cigarette. OSS
documents reported that smoking a mix of tobacco and the
marijuana essence brought on a "state of irresponsibility, caus-
ing the subject to be loquacious and free in his impartation of
information."
The first field test of these marijuana-laced cigarettes took
place on May 27,1943. The subject was one August Del Gracio,
who was described in OSS documents as a "notorious New York
gangster."* George White, an Army captain who had come to
•Del Grade's name was deleted by the CIA from the OSS document that de-
scribed the incident, but his Identity was learned from the papers of George

WORLD WAR II    7
OSS from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, administered the
drug by inviting Del Gracio up to his apartment for a smoke
and a chat. White had been talking to Del Gracio earlier about
securing the Mafia's cooperation to keep Axis agents out of the
New York waterfront and to prepare the way for the invasion
of Sicily.*
Del Gracio had already made it clear to White that he person-
ally had taken part in killing informers who had squealed to
the Feds. The gangster was as tough as they came, and if he
could be induced to talk under the influence of a truth drug,
certainly German prisoners could—or so the reasoning went.
White plied him with cigarettes until "subject became high
and extremely garrulous." Over the next two hours, Del Gracio
told the Federal agent about the ins and outs of the drug trade
(revealing information so sensitive that the CIA deleted it from
the OSS documents it released 34 years later). At one point in
the conversation, after Del Gracio had begun to talk, the gang-
ster told White, "Whatever you do, don't ever use any of the stuff
I'm telling you." In a subsequent session, White packed the
cigarettes with so much marijuana that Del Gracio became
unconscious for about an hour. Yet, on the whole the experi-
ment was considered a success in "loosening the subject's
tongue."
While members of the truth-drug committee never believed
that the concentrated marijuana could compel a person to con-
fess his deepest secrets, they authorized White to push ahead
with the testing. On the next stage, he and a Manhattan Project
counterintelligence man borrowed 15 to 18 thick dossiers from
the FBI and went off to try the marijuana on suspected Commu-
nist soldiers stationed in military camps outside Atlanta, Mem-
phis, and New Orleans. According to White's Manhattan Pro-
ject sidekick, a Harvard Law graduate and future judge, they
worked out a standard interrogation technique:
White, whose widow donated them to Foothills College in Los Altos, California.
CIA officials cut virtually all the names from the roughly 16,000 pages of its
own papers and the few score pages from OSS that it released to me under the
Freedom of Information Act. However, as in this case, many of the names could
be found through collateral sources.
'Naval intelligence officers eventually made a deal in which mob leaders pro-
mised to cooperate, and as a direct result, New York Governor Thomas Dewey
ordered Del Gracio's chief, boss of bosses, Charles "Lucky" Luciano freed from
jail in 1946.

8    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
Before we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes, remove
them from the bottom of the pack, use a hypodermic needle to
put in the fluid, and leave the cigarettes in a shot glass to dry.
Then, we resealed the pack. . . . We sat down with a particular
soldier and tried to win his confidence. We would say something
like "This is better than being overseas and getting shot at," and
we would try to break them. We started asking questions from
their [FBI] folder, and we would let them see that we had the
folder on them ... We had a pitcher of ice water on the table, and
we knew the drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass.
The stuff actually worked. . . . Everyone but one—and he didn't
smoke—gave us more information than we had before.
The Manhattan Project lawyer remembers this swing
through the South with George White as a "good time." The two
men ate in the best restaurants and took in all the sights.
"George was quite a guy," he says. "At the Roosevelt Hotel in
New Orleans after we had interviewed our men, we were lying
on the beds when George took out his pistol and shot his initials
into the molding that ran along the ceiling. He used his .22
automatic, equipped with a silencer, and he emptied several
clips." Asked if he tried out the truth drug himself, the lawyer
says, "Yes. The cigarettes gave you a feeling of walking a cou-
ple of feet off the floor. I had a pleasant sensation of well-being.
. . . The fellows from my office wouldn't take a cigarette from
me for the rest of the war."
Since World War II, the United States government, led by the
Central Intelligence Agency, has searched secretly for ways to
control human behavior. This book is about that search, which
had its origins in World War II. The CIA programs were not
only an extension of the OSS quest for a truth drug, but they
also echoed such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau
and Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD.
By probing the inner reaches of consciousness, Hofmann's
research took him to the very frontiers of knowledge. As never
before in history, the warring powers sought ideas from scien-
tists capable of reaching those frontiers—ideas that could
make the difference between victory and defeat. While Hof-
mann himself remained aloof, in the Swiss tradition, other
scientists, like Albert Einstein, helped turned the abstractions
of the laboratory into incredibly destructive weapons. Jules
Verne's notions of spaceships touching the moon stopped being

WORLD WAR II    9
absurd when Wernher von Braun's rockets started pounding
London. With their creations, the scientists reached beyond the
speculations of science fiction. Never before had their discover-
ies been so breathtaking and so frightening. Albert Hofmann's
work touched upon the fantasies of the mind—accessible, in
ancient legends, to witches and wizards who used spells and
potions to bring people under their sway. In the early scientific
age, the dream of controlling the brain took on a modern form
in Mary Shelley's creation, Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The
dream would be updated again during the Cold War era to
become the Manchurian Candidate, the assassin whose mind
was controlled by a hostile government.* Who could say for
certain that such a fantasy would not be turned into a reality,
like Verne's rocket stories or Einstein's calculations? And who
should be surprised to learn that government agencies—spe-
cifically the CIA—would swoop down on Albert Hofmann's lab
in an effort to harness the power over the mind that LSD
seemed to hold?
From the Dachau experiments came the cruelty that man
was capable of heaping upon his fellows in the name of ad-
vancing science and helping his country gain advantage in
war. To say that the Dachau experiments are object lessons of
how far people can stretch ends to justify means is to belittle
by cliche what occurred in the concentration camps. Nothing
the CIA ever did in its postwar search for mind-control technol-
ogy came close to the callous killing of the Nazi "aviation re-
search." Nevertheless, in their attempts to find ways to manip-
ulate people, Agency officials and their agents crossed many of
the same ethical barriers. They experimented with dangerous
"The term "Manchurian Candidate" came into the language in 1959 when
author Richard Condon made it the title of his best-selling novel that later
became a popular movie starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. The
story was about a joint Soviet-Chinese plot to take an American soldier cap-
tured in Korea, condition him at a special brainwashing center located in
Manchuria, and create a remote-controlled assassin who was supposed to kill
the President of the United States. Condon consulted with a wide variety of
experts while researching the book, and some inside sources may well have
filled him in on the gist of a discussion that took place at a 1953 meeting at the
CIA on behavior control. Said one participant, ". . . individuals who had come
out of North Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom recently apparently had
a blank period of disorientation while passing through a special zone in Man-
churia." The CIA and military men at this session promised to seek more
information, but the matter never came up again in either the documents
released by the Agency or in the interviews done for this book.

10    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
and unknown techniques on people who had no idea what was
happening. They systematically violated the free will and men-
tal dignity of their subjects, and, like the Germans, they chose
to victimize special groups of people whose existence they con-
sidered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than
their own. Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA
sponsors picked for subjects their own equivalents of the Nazis'
Jews and gypsies: mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug
addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic groups.
In the postwar era, American officials straddled the ethical
and the cutthroat approaches to scientific research. After an
Allied tribunal had convicted the first echelon of surviving
Nazi war criminals—the Gorings and Speers—American
prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with "crimes against
humanity" at a second Nuremberg trial. None of the German
scientists expressed remorse. Most claimed that someone else
had carried out the vilest experiments. All said that issues of
moral and personal responsibility are moot in state-sponsored
research. What is critical, testified Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's
personal physician, is "whether the experiment is important or
unimportant." Asked his attitude toward killing human beings
in the course of medical research, Brandt replied, "Do you
think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results
without a definite toll of lives?" The judges at Nuremberg re-
jected such defenses and put forth what came to be known as
the Nuremberg Code on scientific research.* Its main points
were simple: Researchers must obtain full voluntary consent
from all subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for
the good of society that can be obtained in no other way; re-
searchers should not conduct tests where death or serious in-
jury might occur, "except, perhaps" when the supervising doc-
tors also serve as subjects. The judges—all Americans—
sentenced seven of the Germans, including Dr. Brandt, to death
by hanging. Nine others received long prison sentences. Thus,
the U.S. government put its full moral force behind the idea
that there were limits on what scientists could do to human
subjects, even when a country's security was thought to hang
in the balance.
The Nuremberg Code has remained official American pol-
*The Code was suggested in essentially its final form by prosecution team
consultant, I)r Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist.

WORLD WAR II   11
icy ever since 1946, but, even before the verdicts were in,
special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the ex-
perimental records at Dachau for information of military
value. The report of one such team found that while part of
the data was "inaccurate," some of the conclusions, if
confirmed, would be "an important complement to existing
knowledge." Military authorities sent the records, including
a description of the mescaline and hypnosis experiments,
back to the United States. None of the German mind-control
research was ever made public.
Immediately after the war, large political currents began to
shift in the world, as they always do. Allies became enemies
and enemies became allies. Other changes were fresh and yet
old. In the United States, the new Cold War against commu-
nism carried with it a piercing sense of fear and a sweeping
sense of mission—at least as far as American leaders were con-
cerned. Out of these feelings and out of that overriding Ameri-
can faith in advancing technology came the CIA's attempts to
tame hostile minds and make spy fantasies real. Experiments
went forward and the CIA's scientists—bitten, sometimes ob-
sessed—kept going back to their laboratories for one last adjust-
ment. Some theories were crushed, while others emerged in
unexpected ways that would have a greater impact outside the
CIA than in the world of covert operations. Only one aspect
remained constant during the quarter-century of active re-
search: The CIA's interest in controlling the human mind had
to remain absolutely secret.
World War II provided more than the grand themes of the
CIA's behavioral programs. It also became the formative life
experience of the principal CIA officials, and, indeed, of the
CIA itself as an institution. The secret derring-do of the OSS
was new to the United States, and the ways of the OSS would
grow into the ways of the CIA. OSS leaders would have their
counterparts later in the Agency. CIA officials tended to have
known the OSS men, to think like them, to copy their methods,
and even, in some cases, to be the same people. When Agency
officials wanted to launch their massive effort for mind control,
for instance, they got out the old OSS documents and went
about their goal in many of the same ways the OSS had. OSS
leaders enlisted outside scientists; Agency officials also went to
the most prestigious ones in academia and industry, soliciting
aid for the good of the country. They even approached the same

12    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
George White who had shot his initials in the hotel ceiling
while on OSS assignment.
Years later, White's escapades with OSS and CIA would carry
with them a humor clearly unintended at the time. To those
directly involved, influencing human behavior was a deadly
serious business, but qualities like bumbling and pure crazi-
ness shine through in hindsight. In the CIA's campaign, some
of America's most distinguished behavioral scientists would
stick all kinds of drugs and wires into their experimental sub-
jects—often dismissing the obviously harmful effects with
theories reminiscent of the learned nineteenth-century physi-
cians who bled their patients with leeches and belittled the
ignorance of anyone who questioned the technique. If the
schemes of these scientists to control the mind had met with
more success, they would be much less amusing. But so far, at
least, the human spirit has apparently kept winning. That—if
anything—is the saving grace of the mind-control campaign.
World War II signaled the end of American isolation and inno-
cence, and the United States found it had a huge gap to close,
with its enemies and allies alike, in applying underhanded
tactics to war. Unlike Britain, which for hundreds of years had
used covert operations to hold her empire together, the United
States had no tradition of using subversion as a secret instru-
ment of government policy. The Germans, the French, the Rus-
sians, and nearly everyone else had long been involved in this
game, although no one seemed as good at it as the British.
Clandestine lobbying by British agents in the United States
led directly to President Franklin Roosevelt's creation of the
organization that became OSS in 1942. This was the first
American agency set up to wage secret, unlimited war. Roose-
velt placed it under the command of a Wall Street lawyer and
World War I military hero, General William "Wild Bill" Dono-
van. A burly, vigorous Republican millionaire with great intel-
lectual curiosity, Donovan started as White House intelligence
adviser even before Pearl Harbor, and he had direct access to
the President.
Learning at the feet of the British who made available their
expertise, if not all their secrets, Donovan put together an orga-
nization where nothing had existed before. A Columbia College
and Columbia Law graduate himself, he tended to turn to the
gentlemanly preserves of the Eastern establishment for re-

WORLD WAR II    13
cruits. (The initials OSS were said to stand for "Oh So Social.")
Friends—or friends of friends—could be trusted. "Old boys"
were the stalwarts of the British secret service, and, as with
most other aspects of OSS, the Americans followed suit.
One of Donovan's new recruits was Richard Helms, a young
newspaper executive then best known for having gained an
interview with Adolf Hitler in 1936 while working for United
Press. Having gone to Le Rosey, the same Swiss prep school as
the Shah of Iran, and then on to clubby Williams College,
Helms moved easily among the young OSS men. He was al-
ready more taciturn than the jovial Donovan, but he was
equally ambitious and skilled as a judge of character. For
Helms, OSS spywork began a lifelong career. He would become
the most important sponsor of mind-control research within
the CIA, nurturing and promoting it throughout his steady
climb to the top position in the Agency.
Like every major wartime official from President Roosevelt
down, General Donovan believed that World War II was in
large measure a battle of science and organization. The idea
was to mobilize science for defense, and the Roosevelt adminis-
tration set up a costly, intertwining network of research pro-
grams to deal with everything from splitting the atom to pre-
venting mental breakdowns in combat. Donovan named Boston
industrialist Stanley Lovell to head OSS Research and Develop-
ment and to be the secret agency's liaison with the government
scientific community.
A Cornell graduate and a self-described "saucepan chemist,"
Lovell was a confident energetic man with a particular knack
for coming up with offbeat ideas and selling them to others.
Like most of his generation, he was an outspoken patriot. He
wrote in his diary shortly after Pearl Harbor: "As James Hilton
said, 'Once at war, to reason is treason.' My job is clear—to do
all that is in me to help America."
General Donovan minced no words in laying out what he
expected of Lovell: "I need every subtle device and every un-
derhanded trick to use against the Germans and Japanese—
by our own people—but especially by the underground re-
sistance programs in all the occupied countries. You'll have
to invent them all, Lovell, because you're going to be my
man." Thus Lovell recalled his marching orders from Dono-
van, which he instantly received on being introduced to the
blustery, hyperactive OSS chief. Lovell had never met any-

14    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
one with Donovan's personal magnetism.
Lovell quickly turned to some of the leading lights in the
academic and private sectors. A special group—called Division
19—within James Conant's National Defense Research Com-
mittee was set up to produce "miscellaneous weapons" for OSS
and British intelligence. Lovell's strategy, he later wrote, was
"to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every
American scientist and to say to him, Throw all your normal
law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise
merry hell.1"
Dr. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist who worked
on explosives research during the war (and who became sci-
ence adviser to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy) remem-
bers Stanley Lovell well: "Stan came to us and asked us to
develop ways for camouflaging explosives which could be
smuggled into enemy countries." Kistiakowsky and an associ-
ate came up with a substance which was dubbed "Aunt
Jemima" because it looked and tasted like pancake mix. Says
Kistiakowsky: "You could bake bread or other things out of it.
I personally took it to a high-level meeting at the War Depart-
ment and ate cookies in front of all those characters to show
them what a wonderful invention it was. All you had to do was
attach a powerful detonator, and it exploded with the force of
dynamite." Thus disguised, "Aunt Jemima" could be slipped
into occupied lands. It was credited with blowing up at least
one major bridge in China.
Lovell encouraged OSS behavioral scientists to find some-
thing that would offend Japanese cultural sensibilities. His
staff anthropologists reported back that nothing was so shame-
ful to the Japanese soldier as his bowel movements. Lovell then
had the chemists work up a skatole compound which du-
plicated the odor of diarrhea. It was loaded into collapsible
tubes, flown to China, and distributed to children in enemy-
occupied cities. When a Japanese officer appeared on a
crowded street, the kids were encouraged to slip up behind him
and squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. Lovell named the
product "Who? Me?" and he credited it with costing the Japa-
nese "face."
Unlike most weapons, "Who? Me?" was not designed  to kill or maim. It was a "harassment substance" designed to lower the morale of individual Japanese. The inspiration came from academicians who tried to make a science of human behavior.

WORLD WAR II   15
During World War II, the behavioral sciences were still very
much in their infancy, but OSS—well before most of the outside
world—recognized their potential in warfare. Psychology and
psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology all seemed to offer in-
sights that could be exploited to manipulate the enemy.
General Donovan himself believed that the techniques of
psychoanalysis might be turned on Adolf Hitler to get a better
idea of "the things that made him tick," as Donovan put it.
Donovan gave the job of being the Fuhrer's analyst to Walter
Langer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts psychoanalyst whose
older brother William had taken leave from a chair of history
at Harvard to head OSS Research and Analysis.* Langer pro-
tested that a study of Hitler based on available data would be
highly uncertain and that conventional psychiatric and psy-
choanalytic methods could not be used without direct access to
the patient. Donovan was not the sort to be deterred by such
details. He told Langer to go ahead anyway.
With the help of a small research staff, Langer looked
through everything he could find on Hitler and interviewed a
number of people who had known the German leader. Aware of
the severe limitations on his information, but left no choice by
General Donovan, Langer plowed ahead and wrote up a final
study. It pegged Hitler as a "neurotic psychopath" and pro-
ceeded to pick apart the Fuhrer's psyche. Langer, since retired
to Florida, believes he came "pretty close" to describing the real
Adolf Hitler. He is particularly proud of his predictions that the
Nazi leader would become increasingly disturbed as Germany
suffered more and more defeats and that he would commit
suicide rather than face capture.
One reason for psychoanalyzing Hitler was to uncover vul-
nerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Stanley Lovell
seized upon one of Langer's ideas—that Hitler might have fem-
inine tendencies—and got permission from the OSS hierarchy
to see if he could push the Fuhrer over the gender line. "The
'Four months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan had enlisted Walter Langer to put
together a nationwide network of analysts to study the morale of the country's
young men, who, it was widely feared, were not enthusiastic about fighting a
foreign war. Pearl Harbor seemed to solve this morale problem, but Langer
stayed with Donovan as a part-time psychoanalytic consultant.
tLanger wrote that Hitler was "masochistic in the extreme inasmuch as he
derives sexual pleasure from punishment inflicted on his own body. There Is
every reason to suppose that during his early years, instead of identifying
himself with his father as most boys do, he identified with his mother. This was

16    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice be-
come soprano," Lovell wrote. Lovell used OSS's agent network
to try to slip female sex hormones into Hitler's food, but nothing
apparently came of it. Nor was there ever any payoff to other
Lovell schemes to blind Hitler permanently with mustard gas
or to use a drug to exacerbate his suspected epilepsy. The main
problem in these operations—all of which were tried—was to
get Hitler to take the medicine. Failure of the delivery schemes
also kept Hitler alive—OSS was simultaneously trying  to poison him.*
Without question, murdering a man was a decisive way to
influence his behavior, and OSS scientists developed an arsenal
of chemical and biological poisons that included the incredibly
potent botulinus toxin, whose delivery system was a gelatin
capsule smaller than the head of a pin. Lovell and his associ-
ates also realized there were less drastic ways to manipulate an
enemy's behavior, and they came up with a line of products to
cause sickness, itching, baldness, diarrhea, and/or the odor
thereof. They had less success finding a drug to compel truth-
telling, but it was not for lack of trying.
Chemical and biological substances had been used in war-
time long before OSS came on the scene. Both sides had used
poison gas in World War I; during the early part of World War
II, the Japanese had dropped deadly germs on China and
caused epidemics; and throughout the war, the Allies and Axis
powers alike had built up chemical and biological warfare
(CBW) stockpiles, whose main function turned out, in the end,
to be deterring the other side. Military men tended to look on
CBW as a way of destroying whole armies and even popula-
tions. Like the world's other secret services, OSS individualized
perhaps easier for him than for most boys since, as we have seen, there is a
large feminine component in his physical makeup.... His extreme sentimen-
tality, his emotionality, his occasional softness, and his weeping, even after he
became Chancellor, may be regarded as manifestations of a fundamental pat-
tern that undoubtedly had its origin in his relationship to his mother."
'Although historians have long known that OSS men had been in touch with
the German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, the fact that OSS
independently was trying to murder him has eluded scholars of the period.
Stanley Lovell gave away the secret in his 1963 book, Of Spies and Strategems,
but he used such casual and obscure words that the researchers apparently did
not notice. Lovell wrote: "I supplied now and then a carbamate or other quietus
medication, all to be injected into der Fuhrer's carrots, beets, or whatever." A
"quietus medicine" is a generic term for a lethal poison, of which carbamates
are one type.

WORLD WAR II   17
CBW and made it into a way of selectively but secretly embar-
rassing, disorienting, incapacitating, injuring, or killing an
enemy.
As diversified as were Lovell's scientific duties for OSS, they
were narrow in comparison with those of his main counterpart
in the CIA's postwar mind-control program, Dr. Sidney Gott-
lieb. Gottlieb would preside over investigations that ranged
from advanced research in amnesia by electroshock to dragnet
searches through the jungles of Latin America for toxic leaves
and barks. Fully in the tradition of making Hitler moustache-
less, Gottlieb's office would devise a scheme to make Fidel Cas-
tro's beard fall out; like Lovell, Gottlieb would personally pro-
vide operators with deadly poisons to assassinate foreign
leaders like the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and he would be
equally at ease discussing possible applications of new re-
search in neurology. On a much greater scale than Lovell's,
Gottlieb would track down every conceivable gimmick that
might give one person leverage over another's mind. Gottlieb
would preside over arcane fields from handwriting analysis to
stress creation, and he would rise through the Agency along
with his bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms.
Early in the war, General Donovan got another idea from .the
British, whose psychologists and psychiatrists had devised a
testing program to predict the performance of military officers.
Donovan thought such a program might help OSS sort through
the masses of recruits who were being rushed through training.
To create an assessment system for Americans, Donovan called
in Harvard psychology professor Henry "Harry" Murray. In
1938 Murray had written Explorations of Personality, a nota-
ble book which laid out a whole battery of tests that could be
used to size up the personalities of individuals. "Spying is at-
tractive to loonies," states Murray. "Psychopaths, who are peo-
ple who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field."
The program's prime objective, according to Murray, was keep-
ing out the crazies, as well as the "sloths, irritants, bad actors,
and free talkers."
Always in a hurry, Donovan gave Murray and a distin-
guished group of colleagues only 15 days until the first candi-
dates arrived to be assessed. In the interim, they took over a
spacious estate outside Washington as their headquarters. In a
series of hurried meetings, they put together an assessment

18    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
system that combined German and British methods with Mur-
ray's earlier research. It tested a recruit's ability to stand up
under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully,
and to read a person's character by the nature of his clothing.
More than 30 years after the war, Murray remains modest in
his claims for the assessment system, saying that it was only an
aid in weeding out the "horrors" among OSS candidates.
Nevertheless, the secret agency's leaders believed in its results,
and Murray's system became a fixture in OSS, testing Ameri-
cans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray's young behav-
ioral scientists, like John Gardner,* would go on to become
prominent in public affairs, and, more importantly, the OSS
assessment program would be recognized as a milestone in
American psychology. It was the first systematic effort to evalu-
ate an individual's personality in order to predict his future
behavior. After the war, personality assessment would become
a new field in itself, and some of Murray's assistants would go
on to establish OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting
with AT&T. They also would set up study programs at universi-
ties, beginning with the University of California at Berkley. As
would happen repeatedly with the CIA's mind-control re-
search, OSS was years ahead of public developments in behav-
ioral theory and application.
In the postwar years, Murray would be superseded by a young
Oklahoma psychologist John Gittinger, who would rise in the
CIA on the strength of his ideas about how to make a hard
science out of personality assessment and how to use it to ma-
nipulate people. Gittinger would build an office within CIA that
refined both Murray's assessment function and Walter
Langer's indirect analysis of foreign leaders. Gittinger's meth-
ods would become an integral part of everyday Agency opera-
tions, and he would become Sid Gottlieb's protege.
Stanley Lovell reasoned that a good way to kill Hitler—and the
OSS man was always looking for ideas—would be to hypnoti-
*Gardner, a psychologist teaching at Mount Holyoke College, helped Murray
set up the original program and went on to open the West Coast OSS assessment
site at a converted beach club in San Juan Capistrano. After the war, he would
become Secretary of HEW in the Johnson administration and founder of Com-
mon Cause.
tMurray is not at all enthusiastic with the spinoffs. "Some of the things done
with it turn your stomach," he declares.

WORLD WAR II    19
cally control a German prisoner to hate the Gestapo and the
Nazi regime and then to give the subject a hypnotic suggestion
to assassinate the Fuhrer. The OSS candidate would be let loose
in Germany where he would take the desired action, "being
under a compulsion that might not be denied," as Lovell wrote.
Lovell sought advice on whether this scheme would work
from New York psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie and from the
famed Menninger brothers, Karl and William. The Menning-
ers reported that the weight of the evidence showed hypnotism
to be incapable of making people do anything that they would
not otherwise do. Equally negative, Dr. Kubie added that if a
German prisoner had a logical reason to kill Hitler or anyone
else, he would not need hypnotism to motivate him.
Lovell and his coworkers apparently accepted this skeptical
view of hypnosis, as did the overwhelming majority of psy-
chologists and psychiatrists in the country. At the time, hypno-
sis was considered a fringe activity, and there was little recog-
nition of either its validity or its usefulness for any purpose—
let alone covert operations. Yet there were a handful of serious
experimenters in the field who believed in its military poten-
tial. The most vocal partisan of this view was the head of the
Psychology Department at Colgate University, George "Esty"
Estabrooks. Since the early 1930s, Estabrooks had periodically
ventured out from his sleepy upstate campus to advise the mili-
tary on applications of hypnotism.
Estabrooks acknowledged that hypnosis did not work on ev-
eryone and that only one person in five made a good enough
subject to be placed in a deep trance, or state of somnambulism.
He believed that only these subjects could be induced to such
things against their apparent will as reveal secrets or commit
crimes. He had watched respected members of the community
make fools of themselves in the hands of stage hypnotists, and
he had compelled his own students to reveal fraternity secrets
and the details of private love affairs—all of which the subjects
presumably did not want to do.
Still his experience was limited. Estabrooks realized that the
only certain way to know whether a person would commit a
crime like murder under hypnosis was to have the person kill
someone. Unwilling to settle the issue on his own by trying the
experiment, he felt that government sanction of the process
would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility. "Any
'accidents' that might occur during the experiments will sim-

20    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
ply be charged to profit and loss," he wrote, "a very trifling
portion of that enormous wastage in human life which is part
and parcel of war."
After Pearl Harbor, Estabrooks offered his ideas to OSS, but
they were not accepted by anyone in government willing to
carry them to their logical conclusion. He was reduced to writ-
ing books about the potential use of hypnotism in warfare.
Cassandra-like, he tried to warn America of the perils posed by
hypnotic control. His 1945 novel, Death in the Mind, concerned
a series of seemingly treasonable acts committed by Allied per-
sonnel: an American submarine captain torpedoes one of our
own battleships, and the beautiful heroine starts acting in an
irrational way which serves the enemy. After a perilous inves-
tigation, secret agent Johnny Evans learns that the Germans
have been hypnotizing Allied personnel and conditioning them
to obey Nazi commands. Evans and his cohorts, shaken by the
many ways hypnotism can be used against them, set up elabo-
rate countermeasures and then cannot resist going on the
offensive. Objections are heard from the heroine, who by this
time has been brutally and rather graphically tortured. She
complains that "doing things to people's minds" is "a loath-
some way to fight." Her qualms are brushed aside by Johnny
Evans, her lover and boss. He sets off after the Germans—"to
tamper with their minds; Make them traitors; Make them work
for us."
In the aftermath of the war, as the U.S. national security
apparatus was being constructed, the leaders of the Central
Intelligence Agency would adopt Johnny Evans' mission—al-
most in those very words. Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, John
Gittinger, George White, and many others would undertake a
far-flung and complicated assault on the human mind. In hyp-
nosis and many other fields, scientists even more eager than
George Estabrooks would seek CIA approval for the kinds of
experiments they would not dare perform on their own. Some-
times the Agency men concurred; on other occasions, they re-
served such experiments for themselves. They would tamper
with many minds and inevitably cause some to be damaged. In
the end, they would minimize and hide their deeds, and they
would live to see doubts raised about the health of their own
minds.

2
CHAPTER
COLD WAR
ON THE MIND

CIA officials started preliminary work on drugs and hypnosis
shortly after the Agency's creation in 1947, but the behavior-
control program did not really get going until the Hungarian
government put Josef Cardinal Mindszenty on trial in 1949.
With a glazed look in his eyes, Mindszenty confessed to crimes
of treason he apparently did not commit. His performance re-
called the Moscow purge trials of 1937 and 1938 at which tough
and dedicated party apparatchiks had meekly pleaded guilty to
long series of improbable offenses. These and a string of post-
war trials in other Eastern European countries seemed staged,
eerie, and unreal. CIA men felt they had to know how the Com-
munists had rendered the defendants zombielike. In the
Mindszenty case, a CIA Security Memorandum declared that
"some unknown force" had controlled the Cardinal, and the
memo speculated that the communist authorities had used
hypnosis on him.
In the summer of 1949, the Agency's head of Scientific Intelli-
gence made a special trip to Western Europe to find out more
about what the Soviets were doing and "to apply special meth-
ods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian
practices." In other words, fearful that the communists might
have used drugs and hypnosis on prisoners, a senior CIA official
used exactly the same techniques on refugees and returned
prisoners from Eastern Europe. On returning to the United

22    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
States, this official recommended two courses of action: first,
that the Agency consider setting up an escape operation to free
Mindszenty; and second, that the CIA train and send to Europe
a team skilled in "special" interrogation methods of the type he
had tried out in Europe.
By the spring of 1950, several other CIA branches were con-
templating the operational use of hypnosis. The Office of Secu-
rity, whose main job was to protect Agency personnel and
facilities from enemy penetration, moved to centralize all ac-
tivity in this and other behavioral fields. The Security chief,
Sheffield Edwards, a former Army colonel who a decade later
would personally handle joint CIA-Mafia operations, took the
initiative by calling a meeting of all interested Agency parties
and proposing that interrogation teams be formed under Secu-
rity's command. Security would use the teams to check out
agents and defectors for the whole CIA. Each team would con-
sist of a psychiatrist, a polygraph (lie detector) expert trained
in hypnosis, and a technician. Edwards agreed not to use the
teams operationally without the permission of a high-level
committee. He called the project BLUEBIRD, a code name
which, like all Agency names, had no significance—except per-
haps to the person who chose it. Edwards classified the pro-
gram TOP SECRET and stressed the extraordinary need for
secrecy. On April 20, 1950, CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter
approved BLUEBIRD and authorized the use of unvouchered
funds to pay for its most sensitive areas. The CIA's behavior-
control program now had a bureaucratic structure.
The chief of Scientific Intelligence attended the original
BLUEBIRD meeting in Sheffield Edwards' office and assured
those present that his office would keep trying to gather all
possible data on foreign—particularly Russian—efforts in the
behavioral field. Not long afterward, his representative ar-
ranged to inspect the Nuremberg Tribunal records to see if
they contained anything useful to BLUEBIRD. According to a
CIA psychologist who looked over the German research, the
Agency did not find much of specific help. "It was a real horror
story, but we learned what human beings were capable of," he
recalls. "There were some experiments on pain, but they were
so mixed up with sadism as not to be useful.... How the victim
coped was very interesting."
At the beginning, at least, there was cooperation between the
scientists and the interrogators in the CIA. Researchers from

COLD WAR ON THE MIND    23
Security (who had no special expertise but who were ex-
perienced in police work) and researchers from Scientific In-
telligence (who lacked operational background but who had
academic training) pored jointly over all the open literature
and secret reports. They quickly realized that the only way to
build an effective defense against mind control was to under-
stand its offensive possibilities. The line between offense and
defense—if it ever existed—soon became so blurred as to be
meaningless. Nearly every Agency document stressed goals
like "controlling an individual to the point where he will do our
bidding against his will and even against such fundamental
laws of nature as self-preservation." On reading one such
memo, an Agency officer wrote to his boss: "If this is supposed
to be covered up as a defensive feasibility study, it's pretty
damn transparent."
Three months after the Director approved BLUEBIRD, the
first team traveled to Japan to try out behavioral techniques on
human subjects—probably suspected double agents. The three
men arrived in Tokyo in July 1950, about a month after the start
of the Korean War. No one needed to impress upon them the
importance of their mission. The Security Office ordered them
to conceal their true purpose from even the U.S. military au-
thorities with whom they worked in Japan, using the cover that
they would be performing "intensive polygraph" work. In sti-
fling, debilitating heat and humidity, they tried out combina-
tions of the depressant sodium amytal with the stimulant
benzedrine on each of four subjects, the last two of whom also
received a second stimulant, picrotoxin. They also tried to in-
duce amnesia. The team considered the tests successful, but the
CIA documents available on the trip give only the sketchiest
outline of what happened.* Then around October 1950, the
BLUEBIRD team used "advanced" techniques on 25 subjects,
apparently North Korean prisoners of war.
By the end of that year, a Security operator, Morse Allen, had
become the head of the BLUEBIRD program. Forty years old at
the time, Allen had spent most of his earlier career rooting out
the domestic communist threat, starting in the late 1930s when
he had joined the Civil Service Commision and set up its first
security files on communists. ("He knows their methods," wrote
* For a better-documented case of narcotherapy and narcohypnosis, see Chap-
ter  3.

24    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
a CIA colleague.) During World War II, Allen had served with
Naval intelligence, first pursuing leftists in New York and then
landing with the Marines on Okinawa. After the war, he went
to the State Department, only to leave in the late 1940s because
he felt the Department was whitewashing certain communist
cases. He soon joined the CIA's Office of Security. A suspicious
man by inclination and training, Allen took nothing at face
value. Like all counterintelligence or security operators, his job
was to show why things are not what they seem to be. He was
always thinking ahead and behind, punching holes in surface
realities. Allen had no academic training for behavioral re-
search (although he did take a short course in hypnotism, a
subject that fascinated him). He saw the BLUEBIRD job as one
that called for studying every last method the communists
might use against the United States and figuring out ways to
counter them.
The CIA had schooled Morse Allen in one field which in the
CIA's early days became an important part of covert operations:
the use of the polygraph. Probably more than any intelligence
service in the world, the Agency developed the habit of strap-
ping its foreign agents—and eventually, its own employees—
into the "box." The polygraph measures physiological changes
that might show lying—heartbeat, blood pressure, perspira-
tion, and the like. It has never been foolproof. In 1949 the Office
of Security estimated that it worked successfully on seven out
of eight cases, a very high fraction but not one high enough for
those in search of certainty. A psychopathic liar, a hypnotized
person, or a specially trained professional can "beat" the ma-
chine. Moreover, the skill of the person running the polygraph
and asking the questions determines how well the device will
work. "A good operator can make brilliant use of the polygraph
without plugging it in," claims one veteran CIA case officer.
Others maintain only somewhat less extravagantly that its
chief value is to deter agents tempted to switch loyalties or
reveal secrets. The power of the machine—real and imagined
—to detect infidelity and dishonesty can be an intimidating
factor.* Nevertheless, the polygraph cannot compel truth. Like
*While the regular polygraphing of CIA career employees apparently never
has turned up a penetration agent in the ranks, it almost certainly has a deter-
rent effect on those considering coming out of the homosexual closet or on those
considering dipping into the large sums of cash dispensed from proverbial
black bags.

COLD WAR ON THE MIND    25
Pinocchio's nose, it only indicates lying. In addition, the ma-
chine requires enough physical control over the subject to strap
him in. For years, the CIA tried to overcome this limitation by
developing a "super" polygraph that could be aimed from afar
or concealed in a chair. In this field, as in many others, no
behavior control scheme was too farfetched to investigate, and
Agency scientists did make some progress.
In December 1950, Morse Allen told his boss, Paul Gaynor, a
retired brigadier general with a long background in counterin-
telligence and interrogation, that he had heard of experiments
with an "electro-sleep" machine in a Richmond, Virginia hos-
pital. Such an invention appealed to Allen because it sup-
posedly put people to sleep without shock or convulsions. The
BLUEBIRD team had been using drugs to bring on a state simi-
lar to a hypnotic trance, and Allen hoped this machine would
allow an operator to put people into deep sleep without having
to resort to chemicals. In theory, all an operator had to do was
to attach the electrode-tipped wires to the subject's head and let
the machine do the rest. It cost about $250 and was about twice
the size of a table-model dictating machine. "Although it would
not be feasible to use it on any of our own people because there
is at least a theoretical danger of temporary brain damage,"
Morse Allen wrote, "it would possibly be of value in certain
areas in connection with POW interrogation or on individuals
of interest to this Agency." The machine never worked well
enough to get into the testing stage for the CIA.
At the end of 1951, Allen talked to a famed psychiatrist
(whose name, like most of the others, the CIA has deleted from
the documents released) about a gruesome but more practical
technique. This psychiatrist, a cleared Agency consultant, re-
ported that electroshock treatments could produce amnesia for
varying lengths of time and that he had been able to obtain
information from patients as they came out of the stupor that
followed shock treatments. He also reported that a lower set-
ting of the Reiter electroshock machine produced an "excruci-
ating pain" that, while nontherapeutic, could be effective as "a
third degree method" to make someone talk. Morse Allen asked
if the psychiatrist had ever taken advantage of the "groggy"
period that followed normal electroshock to gain hypnotic con-
trol of his patients. No, replied the psychiatrist, but he would
try it in the near future and report back to the Agency. The
psychiatrist also mentioned that continued electroshock treat-

26    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
ments could gradually reduce a subject to the "vegetable level,"
and that these treatments could not be detected unless the sub-
ject was given EEC tests within two weeks. At the end of a
memo laying out this information, Allen noted that portable,
battery-driven electroshock machines had come on the market.
Shortly after this Morse Allen report, the Office of Scientific
Intelligence recommended that this same psychiatrist be given
$100,000 in research funds "to develop electric shock and hyp-
notic techniques." While Allen thought this subject worth pur-
suing, he had some qualms about the ultimate application of
the shock treatments: "The objections would, of course, apply
to the use of electroshock if the end result was creation of a
'vegetable.' [I] believe that these techniques should not be con-
sidered except in gravest emergencies, and neutralization by
confinement and/or removal from the area would be far more
appropriate and certainly safer."
In 1952 the Office of Scientific Intelligence proposed giv-
ing another private doctor $100,000 to develop BLUEBIRD-
related "neurosurgical techniques"—presumably lobotomy-
connected.* Similarly, the Security office planned to use outside
consultants to find out about such techniques as ultrasonics,
vibrations, concussions, high and low pressure, the uses of vari-
ous gases in airtight chambers, diet variations, caffeine, fa-
tigue, radiation, heat and cold, and changing light. Agency offi-
cials looked into all these areas and many others. Some they
studied intensively; others they merely discussed with consult-
ants.
The BLUEBIRD mind-control program began when Stalin
was still alive, when the memory of Hitler was fresh, and the
terrifying prospect of global nuclear war was just sinking into
popular consciousness. The Soviet Union had subjugated most
of Eastern Europe, and a Communist party had taken control
over the world's most populous nation, China. War had broken
out in Korea, and Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist
crusade was on the rise in the United States. In both foreign and
domestic politics, the prevailing mood was one of fear—even
paranoia.
American officials have pointed to the Cold War atmosphere
ever since as an excuse for crimes and excesses committed then
*Whether the Agency ultimately funded this or the electric-shock proposal
cited above cannot be determined from the documents.

COLD WAR ON THE MIND    27
and afterward. One recurring litany in national security inves-
tigations has been the testimony of the exposed official citing
Cold War hysteria to justify an act that he or she would not
otherwise defend. The apprehensions of the Cold War do not
provide a moral or legal shield for such acts, but they do help
explain them. Even when the apprehensions were not well
founded, they were no less real to the people involved.
It was also a time when the United States had achieved a new
preeiminence in the world. After World War II, American offi-
cials wielded the kind of power that diplomats frequently
dream of. They established new alliances, new rulers, and even
new nations to suit their purposes. They dispensed guns, favors,
and aid to scores of nations. Consequently, American officials
were noticed, respected, and pampered wherever they went—
as never before. Their new sense of importance and their Cold
War fears often made a dangerous combination—it is a fact of
human nature that anyone who is both puffed up and afraid is
someone to watch out for.
In 1947 the National Security Act created not only the CIA but
also the National Security Council—in sum, the command
structure for the Cold War. Wartime OSS leaders like William
Donovan and Allen Dulles lobbied feverishly for the Act. Offi-
cials within the new command structure soon put their fear
and their grandiose notions to work. Reacting to the perceived
threat, they adopted a ruthless and warlike posture toward any-
one they considered an enemy—most especially the Soviet
Union. They took it upon themselves to fight communism and
things that might lead to communism everywhere in the world.
Few citizens disagreed with them; they appeared to express the
sentiments of most Americans in that era, but national security
officials still preferred to act in secrecy. A secret study commi-
sion under former President Hoover captured the spirit of their
call to clandestine warfare:
It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed
objective is world domination by whatever means and at what-
ever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable
longstanding American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsid-
ered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage
services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our
enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective
methods than those used against us.

28    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
The men in the new CIA took this job quite seriously. "We felt
we were the first line of defense in the anticommunist cru-
sade," recalls Harry Rositzke, an early head of the Agency's
Soviet Division. "There was a clear and heady sense of mission
—a sense of what a huge job this was." Michael Burke, who was
chief of CIA covert operations in Germany before going on to
head the New York Yankees and Madison Square Garden,
agrees: "It was riveting. . . . One was totally absorbed in some-
thing that has become misunderstood now, but the Cold War in
those days was a very real thing with hundreds of thousands of
Soviet troops, tanks, and planes poised on the East German
border, capable of moving to the English Channel in forty-eight
hours." Hugh Cunningham, an Agency official who stayed on
for many years, remembers that survival itself was at stake,
"What you were made to feel was that the country was in des-
perate peril and we had to do whatever it took to save it."
BLUEBIRD and the CIA's later mind-control programs
sprang from such alarm. As a matter of course, the CIA was
also required to learn the methods and intentions of all possible
foes. "If the CIA had not tried to find out what the Russians
were doing with mind-altering drugs in the early 1950s, I think
the then-Director should have been fired," says Ray Cline, a
former Deputy Director of the Agency.
High Agency officials felt they had to know what the Rus-
sians were up to. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the contem-
poraneous CIA documents almost three decades later indicates
that if the Russians were scoring breakthroughs in the behav-
ior-control field—whose author they almost certainly were not
—the CIA lacked intelligence to prove that. For example, a 1952
Security document, which admittedly had an ax to grind with
the Office of Scientific Intelligence, called the data gathered on
the Soviet programs "extremely poor." The author noted that
the Agency's information was based on "second- or third-hand
rumors, unsupported statements and non-factual data."* Ap-
parently, the fears and fantasies aroused by the Mindszenty
trial and the subsequent Korean War "brainwashing" furor
outstripped the facts on hand. The prevalent CIA notion
of a "mind-control gap" was as much of a myth as the later
bomber and missile "gaps." In any case, beyond the defensive
•The CIA refused to supply either a briefing or additional material when I
asked for more background on Soviet behavior-control programs.

COLD WAR ON THE MIND   29
curiosity, mind control took on a momentum of its own.
As unique and frightening as the Cold War was, it did not
cause people working for the government to react much differ-
ently to each other or power than at other times in American
history. Bureaucratic squabbling went on right through the
most chilling years of the behavior-control program. No matter
how alarmed CIA officials became over the Russian peril, they
still managed to quarrel with their internal rivals over control
of Agency funds and manpower. Between 1950 and 1952, re-
sponsibility for mind control went from the Office of Security
to the Scientific Intelligence unit back to Security again. In the
process, BLUEBIRD was rechristened ARTICHOKE. The
bureaucratic wars were drawn-out affairs, baffling to outsiders;
yet many of the crucial turns in behavioral research came out
of essentially bureaucratic considerations on the part of the
contending officials. In general, the Office of Security was full
of pragmatists who were anxious to weed out communists (and
homosexuals) everywhere. They believed the intellectuals
from Scientific Intelligence had failed to produce "one new,
usable paper, suggestion, drug, instrument, name of an individ-
ual, etc., etc.," as one document puts it. The learned gentlemen
from Scientific Intelligence felt that the former cops, military
men, and investigators in Security lacked the technical back-
ground to handle so awesome a task as controlling the human
mind.
"Jurisdictional conflict was constant in this area," a Senate
committee would state in 1976. A 1952 report to the chief of the
CIA's Medical Staff (itself a participant in the infighting) drew
a harsher conclusion: "There exists a glaring lack of coopera-
tion among the various intra-Agency groups fostered by petty
jealousies and personality differences that result in the retar-
dation of the enhancing and advancing of the Agency as a
body." When Security took ARTICHOKE back from Scientific
Intelligence in 1952, the victory lasted only two and one-half
years before most of the behavioral work went to yet another
CIA outfit, full of Ph.D.s with operational experience—the
Technical Services Staff (TSS).*
There was bureaucratic warfare outside the CIA as well, al-
•This Agency component, responsible for providing the supporting gadgets,
disguises, forgeries, secret writing, and weapons, has been called during its
history the Technical Services Division and the Office of Technical Services,
as well as TSS, the name which will be used throughout this book.

30    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
though there were early gestures toward interagency coopera-
tion. In April 1951 the CIA Director approved liaison with
Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence to avoid duplication of
effort. The Army and Navy were both looking for truth drugs,
while the prime concern of the Air Force was interrogation
techniques used on downed pilots. Representatives of each ser-
vice attended regular meetings to discuss ARTICHOKE mat-
ters. The Agency also invited the FBI, but J. Edgar Hoover's
men stayed away.
During their brief period of cooperation, the military and the
CIA also exchanged information with the British and Canadian
governments. At the first session in June 1951, the British repre-
sentative announced at the outset that there had been nothing
new in the interrogation business since the days of the Inquisi-
tion and that there was little hope of achieving valuable results
through research. He wanted to concentrate on propaganda
and political warfare as they applied to such threats as commu-
nist penetration of trade unions. The CIA's minutes of the ses-
sion record that this skeptical Englishman finally agreed to the
importance of behavioral research, but one doubts the sincerity
of this conversion. The minutes also record a consensus of "no
conclusive evidence" that either Western countries or the Sovi-
ets had made any "revolutionary progress" in the field, and
describe Soviet methods as "remarkably similar ... to the age-
old methods." Nonetheless, the representatives of the three
countries agreed to continue investigating behavior-control
methods because of their importance to "cold war operations."
To what extent the British and Canadians continued cannot be
told. The CIA did not stop until the 1970s.
Bureaucratic conflict was not the only aspect of ordinary gov-
ernment life that persisted through the Cold War. Officials also
maintained their normal awareness of the ethical and legal
consequences of their decisions. Often they went through con-
torted rationalizations and took steps to protect themselves, but
at least they recognized and paused over the various ethical
lines before crossing them. It would be unfair to say that all
moral awareness evaporated. Officials agonized over the conse-
quences of their acts, and much of the bureaucratic record of
behavior control is the history of officials dealing with moral
conflicts as they arose.
The Security office barely managed to recruit the team psy-

COLD WAR ON THE MIND    31
chiatrist in time for the first mission to Japan, and for years,
Agency officials had trouble attracting qualified medical men
to the project. Speculating why, one Agency memo listed such
reasons as the CIA's comparatively low salaries for doctors and
ARTICHOKE'S narrow professional scope, adding that a candi-
date's "ethics might be such that he might not care to cooperate
in certain more revolutionary phases of our project." This con-
sideration became explicit in Agency recruiting. During the
talent search, another CIA memo stated why another doctor
seemed suitable: "His ethics are such that he would be com-
pletely cooperative in any phase of our program, regardless of
how revolutionary it may be."
The matter was even more troublesome in the task of obtain-
ing guinea pigs for mind-control experiments. "Our biggest
current problem," noted one CIA memo, "is to find suitable
subjects." The men from ARTICHOKE found their most conve-
nient source among the flotsam and jetsam of the international
spy trade: "individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or
plants, subjects having known reason for deception, etc," as one
Agency document described them. ARTICHOKE officials
looked on these people as "unique research material," from
whom meaningful secrets might be extracted while the experi-
ments went on.
It is fair to say that the CIA operators tended to put less
value on the lives of these subjects than they did on those of
American college students, upon whom preliminary, more
benign testing was done. They tailored the subjects to suit
the ethical sensitivity of the experiment. A psychiatrist who
worked on an ARTICHOKE team stresses that no one from
the Agency wanted subjects to be hurt. Yet he and his col-
leagues were willing to treat dubious defectors and agents in
a way which not only would be professionally unethical in
the United States but also an indictable crime. In short,
these subjects were, if not expendable, at least not particu-
larly prized as human beings. As a CIA psychologist who
worked for a decade in the behavior-control program, puts
it, "One did not put a high premium on the civil rights of a
person who was treasonable to his own country or who was
operating effectively to destroy us." Another ex-Agency psy-
chologist observes that CIA operators did not have "a univer-
sal concept of mankind" and thus were willing to do things
to foreigners that they would have been reluctant to try on

32    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
Americans. "It was strictly a patriotic vision," he says.
ARTICHOKE officials never seemed to be able to find enough
subjects. The professional operators—particularly the tradi-
tionalists—were reluctant to turn over agents to the Security
men with their unproved methods. The field men did not par-
ticularly want outsiders, such as the ARTICHOKE crew, get-
ting mixed up in their operations. In the spy business, agents
are very valuable property indeed, and operators tend to be very
protective of them. Thus the ARTICHOKE teams were given
mostly the dregs of the clandestine underworld to work on.
Inexorably, the ARTICHOKE men crossed the clear ethical
lines. Morse Allen believed it proved little or nothing to experi-
ment on volunteers who gave their informed consent. For all
their efforts to act naturally, volunteers still knew they were
playing in a make-believe game. Consciously or intuitively,
they understood that no one would allow them to be harmed.
Allen felt that only by testing subjects "for whom much is at
stake (perhaps life and death)," as he wrote, could he get reli-
able results relevant to operations. In documents and conversa-
tion, Allen and his coworkers called such realistic tests "termi-
nal experiments"—terminal in the sense that the experiment
would be carried through to completion. It would not end when
the subject felt like going home or when he or his best interest
was about to be harmed. Indeed, the subject usually had no idea
that he had ever been part of an experiment.
In every field of behavior control, academic researchers took
the work only so far. From Morse Allen's perspective, somebody
then had to do the terminal experiment to find out how well the
technique worked in the real world: how drugs affected unwit-
ting subjects, how massive electroshock influenced memory,
how prolonged sensory deprivation disturbed the mind. By defi-
nition, terminal experiments went beyond conventional ethi-
cal and legal limits. The ultimate terminal experiments caused
death, but ARTICHOKE sources state that those were forbid-
den.
For career CIA officials, exceeding these limits in the name
of national security became part of the job, although individual
operators usually had personal lines they would not cross. Most
academics wanted no part of the game at this stage—nor did
Agency men always like having these outsiders around. If aca-
demic and medical consultants were brought along for the ter-
minal phase, they usually did the work overseas, in secret. As

COLD WAR ON THE MIND    33
Cornell Medical School's famed neurologist Harold Wolff ex-
plained in a research proposal he made to the CIA, when any
of the tests involved doing harm to the subjects, "We expect the
Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place
for the performance of the necessary experiments." Any pro-
fessional caught trying the kinds of things the Agency came to
sponsor—holding subjects prisoner, shooting them full of un-
wanted drugs— probably would have been arrested for kidnap-
ping or aggravated assault. Certainly such a researcher would
have been disgraced among his peers. Yet, by performing the
same experiment under the CIA's banner, he had no worry
from the law. His colleagues could not censure him because
they had no idea what he was doing. And he could take pride
in helping his country.
Without having been there in person, no one can know ex-
actly what it felt like to take part in a terminal experiment. In
any case, the subjects probably do not have fond memories of
the experience. While the researchers sometimes resembled
Alphonse and Gastone, they took themselves and their work
very seriously. Now they are either dead, or, for their own rea-
sons, they do not want to talk about the tests. Only in the follow-
ing case have I been able to piece together anything approach-
ing a firsthand account of a terminal experiment, and this one
is quite mild compared to the others the ARTICHOKE men
planned.

3
CHAPTER
THE PROFESSOR AND
THE "A" TREATMENT

The three men were all part of the same Navy team, traveling
together to Germany. Their trip was so sensitive that they had
been ordered to ignore each other, even as they waited in the
terminal at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on a
sweltering August morning in 1952. Just the month before,
Gary Cooper had opened in High Noon, and the notion of show-
down—whether with outlaws or communists—was in the air.
With war still raging in Korea, security consciousness was
high. Even so, the secrecy surrounding this Navy mission went
well beyond ordinary TOP SECRET restrictions, for the team
was slated to link up in Frankfurt with a contingent from the
most hush-hush agency of all, the CIA. Then the combined
group was going to perform dangerous experiments on human
subjects. Both Navy and CIA officials believed that any disclo-
sure about these tests would cause grave harm to the American
national interest.
The Navy team sweated out a two-hour delay at Andrews
before the four-engine military transport finally took off. Not
until the plane touched down at the American field in the
Azores did one of the group, a representative of Naval intelli-
gence, flash a prearranged signal indicating that they were not
being watched and they could talk. "It was all this cloak-and-
dagger crap," recalls another participant, Dr. Samuel Thomp-
son, a psychiatrist, physiologist, and pharmacologist who was
also a Navy commander.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   35
The third man in the party was G. Richard Wendt, chair-
man of the Psychology Department at the University of
Rochester and a part-time Navy contractor. A small 46-year-
old man with graying blond hair and a fair-sized paunch,
Wendt had been the only one with companionship during
the hours of decreed silence. He had brought along his at-
tractive young assistant, ostensibly to help him with the ex-
periments. She was not well received by the Navy men, nor
would she be appreciated by the CIA operators in Frankfurt.
The behavior-control field was very much a man's world, ex-
cept when women subjects were used. The professor's rela-
tionship with this particular lady was destined to become a
source of friction with his fellow experimenters, and, even-
tually, a topic of official CIA reporting.
In theory, Professor Wendt worked under Dr. Thompson's
supervision in a highly classified Navy program called Project
CHATTER, but the strong-minded psychologist did not take
anyone's orders easily. Very much an independent spirit,
Wendt ironically, had accepted CHATTER'S goal of weaken-
ing, if not eliminating, free will in others. The Navy program,
which had started in 1947, was aimed at developing a truth
drug that would force people to reveal their innermost secrets.
Thompson, who inherited Wendt and CHATTER in 1951
when he became head of psychiatric research at the Naval
Medical Research Institute, remembers Naval intelligence tell-
ing him of the need for a truth drug in case "someone planted
an A-bomb in one of our cities and we had twelve hours to find
out from a person where it was. What could we do to make him
talk?" Thompson concedes he was always "negative" about the
possibility that such a drug could ever exist, but he cites the
fear that the Russians might develop their own miracle potion
as reason enough to justify the program. Also, Thompson and
the other U.S. officials could not resist looking for a pill or
panacea that would somehow make their side all-knowing or
all-powerful.
Professor Wendt had experimented with drugs for the Navy
before he became involved in the search for a truth serum. His
earlier work had been on the use of dramamine and other
methods to prevent motion sickness, and now that he was doing
more sensitive research, the Navy hid it under the cover of
continuing his "motion sickness" study. At the end of 1950, the
Navy gave Wendt a $300,000 contract to study such substances
as barbiturates, amphetamines, alcohol, and heroin. To pre-

36    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
serve secrecy, which often reached fetish proportions in mind-
control research, the money flowed to him not through Navy
channels but out of the Secretary of Defense's contingency
fund. For those drugs that were not available from phar-
maceutical companies, Navy officials went to the Federal Bu-
reau of Narcotics. The Commissioner of Narcotics personally
signed the papers, and special couriers carried pouches of il-
legal drugs through Washington streets and then up to the pro-
fessor at Rochester. Receipts show that the Bureau sent the
Navy 30 grams of pure heroin and 11 pounds of "Mexican
grown" marijuana, among other drugs.
Like most serious drug researchers, Wendt sampled every-
thing first before testing on assistants and students. The drug
that took up the most space in his first progress report was
heroin. He had became his own prime subject. At weekly inter-
vals, he told the Navy, the psychologist gave himself heroin
injections and then wrote down his reactions as he moved
through the "full range" of his life: driving, shopping, recrea-
tion, manual work, family relations, and sexual activity. He
noted in himself "slight euphoria . . . heightened aesthetic ap-
preciation . . . absentminded behavior . . . lack of desire to
operate at full speed . . . lack of desire for alcohol. . . possibly
reduced sex interest . . . feeling of physical well-being." He
concluded in his report that heroin could have "some, but slight
value for interrogation" if used on someone "worked on for a
long period of time."*
Wendt never had any trouble getting student volunteers. He
simply posted a notice on a campus bulletin board, and he
wound up with a long waiting list. He chose only men subjects
over 21, and he paid everyone accepted after a long interview
$1.00 an hour. With so much government money to spend, he
hired over 20 staff assistants, and he built a whole new testing
facility in the attic of the school library. Wendt was cautious
with his students, and he apparently did not share the hard
drugs with them. He usually tested subjects in small groups—
*What Wendt appears to have been getting at—namely, that repeated shots of
heroin might have an effect on interrogation—was stated explicitly in a 1952
CIA document which declared the drug "can be useful in reverse because of
the stresses produced when ... withdrawn from those addicted." Wendt's inter-
est in heroin seems to have lasted to his death in 1977, long after his experi-
ments had stopped. The woman who cleaned out his safe at that time told the
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle she found a quantity of the white powder,
along with syringes and a good many other drugs.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   37
four to eight at a time. He and his associates watched through
a two-way mirror and wrote down the subjects' reactions. He
always used both placebos (inert substances) and drugs; the
students never knew what—if anything—they were taking. Ac-
cording to Dr. Thompson, to have alerted them in advance and
thus given themselves a chance to steel themselves up "would
have spoiled the experiment."
Nonetheless, Wendt's procedure was a far cry from true un-
witting testing. Any drug that was powerful enough to break
through an enemy's resistance could have a traumatic effect on
the person taking it—particularly if the subject was totally un-
aware of what was happening. The Navy research plan was to
do preliminary studies on subjects like Wendt's students, and
then, as soon as the drug showed promise, to try it under field
conditions. Under normal scientific research, the operational
tests would not have been run before the basic work was
finished. But the Navy could not wait. The drugs were to be
tested on involuntary subjects. Thompson readily admits that
this procedure was "unethical," but he says, "We felt we had to
do it for the good of country."
During the summer of 1952, Professor Wendt announced that
he had found a concoction "so special" that it would be "the
answer" to the truth-drug problem, as Thompson recalls it. "I
thought it would be a good idea to call the Agency," says
Thompson. "I thought they might have someone with some-
thing to spill." Wendt was adamant on one point: He would not
tell anyone in the Navy or the CIA what his potion contained.
He would only demonstrate. Neither the CHATTER nor ARTI-
CHOKE teams could resist the bait. The Navy had no source of
subjects for terminal experiments, but the CIA men agreed to
furnish the human beings—in Germany—even though they
had no idea what Wendt had in store for his guinea pigs. The
CIA named the operation CASTIGATE.
After settling into a Frankfurt hotel, Wendt, Thompson, and
the Naval Intelligence man set out to meet the ARTICHOKE
crew at the local CIA headquarters. It was located in the huge,
elongated building that had housed the I. G. Farben industrial
complex until the end of the war. The frantic bustle of a U.S.
military installation provided ideal cover for this CIA base, and
the arrival of a few new Americans attracted no special atten-
tion. The Navy group passed quickly through the lobby and
rode up the elevator. At the CIA outer office, the team members

38    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
had to show identification, and Thompson says they were
frisked. The Naval Intelligence man had to check his revolver.
A secretary ushered the Navy group in to meet the ARTI-
CHOKE contingent, which had arrived earlier from Washing-
ton. The party included team leader Morse Allen, his boss in the
Office of Security, Paul Gaynor, and a prominent Washington
psychiatrist who regularly left his private practice to fly off on
special missions for the Agency. Also present were case officers
from the CIA's Frankfurt base who had taken care of the sup-
port arrangements—the most important of which was supply-
ing the subjects.
Everyone at the meeting wanted to know what drugs Wendt
was going to use on the five selected subjects, who included one
known double agent, one suspected double, and the three defec-
tors. The professor still was not talking. Dr. Thompson asked
what would happen if something went wrong and the subject
died. He recalls one of the Frankfurt CIA men replying, "Dis-
posal of the body would be no problem."
After the session ended, Thompson took Wendt aside and
pointed out that since the professor, unlike Thompson, was
neither a psychiatrist nor a pharmacologist, he was acting irre-
sponsibly in not having a qualified physician standing by with
antidotes in case of trouble. Wendt finally relented and confided
in Thompson that he was going to slip the subjects a combina-
tion of the depressant Seconal, the stimulant Dexedrine, and
tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Thompson was dumbfounded. He remembers wanting to shoot
Wendt on the spot. These were all well-known drugs that had
been thoroughly tested. Indeed, even the idea of mixing Se-
conal and Dexedrine was not original: The combined drug al-
ready had its own brand name—Dexamyl (and it would eventu-
ally have a street name, "the goofball"). Thompson quickly
passed on to the CIA men what Wendt had in mind.* They, too,
were more than a little disappointed.
Nevertheless, there was never any thought of stopping the
experiments. The ARTICHOKE team had its own methods to
try, even if Wendt's proved a failure, and the whole affair had
developed its own momentum. Since this was one of the early
*Being good undercover operators, the CIA men never let on to Wendt that they
knew his secret, and Wendt was not about to give it away. Toward the end of
the trip, he told the consultant he would feel "unpatriotic" if he were to share
his secret because the ARTICHOKE team was "not competent" to use the drugs.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   39
ARTICHOKE trips into the field, the team was still working to
perfect the logistics of testing. It had reserved two CIA "safe-
houses" in the countryside not far from Frankfurt, and Ameri-
cans had been assigned to guard the experimental sites. Agency
managers had already completed the paperwork for the instal-
lation of hidden microphones and two-way mirrors, so all the
team members could monitor the interrogations.
The first safehouse proved to be a solid old farmhouse set
picturesquely in the middle of green fields, far from the nearest
dwelling. The ARTICHOKE and CHATTER groups drove up
just as the CIA's carpenters were cleaning up the mess they had
made in ripping a hole through the building's thick walls. The
house had existed for several hundred years without an obser-
vation glass peering in on the sitting room, and it had put up
some structural resistance to the workmen.
Subject # 1 arrived in the early afternoon, delivered in a
CIA sedan by armed operators, who had handcuffed him,
shackled his feet, and made him lie down on the floor of the
back seat. Agency officials described him as a suspected Rus-
sian agent, about 40 years old, who had a "Don Juan com-
plex." One can only imagine how the subject must have
reacted to these rather inconsistent Americans who only a
few hours earlier had literally grabbed him out of confine-
ment, harshly bound him, and sat more or less on top of him
as they wandered through idyllic German farm country, and
who now were telling him to relax as they engaged him in
friendly conversation and offered him a beer. He had no
way of knowing that it would be the last unspiked drink he
would have for quite some time.
On the following morning, the testing started in earnest.
Wendt put 20 mg. of Seconal in the subject's breakfast and then
followed up with 50 mg. of Dexedrine in each of his two morn-
ing cups of coffee. Wendt gave him a second dose of Seconal in
his luncheon beer. The subject was obviously not his normal
self—whatever that was. What was clear was that Wendt was
in way over his head, and even the little professor seemed to
realize it. "I don't know how to deal with these people," he told
the CIA psychiatric consultant. Wendt flatly refused to exam-
ine the subject, leaving the interrogation to the consultant. For
his part, the consultant had little success in extracting infor-
mation not already known to the CIA.
The third day was more of the same: Seconal with breakfast,

40    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
Dexedrine and marijuana in a glass of water afterwards. The
only break from the previous day's routine came at 10:10 a.m.
when the subject was allowed to play a short poker game. Then
he was given more of Wendt's drugs in two red capsules that
were, he was told, "a prescription for his nerves." By 2:40 p.m.,
Wendt declared that this subject was not the right personality
type for his treatment. He explained to his disgusted colleagues
that if someone is determined to lie, these drugs will only make
him a better liar. He said that the marijuana extract produced
a feeling of not wanting to hold anything back and that it
worked best on people who wanted to tell the truth but were
afraid to. OSS had discovered the same thing almost a decade
earlier.
Wendt retired temporarily from the scene, and the others
concluded it would be a shame to waste a good subject. They
decided to give him the "A" (for ARTICHOKE) treatment. This,
too, was not very original. It had been used during the war to
interrogate prisoners and treat shell-shocked soldiers. As prac-
ticed on the suspected Russian agent, it consisted of injecting
enough sodium pentothal into the vein of his arm to knock him
out and then, twenty minutes later, stimulating him back to
semiconsciousness with a shot of Benzedrine. In this case, the
benzedrine did not revive the subject enough to suit the psychi-
atric consultant and he told Dr. Thompson to give the subject
another 10 mg. ten minutes later. This put the subject into a
state somewhere between waking and sleeping—almost coma-
tose and yet bug-eyed. In hypnotic tones that had to be trans-
lated into Russian by an interpreter, the consultant used the
technique of "regression" to convince the subject he was talk-
ing to his wife Eva at some earlier time in his life. This was no
easy trick, since a male interpreter was playing Eva. Neverthe-
less, the consultant states he could "create any fantasy" with 60
to 70 percent of his patients, using narcotherapy (as in this
case) or hypnosis. For roughly an hour, the subject seemed to
have no idea he was not speaking with his wife but with CIA
operatives trying to find out about his relationship with Soviet
intelligence. When the subject started to doze, the consultant
had Thompson give him a doubled jolt of Benzedrine. A half
hour later, the subject began to weep violently. The consultant
decided to end the session, and in his most soothing voice, he
urged the subject to fall asleep. As the subject calmed down, the
consultant suggested, with friendly and soothing words, that

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   41
the subject would remember nothing of the experience when
he woke up.
Inducing amnesia was an important Agency goal. "From the
ARTICHOKE point of view," states a 1952 document, "the
greater the amnesia produced, the more effective the results."
Obviously if a victim remembered the "A" treatment, it would
stop being a closely guarded ARTICHOKE secret. Presumably,
some subject who really did work for the Russians would tell
them how the Americans had worked him over. This reality
made "disposal" of ARTICHOKE subjects a particular prob-
lem. Killing them seems to have been ruled out, but Agency
officials made sure that some stayed in foreign prisons for long
periods of time. While in numerous specific cases, ARTI-
CHOKE team members claimed success in making their sub-
jects forget, their outside consultants had told them "that short
of cutting a subject's throat, a true amnesia cannot be guaran-
teed." As early as 1950, the Agency had put out a contract to a
private researcher to find a memory-destroying drug, but to no
apparent avail.* In any case, it would be unreasonable to as-
sume that over the years at least one ARTICHOKE subject did
not shake off the amnesic commands and tell the Russians
what happened to him. As was so often the case with CIA-opera-
tions, the enemy probably had a much better idea of the
Agency's activities than the folks back home.
Back at the safehouse, Wendt was far from through. Four
more subjects would be brought to him. The next one was an
alleged double agent whom the CIA had code-named EXPLO-
SIVE. Agency documents describe him as a Russian "profes-
sional agent type" and "a hard-boiled individual who appar-
ently has the ability to lie consistently but not very effectively."
He was no stranger to ARTICHOKE team members who, a few
months before, had plied him with a mixture of drugs and
hypnosis under the cover of a "psychiatric-medical" exam. At
that time, a professional hypnotist had accompanied the team,
and he had given his commands through an elaborate intercom
system to an interpreter who, in turn, was apparently able to
put EXPLOSIVE under. Afterward, the team reported to the
"Homer reported the ancient Greeks had such a substance—nepenthe—"a drug
to lull all pain and anger, and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow."
tNeither Morse Allen nor anyone else on the ARTICHOKE teams spoke any
foreign languages. Allen believed that the difficulty in communicating with the
guinea pigs hampered ARTICHOKE research.

42    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
CIA's Director that EXPLOSIVE had revealed "extremely valu-
able" information and that he had been made to forget his
interrogation through a hypnotically induced amnesia. Since
that time EXPLOSIVE had been kept in custody. Now he was
being brought out to give Professor Wendt a crack at him with
the Seconal-Dexedrine-marijuana combination.
This time, Wendt gave the subject all three drugs together in
one beer, delivered at the cocktail hour. Next came Seconal in
a dinner beer and then all three once more in a postprandial
beer. There were little, if any, positive results. Wendt ended the
session after midnight and commented, "At least we learned
one thing from this experiment. The people you have to deal
with here are different from American college students."
During the next week, the CIA men brought Wendt three
more subjects, with little success. The general attitude toward
Wendt became, in Thompson's words, "hostile as all hell." Both
the Agency and the Navy groups questioned his competence.
With one subject, the professor declared he had given too
strong a dose; with the next, too weak. While he had advertised
his drugs as tasteless, the subjects realized they had swallowed
something. As one subject in the next room was being interro-
gated in Russian that no one was bothering to translate, Wendt
took to playing the same pattern on the piano over and over for
a half hour. While the final subject was being questioned,
Wendt and his female assistant got a little tipsy on beer. Wendt
became so distracted during this experiment that he finally
admitted, "My thoughts are elsewhere." His assistant began to
giggle. Her presence had become like an open sore—which was
made more painful when Mrs. Wendt showed up in Frankfurt
and the professor threatened to jump off a church tower,
Thompson recalls.
Wendt is not alive to give his version of what happened, but
both CIA and Navy sources are consistent in their description
of him. ARTICHOKE team leader Morse Allen felt he had been
the victim of "a fraud or at least a gross misinterpretation,"
and he described the trip as "a waste of time and money." A
man who usually hid his feelings, Allen became livid when
Wendt's assistant measured drugs out with a penknife. He
recommended in his final report that those who develop drugs
not be allowed to participate in future field testing. "This, of
course, does not mean that experimental work is condemned by
the ARTICHOKE team," he wrote, "but a common sense ap-

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   43
proach in this direction will preclude arguments, alibis, and
complaints as in the recent situation." In keeping with this
"common sense approach," he also recommended that as "an
absolute rule," no women be allowed on ARTICHOKE missions
—because of the possible danger and because "personal conve-
nience, toilet facilities, etc., are complicated by the presence of
women."
Morse Allen and his ARTICHOKE mates returned to the
States still convinced that they could find ways to control
human behavior, but the Navy men were shaken. Their pri-
mary contractor had turned out to be a tremendous embarrass-
ment. Dr. Thompson stated he could never work with Wendt
again. Navy officials soon summoned Wendt to Bethesda and
told him they were canceling their support for his research.
Adding insult to injury, they told him they expected refund of
all unspent money. While the Navy managers made some effort
to continue CHATTER at other institutions, the program never
recovered from the Wendt fiasco. By the end of the next year,
1953, the Korean War had ended and the Navy abandoned
CHATTER altogether.
Over the next two decades, the Navy would still sponsor large
amounts of specialized behavioral research, and the Army
would invest huge sums in schemes to incapacitate whole ar-
mies with powerful drugs. But the CIA clearly pulled far into
the lead in mind control. In those areas in which military re-
search continued, the Agency stayed way ahead. The CIA con-
sistently was out on what was called the "cutting edge" of the
research, sponsoring the lion's share of the most harrowing
experiments. ARTICHOKE and its successor CIA programs be-
came an enormous effort that harnessed the energies of hun-
dreds of scientists.
The experience of the CIA psychiatric consultant provides a
small personal glimpse of how it felt to be a soldier in the
mind-control campaign. This psychiatrist, who insists on ano-
nymity, estimates that he made between 125 and 150 trips over-
seas on Agency operations from 1952 through his retirement in
1966. "To be a psychiatrist chasing off to Europe instead of just
seeing the same patients year after year, that was extraordi-
nary," he reminisces. "I wish I was back in those days. I never
got tired of it." He says his assignments called for "practicing
psychiatry in an ideal way, which meant you didn't become
involved with your patients. You weren't supposed to." Asked

44    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
how he felt about using drugs on unwitting foreigners, he
snaps, "Depends which side you were on. I never hurt anyone.
. . . We were at war."
For the most part, the psychiatrist stopped giving the "A" treat-
ment after the mid-1950s but he continued to use his profes-
sional skills to assess and manipulate agents and defectors. His
job was to help find out if a subject was under another country's
control and to recommend how the person could be switched to
the CIA's. In this work, he was contributing to the mainstream
of CIA activity that permeates its institutional existence from
its operations to its internal politics to its social life: the notion
of controlling people. Finding reliable ways to do that is a pri-
mary CIA goal, and the business is often a brutal one. As former
CIA Director Richard Helms stated in Senate testimony, "The
clandestine operator ... is trained to believe you can't count on
the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want or to
report accurately unless you own him body and soul."
Like all the world's secret services, the CIA sought to find the
best methods of owning people and making sure they stayed
owned. How could an operator be sure of an agent's loyalties?
Refugees and defectors were flooding Western Europe, and the
CIA wanted to exploit them. Which ones were telling the truth?
Who was a deception agent or a provocateur? The Anglo-American secret invasion of Albania had failed miserably. Had they been betrayed?* Whom could the CIA trust?
One way to try to answer these questions is to use physical
duress—or torture. Aside from its ethical drawbacks, however,
physical brutality simply does not work very well. As a senior
counterintelligence official explains, "If you have a blowtorch
up someone's ass, he'll give you tactical information." Yet he
will not be willing or able to play the modern espionage game
on the level desired by the CIA. One Agency document excludes
the use of torture "because such inhuman treatment is not only
out of keeping with the traditions of this country, but of dubious

"The answer was yes, in the sense that Soviet agent Harold "Kim" Philby,
working as British intelligence's liaison with the CIA apparently informed his
spymasters of specific plans to set up anticommunist resistance movements in
Albania and all over Eastern Europe. The Russians almost certainly learned
about CIA plans to overthrow communist rule in Eastern Europe and in the
Soviet Union itself. Knowing of such operations presumably increased Soviet
hostility.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   45
effectiveness as compared with various supplemental psy-
choanalytical techniques."
The second and most popular method to get answers is tradi-
tional spy tradecraft. Given enough time, a good interrogator
can very often find out a person's secrets. He applies persuasion
and mental seduction, mixed with psychological pressures of
every description—emotional carrots and sticks. A successful
covert operator uses the same sorts of techniques in recruiting
agents and making sure they stay in line. While the rest of the
population may dabble in this sort of manipulation, the profes-
sional operator does it for a living, and he operates mostly out-
side the system of restraints that normally govern personal
relationships. "I never gave a thought to legality or morality,"
states a retired and quite cynical Agency case officer with over
20 years' experience. "Frankly, I did what worked."
The operator pursues people he can turn into "controlled
sources"—agents willing to do his bidding either in supplying
intelligence or taking covert action. He seeks people in a posi-
tion to do something useful for the Agency—or who someday
might be in such a position, perhaps with CIA aid. Once he
picks his target, he usually looks for a weakness or vulnerabil-
ity he can play on. Like a good fisherman, the clever operator
knows that the way to hook his prey is to choose an appropriate
bait, which the target will think he is seizing because he wants
to. The hook has to be firmly implanted; the agent sometimes
tries to escape once he understands the implications of betray-
ing his country. While the case officer might try to convince
him he is acting for the good of his homeland, the agent must
still face up to being branded a traitor.
Does every man have his price? Not exactly, states the senior
counterintelligence man, but he believes a shrewd operator
can usually find a way to reach anyone, particularly through
his family. In developing countries, the Agency has caused
family members to be arrested and mistreated by the local
police, given or withheld medical care for a sick child, and,
more prosaically, provided scholarships for a relative to study
abroad. This kind of tactic does not work as well on a Russian
or Western European, who does not live in a society where the
CIA can exert pressure so easily.
Like a doctor's bedside manner or a lawyer's courtroom style,
spy tradecraft is highly personalized. Different case officers
swear by different approaches, and successful methods are

46    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
carefully observed and copied. Most CIA operators seem to pre-
fer using an ideological lure if they can. John Stockwell, who
left the Agency in 1977 to write a book about CIA operations in
Angola, believes his best agents were "people convinced they
were doing the right thing... who disliked communists and felt
the CIA was the right organization." Stockwell recalls his
Agency instructors "hammering away at the positive aspect of
recruitment. This was where they established the myth of CIA
case officers being good guys. They said we didn't use negative
control, and we always made the relationship so that both par-
ties were better off for having worked together." More cynical
operators, like the one quoted above, take a different view: "You
can't create real motivation in a person by waving the flag or
by saying this is for the future good of democracy. You've got
to have a firmer hold than that. . . . His opinions can change."
This ex-operator favors approaches based either on revenge or
helping the agent advance his career:
Those are good motives because they can be created with the
individual. . . . Maybe you start with a Communist party cell
member and you help him become a district committee member
by eliminating his competition, or you help him get a position
where he can get even with someone. At the same time, he's
giving you more and more information as he moves forward, and
if you ever surface his reports, he's out of business. You've really
got him wrapped up. You don't even have to tell him. He realizes
it himself.
No matter what the approach to the prospective agent, the
case officer tries to make money a factor in the relationship.
Sometimes the whole recruiting pitch revolves around enrich-
ment. In other instances, the case officer allows the target the
illusion that he has sold out for higher motives. Always, how-
ever, the operator tries to use money to make the agent depen-
dent. The situation can become sticky with money-minded
agents when the case officer insists that part or all of the pay-
ments be placed in escrow, to prevent attracting undue atten-
tion. But even cash does not create control in the spy business.
As the cynical case officer puts it, "Money is tenuous because
somebody can always offer more."
Surprisingly, each of the CIA operators sampled agrees that
overt blackmail is a highly overrated form of control. The sen-

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT   47
ior counterintelligence man notes that while the Russians fre-
quently use some variety of entrapment—sexual or otherwise
—the CIA rarely did. "Very few [Agency] case officers were
tough enough" to pull it off and sustain it, he says. "Anytime an
agent has been forced to cooperate, you can take it for granted
that he has two things on his mind: he is looking for a way out
and for revenge. Given the slightest opportunity, he will hit you
right between the eyes." Blackmail could backfire in unex-
pected ways. John Stockwell remembers an agent in Southeast
Asia who wanted to quit: "The case officer leaned on the guy
and said, 'Look, friend, we still need your intelligence, and we
have receipts you signed which we can turn over to the local
police.' The agent blew his brains out, leaving a suicide note
regretting his cooperation with the CIA and telling how the
Agency had tried to blackmail him. It caused some problems
with the local government."
The case officer always tries to weave an ever-tightening web
of control around his agent. His methods of doing so are so
personal and so basic that they often reveal more about the case
officer himself than the agent, reflecting his outlook and his
personal philosophy. The cynical operator describes his usual
technique, which turns out to be a form of false idealism:
"You've got to treat a man as an equal and convince him you're
partners in this thing. Even if he's a communist party member,
you can't deal with him like a crumb. You sit down with him
and ask how are the kids, and you remember that he told you
last time that his son was having trouble in school. You build
personal rapport. If you treat him like dirt or an object of use,
eventually he'll turn on you or drop off the bandwagon."
John Stockwell’s approach relies on the power of imagina-
tion in a humdrum world: "I always felt the real key was that
you were offering something special—a real secret life—some-
thing that he and you only knew made him different from all
the pedestrian paper shufflers in a government office or a bor-
ing party cell meeting. Everybody has a little of Walter Mitty
in him—what a relief to know you really do work for the CIA
in your spare time."
Sometimes a case officer wants to get the agent to do some-
thing he does not think he wants to do. One former CIA operator
uses a highly charged metaphor to describe how he did it:
"Sometimes one partner in a relationship wants to get into
deviations from standard sex. If you have some control, you

48    ORIGINS OF MIND-CONTROL RESEARCH
might be able to force your partner to try different things, but
it's much better to lead her down the road a step at a time, to
discuss it and fantasize until eventually she's saying, 'Let's try
this thing.' If her inhibitions and moral reservations are eroded
and she is turned on, it's much more fun and there's less chance
of blowback [exposure, in spy talk]. . . . It's the same with an
agent."
All case officers—and particularly counterintelligence men—
harbor recurring fears that their agents will betray them. The
suspicious professional looks for telltale signs like lateness,
nervousness, or inconsistency. He relies on his intuition. "The
more you've been around agents, the more likely you are to
sense that something isn't what it should be," comments the
senior counterintelligence man. "It's like with children."
No matter how skillfully practiced, traditional spycraft pro-
vides only incomplete answers to the nagging question of how
much the Agency can really trust an agent. All the sixth sense,
digging, and deductive reasoning in the world do not produce
certainty in a field that is based on deception and lies. Whereas
the British, who invented the game, have historically under-
stood the need for patience and a stiff upper lip, Americans
tend to look for quick answers, often by using the latest technol-
ogy. "We were very gimmick-prone," says the senior counterin-
telligence official. Gimmicks—machines, drugs, technical
tricks—comprise the third method of behavior control, after
torture and tradecraft. Like safecrackers who swear by the skill
in their fingertips, most of the Agency's mainstream operators
disparage newfangled gadgets. Many now claim that drugs,
hypnosis, and other exotic methods actually detract from good
tradecraft because they make operators careless and lazy.
Nevertheless, the operators and their high-level sponsors,
like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, consistently pushed for
the magic technique—the deus ex machina—that would solve
their problems. Caught in the muck and frustration of ordinary
spywork, operators hoped for a miracle tool. Faced with liars
and deceivers, they longed for a truth drug. Surrounded by
people who knew too much, they sought a way to create amne-
sia. They dreamed of finding means to make unwilling people
carry out specific tasks, such as stealing documents, provoking
a fight, killing someone, or otherwise committing an antisocial
act. Secret agents recruited by more traditional appeals to ide-
alism, greed, ambition, or fear had always done such deeds, but

THE PROFESSOR AND THE "A " TREA TMENT    49
they usually gave their spymasters headaches in the process.
Sometimes they balked. Moreover, first they had to agree to
serve the CIA. The best tradecraft in the world seldom works
against a well-motivated target. (The cynical operator recalls
offering the head of Cuban intelligence $1,000,000—in 1966 at
a Madrid hotel—only to receive a flat rejection.) Plagued by the
unsureness, Agency officials hoped to take the randomness—
indeed, the free will—out of agent handling. As one one psy-
chologist who worked on behavior control describes it, "The
problem of every intelligence operation is how do you remove
the human element? The operators would come to us and ask
for the human element to be removed." Thus the impetus to-
ward mind-control research came not only from the lure of
science and the fantasies of science fiction, it also came from
the heart of the spy business.

PART II
INTELLIGENCE OR
"WITCHES POTIONS"
And it seems to me perfectly in the cards
that there will be within the next genera-
tion or so a pharmacological method of
making people love their servitude, and
producing ... a kind of painless concentra-
tion camp for entire societies, so that peo-
ple will in fact have their liberties taken
away from them but will rather enjoy it,
because they will be distracted from any
desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwash-
ing, or brainwashing enhanced by phar-
macological methods.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY, 1959.
I had perfected LSD for medical use, not as
a weapon. It can make you insane or even
kill you if it is not properly used under
medical supervision. In any case, the re-
search should be done by medical people
and not by soldiers or intelligence agen-
cies.	—ALBERT  HOFFMAN, 1977.
LSD—LBJ—FBI—CIA.
—lyric from Hair, 1968.

CHAPTER
4
LSD
Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD in 1943 may have begun a
new age in the exploration of the human mind, but it took six
years for word to reach America. Even after Hofmann and his
coworkers in Switzerland published their work in a 1947 arti-
cle, no one in the United States seemed to notice. Then in 1949,
a famous Viennese doctor named Otto Kauders traveled to the
United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference
at Boston Psychopathic Hospital,* a pioneering mental-health
institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School, and he
spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid
diethylamide. Milton Greenblatt, the hospital's research direc-
tor, vividly recalls Kauders' description of how an infinitesi-
mally small dose had rendered Dr. Hofmann temporarily
"crazy." "We were very interested in anything that could make
someone schizophrenic," says Greenblatt. If the drug really did
induce psychosis for a short time, the Boston doctors reasoned,
an antidote—which they hoped to find—might cure schizophre-
nia. It would take many years of research to show that LSD did
not, in fact, produce a "model psychosis," but to the Boston
doctors in 1949, the drug showed incredible promise. Max Rin-
kel, a neuropsychiatrist and refugee from Hitler's Germany,
was so intrigued by Kauders' presentation that he quickly con-
tacted Sandoz, the huge Swiss pharmaceutical firm where Al-
MJuring the 1950s, Boston Psychopathic changed its name to Massachusetts
Mental Health Center, the name it hears today.

54   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
bert Hofmann worked. Sandoz officials arranged to ship some
LSD across the Atlantic.
The first American trip followed. The subject was Robert
Hyde, a Vermont-born psychiatrist who was Boston Psy-
chopathic's number-two man. A bold, innovative sort, Hyde
took it for granted that there would be no testing program until
he tried the drug. With Rinkel and the hospital's senior physi-
cian, H. Jackson DeShon looking on, Hyde drank a glass of
water with 100 micrograms of LSD in it—less than half Hof-
mann's dose, but still a hefty jolt. DeShon describes Hyde's
reaction as "nothing very startling." The perpetually active
Hyde insisted on making his normal hospital rounds while his
colleagues tagged along. Rinkel later told a scientific confer-
ence that Hyde became "quite paranoiac, saying that we had
not given him anything. He also berated us and said the com-
pany had cheated us, given us plain water. That was not Dr.
Hyde's normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man." Hyde's
first experience was hardly as dramatic as Albert Hofmann's,
but then the Boston psychiatrist had not, like Hofmann, set off
on a voyage into the complete unknown. For better or worse,
LSD had come to America in 1949 and had embarked on a
strange trip of its own. Academic researchers would study it in
search of knowledge that would benefit all mankind. Intelli-
gence agencies, particularly the CIA, would subsidize and
shape the form of much of this work to learn how the drug
could be used to break the will of enemy agents, unlock secrets
in the minds of trained spies, and otherwise manipulate
human behavior. These two strains—of helping people and of
controlling them—would coexist rather comfortably through
the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, LSD would escape from the closed
world of scholar and spy, and it would play a major role in
causing a cultural upheaval that would have an impact both on
global politics and on intimate personal beliefs. The trip would
wind up—to borrow some hyperbole from the musical Hair—
with "the youth of America on LSD."
The counterculture generation was not yet out of the nursery,
however, when Bob Hyde went tripping: Hyde himself would
not become a secret CIA consultant for several years. The CIA
and the military intelligence agencies were just setting out on
their quest for drugs and other exotic methods to take posses-
sion of people's minds. The ancient desire to control enemies

LSD    55
through magical spells and potions had come alive again, and
several offices within the CIA competed to become the head
controllers. Men from the Office of Security's ARTICHOKE
program were struggling—as had OSS before them—to find a
truth drug or hypnotic method that would aid in interrogation.
Concurrently, the Technical Services Staff (TSS) was investi-
gating in much greater depth the whole area of applying chem-
ical and biological warfare (CBW) to covert operations. TSS
was the lineal descendent of Stanley Lovell's Research and
Development unit in OSS, and its officials kept alive much of
the excitement and urgency of the World War II days when
Lovell had tried to bring out the Peck's Bad Boy in American
scientists. Specialists from TSS furnished backup equipment
for secret operations: false papers, bugs, taps, suicide pills, ex-
plosive seashells, transmitters hidden in false teeth, cameras in
tobacco pouches, invisible inks, and the like. In later years,
these gadget wizards from TSS would become known for sup-
plying some of history's more ludicrous landmarks, such as
Howard Hunt's ill-fitting red wig; but in the early days of the
CIA, they gave promise of transforming the spy world.
Within TSS, there existed a Chemical Division with func-
tions that few others—even in TSS—knew about. These had to
do with using chemicals (and germs) against specific people.
From 1951 to 1956, the years when the CIA's interest in LSD
peaked, Sidney Gottlieb, a native of the Bronx with a Ph.D. in
chemistry from Cal Tech, headed this division. (And for most
of the years until 1973, he would oversee TSS's behavioral pro-
grams from one job or another.) Only 33 years old when he took
over the Chemical Division, Gottlieb had managed to overcome
a pronounced stammer and a clubfoot to rise through Agency
ranks. Described by several acquaintances as a "compensator,"
Gottlieb prided himself on his ability, despite his obvious handi-
caps, to pursue his cherished hobby, folk dancing. On returning
from secret missions overseas, he invariably brought back a
new step that he would dance with surprising grace. He could
call out instructions for the most complicated dances without
a break in his voice, infecting others with enthusiasm. A man
of unorthodox tastes, Gottlieb lived in a former slave cabin that
he had remodeled himself—with his wife, the daughter of Pres-
byterian missionaries in India, and his four children. Each
morning, he rose at 5:30 to milk the goats he kept on his 15 acres
outside Washington. The Gottliebs drank only goat's milk, and

56   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
they made their own cheese. They also raised Christmas trees
which they sold to the outside world. Greatly respected by his
former colleagues, Gottlieb, who refused to be interviewed for
this book, is described as a humanist, a man of intellectual
humility and strength, willing to carry out, as one ex-associate
puts it, "the tough things that had to be done." This associate
fondly recalls, "When you watched him, you gained more and
more respect because he was willing to work so hard to get an
idea across. He left himself totally exposed. It was more impor-
tant for us to get the idea than for him not to stutter." One idea
he got across was that the Agency should investigate the poten-
tial use of the obscure new drug, LSD, as a spy weapon.
At the top ranks of the Clandestine Services (officially called
the Directorate of Operations but popularly known as the "dirty
tricks department"), Sid Gottlieb had a champion who ap-
preciated his qualities, Richard Helms. For two decades, Gott-
lieb would move into progressively higher positions in the
wake of Helms' climb to the highest position in the Agency.
Helms, the tall, smooth "preppie," apparently liked the way the
Jewish chemist, who had started out at Manhattan's City Col-
lege, could thread his way through complicated technical prob-
lems and make them understandable to nonscientists. Gottlieb
was loyal and he followed orders. Although many people lay in
the chain of command between the two men, Helms preferred
to avoid bureaucratic niceties by dealing directly with Gottlieb.
On April 3, 1953, Helms proposed to Director Allen Dulles
that the CIA set up a program under Gottlieb for "covert use of
biological and chemical materials." Helms made clear that the
Agency could use these methods in "present and future clan-
destine operations" and then added, "Aside from the offensive
potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in
this field . . . gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy's
theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves
against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these
techniques as we are." Once again, as it would throughout the
history of the behavioral programs, defense justified offense.
Ray Cline, often a bureaucratic rival of Helms, notes the spirit
in which the future Director pushed this program: "Helms fan-
cied himself a pretty tough cookie. It was fashionable among
that group to fancy they were rather impersonal about dangers,
risks, and human life. Helms would think it sentimental and
foolish to be against something like this."

LSD    57
On April 13, 1953—the same day that the Pentagon an-
nounced that any U.S. prisoner refusing repatriation in Korea
would be listed as a deserter and shot if caught—Allen Dulles
approved the program, essentially as put forth by Helms.
Dulles took note of the "ultra-sensitive work" involved and
agreed that the project would be called MKULTRA.* He ap-
proved an initial budget of $300,000, exempted the program
from normal CIA financial controls, and allowed TSS to start up
research projects "without the signing of the usual contracts or
other written agreements." Dulles ordered the Agency's book-
keepers to pay the costs blindly on the signatures of Sid Gottlieb
and Willis Gibbons, a former U.S. Rubber executive who
headed TSS.
As is so often the case in government, the activity that Allen
Dulles approved with MKULTRA was already under way, even
before he gave it a bureaucratic structure. Under the code
name MKDELTA, the Clandestine Services had set up proce-
dures the year before to govern the use of CBW products.
(MKDELTA now became the operational side of MKULTRA.)
Also in 1952, TSS had made an agreement with the Special
Operations Division (SOD) of the Army's biological research
center at Fort Detrick, Maryland whereby SOD would produce
germ weapons for the CIA's use (with the program called
MKNAOMI). Sid Gottlieb later testified that the purpose of
these programs was "to investigate whether and how it was
possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means.
The context in which this investigation was started was that of
the height of the Cold War with the Korean War just winding
down; with the CIA organizing its resources to liberate Eastern
Europe by paramilitary means; and with the threat of Soviet
aggression very real and tangible, as exemplified by the recent
Berlin airlift" (which occurred in 1948).
In the early days of MKULTRA, the roughly six TSS profes-
sionals who worked on the program spent a good deal of their
time considering the possibilities of LSD* "The most fascinat-
*Pronounced M-K-ULTRA. The MK digraph simply identified it as a TSS pro-
ject. As for the ULTRA part, it may have had its etymological roots in the most
closely guarded Anglo-American World War II intelligence secret, the ULTRA
program, which handled the cracking of German military codes. While good
espionage tradecraft called for cryptonyms to have no special meaning, war-
time experiences were still very much on the minds of men like Allen Dulles.
*By no means did TSS neglect other drugs. It looked at hundreds of others from
cocaine to nicotine, with special emphasis on special-purpose substances. One

55    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
ing thing about it," says one of them, "was that such minute
quantities had such a terrific effect." Albert Hofman had gone
off into another world after swallowing less than 1/100,000 of
an ounce. Scientists had known about the mind-altering quali-
ties of drugs like mescaline since the late nineteenth century,
but LSD was several thousand times more potent. Hashish had
been around for millennia, but LSD was roughly a million
times stronger (by weight). A two-suiter suitcase could hold
enough LSD to turn on every man, woman, and child in the
United States. "We thought about the possibility of putting
some in a city water supply and having the citizens wander
around in a more or less happy state, not terribly interested in
defending themselves," recalls the TSS man. But incapacitat-
ing such large numbers of people fell to the Army Chemical
Corps, which also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens.
The CIA was concentrating on individuals. TSS officials under-
stood that LSD distorted a person's sense of reality, and they felt
compelled to learn whether it could alter someone's basic loyal-
ties. Could the CIA make spies out of tripping Russians—or vice
versa? In the early 1950s, when the Agency developed an almost
desperate need to know more about LSD, almost no outside
information existed on the subject. Sandoz had done some clin-
ical studies, as had a few other places, including Boston Psy-
chopathic, but the work generally had not moved much beyond
the horse-and-buggy stage. The MKULTRA team had literally
hundreds of questions about LSD's physiological, psychologi-
cal, chemical, and social effects. Did it have any antidotes?
What happened if it were combined with other drugs? Did it
affect everyone the same way? What was the effect of doubling
the dose? And so on.
TSS first sought answers from academic researchers, who, on
the whole, gladly cooperated and let the Agency pick their
brains. But CIA officials realized that no one would undertake
a quick and systematic study of the drug unless the Agency
itself paid the bill. Almost no government or private money was
then available for what had been dubbed "experimental psy-
chiatry." Sandoz wanted the drug tested, for its own commer-
cial reasons, but beyond supplying it free to researchers, it
1952 memo talked about the urgent operational need for a chemical "producing
general listlessness and lethargy." Another mentioned finding—as TSS later
did—a potion to accelerate the effects of liquor, called an "alcohol extender."

LSD    59
would not assume the costs. The National Institutes of Mental
Health had an interest in LSD's relationship to mental illness,
but CIA officials wanted to know how the drug affected normal
people, not sick ones. Only the military services, essentially for
the same reasons as the CIA, were willing to sink much money
into LSD, and the Agency men were not about to defer to them.
They chose instead to take the lead—in effect to create a whole
new field of research.
Suddenly there was a huge new market for grants in aca-
demia, as Sid Gottlieb and his aides began to fund LSD projects
at prestigious institutions. The Agency's LSD pathfinders can
be identified: Bob Hyde's group at Boston Psychopathic, Harold
Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in
New York, Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical
School, Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Re-
search Center in Lexington, Kentucky, Louis Jolyon West at the
University of Oklahoma, and Harold Hodge's group at the Uni-
versity of Rochester. The Agency disguised its involvement by
passing the money through two conduits: the Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, a rich establishment institution which served as a
cutout (intermediary) only for a year or two, and the Geschick-
ter Fund for Medical Research, a Washington, D.C. family
foundation, whose head, Dr. Charles Geschickter, provided the
Agency with a variety of services for more than a decade.
Reflexively, TSS officials felt they had to keep the CIA connec-
tion secret. They could only "assume," according to a 1955
study, that Soviet scientists understood the drug's "strategic
importance" and were capable of making it themselves. They
did not want to spur the Russians into starting their own LSD
program or into devising countermeasures.
The CIA's secrecy was also clearly aimed at the folks back
home. As a 1963 Inspector General's report stated, "Research in
the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many
authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally
unethical"; therefore, openness would put "in jeopardy" the
reputations of the outside researchers. Moreover, the CIA In-
spector General declared that disclosure of certain MKULTRA
activities could result in "serious adverse reaction" among the
American public.
At Boston Psychopathic, there were various levels of conceal-
ment. Only Bob Hyde and his boss, the hospital superintendant,
knew officially that the CIA was funding the hospital's LSD

60    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
program from 1952 on, to the tune of about $40,000 a year. Yet,
according to another member of the Hyde group, Dr. DeShon,
all senior staff understood where the money really came from.
"We agreed not to discuss it," says DeShon. "I don't see any
objection to this. We never gave it to anyone without his con-
sent and without explaining it in detail." Hospital officials told
the volunteer subjects something about the nature of the ex-
periments but nothing about their origins or purpose. None of
the subjects had any idea that the CIA was paying for the prob-
ing of their minds and would use the results for its own pur-
poses; most of the staff was similarly ignorant.
Like Hyde, almost all the researchers tried LSD on them-
selves. Indeed, many believed they gained real insight into
what it felt like to be mentally ill, useful knowledge for health
professionals who spent their lives treating people supposedly
sick in the head. Hyde set up a multidisciplinary program—
virtually unheard of at the time—that brought together psy-
chiatrists, psychologists, and physiologists. As subjects, they
used each other, hospital patients, and volunteers—mostly stu-
dents—from the Boston area. They worked through a long se-
quence of experiments that served to isolate variable after vari-
able. Palming themselves off as foundation officials, the men
from MKULTRA frequently visited to observe and suggest
areas of future research. One Agency man, who himself
tripped several times under Hyde's general supervision,
remembers that he and his colleagues would pass on a nugget
that another contractor like Harold Abramson had gleaned and
ask Hyde to perform a follow-up test that might answer a ques-
tion of interest to the Agency. Despite these tangents, the main
body of research proceeded in a planned and orderly fashion.
The researchers learned that while some subjects seemed to
become schizophrenic, many others did not. Surprisingly, true
schizophrenics showed little reaction at all to LSD, unless
given massive doses. The Hyde group found out that the quality
of a person's reaction was determined mainly by the person's
basic personality structure (set) and the environment (setting)
in which he or she took the drug. The subject's expectation of
what would happen also played a major part. More than any-
thing else, LSD tended to intensify the subject's existing char-
acteristics—often to extremes. A little suspicion could grow
into major paranoia, particularly in the company of people
perceived as threatening.

LSD    61
Unbeknownst to his fellow researchers, the energetic Dr.
Hyde also advised the CIA on using LSD in covert operations.
A CIA officer who worked with him recalls: "The idea would be
to give him the details of what had happened [with a case], and
he would speculate. As a sharp M.D. in the old-school sense, he
would look at things in ways that a lot of recent bright lights
couldn't get... . He had a good sense of make-do." The Agency
paid Hyde for his time as a consultant, and TSS officials eventu-
ally set aside a special MKULTRA subproject as Hyde's private
funding mechanism. Hyde received funds from yet another
MKULTRA subproject that TSS men created for him in 1954,
so he could serve as a cutout for Agency purchases of rare
chemicals. His first buy was to be $32,000 worth of corynan-
thine, a possible antidote to LSD, that would not be traced to the
CIA.
Bob Hyde died in 1976 at the age of 66, widely hailed as a
pacesetter in mental health. His medical and intelligence col-
leagues speak highly of him both personally and profession-
ally. Like most of his generation, he apparently considered
helping the CIA a patriotic duty. An Agency officer states that
Hyde never raised doubts about his covert work. "He wouldn't
moralize. He had a lot of trust in the people he was dealing with
[from the CIA]. He had pretty well reached the conclusion that
if they decided to do something [operationally], they had tried
whatever else there was and were willing to risk it."
Most of the CIA's academic researchers published articles on
their work in professional journals, but those long, scholarly
reports often gave an incomplete picture of the research. In
effect, the scientists would write openly about how LSD affects
a patient's pulse rate, but they would tell only the CIA how the
drug could be used to ruin that patient's marriage or memory.
Those researchers who were aware of the Agency's sponsor-
ship seldom published anything remotely connected to the in-
strumental and rather unpleasant questions the MKULTRA
men posed for investigation. That was true of Hyde and of
Harold Abramson, the New York allergist who became one of
the first Johnny Appleseeds of LSD by giving it to a number of
his distinguished colleagues. Abramson documented all sorts
of experiments on topics like the effects of LSD on Siamese
fighting fish and snails,* but he never wrote a word about one
*As happened to Albert Hofmann the first time, Abramson once unknowingly

62    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
of his early LSD assignments from the Agency. In a 1953 docu-
ment, Sid Gottlieb listed subjects he expected Abramson to in-
vestigate with the $85,000 the Agency was furnishing him.
Gottlieb wanted "operationally pertinent materials along the
following lines: a. Disturbance of Memory; b. Discrediting by
Aberrant Behavior; c. Alteration of Sex Patterns; d. Eliciting of
Information; e. Suggestibility; f. Creation of Dependence."
Dr. Harris Isbell, whose work the CIA funded through Navy
cover with the approval of the Director of the National Insti-
tutes of Health, published his principal findings, but he did not
mention how he obtained his subjects. As Director of the Addic-
tion Research Center at the huge Federal drug hospital in Lex-
ington, Kentucky, he had access to a literally captive popula-
tion. Inmates heard on the grapevine that if they volunteered
for Isbell's program, they would be rewarded either in the drug
of their choice or in time off from their sentences. Most of the
addicts chose drugs—usually heroin or morphine of a purity
seldom seen on the street. The subjects signed an approval
form, but they were not told the names of the experimental
drugs or the probable effects. This mattered little, since the
"volunteers" probably would have granted their informed con-
sent to virtually anything to get hard drugs.
Given Isbell's almost unlimited supply of subjects, TSS offi-
cials used the Lexington facility as a place to make quick tests
of promising but untried drugs and to perform specialized ex-
periments they could not easily duplicate elsewhere. For in-
stance, Isbell did one study for which it would have been im-
possible to attract student volunteers. He kept seven men on
LSD for 77 straight days.* Such an experiment is as chilling as
ingested some LSD, probably by swallowing water from his spiked snail tank.
He started to feel bad, but with his wife's help, he finally pinpointed the cause.
According to brain and dolphin expert John Lilly, who heard the story from
Mrs. Abramson, Harold was greatly relieved that his discomfort was not grave.
"Oh, it's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an LSD psychosis. I'll just go to bed
and sleep it off."
*Army researchers, as usual running about five years behind the CIA, became
interested in the sustained use of LSD as an interrogation device during 1961
field tests (called Operation THIRD CHANCE). The Army men tested the drug
in Europe on nine foreigners and one American, a black soldier named James
Thornwell, accused of stealing classified documents. While Thornwell was
reacting to the drug under extremely stressful conditions, his captors threat-
ened "to extend the state indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insan-
ity," according to an Army document. Thornwell is now suing the U.S. govern-
ment for $30 million.
In one of those twists that Washington insiders take for granted and outsiders

LSD    63
it is astonishing—both to lovers and haters of LSD. Nearly 20
years after Dr. Isbell's early work, counterculture journalist
Hunter S. Thompson delighted and frightened his readers with
accounts of drug binges lasting a few days, during which
Thompson felt his brain boiling away in the sun, his nerves
wrapping around enormous barbed wire forts, and his remain-
ing faculties reduced to their reptilian antecedents. Even
Thompson would shudder at the thought of 77 days straight on
LSD, and it is doubtful he would joke about the idea. To Dr.
Isbell, it was just another experiment. "I have had seven pa-
tients who have now been taking the drug for more than 42
days," he wrote in the middle of the test, which he called "the
most amazing demonstration of drug tolerance I have ever
seen." Isbell tried to "break through this tolerance" by giving
triple and quadruple doses of LSD to the inmates.
Filled with intense curiosity, Isbell tried out a wide variety of
unproven drugs on his subjects. Just as soon as a new batch of
scopolamine, rivea seeds, or bufontenine arrived from the CIA
or NIMH, he would start testing. His relish for the task occa-
sionally shone through the dull scientific reports. "I will write
you a letter as soon as I can get the stuff into a man or two," he
informed his Agency contact.
No corresponding feeling shone through for the inmates,
however. In his few recorded personal comments, he com-
plained that his subjects tended to be afraid of the doctors and
were not as open in describing their experiences as the experi-
menters would have wished. Although Isbell made an effort to
"break through the barriers" with the subjects, who were
nearly all black drug addicts, Isbell finally decided "in all prob-
ability, this type of behavior is to be expected with patients of
this type." The subjects have long since scattered, and no one
apparently has measured the aftereffects of the more extreme
experiments on them.
One subject who could be found spent only a brief time with
Dr. Isbell. Eddie Flowers was 19 years old and had been in
Lexington for about a year when he signed up for Isbell's pro-
gram. He lied about his age to get in, claiming he was 21. All
he cared about was getting some drugs. He moved into the
do not quite believe, Terry Lenzner, a partner of the same law firm seeking this
huge sum for Thornwell, is the lawyer for Sid Gottlieb, the man who oversaw
the 77-day trips at Lexington and even more dangerous LSD testing.

64    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
experimental wing of the hospital where the food was better
and he could listen to music. He loved his heroin but knew
nothing about drugs like LSD. One day he took something in a
graham cracker. No one ever told him the name, but his de-
scription sounds like it made him trip—badly, to be sure. "It
was the worst shit I ever had," he says. He hallucinated and
suffered for 16 or 17 hours. "I was frightened. I wouldn't take
it again." Still, Flowers earned enough "points" in the experi-
ment to qualify for his "payoff" in heroin. All he had to do was
knock on a little window down the hall. This was the drug bank.
The man in charge kept a list of the amount of the hard drug
each inmate had in his account. Flowers just had to say how
much he wanted to withdraw and note the method of payment.
"If you wanted it in the vein, you got it there," recalls Flowers
who now works in a Washington, D.C. drug rehabilitation cen-
ter.
Dr. Isbell refuses all request for interviews. He did tell a
Senate subcommittee in 1975 that he inherited the drug payoff
system when he came to Lexington and that "it was the custom
in those days. . . . The ethical codes were not so highly devel-
oped, and there was a great need to know in order to protect the
public in assessing the potential use of narcotics. ... I person-
ally think we did a very excellent job."
For every Isbell, Hyde, or Abramson who did TSS contract
work, there were dozens of others who simply served as casual
CIA informants, some witting and some not. Each TSS project
officer had a skull session with dozens of recognized experts
several times a year. "That was the only way a tiny staff like Sid
Gottlieb's could possibly keep on top of the burgeoning behav-
ioral sciences," says an ex-CIA official. "There would be no way
you could do it by library research or the Ph.D. dissertation
approach." The TSS men always asked their contacts for the
names of others they could talk to, and the contacts would pass
them on to other interesting scientists.
In LSD research, TSS officers benefited from the energetic
intelligence gathering of their contractors, particularly Harold
Abramson. Abramson talked regularly to virtually everyone
interested in the drug, including the few early researchers not
funded by the Agency or the military, and he reported his
findings to TSS. In addition, he served as reporting secretary of
two conference series sponsored by the Agency's sometime con-
duit, the Macy Foundation. These series each lasted over five

LSD    65
year periods in the 1950s; one dealt with "Problems of Con-
sciousness" and the other with "Neuropharmacology." Held
once a year in the genteel surroundings of the Princeton Inn,
the Macy Foundation conferences brought together TSS's (and
the military's) leading contractors, as part of a group of roughly
25 with the multidisciplinary background that TSS officials so
loved. The participants came from all over the social sciences
and included such luminaries as Margaret Mead and Jean Pia-
get. The topics discussed usually mirrored TSS's interests at the
time, and the conferences served as a spawning ground for
ideas that allowed researchers to engage in some healthy cross-
fertilization.
Beyond the academic world, TSS looked to the pharmaceuti-
cal companies as another source on drugs—and for a continu-
ing supply of new products to test. TSS's Ray Treichler handled
the liaison function, and this secretive little man built up close
relationships with many of the industry's key executives. He
had a particular knack for convincing them he would not re-
veal their trade secrets. Sometimes claiming to be from the
Army Chemical Corps and sometimes admitting his CIA con-
nection, Treichler would ask for samples of drugs that were
either highly poisonous, or, in the words of the onetime director
of research of a large company, "caused hypertension, in-
creased blood pressure, or led to other odd physiological activ-
ity."
Dealing with American drug companies posed no particular
problems for TSS. Most cooperated in any way they could. But
relations with Sandoz were more complicated. The giant Swiss
firm had a monopoly on the Western world's production of LSD
until 1953. Agency officials feared that Sandoz would somehow
allow large quantities to reach the Russians. Since information
on LSD's chemical structure and effects was publicly available
from 1947 on, the Russians could have produced it any time
they felt it worthwhile. Thus, the Agency's phobia about San-
doz seems rather irrational, but it unquestionably did exist.
On two occasions early in the Cold War, the entire CIA hier-
archy went into a dither over reports that Sandoz might allow
large amounts of LSD to reach Communist countries. In 1951
reports came in through military channels that the Russians
had obtained some 50 million doses from Sandoz. Horrendous
visions of what the Russians might do with such a stockpile
circulated in the CIA, where officials did not find out the intelli-

66    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
gence was false for several years. There was an even greater
uproar in 1953 when more reports came in, again through mili-
tary intelligence, that Sandoz wanted to sell the astounding
quantity of 10 kilos (22 pounds) of LSD—enough for about 100
million doses—on the open market.
A top-level coordinating committee which included CIA and
Pentagon representatives unanimously recommended that the
Agency put up $240,000 to buy it all. Allen Dulles gave his
approval, and off went two CIA representatives to Switzerland,
presumably with a black bag full of cash. They met with the
president of Sandoz and other top executives. The Sandoz men
stated that the company had never made anything approach-
ing 10 kilos of LSD and that, in fact, since the discovery of the
drug 10 years before, its total production had been only 40
grams (about 1.5 ounces).* The manufacturing process moved
quite slowly at that time because Sandoz used real ergot, which
could not be grown in large quantities. Nevertheless, Sandoz
executives, being good Swiss businessmen, offered to supply
the U.S. Government with 100 grams weekly for an indefinite
period, if the Americans would pay a fair price. Twice the
Sandoz president thanked the CIA men for being willing to take
the nonexistent 10 kilos off the market. While he said the com-
pany now regretted it had ever discovered LSD in the first
place, he promised that Sandoz would not let the drug fall into
communist hands. The Sandoz president mentioned that vari-
ous Americans had in the past made "covert and sideways"
approaches to Sandoz to find out about LSD, and he agreed to
keep the U.S. Government informed of all future production
and shipping of the drug. He also agreed to pass on any intelli-
gence about Eastern European interest in LSD. The Sandoz
executives asked only that their arrangement with the CIA be
kept "in the very strictest confidence."
All around the world, the CIA tried to stay on top of the LSD
supply. Back home in Indianapolis, Eli Lilly & Company was
even then working on a process to synthesize LSD. Agency offi-
*A 1975 CIA document clears up the mystery of how the Agency's military
sources could have made such a huge error in estimating Sandoz's LSD supply
(and probably also explains the earlier inaccurate report that the Russians had
bought 50,000,000 doses). What happened, according to the document, was that
the U.S. military attache in Switzerland did not know the difference between
a milligram (1/1,000 of a gram) and a kilogram (1,000 grams). This mix-up
threw all his calculations off by a factor of 1,000,000.

LSD    67
cials felt uncomfortable having to rely on a foreign company
for their supply, and in 1953 they asked Lilly executives to
make them up a batch, which the company subsequently
donated to the government. Then, in 1954, Lilly scored a major
breakthrough when its researchers worked out a complicated
12- to 15-step process to manufacture first lysergic acid (the
basic building block) and then LSD itself from chemicals avail-
able on the open market. Given a relatively sophisticated lab,
a competent chemist could now make LSD without a supply of
the hard-to-grow ergot fungus. Lilly officers confidentially in-
formed the government of their triumph. They also held an
unprecedented press conference to trumpet their synthesis of
lysergic acid, but they did not publish for another five years
their success with the closely related LSD.
TSS officials soon sent a memo to Allen Dulles, explaining
that the Lilly discovery was important because the government
henceforth could buy LSD in "tonnage quantities," which
made it a potential chemical-warfare agent. The memo writer
pointed out, however, that from the MKULTRA point of view,
the discovery made no difference since TSS was working on
ways to use the drug only in small-scale covert operations, and
the Agency had no trouble getting the limited amounts it
needed. But now the Army Chemical Corps and the Air Force
could get their collective hands on enough LSD to turn on the
world.
Sharing the drug with the Army here, setting up research
programs there, keeping track of it everywhere, the CIA gener-
ally presided over the LSD scene during the 1950s. To be sure,
the military services played a part and funded their own re-
search programs.* So did the National Institutes of Health, to
a lesser extent. Yet both the military services and the NIH
allowed themselves to be co-opted by the CIA—as funding con-
*Military security agencies supported the LSD work of such well-known re-
searchers as Amedeo Marrazzi of the University of Minnesota and Missouri
Institute of Psychiatry, Henry Beecher of Harvard and Massachusetts General
Hospital, Charles Savage while he was at the Naval Medical Research Insti-
tute, James Dille of the University of Washington, Gerald Klee of the University
of Maryland Medical School, Neil Burch of Baylor University (who performed
later experiments for the CIA), and Paul Hoch and James Cattell of the New
York State Psychiatric Institute, whose forced injections of a mescaline deriva-
tive led to the 1953 death of New York tennis professional Harold Blauer. (Dr.
Cattell later told Army investigators, "We didn't know whether it was dog piss
or what it was we were giving him.")

68    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
duits and intelligence sources. The Food and Drug Administra-
tion also supplied the Agency with confidential information on
drug testing. Of the Western world's two LSD manufacturers,
one—Eli Lilly—gave its entire (small) supply to the CIA and the
military. The other—Sandoz—informed Agency representa-
tives every time it shipped the drug. If somehow the CIA missed
anything with all these sources, the Agency still had its own
network of scholar-spies, the most active of whom was Harold
Abramson who kept it informed of all new developments in the
LSD field. While the CIA may not have totally cornered the LSD
market in the 1950s, it certainly had a good measure of control
—the very power it sought over human behavior.
Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues at MKULTRA soaked up pools
of information about LSD and other drugs from all outside
sources, but they saved for themselves the research they really
cared about: operational testing. Trained in both science and
espionage, they believed they could bridge the huge gap be-
tween experimenting in the laboratory and using drugs to out-
smart the enemy. Therefore the leaders of MKULTRA initiated
their own series of drug experiments that paralleled and drew
information from the external research. As practical men of
action, unlimited by restrictive academic standards, they did
not feel the need to keep their tests in strict scientific sequence.
They wanted results now—not next year. If a drug showed
promise, they felt no qualms about trying it out operationally
before all the test results came in. As early as 1953, for instance,
Sid Gottlieb went overseas with a supply of a hallucinogenic
drug—almost certainly LSD. With unknown results, he ar-
ranged for it to be slipped to a speaker at a political rally,
presumably to see if it would make a fool of him.
These were freewheeling days within the CIA—then a young
agency whose bureaucratic arteries had not started to harden.
The leaders of MKULTRA had high hopes for LSD. It appeared
to be an awesome substance, whose advent, like the ancient
discovery of fire, would bring out primitive responses of fear
and worship in people. Only a speck of LSD could take a strong-
willed man and turn his most basic perceptions into willowy
shadows. Time, space, right, wrong, order, and the notion of
what was possible all took on new faces. LSD was a frightening
weapon, and it took a swashbuckling boldness for the leaders
of MKULTRA to prepare for operational testing the way they

LSD    69
first did: by taking it themselves. They tripped at the office.
They tripped at safehouses, and sometimes they traveled to
Boston to trip under Bob Hyde's penetrating gaze. Always they
observed, questioned, and analyzed each other. LSD seemed to
remove inhibitions, and they thought they could use it to find
out what went on in the mind underneath all the outside acts
and pretensions. If they could get at the inner self, they rea-
soned, they could better manipulate a person—or keep him
from being manipulated.
The men from MKULTRA were trying LSD in the early 1950s
—when Stalin lived and Joe McCarthy raged. It was a forebod-
ing time, even for those not professionally responsible for
doomsday poisons. Not surprisingly, Sid Gottlieb and col-
leagues who tried LSD did not think of the drug as something
that might enhance creativity or cause transcendental experi-
ences. Those notions would not come along for years. By and
large, there was thought to be only one prevailing and hard-
headed version of reality, which was "normal," and everything
else was "crazy." An LSD trip made people temporarily crazy,
which meant potentially vulnerable to the CIA men (and men-
tally ill, to the doctors). 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.
Despite this prevailing attitude in the Agency, at least one
MKULTRA pioneer recalls that his first trip expanded his con-
ception of reality: "I was shaky at first, but then I just ex-
perienced it and had a high. I felt that everything was working
right. I was like a locomotive going at top efficiency. Sure there
was stress, but not in a debilitating way. It was like the stress
of an engine pulling the longest train it's ever pulled." This CIA
veteran describes seeing all the colors of the rainbow growing
out of cracks in the sidewalk. He had always disliked cracks as
signs of imperfection, but suddenly the cracks became natural
stress lines that measured the vibrations of the universe. He
saw people with blemished faces, which he had previously
found slightly repulsive. "I had a change of values about faces,"
he says. "Hooked noses or crooked teeth would become beauti-
ful for that person. Something had turned loose in me, and all
I had done was shift my attitude. Reality hadn't changed, but
I had. That was all the difference in the world between seeing
something ugly and seeing truth and beauty."

70   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
At the end of this day of his first trip, the CIA man and his
colleagues had an alcohol party to help come down. "I had a
lump in my throat," he recalls wistfully. Although he had never
done such a thing before, he wept in front of his coworkers. "I
didn't want to leave it. I felt I would be going back to a place
where I wouldn't be able to hold on to this kind of beauty. I felt
very unhappy. The people who wrote the report on me said I
had experienced depression, but they didn't understand why I
felt so bad. They thought I had had a bad trip."
This CIA man says that others with his general personality
tended to enjoy themselves on LSD, but that the stereotypical
CIA operator (particularly the extreme counterintelligence
type who mistrusts everyone and everything) usually had nega-
tive reactions. The drug simply exaggerated his paranoia. For
these operators, the official notes, "dark evil things would begin
to lurk around," and they would decide the experimenters were
plotting against them.
The TSS team understood it would be next to impossible to
allay the fears of this ever-vigilant, suspicious sort, although
they might use LSD to disorient or generally confuse such a
person. However, they toyed with the idea that LSD could be
applied to better advantage on more trusting types. Could a
clever foe "re-educate" such a person with a skillful applica-
tion of LSD? Speculating on this question, the CIA official states
that while under the influence of the drug, "you tend to have
a more global view of things. I found it awfully hard when
stoned to maintain the notion: I am a U.S. citizen—my country
right or wrong	You tend to have these good higher feelings.
You are more open to the brotherhood-of-man idea and more
susceptible to the seamy sides of your own society. ... I think
this is exactly what happened during the 1960s, but it didn't
make people more communist. It just made them less inclined
to identify with the U.S. They took a plague-on-both-your-
houses position."
As to whether his former colleagues in TSS had the same
perception of the LSD experience, the man replies, "I think
everybody understood that if you had a good trip, you had a
kind of above-it-all look into reality. What we subsequently
found was that when you came down, you remembered the
experience, but you didn't switch identities. You really didn't
have that kind of feeling. You weren't as suspicious of people.
You listened to them, but you also saw through them more
easily and clearly. We decided that this wasn't the kind of thing

LSD    71
that was going to make a guy into a turncoat to his own country.
The more we worked with it, the less we became convinced this
was what the communists were using for brainwashing."
The early LSD tests—both outside and inside the Agency—
had gone well enough that the MKULTRA scientists moved
forward to the next stage on the road to "field" use: They
tried the drug out on people by surprise. This, after all,
would be the way an operator would give—or get—the drug.
First they decided to spring it on each other without warn-
ing. They agreed among themselves that a coworker might
slip it to them at any time. (In what may be an apocryphal
story, a TSS staff man says that one of his former colleagues
always brought his own bottle of wine to office parties and
carried it with him at all times.) Unwitting doses became an
occupational hazard.
MKULTRA men usually took these unplanned trips in stride,
but occasionally they turned nasty. Two TSS veterans tell the
story of a coworker who drank some LSD-laced coffee during
his morning break. Within an hour, states one veteran, "he sort
of knew he had it, but he couldn't pull himself together. Some-
times you take it, and you start the process of maintaining your
composure. But this grabbed him before he was aware, and it
got away from him." Filled with fear, the CIA man fled the
building that then housed TSS, located on the edge of the Mall
near Washington's great monuments. Having lost sight of him,
his colleagues searched frantically, but he managed to escape.
The hallucinating Agency man worked his way across one of
the Potomac bridges and apparently cut his last links with
rationality. "He reported afterwards that every automobile that
came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get
him personally," says the veteran. "Each time a car passed, he
would huddle down against the parapet, terribly frightened. It
was a real horror trip for him. I mean, it was hours of agony.
It was like a dream that never stops—with someone chasing
you."
After about an hour and a half, the victim's coworkers found
him on the Virginia side of the Potomac, crouched under a
fountain, trembling. "It was awfully hard to persuade him that
his friends were his friends at that point," recalls the colleague.
"He was alone in the world, and everyone was hostile. He'd
become a full-blown paranoid. If it had lasted for two weeks,
we'd have plunked him in a mental hospital." Fortunately for
him, ihe CIA man came down by the end of the day. This was

72    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
not the first, last, or most tragic bad trip in the Agency's testing
program.*
By late 1953, only six months after Allen Dulles had formally
created MKULTRA, TSS officials were already well into the last
stage of their research: systematic use of LSD on "outsiders"
who had no idea they had received the drug. These victims
simply felt their moorings slip away in the midst of an ordinary
day, for no apparent reason, and no one really knew how they
would react.
Sid Gottlieb was ready for the operational experiments. He
considered LSD to be such a secret substance that he gave it a
private code name ("serunim") by which he and his colleagues
often referred to the drug, even behind the CIA's heavily
guarded doors. In retrospect, it seems more than bizarre that
CIA officials—men responsible for the nation's intelligence and
alertness when the hot and cold wars against the communists
were at their peak—would be sneaking LSD into each other's
coffee cups and thereby subjecting themselves to the unknown
frontiers of experimental drugs. But these side trips did not
seem to change the sense of reality of Gottlieb or of high CIA
officials, who took LSD on several occasions. The drug did not
transform Gottlieb out of the mind set of a master scientist-spy,
a protege of Richard Helms in the CIA's inner circle. He never
stopped milking his goats at 5:30 every morning.
The CIA leaders' early achievements with LSD were impres-
sive. They had not invented the drug, but they had gotten in on
the American ground floor and done nearly everything else.
They were years ahead of the scientific literature—let alone the
public—and spies win by being ahead. They had monopolized
the supply of LSD and dominated the research by creating
much of it themselves. They had used money and other blan-
dishments to build a network of scientists and doctors whose
work they could direct and turn to their own use. All that re-
mained between them and major espionage successes was the
performance of the drug in the field.
That, however, turned out to be a considerable stumbling
block. LSD had an incredibly powerful effect on people, but not
in ways the CIA could predict or control.
*TSS officials had long known that LSD could be quite dangerous. In 1952,
Harvard Medical School's Henry Beecher, who regularly gave the Agency in-
formation on his talks with European colleagues, reported that a Swiss doctor
had suffered severe depression after taking the drug and had killed herself
three weeks later.

CHAPTER
5
CONCERNING THE CASE
OF DR. FRANK OLSON

In November 1953, Sid Gottlieb decided to test LSD on a
group of scientists from the Army Chemical Corps' Special
Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick,
Maryland. Although the Clandestine Services hierarchy had
twice put TSS under strict notice not to use LSD without
permission from above, Gottlieb must have felt that trying
the drug on SOD men was not so different from giving it to
his colleagues at the office. After all, officials at TSS and
SOD worked intimately together, and they shared one of the
darkest secrets of the Cold War: that the U.S. government
maintained the capability—which it would use at times—to
kill or incapacitate selected people with biological weapons.
Only a handful of the highest CIA officials knew that TSS
was paying SOD about $200,000 a year in return for opera-
tional systems to infect foes with disease.
Gottlieb planned to drop the LSD on the SOD men in the
splendid isolation of a three-day working retreat. Twice a year,
the SOD and TSS men who collaborated on MKNAOMI, their
joint program, held a planning session at a remote site where
they could brainstorm without interruption. On November 18,
1953, they gathered at Deep Creek Lodge, a log building in the
woods of Western Maryland. It had been built as a Boy Scout
camp 25 years earlier. Surrounded by the water of a mountain
lake on three sides, with the peaks of the Appalachian chain
looking down over the thick forest, the lodge was isolated

74    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
enough for even the most security conscious spy. Only an occa-
sional hunter was likely to wander through after the summer
months.
Dr. John Schwab, who had founded SOD in 1950, Lt. Colonel
Vincent Ruwet, its current chief, and Dr. Frank Olson, its tem-
porary head earlier that year, led the Detrick group. These
germ warriors came under the cover of being wildlife writers
and lecturers off on a busman's holiday. They carefully
removed the Fort Detrick parking stickers from their cars be-
fore setting out. Sid Gottlieb brought three co-workers from the
Agency, including his deputy Robert Lashbrook.
They met in the living room of the lodge, in front of a roaring
blaze in the huge walk-in fireplace. Then they split off into
smaller groups for specialized meetings. The survivors among
those who attended these sessions remain as tight-lipped as
ever, willing to share a few details of the general atmosphere
but none of the substance. However, from other sources at Fort
Detrick and from government documents, the MKNAOMI re-
search can be pieced together. It was this program that was
discussed during the fateful retreat.
Under MKNAOMI, the SOD men developed a whole arse-
nal of toxic substances for CIA use. If Agency operators
needed to kill someone in a few seconds with, say, a suicide
pill, SOD provided super-deadly shellfish toxin.* On his ill-
fated U-2 flight over the Soviet Union in 1960, Francis Gary
Powers carried—and chose not to use—a drill bit coated with
this poison concealed in a silver dollar. While perfect for
someone anxious to die—or kill—instantly, shellfish toxin
offered no time to escape and could be traced easily. More
useful for assassination, CIA and SOD men decided, was
botulinum. With an incubation period of 8 to 12 hours, it al-
lowed the killer time to separate himself from the deed.
Agency operators would later supply pills laced with this le-
thal food poison to its Mafia allies for inclusion in Fidel Cas-
tro's milkshake. If CIA officials wanted an assassination to
look like a death from natural causes, they could choose
*Toxins are chemical substances, not living organisms derived from biolog-
ical agents. While they can make people sick or dead, they cannot repro-
duce themselves like bacteria. Because of their biological origin, toxins
came under the responsibility of Fort Detrick rather than Edgewood Arse-
nal, the facility which handled the chemical side of America's chemical
and biological warfare (CBW) programs.

CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON    75
from a long list of deadly diseases that normally occurred in
particular countries. Thus in 1960, Clandestine Services
chief Richard Bissell asked Sid Gottlieb to pick out an ap-
propriate malady to kill the Congo's Patrice Lumumba. Gott-
lieb told the Senate investigators that he selected one that
"was supposed to produce a disease that was . . . indigenous
to that area [of West Africa] and that could be fatal." Gott-
lieb personally carried the bacteria to the Congo, but this
murderous operation was scrubbed before Lumumba could
be infected. (The Congolese leader was killed shortly the-
reafter under circumstances that still are not clear.)
When CIA operators merely wanted to be rid of somebody
temporarily, SOD stockpiled for them about a dozen diseases
and toxins of varying strengths. At the relatively benign end of
the SOD list stood Staph. enterotoxin, a mild form of food
poisoning—mild compared to botulinum. This Staph. infection
almost never killed and simply incapacitated its victim for 3 to
6 hours. Under the skilled guidance of Sid Gottlieb's wartime
predecessor, Stanley Lovell, OSS had used this very substance
to prevent Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht from attending an
economic conference during the war. More virulent in the SOD
arsenal was Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis virus. It
usually immobilized a person for 2 to 5 days and kept him in
a weakened state for several more weeks. If the Agency wanted
to incapacitate someone for a period of months, SOD had two
different kinds of brucellosis.*
A former senior official at Fort Detrick was kind enough to
run me through all the germs and toxins SOD kept for the CIA,
listing their advantages and disadvantages. Before doing so, he
emphasized that SOD was also trying to work out ways to pro-
tect U.S. citizens and installations from attack with similar
substances. "You can't have a serious defense," he says, "unless
someone has thought about offense." He stated that Japan
made repeated biological attacks against China during World
War II—which was one reason for starting the American pro-
* Brucellosis may well have been the disease that Gottlieb selected in the spring
of 1960 when the Clandestine Services' Health Alteration Committee approved
an operation to disable an Iraqi colonel, said to be "promoting Soviet-bloc
political interests" for at least three months. Gottlieb told the Church commit-
tee that he had a monogrammed handkerchief treated with the incapacitating
agency, and then mailed it to the colonel. CIA officials told the committee that
the colonel was shot by a firing squad—which the Agency had nothing to do
with—before the handkerchief arrived.

76    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
gram.* He knows of no use since by the Soviet Union or any
other power.
According to the Detrick official, anyone contemplating use
of a biological product had to consider many other factors be-
sides toxicity and incubation period.
Can the germ be detected easily and countered with a vac-
cine? He notes that anthrax, a fatal disease (when inhaled) that
SOD stored for CIA, has the advantage of symptoms that resem-
ble pneumonia; similarly, Venezuelan equine encephalomyeli-
tis can be mistaken for the grippe. While vaccines do exist for
many of the stockpiled diseases, SOD was forever developing
more virulent strains. "I don't know of any organism suscepti-
ble to a drug that can't be made more resistant," states the
Detrick man.
Did the disease have a high degree of secondary spread? SOD
preferred it not to, because these germ warfare men did not
want to start epidemics—that was the job of others at Fort De-
trick.
Was the organism stable? How did humidity affect it? SOD
considered these and many other factors.
To the CIA, perhaps the most important question was
whether it could covertly deliver the germ to infect the right
person. One branch of SOD specialized in building delivery
systems, the most famous of which now is the dart gun fash-
ioned out of a .45 pistol that ex-CIA Director William Colby
displayed to the world at a 1975 Senate hearing. The Agency
had long been after SOD to develop a "non-discernible micro-
bioinoculator" which could give people deadly shots that, ac-
cording to a CIA document, could not be "easily detected upon
a detailed autopsy." SOD also rigged up aerosol sprays that
could be fired by remote control, including a fluorescent starter
that was activated by turning on the light, a cigarette lighter
that sprayed when lit, and an engine head bolt that shot off as
the engine heated. "If you're going to infect people, the most
likely way is respiratory," notes the high Detrick official. "Ev-
erybody breathes, but you might not get them to eat."
*For some reason, the U.S. government has made it a point not to release
information about Japanese use of biological warfare. The senior Detrick
source says, "We knew they sprayed Manchuria. We had the results of how they
produced and disseminated [the biological agents, including anthrax].... I read
the autopsy reports myself. We had people who went over to Japan after the
war."

CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON    77
Frank Olson specialized in the airborne delivery of disease.
He had been working in the field ever since 1943, when he came
to Fort Detrick as one of the original military officers in the U.S.
biological warfare program. Before the end of the war, he de-
veloped a painful ulcer condition that led him to seek a medical
discharge from the uniformed military, but he had stayed on as
a civilian. He joined SOD when it started in 1950. Obviously
good at what he did, Olson served for several months as acting
chief of SOD in 1952-53 but asked to be relieved when the
added stress caused his ulcer to flare up. He happily returned
to his lesser post as a branch chief, where he had fewer ad-
ministrative duties and could spend more time in the labora-
tory. A lover of practical jokes, Olson was very popular among
his many friends. He was an outgoing man, but, like most of his
generation, he kept his inner feelings to himself. His great
passion was his family, and he spent most of his spare time
playing with his three kids and helping around the house. He
had met his wife while they both studied at the University of
Wisconsin.
Olson attended all the sessions and apparently did everything
expected of him during the first two days at the lodge. After
dinner on Thursday, November 19, 1953—the same day that a
Washington Post editorial decried the use of dogs in chemical
experiments—Olson shared a drink of Cointreau with all but
two of the men present. (One had a heart condition; the other,
a reformed alcoholic, did not drink.) Unbeknownst to the SOD
men, Sid Gottlieb had decided to spike the liqueur with LSD.*
"To me, everyone was pretty normal," says SOD's Benjamin
Wilson. "No one was aware anything had happened until Gott-
lieb mentioned it. [20 minutes after the drink] Gottlieb asked if
we had noticed anything wrong. Everyone was aware, once it
was brought to their attention." They tried to continue their
discussion, but once the drug took hold, the meeting deteri-
orated into laughter and boisterous conversation. Two of the
SOD men apparently got into an all-night philosophical con-
versation that had nothing to do with biological warfare.
*Gottlieb stated just after Olson's death, at a time when he was trying to mini-
mize his own culpability, that he had talked to the SOD men about LSD and
that they had agreed in general terms to the desirability of unwitting testing.
Two of the SOD group in interviews and a third in congressional testimony
flatly deny the Gottlieb version. Gottlieb and the SOD men all agree Gottlieb
gave no advance warning that he was giving them a drug in their liqueur.

78    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
Ruwet remembers it as "the most frightening experience I ever
had or hope to have." Ben Wilson recalls that "Olson was
psychotic. He couldn't understand what happened. He thought
someone was playing tricks on him. . . . One of his favorite
expressions was 'You guys are a bunch of thespians.' "
Olson and most of the others became increasingly uncom-
fortable and could not sleep.* When the group gathered in the
morning, Olson was still agitated, obviously disturbed, as were
several of his colleagues. The meeting had turned sour, and no
one really wanted to do more business. They all straggled home
during the day.
Alice Olson remembers her husband coming in before dinner
that evening: "He said nothing. He just sat there. Ordinarily
when he came back from a trip, he'd tell me about the things
he could—what they had to eat, that sort of thing. During din-
ner, I said, 'It's a damned shame the adults in this family don't
communicate anymore.' He said, 'Wait until the kids get to bed
and I'll talk to you.' " Later that night, Frank Olson told his wife
he had made "a terrible mistake," that his colleagues had
laughed at him and humiliated him. Mrs. Olson assured him
that the others were his friends, that they would not make fun
of him. Still, Olson would not tell her any more. He kept his
fears bottled up inside, and he shared nothing of his growing
feeling that someone was out to get him. Alice Olson was accus-
tomed to his keeping secrets. Although she realized he worked
on biological warfare, they never talked about it. She had had
only little glimpses of his profession. He complained about the
painful shots he was always taking. He almost never took a
bath at home because he showered upon entering and leaving
his office every day. When a Detrick employee died of anthrax
(one of three fatalities in the base's 27-year history), Frank
*For the very reason that most trips last about eight hours no matter what time
a subject takes the drug, virtually all experimenters, including TSS's own con-
tractors, give LSD in the morning to avoid the discomfort of sleepless nights.
To enter the SOD building, in addition to needing an incredibly hard-to-get
security clearance, one had to have an up-to-date shot card with anywhere
from 10 to 20 immunizations listed. The process was so painful and time con-
suming that at one point in the 1960s the general who headed the whole Army
Chemical Corps decided against inspecting SOD and getting an on-the-spot
briefing. When asked about this incident, an SOD veteran who had earlier
resigned said, "That's the way we kept them out. Those [military] types didn't
need to know. Most of the security violations came from the top level. . . . He
could have gone in without shots if he had insisted. The safety director would
have protested, but he could have."

CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON    79
Olson told his wife the man had died of pneumonia.
Alice Olson had never even seen the building where her hus-
band worked. Fort Detrick was built on the principle of concen-
tric circles, with secrets concealed inside secrets. To enter the
inner regions where SOD operated, one needed not only the
highest security clearance but a "need to know" authorization.
Her husband was not about to break out of a career of govern-
ment-imposed secrecy to tell her about the TOP SECRET ex-
periment that Sid Gottlieb had performed on him.
The Olsons spent an uncommunicative weekend together.
On Sunday they sat on the davenport in their living room, hold-
ing hands—something they had not done for a long time. "It
was a rotten November day," recalls Mrs. Olson. "The fog out-
side was so thick you could hardly see out the front door.
Frank's depression was dreadful." Finally, she recalls, they
packed up the three young children, and went off to the local
theater. The film turned out to be Luther. "It was a very serious
movie," remembers Mrs. Olson, "not a good one to see when
you're depressed."
The following day, Olson appeared at 7:30 a.m. in the office of
his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Ruwet, To Ruwet, Olson seemed
"agitated." He told Ruwet he wanted either to quit or be fired.
Taken aback, Ruwet reassured Olson that his conduct at the
lodge had been "beyond reproach." Seemingly satisfied and
relieved, Olson agreed to stay on and spent the rest of the day
on routine SOD business. That evening, the Olsons spent their
most light-hearted evening since before the retreat to Deep
Creek Lodge, and they planned a farewell party for a colleague
the following Saturday night.
Tuesday morning, Ruwet again arrived at his office to find a
disturbed Frank Olson waiting for him. Olson said he felt "all
mixed up" and questioned his own competence. He said that he
should not have left the Army during the war because of his
ulcer and that he lacked the ability to do his present work. After
an hour, Ruwet decided Olson needed "psychiatric attention."
Ruwet apparently felt that the CIA had caused Olson's problem
in the first place, and instead of sending him to the base hospi-
tal, he called Gottlieb's deputy Robert Lashbrook to arrange for
Olson to see a psychiatrist.
After a hurried conference, Lashbrook and Gottlieb decided
to send Olson to Dr. Harold Abramson in New York. Abramson
had no formal training in psychiatry and did not hold himself

80    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
out to be a psychiatrist. He was an allergist and immunologist
interested in treating the problems of the mind. Gottlieb chose
him because he had a TOP SECRET CIA security clearance
and because he had been working with LSD—under Agency
contract—for several years. Gottlieb was obviously protecting
his own bureaucratic position by not letting anyone outside
TSS know what he had done. Having failed to observe the order
to seek higher approval for LSD use, Gottlieb proceeded to vio-
late another CIA regulation. It states, in effect, that whenever
a potential flap arises that might embarrass the CIA or lead to
a break in secrecy, those involved should immediately call the
Office of Security. For health problems like Olson's, Security
and the CIA medical office keep a long list of doctors (and
psychiatrists) with TOP SECRET clearance who can provide
treatment.
Gottlieb had other plans for Frank Olson, and off to New York
went the disturbed SOD biochemist in the company of Ruwet
and Lashbrook. Olson alternately improved and sank deeper
and deeper into his feelings of depression, inadequacy, guilt,
and paranoia. He began to think that the CIA was putting a
stimulant like Benzedrine in his coffee to keep him awake and
that it was the Agency that was out to get him. That first day
in New York, Abramson saw Olson at his office. Then at 10:30
in the evening, the allergist visited Olson in his hotel room,
armed with a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of the sedative
Nembutal—an unusual combination for a doctor to give to
someone with symptoms like Olson's.
Before Olson's appointment with Dr. Abramson the follow-
ing day, he and Ruwet accompanied Lashbrook on a visit to a
famous New York magician named John Mulholland, whom
TSS had put under contract to prepare a manual that would
apply "the magician's art to covert activities." An expert at
pulling rabbits out of hats could easily find new and better ways
to slip drugs into drinks, and Gottlieb signed up Mulholland to
work on, among other things, "the delivery of various materials
to unwitting subjects." Lashbrook thought that the magician
might amuse Olson, but Olson became "highly suspicious."
The group tactfully cut their visit short, and Lashbrook
dropped Olson off at Abramson's office. After an hour's consul-
tation with Abramson that afternoon the allergist gave Olson
permission to return to Frederick the following day, Thanks-
giving, to be with his family.

CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON   81
Olson, Ruwet, and Lashbrook had plane reservations for
Thursday morning, so that night, in a preholiday attempt to lift
spirits, they all went to see the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit
musical, Me and Juliet. Olson became upset during the first act
and told Ruwet that he knew people were waiting outside the
theater to arrest him. Olson and Ruwet left the show at inter-
mission, and the two old friends walked back to the Statler
Hotel, near Penn Station. Later, while Ruwet slept in the next
bed, Olson crept out of the hotel and wandered the streets.
Gripped by the delusion that he was following Ruwet's orders,
he tore up all his paper money and threw his wallet down a
chute. At 5:30 a.m., Ruwet and Lashbrook found him sitting in
the Statler lobby with his hat and coat on.
They checked out of the hotel and caught the plane back to
Washington. An SOD driver picked Olson and Ruwet up at
National Airport and started to drive them back to Frederick.
As they drove up Wisconsin Avenue, Olson had the driver pull
into a Howard Johnson's parking lot. He told Ruwet that he was
"ashamed" to see his family in his present state and that he
feared he might become violent with his children. Ruwet sug-
gested he go back to see Abramson in New York, and Olson
agreed. Ruwet and Olson drove back to Lashbrook's apartment
on New Hampshire Avenue off Dupont Circle, and Lashbrook
summoned Sid Gottlieb from Thanksgiving dinner in Virginia.
All agreed that Lashbrook would take Olson back to New York
while Ruwet would go back to Frederick to explain the situa-
tion to Mrs. Olson and to see his own family. (Ruwet was
Olson's friend, whereas Lashbrook was no more than a profes-
sional acquaintance. Olson's son Eric believes that his father's
mental state suffered when Ruwet left him in the hands of the
CIA's Lashbrook, especially since Olson felt the CIA was "out
to get him.") Olson and Lashbrook flew to LaGuardia airport
and went to see Abramson at his Long Island office. Then the
two men ate a joyless Thanksgiving dinner at a local restau-
rant. Friday morning Abramson drove them into Manhattan.
Abramson, an allergist, finally realized that he had more on his
hands with Olson than he could handle, and he recommended
hospitalization. He wrote afterward that Olson "was in a
psychotic state . . . with delusions of persecution."
Olson agreed to enter Chestnut Lodge, a Rockville, Maryland
sanitarium that had CIA-cleared psychiatrists on the staff.
They could not get plane reservations until the next morning,

82    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
so Olson and Lashbrook decided to spend one last night at the
Statler. They took a room on the tenth floor. With his spirits
revived, Olson dared to call his wife for the first time since he
had left originally for New York. They had a pleasant talk,
which left her feeling better.
In the early hours of the morning, Lashbrook woke up just in
time to see Frank Olson crash through the drawn blinds and
closed window on a dead run.
Within seconds, as a crowd gathered around Olson's shat-
tered body on the street below, the cover-up started. Lash-
brook called Gottlieb to tell him what had happened before
he notified the police. Next, Lashbrook called Abramson,
who, according to Lashbrook, "wanted to be kept out of the
thing completely." Abramson soon called back and offered to
assist. When the police arrived, Lashbrook told them he
worked for the Defense Department. He said he had no idea
why Olson killed himself, but he did know that the dead
man had "suffered from ulcers." The detectives assigned to
the case later reported that getting information out of Lash-
brook was "like pulling teeth." They speculated to each
other that the case could be a homicide with homosexual
overtones, but they soon dropped their inquiries when Ruwet
and Abramson verified Lashbrook's sketchy account and in-
voked high government connections.
Back in Washington, Sid Gottlieb finally felt compelled to tell
the Office of Security about the Olson case. Director Allen
Dulles personally ordered Inspector General Lyman Kirkpa-
trick to make a full investigation, but first, Agency officials tried
to make sure that no outsider would tie Olson's death either to
the CIA or LSD. Teams of Security officers were soon scurrying
around New York and Washington, making sure the Agency
had covered its tracks. One interviewed Lashbrook and then
accompanied him to a meeting with Abramson. When Lash-
brook and Abramson asked the security officer to leave them
alone, he complied and then, in the best traditions of his office,
listened in on the conversation covertly. From his report on
their talk, it can safely be said that Lashbrook and Abramson
conspired to make sure they told identical stories. Lashbrook
dictated to Abramson, who made a recording of the symptoms
that Olson was supposed to be suffering from and the problems
that were bothering him. Lashbrook even stated that Mrs.
Olson had suggested her husband see a psychiatrist months

CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON   83
before the LSD incident.* Lashbrook's comments appeared in
three reports Abramson submitted to the CIA, but these reports
were internally inconsistent. In one memo, Abramson wrote
that Olson's "psychotic state . . . seemed to have been crystal-
lized by [the LSD] experiment." In a later report, Abramson
called the LSD dose "therapeutic" and said he believed "this
dosage could hardly have had any significant role in the course
of events that followed.^
The CIA officially—but secretly—took the position that the
LSD had "triggered" Olson's suicide. Agency officials worked
industriously behind the scenes to make sure that Mrs. Olson
received an adequate government pension—two-thirds of her
husband's base pay. Ruwet, who had threatened to expose the
whole affair if Mrs. Olson did not get the pension, submitted a
form saying Olson had died of a "classified illness." Gottlieb
and Lashbrook kept trying to have it both ways in regard to
giving Olson LSD, according to the CIA's General Counsel.
They acknowledged LSD's triggering function in his death, but
they also claimed it was "practically impossible" for the drug
to have harmful aftereffects. The General Counsel called these
two positions "completely inconsistent," and he wrote he was
"not happy with what seems to me a very casual attitude on the
part of TSS representatives to the way this experiment was
conducted and to their remarks that this is just one of the risks
running with scientific investigation."
As part of his investigation, Inspector General Kirkpatrick
sequestered Gottlieb's LSD files, which Kirkpatrick remembers
did not make Gottlieb at all happy. "I brought out his stutter,"
says Kirkpatrick with a wry smile. "He was quite concerned
about his future." Kirkpatrick eventually recommended that
some form of reprimand be given to Gottlieb, TSS chief Willis
Gibbons, and TSS deputy chief James "Trapper" Drum, who
had waited 20 days after Olson's death to admit that Gottlieb
*Mrs. Olson says that this is an outright lie.
^Nonpsychiatrist Abramson who allowed chemist Lashbrook to tell him about
his patient's complexes clearly had a strange idea what was "therapeutic"—or
psychotherapeutic, for that matter. In Abramson's 1953 proposal to the CIA for
$85,000 to study LSD, he wrote that over the next year he "hoped" to give
hospital patients "who are essentially normal from a psychiatric point of view
. .. unwitting doses of the drug for psychotherapeutic purposes." His treatment
brings to mind the William Burroughs character in Naked Lunch who states;
"Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often, and there's a
reason for that . . . you see, it has absolutely no medical value."

84    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
had cleared the experiment with him. Others opposed Kirkpa-
trick's recommendation. Admiral Luis deFlorez, the Agency's
Research Chairman, sent a personal memo to Allen Dulles say-
ing reprimands would be an "injustice" and would hinder "the
spirit of initiative and enthusiasm so necessary in our work."
The Director's office went along, and Kirkpatrick began the
tortuous process of preparing letters for Dulles' signature that
would say Gottlieb, Gibbons, and Drum had done something
wrong, but nothing too wrong. Kirkpatrick went through six
drafts of the Gottlieb letter alone before he came up with ac-
ceptable wording. He started out by saying TSS officials had
exercised "exceedingly bad judgment." That was too harsh for
high Agency officials, so Kirkpatrick tried "very poor judg-
ment." Still too hard. He settled for "poor judgment." The TSS
officials were told that they should not consider the letters to be
reprimands and that no record of the letters would be put in
their personnel files where they could conceivably harm future
careers.
The Olson family up in Frederick did not get off so easily.
Ruwet told them Olson had jumped or fallen out of the window
in New York, but he mentioned not a word about the LSD,
whose effects Ruwet himself believed had led to Olson's death.
Ever the good soldier, Ruwet could not bring himself to talk
about the classified experiment—even to ease Alice Olson's sor-
row. Mrs. Olson did not want to accept the idea that her hus-
band had willfully committed suicide. "It was very important
to me—almost the core of my life—that my children not feel
their father had walked out on them," recalls Mrs. Olson.
For the next 22 years, Alice Olson had no harder evidence
than her own belief that her husband did not desert her and the
family. Then in June 1975, the Rockefeller Commission study-
ing illegal CIA domestic operations reported that a man fitting
Frank Olson's description had leaped from a New York hotel
window after the CIA had given him LSD without his knowl-
edge. The Olson family read about the incident in the Washing-
ton Post. Daughter Lisa Olson Hayward and her husband went
to see Ruwet, who had retired from the Army and settled in
Frederick. In an emotional meeting, Ruwet confirmed that
Olson was the man and said he could not tell the family earlier
because he did not have permission. Ruwet tried to discourage
them from going public or seeking compensation from the gov-
ernment, but the Olson family did both.* On national televi-

CONCERNING THE CASE OF DR. FRANK OLSON
sion, Alice Olson and each of her grown children took turns
reading from a prepared family statement:
We feel our family has been violated by the CIA in two ways," it
said. "First, Frank Olson was experimented upon illegally and
negligently. Second, the true nature of his death was concealed
for twenty-two years. ... In telling our story, we are concerned
that neither the personal pain this family has experienced nor
the moral and political outrage we feel be slighted. Only in this
way can Frank Olson's death become part of American memory
and serve the purpose of political and ethical reform so urgently
needed in our society.
The statement went on to compare the Olsons with families
in the Third World "whose hopes for a better life were de-
stroyed by CIA intervention." Although Eric Olson read those
words in behalf of the whole family, they reflected more the
politics of the children than the feelings of their mother, Alice
Olson. An incredibly strong woman who seems to have made
her peace with the world, Mrs. Olson went back to college after
her husband's death, got a degree, and held the family together
while she taught school. She has no malice in her heart toward
Vin Ruwet, her friend who withheld that vital piece of infor-
mation from her all those years. He comforted her and gave
support during the most difficult of times, and she deeply ap-
preciates that. Mrs. Olson defends Ruwet by saying he was in
"a bad position" but then she stops in mid-sentence and says,
"If I had only been given some indication that it was the pres-
sure of work. ... If only I had had something I could have told
the kids. I don't know how [Ruwet] could have done it either. It
was a terrible thing for a man who loved him."
"I'm not vindicative toward Vin [Ruwet]," reflects Mrs. Olson.
"Gottlieb is a different question. He was despicable." She tells
how Gottlieb and Lashbrook both attended Olson's funeral in
Frederick and contributed to a memorial fund. A week or two
later, the two men asked to visit her. She knew they did not
work at Detrick, but she did not really understand where they
came from or their role. "I didn't want to see them," she notes.
"Vin told me it would make them feel better. I didn't want an
•President Gerald Ford later personally apologized to the Olson family, and
Congress passed a bill in 1976 to pay $750,000 in compensation to Mrs. Olson
and her three children. The family voluntarily abandoned the suit.

86    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
ounce of flesh from them. I didn't think it was necessary, but,
okay, I agreed. In retrospect, it was so bizarre, it makes me sick
... I was a sucker for them."
Gottlieb and Lashbrook apparently never returned to the bio-
logical warfare offices at SOD. Little else changed, however.
Ray Treichler and Henry Bortner took over CIA's liaison with
SOD. SOD continued to manufacture and stockpile bacteriolog-
ical agents for the CIA until 1969, when President Richard
Nixon renounced the use of biological warfare tactics.
And presumably, someone replaced Frank Olson.

CHAPTER
6
THEM UNWITTING:
THE SAFEHOUSES

Frank Olson's death could have been a major setback for the
Agency's LSD testing, but the program, like Sid Gottlieb's ca-
reer, emerged essentially unscathed. High CIA officials did call
a temporary halt to all experiments while they investigated the
Olson case and re-examined the general policy. They cabled
the two field stations that had supplies of the drug (Manila and
Atsugi, Japan) not to use it for the time being, and they even
took away Sid Gottlieb's own private supply and had it locked
up in his boss' safe, to which no one else had the combination.
In the end, however, Allen Dulles accepted the view Richard
Helms put forth that the only "operationally realistic" way to
test drugs was to try them on unwitting people. Helms noted
that experiments which gave advance warning would be "pro
forma at best and result in a false sense of accomplishment and
readiness." For Allen Dulles and his top aides, the possible
importance of LSD clearly outweighed the risks and ethical
problem of slipping the drug to involuntary subjects. They gave
Gottlieb back his LSD.
Once the CIA's top echelon had made its decision to continue
unwitting testing, there remained, in Richard Helms' words,
"only then the question of how best to do it." The Agency's role
in the Olson affair had come too perilously close to leaking out
for the comfort of the security-minded, so TSS officials simply
had to work out a testing system with better cover. That meant

88    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
finding subjects who could not be so easily traced back to the
Agency.
Well before Olson's death, Gottlieb and the MKULTRA crew
had started pondering how best to do unwitting testing. They
considered using an American police force to test drugs on
prisoners, informants, and suspects, but they knew that some
local politicians would inevitably find out. In the Agency view,
such people could not be trusted to keep sensitive secrets. TSS
officials thought about trying Federal prisons or hospitals, but,
when sounded out, the Bureau of Prisons refused to go along
with true unwitting testing (as opposed to the voluntary, if coer-
cive, form practiced on drug addicts in Kentucky). They con-
templated moving the program overseas, where they and the
ARTICHOKE teams were already performing operational ex-
periments, but they decided if they tested on the scale they
thought was necessary, so many foreigners would have to know
that it would pose an unacceptable security risk.
Sid Gottlieb is remembered as the brainstorming genius of
the MKULTRA group—and the one with a real talent for show-
ing others, without hurting their feelings, why their schemes
would not work. States an ex-colleague who admires him
greatly, "In the final analysis, Sid was like a good soldier—if the
job had to be done, he did it. Once the decision was made, he
found the most effective way."
In this case, Gottlieb came up with the solution after reading
through old OSS files on Stanley Lovell's search for a truth
drug. Gottlieb noted that Lovell had used George White, a pre-
war employee of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to test con-
centrated marijuana. Besides trying the drug out on Manhattan
Project volunteers and unknowing suspected Communists,
White had slipped some to August Del Gracio, the Lucky
Luciano lieutenant. White had called the experiment a great
success. If it had not been—if Del Gracio had somehow caught
on to the drugging—Gottlieb realized that the gangster would
never have gone to the police or the press. His survival as a
criminal required he remain quiet about even the worst indig-
nities heaped upon him by government agents.
To Gottlieb, underworld types looked like ideal test subjects.
Nevertheless, according to one TSS source, "We were not about
to fool around with the Mafia." Instead, this source says they
chose "the borderline underworld"—prostitutes, drug addicts,
and other small-timers who would be powerless to seek any sort

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES   89
of revenge if they ever found out what the CIA had done to
them. In addition to their being unlikely whistle-blowers, such
people lived in a world where an unwitting dose of some drug
—usually knockout drops—was an occupational hazard any-
way. They would therefore be better equipped to deal with—
and recover from—a surprise LSD trip than the population as
a whole. Or so TSS officials rationalized. "They could at least
say to themselves, 'Here I go again. I've been slipped a
mickey,'" says a TSS veteran. Furthermore, this veteran
remembers, his former colleagues reasoned that if they had to
violate the civil rights of anyone, they might as well choose a
group of marginal people.
George White himself had left OSS after the war and re-
turned to the Narcotics Bureau. In 1952 he was working in the
New York office. As a high-ranking narcotics agent, White had
a perfect excuse to be around drugs and people who used them.
He had proved during the war that he had a talent for clandes-
tine work, and he certainly had no qualms when it came to
unwitting testing. With his job, he had access to all the possible
subjects the Agency would need, and if he could use LSD or any
other drug to find out more about drug trafficking, so much the
better. From a security viewpoint, CIA officials could easily
deny any connection to anything White did, and he clearly was
not the crybaby type. For Sid Gottlieb, George White was clearly
the one. The MKULTRA chief decided to contact White directly
to see if he might be interested in picking up with the CIA
where he had left off with OSS.
Always careful to observe bureaucratic protocol, Gottlieb
first approached Harry Anslinger, the longtime head of the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and got permission to use White
on a part-time basis. Then Gottlieb traveled to New York and
made his pitch to the narcotics agent, who stood 5'7", weighed
over 200 pounds, shaved his head, and looked something like an
extremely menacing bowling ball. After an early-morning
meeting, White scrawled in his sweat-stained, leather-bound
diary for that day, June 9, 1952: "Gottlieb proposed I be a CIA
consultant—I agree." By writing down such a thing and using
Gottlieb's true name,* White had broken CIA security regula-
*C1A operators and agents all had cover names by which they were supposed
to be called—even in classified documents. Gottlieb was "Sherman R. Grifford."
George White became "Morgan Hall."

90    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
tions even before he started work. But then, White was never
known as a man who followed rules.
Despite the high priority that TSS put on drug testing,
White's security approval did not come through until almost a
year later. "It was only last month that I got cleared," the out-
spoken narcotics agent wrote to a friend in 1953. "I then learned
that a couple of crew-cut, pipe-smoking punks had either
known me—or heard of me—during OSS days and had decided
I was 'too rough' for their league and promptly blackballed me.
It was only when my sponsors discovered the root of the trouble
they were able to bypass the blockade. After all, fellas, I didn't
go to Princeton."
People either loved or hated George White, and he had made
some powerful enemies, including New York Governor
Thomas Dewey and J. Edgar Hoover. Dewey would later help
block White from becoming the head of the Narcotics Bureau
in New York City, a job White sorely wanted. For some forgot-
ten reason, Hoover had managed to stop White from being
hired by the CIA in the Agency's early days, at a time when he
would have preferred to leave narcotics work altogether. These
were two of the biggest disappointments of his life. White's
previous exclusion from the CIA may explain why he jumped
so eagerly at Gottlieb's offer and why at the same time he pri-
vately heaped contempt on those who worked for the Agency.
A remarkably heavy drinker, who would sometimes finish off
a bottle of gin in one sitting, White often mocked the CIA crowd
over cocktails. "He thought they were a joke," recalls one long-
time crony. "They were too complicated, and they had other
people do their heavy stuff."
Unlike his CIA counterparts, White loved the glare of public-
ity. A man who gloried in talking about himself and cultivating
a hard-nosed image, White knew how to milk a drug bust for
all it was worth—a skill that grew out of early years spent as a
newspaper reporter in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In
search of a more financially secure profession, he had joined
the Narcotics Bureau in 1934, but he continued to pal around
with journalists, particularly those who wrote favorably about
him. Not only did he come across in the press as a cop hero, but
he helped to shape the picture of future Kojaks by serving as
a consultant to one of the early-television detective series. To
start a raid, he would dramatically tip his hat to signal his
agents—and to let the photographers know that the time had

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES    91
come to snap his picture. "He was sort of vainglorious," says
another good friend, "the kind of guy who if he did something,
didn't mind having the world know about it."*
The scientists from TSS, with their Ph.D.s and lack of street
experience, could not help admiring White for his swashbuck-
ling image. Unlike the men from MKULTRA, who, for all their
pretensions, had never worked as real-live spies, White had put
his life on the line for OSS overseas and had supposedly killed
a Japanese agent with his bare hands. The face of one ex-TSS
man lit up, like a little boy's on Christmas morning, as he told
of racing around New York in George White's car and parking
illegally with no fear of the law. "We were Ivy League, white,
middle-class," notes another former TSSer. "We were naive,
totally naive about this, and he felt pretty expert. He knew the
whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs. He'd
purportedly been in a number of shootouts where he'd captured
millions of dollars worth of heroin. . . . He was a pretty wild
man. I know I was afraid of him. You couldn't control this guy
... I had a little trouble telling who was controlling who in those
days."
White lived with extreme personal contradictions. As could
be expected of a narcotics agent, he violently opposed drugs.
Yet he died largely because his beloved alcohol had destroyed
his liver. He had tried everything else, from marijuana to LSD,
and wrote an acquaintance, "I did feel at times I was having a
'mind-expanding' experience but this vanished like a dream
immediately after the session." He was a law-enforcement offi-
cial who regularly violated the law. Indeed, the CIA turned to
him because of his willingness to use the power of his office to
ride roughshod over the rights of others—in the name of "na-
*One case which put White in every newspaper in the country was his 1949
arrest of blues singer Billie Holliday on an opium charge. To prove she had
been set up and was not then using drugs, the singer checked into a California
sanitarium that had been recommended by a friend of a friend, Dr. James
Hamilton. The jury then acquitted her. Hamilton's involvement is bizarre be-
cause he had worked with George White testing truth drugs for OSS, and the
two men were good friends. White may have put his own role in perspective
when he told a 1970 interviewer he "enjoyed" chasing criminals. "It was a
game for me," he said. "I felt quite a bit of compassion for a number of the
people that I found it necessary to put in jail, particularly when you'd see the
things that would happen to their families. I'd give them a chance to stay out
of jail and take care of their families by giving me information, perhaps, and
they would stubbornly refuse to do so. They wouldn't be a rat, as they would put
it."

92    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
tional security," when he tested LSD for the Agency, in the
name of stamping out drug abuse, for the Narcotics Bureau. As
yet another close associate summed up White's attitude toward
his job, "He really believed the ends justified the means."
George White's "pragmatic" approach meshed perfectly with
Sid Gottlieb's needs for drug testing. In May 1953 the two men,
who wound up going folk dancing together several times, for-
mally joined forces. In CIA jargon, White became MKULTRA
subproject #3. Under this arrangement, White rented two adja-
cent Greenwich Village apartments, posing as the sometime
artist and seaman "Morgan Hall." White agreed to lure guinea
pigs to the "safehouse"—as the Agency men called the apart-
ments—slip them drugs, and report the results to Gottlieb and
the others in TSS. For its part, the CIA let the Narcotics Bureau
use the place for undercover activities (and often for personal
pleasure) whenever no Agency work was scheduled, and the
CIA paid all the bills, including the cost of keeping a well-
stocked liquor cabinet—a substantial bonus for White. Gottlieb
personally handed over the first $4,000 in cash, to cover the
initial costs of furnishing the safehouse in the lavish style that
White felt befitted him.
Gottlieb did not limit his interest to drugs. He and other TSS
officials wanted to try out surveillance equipment. CIA techni-
cians quickly installed see-through mirrors and microphones
through which eavesdroppers could film, photograph, and re-
cord the action. "Things go wrong with listening devices and
two-way mirrors, so you build these things to find out what
works and what doesn't," says a TSS source. "If you are going
to entrap, you've got to give the guy pictures [flagrante delicto]
and voice recordings. Once you learn how to do it so that the
whole thing looks comfortable, cozy, and safe, then you can
transport the technology overseas and use it." This TSS man
notes that the Agency put to work in the bedrooms of Europe
some of the techniques developed in the George White safe-
house operation.
In the safehouse's first months, White tested LSD, several
kinds of knockout drops, and that old OSS standby, essence of
marijuana. He served up the drugs in food, drink, and ciga-
rettes and then tried to worm information—usually on narcot-
ics matters—from his "guests." Sometimes MKULTRA men
came up from Washington to watch the action. A September

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES    93
1953 entry in White's diary noted: "Lashbrook at 81 Bedford
Street—Owen Winkle and LSD surprise—can wash." Sid Gott-
lieb's deputy, Robert Lashbrook, served as "project monitor" for
the New York safehouse.*
White had only been running the safehouse six months when
Olson died (in Lashbrook's company), and Agency officials sus-
pended the operation for re-evaluation. They soon allowed him
to restart it, and then Gottlieb had to order White to slow down
again. A New York State commissioner had summoned the
narcotics agent to explain his role in the deal that wound up
with Governor Dewey pardoning Lucky Luciano after the war.
The commissioner was asking questions that touched on
White's use of marijuana on Del Gracio, and Gottlieb feared
that word of the CIA's current testing might somehow leak out.
This storm also soon passed, but then, in early 1955, the Narcot-
ics Bureau transferred White to San Francisco to become chief
agent there. Happy with White's performance, Gottlieb decided
to let him take the entire safehouse operation with him to the
Coast. White closed up the Greenwich Village apartments,
leaving behind unreceipted "tips" for the landlord "to clear up
any difficulties about the alterations and damages," as a CIA
document put it.^
White soon rented a suitable "pad" (as he always called it) on
Telegraph Hill, with a stunning view of San Francisco Bay, the
Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz. To supplement the furniture
he brought from the New York safehouse, he went out and
bought items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was
to become: Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can-
can dancer, and photos of manacled women in black stockings.
"It was supposed to look rich," recalls a narcotics agent who
regularly visited, "but it was furnished like crap."
White hired a friend's company to install bugging equip-
*Despite this indication from White's diary that Lashbrook came to the New
York safehouse for an "LSD surprise" and despite his signature on papers
authorizing the subproject, Lashbrook flatly denied all firsthand knowledge of
George White's testing in 1977 Senate testimony. Subcommittee chairman Ed-
ward Kennedy did not press Lashbrook, nor did he refer the matter to the
Justice Department for possible perjury charges.
^This was just one of many expenditures that would drive CIA auditors wild
while going over George White's accounts. Others included $44.04 for a tele-
scope, liquor bills over $1,000 "with no record as to the necessity of its use," and
$31.75 to make an on-the-spot payment to a neighborhood lady whose car he
hit The reason stated for using government funds for the last expense: "It was
important to maintain security and forestall an insurance investigation."

94    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
merit, and William Hawkins, a 25-year-old electronics whiz
then studying at Berkley put in four DD-4 microphones dis-
guised as electrical wall outlets and hooked them up to two
F-301 tape recorders, which agents monitored in an adjacent
"listening post." Hawkins remembers that White "kept a
pitcher of martinis in the refrigerator, and he'd watch me for
a while as I installed a microphone and then slip off." For his
own personal "observation post," White had a portable toilet set
up behind a two-way mirror, where he could watch the pro-
ceedings, usually with drink in hand.
The San Francisco safehouse specialized in prostitutes. "But
this was before The Hite Report and before any hooker had
written a book," recalls a TSS man, "so first we had to go out and
learn about their world. In the beginning, we didn't know what
a John was or what a pimp did." Sid Gottlieb decided to send his
top staff psychologist, John Gittinger, to San Francisco to probe
the demimonde.
George White supplied the prostitutes for the study, although
White, in turn, delegated much of the pimping function to one
of his assistants, Ira "Ike" Feldman. A muscular but very short
man, whom even the 57" White towered over, Feldman tried
even harder than his boss to act tough. Dressed in suede shoes,
a suit with flared trousers, a hat with a turned-up brim, and a
huge zircon ring that was supposed to look like a diamond,
Feldman first came to San Francisco on an undercover assign-
ment posing as an East Coast mobster looking to make a big
heroin buy. Using a drug-addicted prostitute name Janet Jones,
whose common-law husband states that Feldman paid her off
with heroin, the undercover man lured a number of suspected
drug dealers to the "pad" and helped White make arrests.
As the chief Federal narcotics agent in San Francisco, White
was in a position to reward or punish a prostitute. He set up a
system whereby he and Feldman provided Gittinger with all
the hookers the psychologist wanted. White paid off the women
with a fixed number of "chits." For each chit, White owed one
favor. "So the next time the girl was arrested with a John," says
an MKULTRA veteran, "she would give the cop George White's
phone number. The police all knew White and cooperated with
him without asking questions. They would release the girl if he
said so. White would keep good records of how many chits each
person had and how many she used. No money was exchanged,
but five chits were worth $500 to $1,000." Prostitutes were not

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES    95
the only beneficiaries of White's largess. The narcotics agent
worked out a similar system to forgive the transgressions of
small time drug pushers when the MKULTRA men wanted to
talk to them about "the rules of their game," according to the
source.
TSS officials wanted to find out everything they could about
how to apply sex to spying, and the prostitute project became
a general learning and then training ground for CIA carnal
operations. After all, states one TSS official, "We did quite a
study of prostitutes and their behavior.... At first nobody really
knew how to use them. How do you train them? How do you
work them? How do you take a woman who is willing to use her
body to get money out of a guy to get things which are much
more important, like state secrets. I don't care how beautiful
she is—educating the ordinary prostitute up to that level is not
a simple task."
The TSS men continually tried to refine their knowledge.
They realized that prostitutes often wheedled extra money out
of a customer by suggesting some additional service as male
orgasm neared. They wondered if this might not also be a good
time to seek sensitive information. "But no," says the source,
"we found the guy was focused solely on hormonal needs. He
was not thinking of his career or anything else at that point."
The TSS experts discovered that the postsexual, light-up-a-
cigarette period was much better suited to their ulterior mo-
tives. Says the source:
Most men who go to prostitutes are prepared for the fact that
[after the act] she's beginning to work to get herself out of there,
so she can get back on the street to make some more money.
... To find a prostitute who is willing to stay is a hell of a shock
to anyone used to prostitutes. It has a tremendous effect on the
guy. It's a boost to his ego if she's telling him he was really neat,
and she wants to stay for a few more hours. . . . Most of the time,
he gets pretty vulnerable. What the hell's he going to talk about?
Not the sex, so he starts talking about his business. It's at this
time she can lead him gently. But you have to train prostitutes
to do that. Their natural inclination is to do exactly the opposite.
The men from MKULTRA learned a great deal about varying
sexual preferences. One of them says:

96   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
We didn't know in those days about hidden sadism and all that
sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bed-
room. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it
wasn't just what we had thought of—you know, the missionary
position.... We started to pick up knowledge that could be used
in operations, but with a lot of it we never figured out any way
to use it operationally. We just learned.... All these ideas did not
come to us at once. But evolving over three or four years in which
these studies were going on, things emerged which we tried. Our
knowledge of prostitutes' behavior became pretty damn good.
. . . This comes across now that somehow we were just playing
around and we just found all these exotic ways to waste the
taxpayers' money on satisfying our hidden urges. I'm not saying
that watching prostitutes was not exciting or something like that.
But what I am saying was there was a purpose to the whole
business.*
In the best tradition of Mata Hari, the CIA did use sex as a
clandestine weapon, although apparently not so frequently as
the Russians. While many in the Agency believed that it simply
did not work very well, others like CIA operators in Berlin
during the mid-1960s felt prostitutes could be a prime source of
intelligence. Agency men in that city used a network of hookers
to good advantage—or so they told visitors from headquarters.
Yet, with its high proportion of Catholics and Mormons—not to
mention the Protestant ethic of many of its top leaders—the
Agency definitely had limits beyond which prudery took over.
For instance, a TSS veteran says that a good number of case
officers wanted no part of homosexual entrapment operations.
And to go a step further, he recalls one senior KGB man who
told too many sexual jokes about young boys. "It didn't take too
long to recognize that he was more than a little fascinated by
youths," says the source. "I took the trouble to point out he was
probably too good, too well-trained, to be either entrapped or to
give away secrets. But he would have been tempted toward a
compromising position by a preteen. I mentioned this, and they
said, 'As a psychological observer, you're probably quite right.
But what the hell are we going to do about it? Where are we
going to get a twelve-year-old boy?' " The source believes that
if the Russian had had a taste for older men, U.S. intelligence
*In 1984, George Orwell wrote about government-encouraged prostitution:
"Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and
joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class."

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES    97
might have mounted an operation, "but the idea of a twelve-
year-old boy was just more than anybody could stomach."
As the TSS men learned more about the San Francisco hustlers,
they ventured outside the safehouse to try out various clandes-
tine-delivery gimmicks in public places like restaurants, bars,
and beaches. They practiced ways to slip LSD to citizens of the
demimonde while buying them a drink or lighting up a ciga-
rette, and they then tried to observe the effects when the drug
took hold. Because the MKULTRA scientists did not move
smoothly among the very kinds of people they were testing,
they occasionally lost an unwitting victim in a crowd—thereby
sending a stranger off alone with a head full of LSD.
In a larger sense, all the test victims would become lost. As
a matter of policy, Sid Gottlieb ordered that virtually no records
be kept of the testing. In 1973, when Gottlieb retired from the
Agency, he and Richard Helms agreed to destroy what they
thought were the few existing documents on the program. Nei-
ther Gottlieb nor any other MKULTRA man has owned up to
having given LSD to an unknowing subject, or even to observ-
ing such an experiment—except of course in the case of Frank
Olson. Olson's death left behind a paper trail outside of Gott-
lieb's control and that hence could not be denied. Otherwise,
Gottlieb and his colleagues have put all the blame for actual
testing on George White, who is not alive to defend himself.
One reason the MKULTRA veterans have gone to such lengths
to conceal their role is obvious: fear of lawsuits from victims
claiming damaged health.
At the time of the experiments, the subjects' health did not
cause undue concern. At the safehouse, where most of the test-
ing took place, doctors were seldom present. Dr. James Hamil-
ton, a Stanford Medical School psychiatrist and White's OSS
colleague, visited the place from time to time, apparently for
studies connected to unwitting drug experiments and deviant
sexual practices. Yet neither Hamilton nor any other doctor
provided much medical supervision. From his perch atop the
toilet seat, George White could do no more than make surface
observations of his drugged victims. Even an experienced doc-
tor would have had difficulty handling White's role. In addition
to LSD, which they knew could cause serious, if not fatal prob-
lems, TSS officials gave White even more exotic experimental
drugs to test, drugs that other Agency contractors may or may

98   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
not have already used on human subjects. "If we were scared
enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San
Francisco," recalls a TSS source. According to a 1963 report by
CIA Inspector General John Earman, "In a number of in-
stances, however, the test subject has become ill for hours or
days, including hospitalization in at least one case, and [White]
could only follow up by guarded inquiry after the test subject's
return to normal life. Possible sickness and attendant economic
loss are inherent contingent effects of the testing."
The Inspector General noted that the whole program could
be compromised if an outside doctor made a "correct diagnosis
of an illness." Thus, the MKULTRA team not only made some
people sick but had a vested interest in keeping doctors from
finding out what was really wrong. If that bothered the Inspec-
tor General, he did not report his qualms, but he did say he
feared "serious damage to the Agency" in the event of public
exposure. The Inspector General was only somewhat reassured
by the fact that George White "maintain[ed] close working rela-
tions with local police authorities which could be utilized to
protect the activity in critical situations."
If TSS officials had been willing to stick with their original
target group of marginal underworld types, they would have
had little to fear from the police. After all, George White was
the police. But increasingly they used the safehouse to test
drugs, in the Inspector General's words, "on individuals of all
social levels, high and low, native American and foreign."
After all, they were looking for an operational payoff, and they
knew people reacted differently to LSD according to everything
from health and mood to personality structure. If TSS officials
wanted to slip LSD to foreign leaders, as they contemplated
doing to Fidel Castro, they would try to spring an unwitting
dose on somebody as similar as possible. They used the safe-
house for "dry runs" in the intermediate stage between the
laboratory and actual operations.
For these dress rehearsals, George White and his staff pro-
curer, Ike Feldman, enticed men to the apartment with prosti-
tutes. An unsuspecting John would think he had bought a night
of pleasure, go back to a strange apartment, and wind up
zonked. A CIA document that survived Sid Gottlieb's shredding
recorded this process. Its author, Gottlieb himself, could not
break a lifelong habit of using nondescriptive language. For

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES    99
the MKULTRA chief, the whores were "certain individuals
who covertly administer this material to other people in ac-
cordance with [White's] instructions." White normally paid the
women $100 in Agency funds for their night's work, and Gott-
lieb's prose reached new bureaucratic heights as he explained
why the prostitutes did not sign for the money: "Due to the
highly unorthodox nature of these activities and the considera-
ble risk incurred by these individuals, it is impossible to re-
quire that they provide a receipt for these payments or that they
indicate the precise manner in which the funds were spent."
The CIA's auditors had to settle for canceled checks which
White cashed himself and marked either "Stormy" or, just as
appropriately, "Undercover Agent." The program was also re-
ferred to as "Operation Midnight Climax."
TSS officials found the San Francisco safehouse so successful
that they opened a branch office, also under George White's
auspices, across the Golden Gate on the beach in Marin
County.* Unlike the downtown apartment, where an MKUL-
TRA man says "you could bring people in for quickies after
lunch," the suburban Marin County outlet proved useful for
experiments that required relative isolation. There, TSS scien-
tists tested such MKULTRA specialties as stink bombs, itching
and sneezing powders, and diarrhea inducers. TSS's Ray
Treichler, the Stanford chemist, sent these "harassment sub-
stances" out to California for testing by White, along with such
delivery systems as a mechanical launcher that could throw a
foul-smelling object 100 yards, glass ampules that could be
stepped on in a crowd to release any of Treichler's powders, a
fine hypodermic needle to inject drugs through the cork in a
wine bottle, and a drug-coated swizzle stick.
TSS men also planned to use the Marin County safehouse for
an ill-fated experiment that began when staff psychologists
David Rhodes and Walter Pasternak spent a week circulating
in bars, inviting strangers to a party. They wanted to spray LSD
from an aerosol can on their guests, but according to Rhodes'
Senate testimony, "the weather defeated us." In the heat of the
summer, they could not close the doors and windows long
enough for the LSD to hang in the air and be inhaled. Sensing

*In 1961 MKULTRA officials started a third safehouse in New York, also under
the Narcotics Bureau's supervision. This one was handled by Charles Siragusa,
who, like White, was a senior agent and OSS veteran.

100    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
a botched operation, their MKULTRA colleague, John Git-
tinger (who brought the drug out from Washington) shut him-
self in the bathroom and let go with the spray. Still, Rhodes
testified, Gittinger did not get high, and the CIA men appar-
ently scrubbed the party.*
The MKULTRA crew continued unwitting testing until the
summer of 1963 when the Agency's Inspector General stum-
bled across the safehouses during a regular inspection of TSS
activities. This happened not long after Director John McCone
had appointed John Earman to the Inspector General position.^
Much to the displeasure of Sid Gottlieb and Richard Helms,
Earman questioned the propriety of the safehouses, and he
insisted that Director McCone be given a full briefing. Al-
though President Kennedy had put McCone in charge of the
Agency the year before, Helms—the professional's professional
—had not bothered to tell his outsider boss about some of the
CIA's most sensitive activities, including the safehouses and
the CIA-Mafia assassination plots.# Faced with Earman's de-
mands, Helms—surely one of history's most clever bureaucrats
—volunteered to tell McCone himself about the safehouses
(rather than have Earman present a negative view of the pro-
gram). Sure enough, Helms told Earman afterward, McCone
raised no objections to unwitting testing (as Helms described
it). A determined man and a rather brave one, Earman coun-
tered with a full written report to McCone recommending that
the safehouses be closed. The Inspector General cited the risks
*Rhodes' testimony about this incident, which had been set up in advance with
Senator Edward Kennedy's staff, brought on the inevitable "Gang That
Couldn't Spray Straight" headline in the Washington Post. This approach
turned the public perception of a deadly serious program into a kind of practi-
cal joke carried out badly by a bunch of bumblers.
^Lyman Kirkpatrick, the longtime Inspector General who had then recently
left the job to take a higher Agency post, had personally known of the safehouse
operation since right after Olson's death and had never raised any noticeable
objection. He now states he was "shocked" by the unwitting testing, but that he
"didn't have the authority to follow up ... I was trying to determine what the
tolerable limits were of what I could do and still keep my job."
#Trying to explain why he had specifically decided not to inform the CIA
Director about the Agency's relationship with the mob, Helms stated to the
Church committee, "Mr. McCone was relatively new to this organization, and
I guess I must have thought to myself, well this is going to look peculiar to him
. . . This was, you know not a very savory effort." Presumably, Helms had
similar reasons for not telling McCone about the unwitting drug-testing in the
safehouses.

THEM UNWITTING: THE SAFEHOUSES    101
of exposure and pointed out that many people both inside and
outside the Agency found "the concepts involved in manipulat-
ing human behavior ... to be distasteful and unethical."
McCone reacted by putting off a final decision but suspending
unwitting testing in the meantime. Over the next year, Helms,
who then headed the Clandestine Services, wrote at least three
memos urging resumption. He cited "indications ... of an ap-
parent Soviet aggressiveness in the field of covertly adminis-
tered chemicals which are, to say the least, inexplicable and
disturbing," and he claimed the CIA's "positive operational ca-
pacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic
testing."* To Richard Helms, the importance of the program
exceeded the risks and the ethical questions, although he did
admit, "We have no answer to the moral issue." McCone simply
did nothing for two years. The director's indecision had the
effect of killing the program, nevertheless. TSS officials closed
the San Francisco safehouse in 1965 and the New York one in
1966.
Years later in a personal letter to Sid Gottlieb, George White
wrote an epitaph for his role with the CIA: "I was a very minor
missionary, actually a heretic, but 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?"
After 10 years of unwitting testing, the men from MKULTRA
apparently scored no major breakthroughs with LSD or other
drugs. They found no effective truth drug, recruitment pill, or
aphrodisiac. LSD had not opened up the mind to CIA control.
"We had thought at first that this was the secret that was going
to unlock the universe," says a TSS veteran. "We found that
human beings had resources far greater than imagined."
Yet despite the lack of precision and uncertainty, the CIA still
made field use of LSD and other drugs that had worked their
way through the MKULTRA testing progression. A 1957 report
showed that TSS had already moved 6 drugs out of the experi-
*Helms was a master of telling different people different stories to suit his
purposes. At the precise time he was raising the Soviet menace to push McCone
into letting the unwitting testing continue, he wrote the Warren Commission
that not only did Soviet behavioral research lag five years behind the West's,
but that "there is no present evidence that the Soviets have any singular, new,
potent, drugs ... to force a course of action on an individual."

102    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
mental stage and into active use. Up to that time, CIA operators
had utilized LSD and other psychochemicals against 33 targets
in 6 different operations. Agency officials hoped in these cases
either to discredit the subject by making him seem insane or to
"create within the individual a mental and emotional situation
which will release him from the restraint of self-control and
induce him to reveal information willingly under adroit ma-
nipulation." The Agency has consistently refused to release
details of these operations, and TSS sources who talk rather
freely about other matters seem to develop amnesia when the
subject of field use comes up. Nevertheless, it can be said that
the CIA did establish a relationship with an unnamed foreign
secret service to interrogate prisoners with LSD-like drugs. CIA
operators participated directly in these interrogations, which
continued at least until 1966. Often the Agency showed more
concern for the safety of its operational targets abroad than it
did for its unwitting victims in San Francisco, since some of the
foreign subjects were given medical examinations before
being slipped the drug.*
In these operations, CIA men sometimes brought in local
doctors for reasons that had nothing to do with the welfare of
the patient. Instead, the doctor's role was to certify the apparent
insanity of a victim who had been unwittingly dosed with LSD
or an even more durable psychochemical like BZ (which
causes trips lasting a week or more and which tends to induce
violent behavior). If a doctor were to prescribe hospitalization
or other severe treatment, the effect on the subject could be
devastating. He would suffer not only the experience itself,
including possible confinement in a mental institution, but also
social stigma. In most countries, even the suggestion of mental
problems severely damages an individual's professional and
personal standing (as Thomas Eagleton, the recipient of some
shock therapy, can testify). "It's an old technique," says an
MKULTRA veteran. "You neutralize someone by having their
constituency doubt them." The Church committee confirms
*TSS officials led by Sid Gottlieb, who were responsible for the operational use
of LSD abroad, took the position that there was "no danger medically" in
unwitting doses and that neither giving a medical exam or having a doctor
present was necessary. The Agency's Medical Office disagreed, saying the drug
was "medically dangerous." In 1957 Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick
noted it would be "unrealistic" to give the Medical Office what amounted to
veto power over covert operations by letting Agency doctors rule on the health
hazard to subjects in the field.

THEM UNWITTING. THE SAFEHOUSES    103
that the Agency used this technique at least several times to
assassinate a target's character.*
Still, the Clandestine Services did not frequently call on TSS
for LSD or other drugs. Many operators had practical and ethi-
cal objections. In part to overcome such objections and also to
find better ways to use chemical and biological substances in
covert operations, Sid Gottlieb moved up in 1959 to become
Assistant for Scientific Matters to the Clandestine Services
chief. Gottlieb found that TSS had kept the MKULTRA pro-
grams so secret that many field people did not even know what
techniques were available. He wrote that tight controls over
field use in MKDELTA operations "may have generated a gen-
eral defeatism among case officers," who feared they would not
receive permission or that the procedure was not worth the
effort. Gottlieb tried to correct these shortcomings by providing
more information on the drug arsenal to senior operators and
by streamlining the approval process. He had less luck in over-
coming views that drugs do not work or are not reliable, and
that their operational use leads to laziness and poor tradecraft.
If the MKULTRA program had ever found that LSD or any
other drug really did turn a man into a puppet, Sid Gottlieb
would have had no trouble surmounting all those biases. In-
stead, Gottlieb and his fellow searchers came frustratingly
close but always fell short of finding a reliable control mecha-
nism. LSD certainly penetrated to the innermost regions of the
mind. It could spring loose a whole gamut of feelings, from
*While I was doing the research for this book, many people approached me
claiming to be victims of CIA drugging plots. Although I listened carefully to
all and realized that some might be authentic victims, I had no way of distin-
guishing between someone acting strangely and someone made to act
strangely. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this whole technique is that
anyone blaming his aberrant behavior on a drug or on the CIA gets labeled a
hopeless paranoid and his case is thrown into the crank file. There is no better
cover than operating on the edge of madness.
One leftist professor in a Latin American university who had opposed the
CIA says that he was working alone in his office one day in 1974 when a strange
woman entered and jabbed his wrist with a pin stuck in a small round object.
Almost immediately, he become irrational, broke glasses, and threw water in
colleagues' faces. He says his students spotted an ambulance waiting for him
out front. They spirited him out the back door and took him home, where he
tripped (or had psychotic episodes) for more than a week. He calls the experi-
ence a mix of "heaven and hell," and he shudders at the thought that he might
have spent the time in a hospital "with nurses and straitjackets." Although he
eventually returned to his post at the university, he states that it took him
several years to recover the credibility he lost the day he "went crazy at the
office." If the CIA was involved, it had neutralized a foe.

104    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
terror to insight. But in the end, the human psyche proved so
complex that even the most skilled manipulator could not an-
ticipate all the variables. He could use LSD and other drugs to
chip away at free will. He could score temporary victories, and
he could alter moods, perception—sometimes even beliefs. He
had the power to cause great harm, but ultimately he could not
conquer the human spirit.

7
CHAPTER
MUSHROOMS TO
COUNTERCULTURE

The MKULTRA scientists reaped little but disaster, mischief,
and disappointment from their efforts to use LSD as a miracle
weapon against the minds of their opponents. Nevertheless,
their insatiable need to try every possibility led them to test
hundreds of other substances, including all the drugs that
would later be called psychedelic. These drugs were known to
have great potency. They were derived from natural botanical
products, and the men from MKULTRA believed from the be-
ginning that rare organic materials might somehow have the
greatest effect on the human mind. The most amazing of the
psychedelics came from odd corners of the natural world. Al-
bert Hofmann created LSD largely out of ergot, a fungus that
grows on rye; mescaline is nothing more than the synthetic
essence of peyote cactus. Psilocybin, the drug that Timothy
Leary preferred to LSD for his Harvard experiments, was syn-
thesized from exotic Mexican mushrooms that occupy a special
place in CIA history.
When the MKULTRA team first embarked on its mind-con-
trol explorations, the "magic mushroom" was only a rumor or
fable in the linear history of the Western world. On nothing
more than the possibility that the legend was based on fact, the
Agency's scientists tracked the mushroom to the most remote
parts of Mexico and then spent lavishly to test and develop its
mind-altering properties. The results, like the LSD legacy,

106   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
were as startling as they were unintended.
Among the botanicals that mankind has always turned to for
intoxicants and poisons, mushrooms stand out. There is some-
thing enchantingly odd about the damp little buttons that can
thrill a gourmet or kill one, depending on the subtle differences
among the countless varieties. These fungi have a long record
in unorthodox warfare. Two thousand years before the CIA
looked to unleash powerful mushrooms in covert operations,
the Roman Empress Agrippina eliminated her husband
Claudius with a dish of poisonous mushrooms. According to
Roman history, Agrippina wanted the emperor dead so that her
son Nero could take the throne. She planned to take advantage
of Claudius' love for the delicious Amanita caesarea mush-
room, but she had to choose carefully among its deadly look-
alikes. The poison could not be "sudden and instantaneous in
its operation, lest the desperate achievement should be discov-
ered," wrote Gordon and Valentina Wasson in their monumen-
tal and definitive work, Mushrooms, Russia and History. The
Empress settled on the lethal Amanita phalloides, a fungus the
Wassons considered well suited to the crime: "The victim
would not give away the game by abnormal indispositions at
the meal, but when the seizure came he would be so severely
stricken that thereafter he would no longer be in command of
his own affairs." Agrippina knew her mushrooms, and Nero
became Emperor.
CIA mind-control specialists sought to emulate and surpass
that kind of sophistication, as it might apply to any conceivable
drug. Their fixation on the "magic mushroom" grew indirectly
out of a meeting between drug experts and Morse Allen, head
of the Agency's ARTICHOKE program, in October 1952. One
expert told Allen about a shrub called piule, whose seeds had
long been used as an intoxicant by Mexican Indians at religious
ceremonies. Allen, who wanted to know about anything that
distorted reality, immediately arranged for a young CIA scien-
tist to take a Mexican field trip and gather samples of piule as
well as other plants of "high narcotic and toxic value of interest
to ARTICHOKE."
That young scientist arrived in Mexico City early in 1953. He
could not advertise the true purpose of his trip because of AR-
TICHOKE's extreme secrecy, so he assumed cover as a re-
searcher interested in finding native plants which were anes-
thetics. Fluent in Spanish and familiar with Mexico, he had no

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    107
trouble moving around the country, meeting with leading ex-
perts on botanicals. Then he was off into the mountains south
of the capital with his own field-testing equipment, gathering
specimens and testing them crudely on the spot. By February,
he had collected sacks full of material, including 10 pounds of
piule. Before leaving Mexico to look for more samples around
the Caribbean, the young scientist heard amazing tales about
special mushrooms that grew only in the hot and rainy summer
months. Such stories had circulated among Europeans in Mex-
ico since Cortez had conquered the country early in the six-
teenth century. Spanish friars had reported that the Aztecs
used strange mushrooms in their religious ceremonies, which
these converters of the heathens described as "demonic holy
communions." Aztec priests called the special mushrooms
teonanactl, "God's flesh." But Cortez's plunderers soon lost
track of the rite, as did the traders and anthropologists who
followed in their wake. Only the legend survived.
Back in Washington, the young scientist's samples went
straight to the labs, and Agency officials scoured the historical
record for accounts of the strange mushrooms. Morse Allen
himself, though responsible in ARTICHOKE research for ev-
erything from the polygraph to hypnosis, took the trouble to go
through the Indian lore. "Very early accounts of the ceremo-
nies of some tribes of Mexican Indians show that mushrooms
are used to produce hallucinations and to create intoxication in
connection with religious festivals," he wrote. "In addition, this
literature shows that witch doctors or 'divinators' used some
types of mushrooms to produce confessions or to locate stolen
objects or to predict the future." Here was a possible truth drug,
Morse Allen reasoned. "Since it had been determined that no
area of human knowledge is to be left unexplored in connection
with the ARTICHOKE program, it was therefore regarded as
essential that the peculiar qualities of the mushroom be ex-
plored. ..." Allen declared. "Full consideration," he concluded,
should be given to sending an Agency man back to Mexico
during the summer. The CIA had begun its quest for "God's
flesh."
Characteristically, Morse Allen was planning ahead in case
the CIA's searchers came up with a mushroom worth having in
large quantities. He knew that the supply from the tropics var-
ied by season, and, anyway, it would be impractical to go to
Mexico for fungi each time an operational need popped up. So

108    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
Allen decided to see if it were possible to grow the mushrooms
at home, either outdoors or in hothouses. On June 24, 1953, he
and an associate drove from Washington to Toughkenamon,
Pennsylvania, in the heart of "the largest mushroom-growing
area in the world." At a three-hour session with the captains of
the mushroom industry, Allen explained the government's in-
terest in poisonous and narcotic fungi. Allen reported that the
meeting "was primarily designed to obtain a 'foothold' in the
center of the mushroom-growing industry where, if require-
ments for mushroom growing were demanded, it would be
done by professionals in the trade." The mushroom executives
were quite reluctant to grow toxic products because they knew
that any accidental publicity would scare their customers. In
the end, however, their patriotism won out, and they agreed to
grow any kind of fungus the government desired. Allen consid-
ered the trip a great success.
As useful as this commitment might be, an element of chance
remained as long as the CIA had to depend on the natural
process. But if the Agency could find synthetic equivalents for
the active ingredients, it could manufacture rather than grow
its own supply. Toward this goal of bypassing nature, Morse
Allen had little choice but to turn for help to the man who the
following year would wrest most of the ARTICHOKE functions
from his grasp: Sid Gottlieb. Gottlieb, himself a Ph.D. in chem-
istry, had scientists working for him who knew what to do on
the level of test tubes and beakers. Allen ran ARTICHOKE out
of the Office of Security, which was not equipped for work on
the frontiers of science.
Gottlieb and his colleagues moved quickly into the mysteries
of the Mexican hallucinogens. They went to work on the chemi-
cal structures of the piule and other plants that Morse Allen's
emissary brought back from his field trip, but they neglected to
report their findings to the bureaucratically outflanked Allen.
Gottlieb and the MKULTRA crew soon got caught up in the
search for the magic mushroom. While TSS had its own limited
laboratory facilities, it depended on secret contractors for most
research and development. Working with an associate, a
cadaverously thin chemistry Ph.D. named Henry Bortner, Gott-
lieb passed the tropical plants to a string of corporate and aca-
demic researchers. One of them, Dr. James Moore, a 29-year-
old chemist at Parke, Davis & Company in Detroit, was
destined to be the first man in the CIA camp to taste the magic
mushroom.

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    109
Moore's career was typical of the specialists in the CIA's
vast network of private contractors. His path to the mush-
room led through several jobs and offbeat assignments, al-
ways with Agency funds and direction behind him. A pre-
cise, meticulous man of scientific habits, Moore was hardly
the sort one would expect to find chasing psychedelic drugs.
Such pursuits began for him in March 1953, when he had
returned to his lab at Parke, Davis after a year of postdoc-
toral research at the University of Basel. His supervisor had
called him in with an intriguing proposal: How would he
like to work inside the company on a CIA contract? "Those
were not particularly prosperous times, and the company
was glad to get someone else to pay my salary [$8,000 a
year]," notes Moore 25 years later. "If I had thought I was
participating in a scheme run by a small band of mad in-
dividuals, I would have demurred."
He accepted the job.
The Agency contracted with Parke, Davis, as it did with nu-
merous other drug companies, universities, and government
agencies to develop behavioral products and poisons from
botanicals. CIA-funded chemists extracted deadly substances
like the arrow-poison curare from natural products, while oth-
ers worked on ways to deliver these poisons most effectively,
like the "nondiscernible microbioinoculator" (or dart gun) that
the Army Chemical Corps invented. CIA-connected botanists
collected—and then chemists analyzed—botanicals from all
over the tropics: a leaf that killed cattle, several plants deadly
to fish, another leaf that caused hair to fall out, sap that caused
temporary blindness, and a host of other natural products that
could alter moods, dull or stimulate nerves, or generally disori-
ent people. Among the plants Moore investigated was Jamaica
dogwood, a plant used by Caribbean natives to stun fish so they
could be easily captured for food. This work resulted in the
isolation of several new substances, one of which Moore named
"lisetin," in honor of his daughter.
Moore had no trouble adjusting to the secrecy demanded by
his CIA sponsors, having worked on the Manhattan Project as
a graduate student. He dealt only with his own case officer,
Henry Bortner, and two or three other CIA men in TSS. Once
Moore completed his chemical work on a particular substance,
he turned the results over to Bortner and apparently never
learned of the follow-up. Moore worked in his own little iso-
lated compartment, and he soon recognized that the Agency

110    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
preferred contractors who did not ask questions about what
was going on in the next box.
In 1955 Moore left private industry for academia, moving
from Detroit to the relatively placid setting of the University of
Delaware in Newark. The school made him an assistant profes-
sor, and he moved into a lab in the Georgian red-brick building
that housed the chemistry department. Along with his family,
Moore brought his CIA contract—then worth $16,000 a year, of
which he received $650 per month, with the rest going to pay
research assistants and overhead. Although the Agency al-
lowed a few top university officials to be briefed on his secret
connection, Moore appeared to his colleagues and students to
be a normal professor who had a healthy research grant from
the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research in Washington.
In the world of natural products—particularly mushrooms—
the CIA soon made Moore a full-service agent. With some help
from his CIA friends, he made contact with the leading lights
in mycology (the study of mushrooms), attended professional
meetings, and arranged for others to send him samples. From
the CIA's point of view, he could not have had better cover. As
Sid Gottlieb wrote, Moore "maintains the fiction that the botan-
ical specimens he collects are for his own use since his field
interest is natural-product chemistry." Under this pretext,
Moore had a perfect excuse to make and purchase for the CIA
chemicals that the Agency did not want traced. Over the years,
Moore billed the Agency for hundreds of purchases, including
50 cents for an unidentified pamphlet, $433.13 for a particular
shipment of mescaline, $1147.60 for a large quantity of mush-
rooms, and $12,000 for a quarter-ton of fluothane, an inhalation
anesthetic. He shipped his purchases on as Bortner directed.
Moore eventually became a kind of short-order cook for what
CIA documents call "offensive CW, BW" weapons at "very low
cost and in a few days' time . . ." If there were an operational
need, Bortner had only to call in the order, and Moore would
whip up a batch of a "reputed depilatory" or hallucinogens like
DMT or the incredibly potent BZ. On one occasion in 1963,
Moore prepared a small dose of a very lethal carbamate poison
—the same substance that OSS used two decades earlier to try
to kill Adolf Hitler. Moore charged the Agency his regular con-
sulting fee, $100, for this service.
"Did I ever consider what would have happened if this stuff
were given to unwitting people?" Moore asks, reflecting on his

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    111
CIA days. "No. Particularly no. Had I been given that informa-
tion, I think I would have been prepared to accept that. If I had
been knee-jerk about testing on unwitting subjects, I wouldn't
have been the type of person they would have used. There was
nothing that I did that struck me as being so sinister and
deadly. ... It was all investigative."
James Moore was only one of many CIA specialists on the look-
out for the magic mushroom. For three years after Morse
Allen's man returned from Mexico with his tales of wonder,
Moore and the others in the Agency's network pushed their
lines of inquiry among contacts and travelers into Mexican
villages so remote that Spanish had barely penetrated. Yet they
found no magic mushrooms. Given their efforts, it was ironic
that the man who beat them to "God's flesh" was neither a spy
nor a scientist, but a banker. It was R. Gordon Wasson, vice-
president of J. P. Morgan & Company, amateur mycologist, and
co-author with his wife Valentina of Mushrooms, Russia and
History. Nearly 30 years earlier, Wasson and his Russian-born
wife had become fascinated by the different ways that societies
deal with the mushroom, and they followed their lifelong ob-
session with these fungi, in all their glory, all over the globe.*
They found whole nationalities, such as the Russians and the
Catalans, were mycophiles, while others like the Spaniards and
the Anglo-Saxons were not. They learned that in ancient
Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain kinds of mush-
rooms were brought into being by lightning bolts. They discov-
ered that widely scattered peoples, including desert Arabs,
Siberians, Chinese, and Maoris of New Zealand, have shared
*On their honeymoon, in the summer of 1927, the Wassons were strolling along
a mountain path when suddenly Valentina abandoned Gordon's side. "She had
spied wild mushrooms in the forest," wrote Wasson, "and racing over the car-
pet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before one
cluster and then another of these growths. In ecstasy she called each kind by
an endearing Russian name. Like all good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about
the fungal world and felt the less I knew about these putrid, treacherous excres-
cences the better. For her they were things of grace infinitely inviting to the
perceptive mind." In spite of his protests, Valentina gathered up the mush-
rooms and brought them back to the lodge where she cooked them for dinner. She ate them all—alone. Wasson wanted no part of the fungi. While she mocked his horror, he predicted in the face of her laughter he would wake up a widower the next morning. When Valentina survived, the couple decided to find an explanation for "the strange cultural cleavage" that had caused them to react so differently to mushrooms. From then on, they were hooked, and the world became the richer.

112    INTELLIGENCE OR ''WITCHES POTIONS"
the idea that mushrooms have supernatural connections. Their
book appeared in limited edition, selling new in 1957 for $125.
It contains facts and legends, lovingly told, as well as beautiful
photographs of nearly every known species of mushroom.
Inevitably, the Wassons heard tell of "God's flesh," and in
1953 they started spending their vacations pursuing it. They
took their first unsuccessful trek to Mexico about the time
James Moore got connected to the CIA and Morse Allen met
with the Pennsylvania mushroom executives. They had no luck
until their third expedition, when Gordon Wasson and his trav-
eling companion, Allan Richardson, found their holy grail high
in the mountains above Oaxaca. On June 29,1955, they entered
the town hall in a village called Huautla de Jimenez. There,
they found a young Indian about 35, sitting by a large table in
an upstairs room. Unlike most people in the village, he spoke
Spanish. "He had a friendly manner," Wasson later wrote, "and
I took a chance. Leaning over the table, I asked him earnestly
and in a low voice if I could speak to him in confidence. In-
stantly curious, he encouraged me. 'Will you,' I went on, 'help
me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?' and I used the
Indian name nti sheeto, correctly pronouncing it with glottal
stop and tonal differentiation of the syllables. When [he] recov-
ered from his surprise he said warmly that nothing could be
easier."
Shortly thereafter, the Indian led Wasson and Richardson
down into a deep ravine where mushrooms were growing in
abundance. The white men snapped picture after picture of the
fungi and picked a cardboard box-full. Then, in the heavy
humid heat of the afternoon, the Indian led them up the moun-
tain to a woman who performed the ancient mushroom rite.
Her name was Maria Sabina. She was not only a curandera, or
shaman, of "the highest quality," wrote Wasson, but a "senora
sin mancha, a woman without stain." Wasson described her as
middle-aged and short, "with a spirituality in her expression
that struck us at once. She had a presence. We showed our
mushrooms to the woman and her daughter. They cried out in
rapture over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of
our young specimens. Through the interpreter we asked if they
would serve us that night. They said yes."
That night, Wasson, Richardson, and about 20 Indians gath-
ered in one of the village's adobe houses. The natives wore their
best clothes and were friendly to the white strangers. The host

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    113
provided chocolate drinks, which evoked for Wasson accounts
of similar beverages being served early Spanish writers. Maria
Sabina sat on a mat before a simple altar table that was
adorned with the images of the Child Jesus and the Baptism in
Jordan. After cleaning the mushrooms, she handed them out to
all the adults present, keeping 26 for herself and giving Wasson
and Richardson 12 each.
Maria Sabina put out the last candle about midnight, and she
chanted haunting, tightly measured melodies. The Indian cele-
brants responded with deep feeling. Both Wasson and Richard-
son began to experience intense hallucinations that did not
diminish until about 4:00 a.m. "We were never more wide
awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were open or
closed," Wasson wrote:
They emerged from the center of the field of our vision, opening
up as they came, now rushing, now slowly at the pace that our
will chose. They were vivid in color, always harmonious. They
began with art motifs, such as might decorate carpets or textiles
or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they
evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens—resplendent
palaces with semiprecious stones.... Could the miraculous mo-
bility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying
witches that played some important part in the folklore and fairy
tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my
mind at the very time that I was seeing the vision, for the effect
of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split
in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side
continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other
side is enjoying. The mind is attached by an elastic cord to the
vagrant senses.
Thus Gordon Wasson described the first known mushroom
trip by "outsiders" in recorded history. The CIA's men missed
the event, but they quickly learned of it, even though Wasson's
visit was a private noninstitutional one to a place where mate-
rial civilization had not reached. Such swiftness was assured
by the breadth of the Agency's informant network, which in-
cluded formal liaison arrangements with agencies like the Ag-
riculture Department and the FDA and informal contacts all
over the world. A botanist in Mexico City sent the report that
reached both CIA headquarters and then James Moore. In the
best bureaucratic form, the CIA description of Wasson's visions

114    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
stated sparsely that the New York banker thought he saw "a
multitude of architectural forms." Still, "God's flesh" had been
located, and the MKULTRA leaders snatched up information
that Wasson planned to return the following summer and bring
back some mushrooms.
During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote Wasson—
"out of the blue," as Wasson recalls—and expressed a desire to
look into the chemical properties of Mexican fungi. Moore
eventually suggested that he would like to accompany Was-
son's party, and, to sweeten the proposition, he mentioned that
he knew a foundation that might be willing to help underwrite
the expedition. Sure enough, the CIA's conduit, the Geschickter
Fund, made a $2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the
quest for the divine mushroom became Subproject 58.
Joining Moore and Wasson on the 1956 trip were the world-
renowned French mycologist Roger Heim and a colleague from
the Sorbonne. The party made the final leg of the trip, one at
a time, in a tiny Cessna, but when it was Moore's turn, the load
proved too much for the plane. The pilot suddenly took a dra-
matic right angle turn through a narrow canyon and made an
unscheduled stop on the side of a hill. Immediately on landing,
an Indian girl ran out and slid blocks under the wheels, so the
plane would not roll back into a ravine. The pilot decided to
lighten the load by leaving Moore among the local Indians, who
spoke neither English nor Spanish. Later in the day, the plane
returned and picked up the shaken Moore.
Finally in Huautla, sleeping on a dirt floor and eating local
food, everyone reveled in the primitiveness of the adventure
except Moore, who suffered. In addition to diarrhea, he recalls,
"I had a terribly bad cold, we damned near starved to death,
and I itched all over." Beyond his physical woes, Moore became
more and more alienated from the others, who got on famously.
Moore was a "complainer," according to Wasson. "He had no
empathy for what was going on," recalls Wasson. "He was like
a landlubber at sea. He got sick to his stomach and hated it all."
Moore states, "Our relationship deteriorated during the course
of the trip."
Wasson returned to the same Maria Sabina who had led him
to the high ground the year before. Again the ritual started well
after dark and, for everyone but Moore, it was an enchanted
evening. Sings Wasson: "I had the most superb feeling—a feel-
ing of ecstasy. You're raised to a height where you have not
been in everyday life—not ever." Moore, on the other hand,

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    115
never left the lowlands. His description: "There was all this
chanting in the dialect. Then they passed the mushrooms
around, and we chewed them up. I did feel the hallucinogenic
effect, although 'disoriented' would be a better word to describe
my reaction."
Soon thereafter, Moore returned to Delaware with a bag of
mushrooms—just in time to take his pregnant wife to the hospi-
tal for delivery. After dropping her off with the obstetrician, he
continued down the hall to another doctor about his digestion.
Already a thin man, Moore had lost 15 pounds. Over the next
week, he slowly nursed himself back to health. He reported in
to Bortner and started preliminary work in his lab to isolate the
active ingredient in the mushrooms. Bortner urged him on; the
men from MKULTRA were excited at the prospect that they
might be able to create "a completely new chemical agent."
They wanted their own private supply of "God's flesh." Sid
Gottlieb wrote that if Moore succeeded, it was "quite possible"
that the new drugs could "remain an Agency secret."
Gottlieb's dream of a CIA monopoly on the divine mushroom
vanished quickly under the influence of unwanted competitors,
and indeed, the Agency soon faced a control problem of bur-
geoning proportions. While Moore toiled in his lab, Roger Heim
in Paris unexpectedly pulled off the remarkable feat of grow-
ing the mushrooms in artificial culture from spore prints he
had made in Mexico. Heim then sent samples to none other
than Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who quickly iso-
lated and chemically reproduced the active chemical ingredi-
ent. He named it psilocybin.
The dignified Swiss chemist had beaten out the CIA,* and the
men from MKULTRA found themselves trying to obtain for-
*Within two years, Albert Hofmann would scoop the CIA once again, with some
help from Gordon Wasson. In 1960 Hofmann broke down and chemically re-
created the active ingredient in hallucinatory ololiuqui seeds sent him by Was-
son before the Agency's contractor, William Boyd Cook of Montana State Uni-
versity, could do the job. Hofmann's and Wasson's professional relationship
soon grew into friendship, and in 1962 they traveled together on horseback to
Huautla de Jimenez to visit Maria Sabina. Hofmann presented the curandera
with some genuine Sandoz psilocybin. Wasson recalls: "Of course, Albert Hof-
mann is so conservative he always gives too little a dose, and it didn't have any
effect." The crestfallen Hofmann believed he had duplicated "God's flesh," and
he doubled the dose. Then Maria Sabina had her customary visions, and she
reported, according to Wasson, the drug was the "same" as the mushroom.
States Wasson, whose prejudice for real mushrooms over chemicals is unmis-
takable, "I don't think she said it with very much enthusiasm."

116   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
mulas and supplies from overseas. Instead of locking up the
world's supply of the drug in a safe somewhere, they had to
keep track of disbursements from Sandoz, as they were doing
with LSD. Defeated by the old master, Moore laid his own work
aside and sent away to Sandoz for a supply of psilocybin.
This lapse in control still did not quash the hopes of Agency
officials that the mushroom might become a powerful weapon
in covert operations. Agency scientists rushed it into the experi-
mental stage. Within three summers of the first trip with James
Moore, the CIA's queasy professor from America, the mush-
room had journeyed through laboratories on two continents,
and its chemical essence had worked its way back to Agency
conduits and a contractor who would test it. In Kentucky, Dr.
Harris Isbell ordered psilocybin injected into nine black in-
mates at the narcotics prison. His staff laid the subjects out on
beds as the drug took hold and measured physical symptoms
every hour: blood pressure, knee-jerk reflexes, rectal tempera-
ture, precise diameter of eye pupils, and so on. In addition, they
recorded the inmates' various subjective feelings:
After 30 minutes, anxiety became quite definite and was ex-
pressed as consisting of fear that something evil was going to
happen, fear of insanity, or of death	At times patients had the
sensation that they could see the blood and bones in their own
body or in that of another person. They reported many fantasies
or dreamlike states in which they seemed to be elsewhere. Fan-
tastic experiences, such as trips to the moon or living in gorgeous
castles were occasionally reported. . . . Two of the 9 patients
... felt their experiences were caused by the experimenters con-
trolling their minds. . . .
Experimental data piled up, with operational testing to follow.
But the magic mushroom never became a good spy weapon.
It made people behave strangely but no one could predict
where their trips would take them. Agency officials craved cer-
tainty.
On the other hand, Gordon Wasson found revelation. After a
lifetime of exploring and adoring mushrooms, he had discov-
ered the greatest wonder of all in that remote Indian village.
His experience inspired him to write an account of his journey
for the "Great Adventures" series in Life magazine. The story,
spread across 17 pages of text and color photographs, was

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    117
called "Seeking the Magic Mushroom: A New York banker goes
to Mexico's mountains to participate in the age-old rituals of
Indians who chew strange growths that produce visions." In
1957, before the Russian sputnik shook America later that
year, Life introduced its millions of readers to the mysteries of
hallucinogens, with a tone of glowing but dignified respect.
Wasson wrote movingly of his long search for mushroom lore,
and he became positively rhapsodic in reflecting on his Mexi-
can "trip":
In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his
lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he
discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their
effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detona-
tor to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds
beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even
worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell.
For the credulous, primitive mind, the mushrooms must have
reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. Many emotions
are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and rever-
ence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in
mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engen-
dered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point
of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man
the very idea of God.
The article caused a sensation in the United States, where
people had already been awakened to ideas like these by Al-
dous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. It lured waves of re-
spectable adults—precursors of later hippie travelers—to
Mexico in search of their own curanderas. (Wasson came to
have mixed feelings about the response to his story, after
several tiny Mexican villages were all but trampled by
American tourists on the prowl for divinity.) One person
whose curiosity was stimulated by the article was a young
psychology professor named Timothy Leary. In 1959, in
Mexico on vacation, he ate his first mushrooms. He recalls
he "had no idea it was going to change my life." Leary had
just been promised tenure at Harvard, but his life of conven-
tional prestige lost appeal for him within five hours of swal-
lowing the mushroom: "The revelation had come. The veil
had been pulled back. . . . The prophetic call. The works.
God had spoken."

118    INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
Having responded to a Life article about an expedition that
was partially funded by the CIA, Leary returned to a Harvard
campus where students and professors had for years served as
subjects for CIA- and military-funded LSD experiments. His
career as a drug prophet lay before him. Soon he would be
quoting in his own Kamasutra from the CIA's contractor Har-
old Abramson and others, brought together for scholarly drug
conferences by the sometime Agency conduit, the Macy Foun-
dation.
With LSD, as with mushrooms, the men from MKULTRA
remained oblivious, for the most part, to the rebellious effect of
the drug culture in the United States. "I don't think we were
paying any attention to it," recalls a TSS official. The CIA's
scientists looked at drugs from a different perspective and went
on trying to fashion their spy arsenal. Through the entire 1960s
and into the 1970s, the Agency would scour Latin America for
poisonous and narcotic plants.* Earlier, TSS officials and con-
tractors actually kept spreading the magic touch of drugs by
forever pressing new university researchers into the field. Bos-
ton Psychopathic's Max Rinkel stirred up the interest of
Rochester's Harold Hodge and told him how to get a grant from
the Agency conduit, the Geschickter Fund. Hodge's group
found a way to put a radioactive marker into LSD, and the
MKULTRA crew made sure that the specially treated sub-
stance found its way to still more scientists. When a contractor
like Harold Abramson spoke highly of the drug at a new confer-
ence or seminar, tens or hundreds of scientists, health profes-
sionals, and subjects—usually students—would wind up trying
LSD.
One day in 1954, Ralph Blum, a senior at Harvard on his way
to a career as a successful author, heard from a friend that
doctors at Boston Psychopathic would pay $25 to anyone willing
to spend a day as a happy schizophrenic. Blum could not resist.
He applied, passed the screening process, took a whole battery
of Wechsler psychological tests, and was told to report back on
a given morning. That day, he was shown into a room with five
other Harvard students. Project director Bob Hyde joined them
and struck Blum as a reassuring father figure. Someone
brought in a tray with six little glasses full of water and LSD.
The students drank up. For Blum, the drug did not take hold for
*See Chapter 12.

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    119
about an hour and a half—somewhat longer than the average.
While Hyde was in the process of interviewing him, Blum felt
his mind shift gears. "I looked at the clock on the wall and
thought how well behaved it was. It didn't pay attention to
itself. It just stayed on the wall and told time." Blum felt that
he was looking at everything around him from a new perspec-
tive. "It was a very subtle thing," he says. "My ego filter had
been pretty much removed. I turned into a very accessible state
—accessible to myself. I knew when someone was lying to me,
and the richness of the experience was such that I didn't want
to suffer fools gladly." Twenty-four years later, Blum con-
cludes: "It was undeniably a very important experience for me.
It made a difference in my life. It began to move the log jam of
my old consciousness. You can't do it with just one blast. It was
the beginning of realizing it was safe to love again. Although
I wouldn't use them until much later, it gave me a new set of
optics. It let me know there was something downstream."*
Many student subjects like Blum thought LSD transformed
the quality of their lives. Others had no positive feelings, and
some would later use the negative memories of their trips to
invalidate the whole drug culture and stoned thinking process
of the 1960s. In a university city like Boston where both the CIA
and the Army were carrying on large testing programs at hospi-
tals connected to Harvard, volunteering for an LSD trip became
quite popular in academic circles. Similar reactions, although
probably not as pronounced, occurred in other intellectual cen-
ters. The intelligence agencies turned to America's finest uni-
versities and hospitals to try LSD, which meant that the cream
of the country's students and graduate assistants became the
test subjects.
In 1969 the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs pub-
lished a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD
*Lincoln Clark, a psychiatrist who tested LSD for the Army at Massachusetts
General Hospital, reflects a fairly common view among LSD researchers when
he belittles drug-induced thinking of the sort described by Blum. "Everybody
who takes LSD has an incredible experience that you can look at as having
positive characteristics. I view it as pseudo-insight. This is part of the usual
response of intellectually pretentious people." On the other hand, psychiatrist
Sidney Cohen, who has written an important book on LSD, noted that to experi-
ence a visionary trip, "the devotee must have faith in, or at least be open to the
possibility of the 'other state.' . . . He must 'let go,' not offer too much resistance
to losing his personal identity. The ability to surrender oneself is probably the
most important operation of all."

120   INTELLIGENCE OR "WITCHES POTIONS"
use. The authors wrote that the drug's "early use was among
small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast
universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other
campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug
by persons of higher status. Teachers have influenced students;
upperclassmen have influenced lowerclassmen." Calling this a
"trickle-down phenomenon," the authors seem to have cor-
rectly analyzed how LSD got around the country. They left out
only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing:
That somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there
at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the
men of MKULTRA.
Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of getting
his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fre-
mont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA
money to Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone
knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized the conferences
that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands.
Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead's former
husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange
for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the
drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus. No
stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg
reacted badly to what he describes as "the closed little doctor's
room full of instruments," where he took the drug. Although he
was allowed to listen to records of his choice (he chose a Ger-
trude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Gins-
berg felt he "was being connected to Big Brother's brain." He
says that the experience resulted in "a slight paranoia that
hung on all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until
I learned from meditation how to disperse that."
Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then
worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto.
From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was testing LSD at that same
hospital. Hollister says he entered the hallucinogenic field re-
luctantly because of the "unscientific" work of the early LSD
researchers. He refers specifically to most of the people who
attended Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA-
and military-funded work, Hollister tried drugs out on student
volunteers, including a certain Ken Kesey, in 1960. Kesey said
he was a jock who had only been drunk once before, but on
three successive Tuesdays, he tried different psychedelics. "Six

MUSHROOMS TO COUNTERCULTURE    121
weeks later I'd bought my first ounce of grass," Kesey later
wrote, adding, "Six months later I had a job at that hospital as
a psychiatric aide." Out of that experience, using drugs while
he wrote, Kesey turned out One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
He went on to become the counterculture's second most famous
LSD visionary, spreading the creed thoughout the land, as Tom
Wolfe would chronicle in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
CIA officials never meant that the likes of Leary, Kesey, and
Ginsberg should be turned on. Yet these men were, and they,
along with many of the lesser-known experimental subjects,
like Harvard's Ralph Blum, created the climate whereby LSD
escaped the government's control and became available by the
early sixties on the black market. No one at the Agency appar-
ently foresaw that young Americans would voluntarily take the
drug—whether for consciousness expansion or recreational
purposes. The MKULTRA experts were mainly on a control
trip, and they proved incapable of gaining insight from their
own LSD experiences of how others less fixated on making
people do their bidding would react to the drug.
It would be an exaggeration to put all the blame on—or give
all the credit to—the CIA for the spread of LSD. One cannot
forget the nature of the times, the Vietnam War, the breakdown
in authority, and the wide availability of other drugs, especially
marijuana. But the fact remains that LSD was one of the cata-
lysts of the traumatic upheavals of the 1960s. No one could
enter the world of psychedelics without first passing, una-
wares, through doors opened by the Agency. It would become
a supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons
among drugs—fueled by the hope that spies could, like Dr.
Frankenstein, control life with genius and machines—would
wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds
of the counterculture.

PART
iii
SPELLS-
ELECTRODES AND
HYPNOSIS
It is possible that a certain amount of brain
damage is of therapeutic value.
—DR. PAUL HOCH, 1948
The whole history of scientific advance is
full of scientists investigating phenomena
the establishment did not even believe
were there.	—margaret mead, 1969

CHAPTER
8
BRAINWASHING

In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by
Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese
into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in
any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly be-
came a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA
propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist,
turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject.
He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to
cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chi-
nese.
American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's
ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward
communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious
and alien. Most Americans knew something about the fa-
mous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at
which the Cardinal appeared zombielike, as though drugged
or hypnotized. Other defendants at Soviet "show trials" had
displayed similar symptoms as they recited unbelievable
confessions in dull, cliche-ridden monotones. Americans
were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways
to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped
pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.
The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy
1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government
launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded
statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a va-

126    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
riety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.
The official American position on prisoner confessions was
that they were false and forced. As expressed in an Air
Force Headquarters document, "Confessions can be of truth-
ful details. . . . For purposes of this section, 'confessions' are
considered as being the forced admission to a lie." But if the
military had understandable reasons to gloss over the truth
or falsity of the confessions, this still did not address the fact
that confessions had been made at all. Nor did it lay to rest
the fears of those like Edward Hunter who saw the confes-
sions as proof that the communists now had techniques "to
put a man's mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is
true for what is untrue, what is right for what is wrong, and
come to believe what did not happen actually had happened,
until he ultimately becomes a robot for the Communist
manipulator."
By the end of the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190 U.S.
prisoners held in China had either made confessions or signed
petitions calling for an end to the American war effort in Asia.
Fifteen percent collaborated fully with the Chinese, and only 5
percent steadfastly resisted. The American performance con-
trasted poorly with that of the British, Australian, Turkish, and
other United Nations prisoners—among whom collaboration
was rare, even though studies showed they were treated about
as badly as the Americans. Worse, an alarming number of the
prisoners stuck by their confessions after returning to the
United States. They did not, as expected, recant as soon as they
stepped on U.S. soil. Puzzled and dismayed by this wholesale
collapse of morale among the POWs, American opinion leaders
settled in on Edward Hunter's explanation: The Chinese had
somehow brainwashed our boys.
But how? At the height of the brainwashing furor, conserva-
tive spokesmen often seized upon the very mystery of it all to
give a religious cast to the political debate. All communists
have been, by definition, brainwashed through satanic forces,
they argued—thereby making the enemy seem like robots com-
pletely devoid of ordinary human feelings and motivation. Lib-
erals favored a more scientific view of the problem. Given the
incontrovertible evidence that the Russians and the Chinese
could, in a very short time and often under difficult circum-
stances, alter the basic belief and behavior patterns of both
domestic and foreign captives, liberals argued that there must

BRAINWASHING    127
be a technique involved that would yield its secrets under ob-
jective investigation.
CIA Director Allen Dulles favored the scientific approach,
although he naturally encouraged his propaganda experts to
exploit the more emotional interpretations of brainwashing.
Dulles and the heads of the other American security agencies
became almost frantic in their efforts to find out more about the
Soviet and Chinese successes in mind control. Under pressure
for answers, Dulles turned to Dr. Harold Wolff, a world-famous
neurologist with whom he had developed an intensely personal
relationship. Wolff was then treating Dulles' own son for brain
damage suffered from a Korean War head wound. Together
they shared the trauma of the younger Dulles' fits and mental
lapses. Wolff, a skinny little doctor with an overpowering per-
sonality, became fast friends with the tall, patrician CIA Direc-
tor. Dulles may have seen brainwashing as an induced form of
brain damage or mental illness. In any case, in late 1953, he
asked Wolff to conduct an official study of communist brain-
washing techniques for the CIA. Wolff, who had become fas-
cinated by the Director's tales of the clandestine world, eagerly
accepted.
Harold Wolff was known primarily as an expert on migraine
headaches and pain, but he had served on enough military and
intelligence advisory panels that he knew how to pick up
Dulles' mandate and expand on it. He formed a working part-
nership with Lawrence Hinkle, his colleague at Cornell Uni-
versity Medical College in New York City. Hinkle handled the
administrative part of the study and shared in the substance.
Before going ahead, the two doctors made sure they had the
approval of Cornell's president, Deane W. Malott and other
high university officials who checked with their contacts in
Washington to make sure the project did indeed have the great
importance that Allen Dulles stated. Hinkle recalls a key White
House aide urging Cornell to cooperate. The university ad-
ministration agreed, and soon Wolff and Hinkle were poring
over the Agency's classified files on brainwashing. CIA officials
also helped arrange interviews with former communist inter-
rogators and prisoners alike. "It was done with great secrecy,"
recalls Hinkle. "We went through a great deal of hoop-de-do
and signed secrecy agreements, which everyone took very seri-
ously."

128    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
The team of Wolff and Hinkle became the chief brainwashing
studiers for the U.S. government, although the Air Force and
Army ran parallel programs.* Their secret report to Allen
Dulles, later published in a declassified version, was consid-
ered the definitive U.S. Government work on the subject. In
fact, if allowances are made for the Cold War rhetoric of the
fifties, the Wolff-Hinkle report still remains one of the better
accounts of the massive political re-education programs in
China and the Soviet Union. It stated flatly that neither the
Soviets nor the Chinese had any magical weapons—no drugs,
exotic mental ray-guns, or other fanciful machines. Instead,
the report pictured communist interrogation methods resting
on skillful, if brutal, application of police methods. Its portrait
of the Soviet system anticipates, in dry and scholarly form, the
work of novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn in The Gulag Ar-
chipelago. Hinkie and Wolff showed that the Soviet technique
rested on the cumulative weight of intense psychological pres-
sure and human weakness, and this thesis alone earned the two
Cornell doctors the enmity of the more right-wing CIA officials
such as Edward Hunter. Several of his former acquaintances
remember that Hunter was fond of saying that the Soviets
brainwashed people the way Pavlov had conditioned dogs.
In spite of some dissenters like Hunter, the Wolff-Hinkle
model became, with later refinements, the best available de-
scription of extreme forms of political indoctrination. Accord-
ing to the general consensus, the Soviets started a new prisoner
off by putting him in solitary confinement. A rotating corps of
guards watched him constantly, humiliating and demeaning
him at every opportunity and making it clear he was totally cut
off from all outside support. The guards ordered him to stand
for long periods, let him sit, told him exactly the position he
could take to lie down, and woke him if he moved in the slight-
est while sleeping. They banned all outside stimuli—books,
conversation, or news of the world.
After four to six weeks of this mind-deadening routine, the
prisoner usually found the stress unbearable and broke down.
"He weeps, he mutters, and prays aloud in his cell," wrote Hin-
kle and Wolff. When the prisoner reached this stage, the inter-
*Among the Air Force and Army project leaders were Dr. Fred Williams of the
Air Force Psychological Warfare Division, Robert Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein,
Albert Blderman, and Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe (an Air Force officer
who would later go to work full time in CIA behavioral programs).

BRAINWASHING    129
rogation began. Night after night, the guards brought him into
a special room to face the interrogator. Far from confronting
his captive with specific misdeeds, the interrogator told him
that he knew his own crimes—all too well. In the most harrow-
ing Kafkaesque way, the prisoner tried to prove his innocence
to he knew not what. Together the interrogator and prisoner
reviewed the prisoner's life in detail. The interrogator seized
on any inconsistency—no matter how minute—as further evi-
dence of guilt, and he laughed at the prisoner's efforts to justify
himself. But at least the prisoner was getting a response of
some sort. The long weeks of isolation and uncertainty had
made him grateful for human contact—even grateful that his
case was moving toward resolution. True, it moved only as fast
as he was willing to incriminate himself, but... Gradually, he
came to see that he and his interrogator were working toward
the same goal of wrapping up his case. In tandem, they ran-
sacked his soul. The interrogator would periodically let up the
pressure. He offered a cigarette, had a friendly chat, explained
he had a job to do—making it all the more disappointing the
next time he had to tell the prisoner that his confession was
unsatisfactory.
As the charges against him began to take shape, the prisoner
realized that he could end his ordeal only with a full confes-
sion. Otherwise the grueling sessions would go on forever. "The
regimen of pressure has created an overall.discomfort which
is well nigh intolerable," wrote Hinkle and Wolff. "The pris-
oner invariably feels that 'something must be done to end this.'
He must find a way out." A former KGB officer, one of many
former interrogators and prisoners interviewed for the CIA
study, said that more than 99 percent of all prisoners signed a
confession at this stage.
In the Soviet system under Stalin, these confessions were the
final step of the interrogation process, and the prisoners usu-
ally were shot or sent to a labor camp after sentencing. Today,
Russian leaders seem much less insistent on exacting confes-
sions before jailing their foes, but they still use the penal (and
mental health) system to remove from the population classes of
people hostile to their rule.
The Chinese took on the more ambitious task of re-educating
their prisoners. For them, confession was only the beginning.
Next, the Chinese authorities moved the prisoner into a group
cell where his indoctrination began. From morning to night, he

130   SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
and his fellow prisoners studied Marx and Mao, listened to
lectures, and engaged in self-criticism. Since the progress of
each member depended on that of his cellmates, the group
pounced on the slightest misconduct as an indication of backsl-
iding. Prisoners demonstrated the zeal of their commitment by
ferociously attacking deviations. Constant intimacy with peo-
ple who reviled him pushed the resistant prisoner to the limits
of his emotional endurance. Hinkle and Wolff found that "The
prisoner must conform to the demands of the group sooner or
later," As the prisoner developed genuine changes of attitude,
pressure on him relaxed. His cellmates rewarded him with
increasing acceptance and esteem. Their acceptance, in turn,
reinforced his commitment to the Party, for he learned that
only this commitment allowed him to live successfully in the
cell. In many cases, this process produced an exultant sense of
mission in the prisoner—a feeling of having finally straight-
ened out his life and come to the truth. To be sure, this experi-
ence, which was not so different from religious conversion, did
not occur in all cases or always last after the prisoner returned
to a social group that did not reinforce it.
From the first preliminary studies of Wolff and Hinkle, the
U.S. intelligence community moved toward the conclusion that
neither the Chinese nor the Russians made appreciable use of
drugs or hypnosis, and they certainly did not possess the brain-
washing equivalent of the atomic bomb (as many feared). Most
of their techniques were rooted in age-old methods, and CIA
brainwashing researchers like psychologist John Gittinger
found themselves poring over ancient documents on the Span-
ish Inquisition. Furthermore, the communists used no psychia-
trists or other behavioral scientists to devise their interrogation
system. The differences between the Soviet and Chinese sys-
tems seemed to grow out of their respective national cultures.
The Soviet brainwashing system resembled a heavy-handed
cop whose job was to isolate, break, and then subdue all the
troublemakers in the neighborhood. The Chinese system was
mort; like thousands of skilled acupuncturists, working on each
other and relying on group pressure, ideology, and repetition.
To understand further the Soviet or Chinese control systems,
one had to plunge into the subtle mysteries of national and
individual character.
While CIA researchers looked into those questions, the main
thrust of the Agency's brainwashing studies veered off in a

BRAINWASHING    131
different direction. The logic behind the switch was familiar in
the intelligence business. Just because the Soviets and the Chi-
nese had not invented a brainwashing machine, officials rea-
soned, there was no reason to assume that the task was impossi-
ble. If such a machine were even remotely feasible, one had to
assume the communists might discover it. And in that case,
national security required that the United States invent the
machine first. Therefore, the CIA built up its own elaborate
brainwashing program, which, like the Soviet and Chinese ver-
sions, took its own special twist from our national character. It
was a tiny replica of the Manhattan Project, grounded in the
conviction that the keys to brainwashing lay in technology.
Agency officials hoped to use old-fashioned American know-
how to produce shortcuts and scientific breakthroughs. Instead
of turning to tough cops, whose methods repelled American
sensibilities, or the gurus of mass motivation, whose ideology
Americans lacked, the Agency's brainwashing experts gravi-
tated to people more in the mold of the brilliant—and some-
times mad—scientist, obsessed by the wonders of the brain.
In 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles made a rare public state-
ment on communist brainwashing: "We in the West are some-
what handicapped in getting all the details," Dulles declared.
"There are few survivors, and we have no human guinea pigs
to try these extraordinary techniques." Even as Dulles spoke,
however, CIA officials acting under his orders had begun to find
the scientists and the guinea pigs. Some of their experiments
would wander so far across the ethical borders of experimental
psychiatry (which are hazy in their own right) that Agency
officials thought it prudent to have much of the work done
outside the United States.
Call her Lauren G. For 19 years, her mind has been blank about
her experience. She remembers her husband's driving her up
to the old gray stone mansion that housed the hospital, Allan
Memorial Institute, and putting her in the care of its director,
Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. The next thing she recalls happened
three weeks later:
They gave me a dressing gown. It was way too big, and I was
tripping all over it. I was mad. I asked why did I have to go round
in this sloppy thing. I could hardly move because I was pretty
weak. I remember trying to walk along the hall, and the walls

132    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
were all slanted. It was then that I said, "Holy Smokes, what a
ghastly thing." I remember running out the door and going up
the mountain in my long dressing gown.
The mountain, named Mont Royal, loomed high above Mont-
real. She stumbled and staggered as she tried to climb higher
and higher. Hospital staff members had no trouble catching
her and dragging her back to the Institute. In short order, they
shot her full of sedatives, attached electrodes to her temples,
and gave her a dose of electroshock. Soon she slept like a baby.
Gradually, over the next few weeks, Lauren G. began to func-
tion like a normal person again. She took basket-weaving ther-
apy and played bridge with her fellow patients. The hospital
released her, and she returned to her husband in another Cana-
dian city.
Before her mental collapse in 1959, Lauren G. seemed to have
everything going for her. A refined, glamorous horsewoman of
30, whom people often said looked like Elizabeth Taylor, she
had auditioned for the lead in National Velvet at 13 and mar-
ried the rich boy next door at 20. But she had never loved her
husband and had let her domineering mother push her into his
arms. He drank heavily. "I was really unhappy," she recalls. "I
had a horrible marriage, and finally I had a nervous break-
down. It was a combination of my trying to lose weight, sleep
loss, and my nerves."
The family doctor recommended that her husband send her
to Dr. Cameron, which seemed like a logical thing to do, consid-
ering his wide fame as a psychiatrist. He had headed Allan
Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation had
donated funds to set up a psychiatric facility at McGill Univer-
sity. With continuing help from the Rockefellers, McGill had
built a hospital known far beyond Canada's borders as innova-
tive and exciting. Cameron was elected president of the Ameri-
can Psychiatric Association in 1953, and he became the first
president of the World Psychiatric Association. His friends
joked that they had run out of honors to give him.
Cameron's passion lay in the more "objective" forms of ther-
apy, with which he could more easily and swiftly bring about
improvements in patients than with the notoriously slow
Freudian methods. An impatient man, he dreamed of finding
a cure for schizophrenia. No one could tell him he was not on
the right track. Cameron's supporter at the Rockefeller Foun-

BRAINWASHING    133
dation, Robert Morrison, recorded in his private papers that he
found the psychiatrist tense and ill-at-ease, and Morrison ven-
tured that this may account for "his lack of interest and effec-
tiveness in psychotherapy and failure to establish warm per-
sonal relations with faculty members, both of which were
mentioned repeatedly when I visited Montreal." Another Rock-
efeller observer noted that Cameron "appears to suffer from
deep insecurity and has a need for power which he nourishes
by maintaining an extraordinary aloofness from his associ-
ates."
When Lauren G.'s husband delivered her to Cameron, the
psychiatrist told him she would receive some electroshock, a
standard treatment at the time. Besides that, states her hus-
band, "Cameron was not very communicative, but I didn't
think she was getting anything out of the ordinary." The hus-
band had no way of knowing that Cameron would use an un-
proved experimental technique on his wife—much less that the
psychiatrist intended to "depattern" her. Nor did he realize
that the CIA was supporting this work with about $19,000 a year
in secret funds.*
Cameron defined "depatterning" as breaking up existing pat-
terns of behavior, both the normal and the schizophrenic, by
means of particularly intensive electroshocks, usually com-
bined with prolonged, drug-induced sleep. Here was a psychia-
trist willing—indeed, eager—to wipe the human mind totally
clean. Back in 1951, ARTICHOKE'S Morse Allen had likened
the process to "creation of a vegetable." Cameron justified this
tabula rasa approach because he had a theory of "differential
amnesia," for which he provided no statistical evidence when
he published it. He postulated that after he produced "complete
amnesia" in a subject, the person would eventually recover
memory of his normal but not his schizophrenic behavior.
Thus, Cameron claimed he could generate "differential amne-
sia." Creating such a state in which a man who knew too much
could be made to forget had long been a prime objective of the
ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs.
Needless to say, Lauren G. does not recall a thing today about
those weeks when Cameron depatterned her. Afterward, unlike
*Cameron himself may not have known that the Agency was the ultimate
source of these funds which came through a conduit, the Society for the Investi-
gation of Human Ecology. A CIA document stated he was unwitting when the
grants started in 1957, and it cannot be said whether he ever found out.

134    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
over half of the psychiatrist's depatterning patients, Lauren G.
gradually recovered full recall of her life before the treatment,
but then, she remembered her mental problems, too.* Her hus-
band says she came out of the hospital much improved. She
declares the treatment had no effect one way or another on her
mental condition, which she believes resulted directly from
her miserable marriage. She stopped seeing Cameron after
about a month of outpatient electroshock treatments, which
she despised. Her relationship with her husband further
deteriorated, and two years later she walked out on him. "I just
got up on my own hind legs," she states. "I said the hell with it.
I'm going to do what I want and take charge of my own life. I
left and started over." Now divorced and remarried, she feels
she has been happy ever since.
Cameron's depatterning, of which Lauren G. had a compara-
tively mild version, normally started with 15 to 30 days of
"sleep therapy." As the name implies, the patient slept almost
the whole day and night. According to a doctor at the hospital
who used to administer what he calls the "sleep cocktail," a
staff member woke up the patient three times a day for medica-
tion that consisted of a combination of 100 mg. Thorazine, 100
mg. Nembutal, 100 mg. Seconal, 150 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg.
Phenergan. Another staff doctor would also awaken the patient
two or sometimes three times daily for electroshock treat-
ments.^ This doctor and his assistant wheeled a portable ma-
chine into the "sleep room" and gave the subject a local anes-
thetic and muscle relaxant, so as not to cause damage with the
convulsions that were to come. After attaching electrodes
soaked in saline solution, the attendant held the patient down
and the doctor turned on the current. In standard, professional
electroshock, doctors gave the subject a single dose of 110 volts,
lasting a fraction of a second, once a day or every other day. By
*Cameron wrote that when a patient remembered his schizophrenic symp-
toms, the schizophrenic behavior usually returned. If the amnesia held for
these symptoms, as Cameron claimed it often did, the subject usually did not
have a relapse. Even in his "cured" patients, Cameron found that Rorschach
tests continued to show schizophrenic thinking despite the improvement in
overt behavior. To a layman, this would seem to indicate that Cameron's ap-
proach got only at the symptoms, not the causes of mental problems. Not de-
terred, however, Cameron dismissed this inconsistency as a "persistent
enigma."
^Cameron wrote in a professional journal that he gave only two electroshocks
a day, but a doctor who actually administered the treatment for him says that
three were common at the beginning of the therapy.

BRAINWASHING    135
contrast, Cameron used a form 20 to 40 times more intense, two
or three times daily, with the power turned up to 150 volts.
Named the "Page-Russell" method after its British originators,
this technique featured an initial one-second shock, which
caused a major convulsion, and then five to nine additional
shocks in the middle of the primary and follow-on convulsions.
Even Drs. Page and Russell limited their treatment to once a
day, and they always stopped as soon as their patient showed
"pronounced confusion" and became "faulty in habits." Cam-
eron, however, welcomed this kind of impairment as a sign the
treatment was taking effect and plowed ahead through his rou-
tine.
The frequent screams of patients that echoed through the
hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their
attempts to "depattern" their subjects completely. Other hospi-
tal patients report being petrified by the "sleep rooms," where
the treatment took place, and they would usually creep down
the opposite side of the hall.
Cameron described this combined sleep-electroshock treat-
ment as lasting between 15 to 30 days, with some subjects stay-
ing in up to 65 days (in which case, he reported, he awakened
them for three days in the middle). Sometimes, as in the case
of Lauren G., patients would try to escape when the sedatives
wore thin, and the staff would have to chase after them. "It was
a tremendous nursing job just to keep these people going dur-
ing the treatment," recalls a doctor intimately familiar with
Cameron's operation. This doctor paints a picture of dazed pa-
tients, incapable of taking care of themselves, often groping
their way around the hospital and urinating on the floor.
Cameron wrote that his typical depatterning patient—usu-
ally a woman—moved through three distinct stages. In the first,
the subject lost much of her memory. Yet she still knew where
she was, why she was there, and who the people were who
treated her. In the second phase, she lost her "space-time
image," but still wanted to remember. In fact, not being able to
answer questions like, "Where am I?" and "How did I get here?"
caused her considerable anxiety. In the third stage, all that
anxiety disappeared. Cameron described the state as "an ex-
tremely interesting constriction of the range of recollections
which one ordinarily brings in to modify and enrich one's state-
ments. Hence, what the patient talks about are only his sensa-
tions of the moment, and he talks about them almost exclu-

136    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
sively in highly concrete terms. His remarks are entirely unin-
fluenced by previous recollections—nor are they governed in
any way by his forward anticipations. He lives in the immedi-
ate present. All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared.
There is complete amnesia for all events in his life."
Lauren G. and 52 other subjects at Allan Memorial received
this level of depatterning in 1958 and 1959. Cameron had al-
ready developed the technique when the CIA funding started.
The Agency sent the psychiatrist research money to take the
treatment beyond this point. Agency officials wanted to know
if, once Cameron had produced the blank mind, he could then
program in new patterns of behavior, as he claimed he could.
As early as 1953—the year he headed the American Psychiatric
Association—Cameron conceived a technique he called "psy-
chic driving," by which he would bombard the subject with
repeated verbal messages. From tape recordings based on in-
terviews with the patient, he selected emotionally loaded "cue
statements"—first negative ones to get rid of unwanted behav-
ior and then positive to condition in desired personality traits.
On the negative side, for example, the patient would hear this
message as she lay in a stupor:
Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all
through your single life. You let your mother check you up sexu-
ally after every date you had with a boy. You hadn't enough
determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for your-
self against your mother or father but would run away from
trouble.... They used to call you "crying Madeleine." Now that
you have two children, you don't seem to be able to manage them
and keep a good relationship with your husband. You are drifting
apart. You don't go out together. You have not been able to keep
him interested sexually.
Leonard Rubenstein, Cameron's principal assistant, whose
entire salary was paid from CIA-front funds, put the message
on a continuous tape loop and played it for 16 hours every day
for several weeks. An electronics technician, with no medical
or psychological background, Rubenstein, an electrical whiz,
designed a giant tape recorder that could play 8 loops for 8
patients at the same time. Cameron had the speakers installed
literally under the pillows in the "sleep rooms." "We made sure
they heard it," says a doctor who worked with Cameron. With

BRAINWASHING    137
some patients, Cameron intensified the negative effect by run-
ning wires to their legs and shocking them at the end of the
message.
When Cameron thought the negative "psychic driving" had
gone far enough, he switched the patient over to 2 to 5 weeks
of positive tapes:
You mean to get well. To do this you must let your feelings come
out. It is all right to express your anger.... You want to stop your
mother bossing you around. Begin to assert yourself first in little
things and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis.
You will then be free to be a wife and mother just like other
women.
Cameron wrote that psychic driving provided a way to make
"direct, controlled changes in personality," without having to
resolve the subject's conflicts or make her relive past experi-
ences. As far as is known, no present-day psychologist or psy-
chiatrist accepts this view. Dr. Donald Hebb, who headed
McGill's psychology department at the time Cameron was in
charge of psychiatry, minces no words when asked specifically
about psychic driving: "That was an awful set of ideas Cam-
eron was working with. It called for no intellectual respect. If
you actually look at what he was doing and what he wrote, it
would make you laugh. If I had a graduate student who talked
like that, I'd throw him out." Warming to his subject, Hebb
continues: "Look, Cameron was no good as a researcher.... He
was eminent because of politics." Nobody said such things at
the time, however. Cameron was a very powerful man.
The Scottish-born psychiatrist, who never lost the burr in his
voice, kept searching for ways to perfect depatterning and psy-
chic driving. He held out to the CIA front—the Society for the
Investigation of Human Ecology—that he could find more
rapid and less damaging ways to "break down behavior. He sent
the Society a proposal that combined his two techniques with
sensory deprivation and strong drugs. His smorgasbord ap-
proach brought together virtually all possible techniques of
mind control, which he tested individually and together. When
his Agency grant came through in 1957, Cameron began work
on sensory deprivation.
For several years, Agency officials had been interested in the
interrogation possibilities of this technique that Hebb himself

138    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
had pioneered at McGill with Canadian defense and Rockefel-
ler money. It consisted of putting a subject in a sealed environ-
ment—a small room or even a large box—and depriving him of
all sensory input: eyes covered with goggles, ears either covered
with muffs or exposed to a constant, monotonous sound, pad-
ding to prevent touching, no smells—with this empty regime
interrupted only by meal and bathroom breaks. In 1955 Morse
Allen of ARTICHOKE made contact at the National Institutes
of Health with Dr. Maitland Baldwin who had done a rather
gruesome experiment in which an Army volunteer had stayed
in the "box" for 40 hours until he kicked his way out after, in
Baldwin's words, "an hour of crying loudly and sobbing in a
most heartrending fashion." The experiment convinced Bald-
win that the isolation technique could break any man, no mat-
ter how intelligent or strong-willed. Hebb, who unlike Baldwin
released his subjects when they wanted, had never left anyone
in "the box" for more than six days. Baldwin told Morse Allen
that beyond that sensory deprivation would almost certainly
cause irreparable damage. Nevertheless, Baldwin agreed that
if the Agency could provide the cover and the subjects, he
would do, according to Allen's report, "terminal type" experi-
ments. After numerous meetings inside the CIA on how and
where to fund Baldwin, an Agency medical officer finally shot
down the project as being "immoral and inhuman," suggesting
that those pushing the experiments might want to "volunteer
their heads for use in Dr. Baldwin's 'noble' project."
With Cameron, Agency officials not only had a doctor willing
to perform terminal experiments in sensory deprivation, but
one with his own source of subjects. As part of his CIA-funded
research, he had a "box" built in the converted stables behind
the hospital that housed Leonard Rubenstein and his behav-
ioral laboratory. Undaunted by the limits set in Hebb's work,
Cameron left one woman in for 35 days, although he had so
scrambled her mind with his other techniques that one cannot
say, as Baldwin predicted to the Agency, if the prolonged depri-
vation did specific damage. This subject's name was Mary C.,
and, try as he might, Cameron could not get through to her. As
the aloof psychiatrist wrote in his notes: "Although the patient
was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and
by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days
of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained."* Be-
fore prescribing this treatment, Cameron had diagnosed the

BRAINWASHING    139
52-year-old Mary C.: "Conversion reaction in a woman of the
involuvional age with mental anxiety; hypochondriatic." In
other words, Mary C. was going through menopause.
In his proposal to the CIA front, Cameron also said he would
test curare, the South American arrow poison which, when
liberally applied, kills by paralyzing internal body functions. In
nonlethal doses, curare causes a limited paralysis which blocks
but does not stop these functions. According to his papers, some
of which wound up in the archives of the American Psychiatric
Association, Cameron injected subjects with curare in conjunc-
tion with sensory deprivation, presumably to immobilize them
further.
Cameron also tested LSD in combination with psychic driv-
ing and other techniques. In late 1956 and early 1957, one of his
subjects was Val Orlikow, whose husband David has become a
member of the Canadian parliament. Suffering from what she
calls a "character neurosis that started with postpartum de-
pression," she entered Allan Memorial as one of Cameron's
personal patients. He soon put her under his version of LSD
therapy. One to four times a week, he or another doctor would
come into her room and give her a shot of LSD, mixed with
either a stimulant or a depressant and then leave her alone
with a tape recorder that played excerpts from her last session
with him. As far as is known, no other LSD researcher ever
subjected his patients to unsupervised trips—certainly not over
the course of two months when her hospital records show she
was given LSD 14 times. "It was terrifying," Mrs. Orlikow re-
calls. "You're afraid you've gone off somewhere and can't come
back." She was supposed to write down on a pad whatever came
into her head while listening to the tapes, but often she became
so frightened that she could not write at all. "You become very
small," she says, as her voice quickens and starts to reflect some
of her horror. "You're going to fall off the step, and God, you're
going down into hell because it's so far, and you are so little.
Like Alice, where is the pill that makes you big, and you're a
squirrel, and you can't get out of the cage, and somebody's going
*In his proposal to the Human Ecology group, Cameron wrote that his subjects
would be spending only 16 hours a day in sensory deprivation, while they
listened to psychic driving tapes (thus providing some outside stimuli). Never-
theless, one of Cameron's colleagues states that some patients, including Mary
C. were in continuously. Always looking for a better way, Cameron almost
certainly tried both variations.

140    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
to kill you." Then, suddenly, Mrs. Orlikow pulls out of it and
lucidly states, "Some very weird things happened."
Mrs. Orlikow hated the LSD treatment. Several times she told
Cameron she would take no more, and the psychiatrist would
put his arm around her and ask, "Lassie," which he called all
his women patients, "don't you want to get well, so you can go
home and see your husband?" She remembers feeling guilty
about not following the doctor's orders, and the thought of
disappointing Cameron, whom she idolized, crushed her. Fi-
nally, after Cameron talked her out of quitting the treatment
several times, she had to end it. She left the hospital but stayed
under his private care. In 1963 he put her back in the hospital
for more intensive psychic driving. "I thought he was God," she
states. "I don't know how I could have been so stupid. ... A lot
of us were na'ive. We thought psychiatrists had the answers.
Here was the greatest in the world, with all these titles."
In defense of Cameron, a former associate says the man truly
cared about the welfare of his patients. He wanted to make
them well. As his former staff psychologist wrote:
He abhorred the waste of human potential, seen most dramati-
cally in the young people whose minds were distorted by what
was then considered to be schizophrenia. He felt equally strongly
about the loss of wisdom in the aged through memory malfunc-
tion. For him, the end justified the means, and when one is deal-
ing with the waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt this
stance.
Cameron retired abruptly in 1964, for unexplained reasons.
His successor, Dr. Robert Cleghorn, made a virtually unprece-
dented move in the academic world of mutual back-scratching
and praise. He commissioned a psychiatrist and a psychologist,
unconnected to Cameron, to study his electroshock work. They
found that 60 percent of Cameron's depatterned patients com-
plained they still had amnesia for the period 6 months to 10
years before the therapy.* They could find no clinical proof that
showed the treatment to be any more or less effective than
other approaches. They concluded that "the incidence of physi-
*Cleghorn's team found little loss of memory on objective tests, like the
Wechsler Memory Scale but speculated that these tests measured a different
memory function—short-term recall—than that the subjects claimed to be
missing.

BRAINWASHING    141
cal complications and the anxiety generated in the patient be-
cause of real or imagined memory difficulty argue against"
future use of the technique.
The study-team members couched their report in densely
academic jargon, but one of them speaks more clearly now. He
talks bitterly of one of Cameron's former patients who needs to
keep a list of her simplest household chores to remember how
to do them. Then he repeats several times how powerful a man
Cameron was, how he was "the godfather of Canadian psychia-
try." He continues, "I probably shouldn't talk about this, but
Cameron—for him to do what he did—he was a very schizo-
phrenic guy, who totally detached himself from the human
implications of his work . . . God, we talk about concentration
camps. I don't want to make this comparison, but God, you talk
about 'we didn't know it was happening,' and it was—right in
our back yard."
Cameron died in 1967, at age 66, while climbing a mountain.
The American Journal of Psychiatry published a long and
glowing obituary with a full-page picture of his not-unpleasant
face.
D. Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt him. He
clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long
before the Agency front started to fund him. With his own
hospital and source of subjects, he could have found elsewhere
encouragement and money to replace the CIA's contribution,
which never exceeded $20,000 a year. However, Agency offi-
cials knew exactly what they were paying for. They traveled
periodically to Montreal to observe his work, and his proposal
was chillingly explicit. In Cameron, they had a doctor, conven-
iently outside the United States, willing to do terminal experi-
ments in electroshock, sensory deprivation, drug testing, and
all of the above combined. By literally wiping the minds of his
subjects clean by depatterning and then trying to program in
new behavior, Cameron carried the process known as "brain-
washing" to its logical extreme.
It cannot be said how many—if any—other Agency brain-
washing projects reached the extremes of Cameron's work. De-
tails are scarce, since many of the principal witnesses have
died, will not talk about what went on, or lie about it. In what
ways the CIA applied work like Cameron's is not known. What
is known, however, is that the intelligence community, includ-
ing the CIA, changed the face of the scientific community dur-

142    SPELLS—ELECTR ODES AND HYPNOSIS
ing the 1950s and early 1960s by its interest in such experi-
ments. Nearly every scientist on the frontiers of brain research
found men from the secret agencies looking over his shoulders,
impinging on the research. The experience of Dr. John Lilly
illustrates how this intrusion came about.
In 1953 Lilly worked at the National Institutes of Health,
outside Washington, doing experimental studies in an effort to
"map" the body functions controlled from various locations in
the brain. He devised a method of pounding up to 600 tiny
sections of hypodermic tubing into the skulls of monkeys,
through which he could insert electrodes "into the brain to any
desired distance and at any desired location from the cortex
down to the bottom of the skull," he later wrote. Using electric
stimulation, Lilly discovered precise centers of the monkeys'
brains that caused pain, fear, anxiety, and anger. He also dis-
covered precise, separate parts of the brain that controlled
erection, ejaculation, and orgasm in male monkeys. Lilly found
that a monkey, given access to a switch operating a correctly
planted electrode, would reward himself with nearly continu-
ous orgasms—at least once every 3 minutes—for up to 16 hours
a day.
As Lilly refined his brain "maps," officials of the CIA and
other agencies descended upon him with a request for a
briefing. Having a phobia against secrecy, Lilly agreed to the
briefing only under the condition that it and his work remain
unclassified, completely open to outsiders. The intelligence offi-
cials submitted to the conditions most reluctantly, since they
knew that Lilly's openness would not only ruin the spy value of
anything they learned but could also reveal the identities and
the interests of the intelligence officials to enemy agents. They
considered Lilly annoying, uncooperative—possibly even sus-
picious.
Soon Lilly began to have trouble going to meetings and con-
ferences with his colleagues. As part of the cooperation with
the intelligence agencies, most of them had agreed to have
their projects officially classified as SECRET, which meant that
access to the information required a security clearance.* Lilly's
security clearance was withdrawn for review, then tangled up
"Lilly and other veterans of government-supported research note that there is
a practical advantage for the scientist who allows his work to be classified: it
gives him an added claim on government funds. He is then in a position to
argue that if his work is important enough to be SECRET, it deserves money.

BRAINWASHING    143
and misplaced—all of which he took as pressure to cooperate
with the CIA. Lilly, whose imagination needed no stimulation
to conjure up pictures of CIA agents on deadly missions with
remote-controlled electrodes strategically implanted in their
brains, decided to withdraw from that field of research. He says
he had decided that the physical intrusion of the electrodes did
too much brain damage for him to tolerate.
In 1954 Lilly began trying to isolate the operations of the
brain, free of outside stimulation, through sensory deprivation.
He worked in an office next to Dr. Maitland Baldwin, who the
following year agreed to perform terminal sensory deprivation
experiments for ARTICHOKE'S Morse Allen but who never told
Lilly he was working in the field. While Baldwin experimented
with his sensory-deprivation "box," Lilly invented a special
"tank." Subjects floated in a tank of body-temperature water,
wearing a face mask that provided air but cut off sight and
sound. Inevitably, intelligence officials swooped down on Lilly
again, interested in the use of his tank as an interrogation tool.
Could involuntary subjects be placed in the tank and broken
down to the point where their belief systems or personalities
could be altered?
It was central to Lilly's ethic that he himself be the first
subject of any experiment, and, in the case of the conscious-
ness-exploring tank work, he and one colleague were the only
ones. Lilly realized that the intelligence agencies were not in-
terested in sensory deprivation because of its positive benefits,
and he finally concluded that it was impossible for him to work
at the National Institutes of Health without compromising his
principles. He quit in 1958.
Contrary to most people's intuitive expectations, Lilly found
sensory deprivation to be a profoundly integrating experience
for himself personally. He considered himself to be a scientist
who subjectively explored the far wanderings of the brain. In
a series of private experiments, he pushed himself into the
complete unknown by injecting pure Sandoz LSD into his thigh
before climbing into the sensory-deprivation tank.* When the

*As was the case with LSD work, sensory deprivation research had both a mind
control and a transcendental side. Aldous Huxley wrote thusly about the two
pioneers in the field: "What men like Hebb and Lilly are doing in the laboratory
was done by the Christian hermits in the Thebaid and elsewhere, and by Hindu
and Tibetan hermits in the remote fastness of the Himalayas. My own belief
is that these experiences really tell us something about the nature of the uni-

144    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
counterculture sprang up, Lilly became something of a cult
figure, with his unique approach to scientific inquiry—though
he was considered more of an outcast by many in the profes-
sional research community.
For most of the outside world, Lilly became famous with the
release of the popular film, The Day of the Dolphin, which the
filmmakers acknowledged was based on Lilly's work with dol-
phins after he left NIH. Actor George C. Scott portrayed a scien-
tist, who, like Lilly, loved dolphins, did pioneering experiments
on their intelligence, and tried to find ways to communicate
with them. In the movie, Scott became dismayed when the
government pounced on his breakthrough in talking to dol-
phins and turned it immediately to the service of war. In real
life, Lilly was similarly dismayed when Navy and CIA scien-
tists trained dolphins for special warfare in the waters off Viet-
nam.*
A few scientists like Lilly made up their minds not to cross
certain ethical lines in their experimental work, while others
were prepared to go further even than their sponsors from
ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. Within the Agency itself, there
was only one final question: Will a technique work? CIA offi-
cials zealously tracked every lead, sparing no expense to check
each angle many times over.
By the time the MKULTRA program ended in 1963, Agency
researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash another
person.^ "All experiments beyond a certain point always
failed," says the MKULTRA veteran, "because the subject
jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got am-
nesiac or catatonic." Agency officials found through work like
verse, that they are valuable in themselves and, above all, valuable when
incorporated into our world-picture and acted upon [in] normal life."
*In a program called "swimmer nullification," government scientists trained
dolphins to attack enemy frogmen with huge needles attached to their snouts.
The dolphins carried tanks of compressed air, which when jabbed into a deep-
diver caused him to pop dead to the surface. A scientist who worked in this
CIA-Navy program states that some of the dolphins sent to Vietnam during the
late 1960s got out of their pens and disappeared—unheard of behavior for
trained dolphins. John Lilly confirms that a group of the marine mammals
stationed at Cam Ranh Bay did go AWOL, and he adds that he heard that some
eventually returned with their bodies and fins covered with attack marks made
by other dolphins.
^After 1963 the Agency's Science and Technology Directorate continued brain
research with unknown results. See Chapter 12.

BRAINWASHING    145
Cameron's that they could create "vegetables," but such people
served no operational use. People could be tortured into saying
anything, but no science could guarantee that they would tell
the truth.
The impotency of brainwashing techniques left the Agency
in a difficult spot when Yuri Nosenko defected to the United
States in February 1964. A ranking official of the Soviet KGB,
Nosenko brought with him stunning information. He said the
Russians had bugged the American embassy in Moscow, which
turned out to be true. He named some Russian agents in the
West. And he said that he had personally inspected the KGB file
of Lee Harvey Oswald, who only a few months earlier had been
murdered before he could be brought to trial for the assassina-
tion of President Kennedy. Nosenko said he learned that the
KGB had had no interest in Oswald.
Was Nosenko telling the truth, or was he a KGB "plant" sent
to throw the United States off track about Oswald? Was his
information about penetration correct, or was Nosenko himself
the penetration? Was he acting in good faith? Were the men
within the CIA who believed he was acting in good faith them-
selves acting in good faith? These and a thousand other ques-
tions made up the classical trick deck for spies—each card
having "true" on one side and "false" on the other.
Top CIA officials felt a desperate need to resolve the issue of
Nosenko's legitimacy. With numerous Agency counterintelli-
gence operations hanging in the balance, Richard Helms, first
as Deputy Director and then as Director, allowed CIA operators
to work Nosenko over with the interrogation method in which
Helms apparently had the most faith. It turned out to be not any
truth serum or electroshock depatterning program or anything
else from the Agency's brainwashing search. Helms had
Nosenko put through the tried-and-true Soviet method: isolate
the prisoner, deaden his senses, break him. For more than three
years—1,277 days, to be exact—Agency officers kept Nosenko in
solitary confinement. As if they were using the Hinkle-Wolff
study as their instruction manual and the Cardinal Mindszenty
case as their success story, the CIA men had guards watch over
Nosenko day and night, giving him not a moment of privacy.
A light bulb burned continuously in his cell. He was allowed
nothing to read—not even the labels on toothpaste boxes. When
he tried to distract himself by making a chess set from pieces
of lint in his cell, the guards discovered his game and swept the

146    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
area clean. Nosenko had no window, and he was eventually put
in a specially built 12' x 12' steel bank vault.
Nosenko broke down. He hallucinated. He talked his head off
to his interrogators, who questioned him for 292 days, often
while they had him strapped into a lie detector. If he told the
truth, they did not believe him. While the Soviets and Chinese
had shown that they could make a man admit anything, the
CIA interrogators apparently lacked a clear idea of exactly
what they wanted Nosenko to confess. When it was all over and
Richard Helms ordered Nosenko freed after three and a half
years of illegal detention, some key Agency officers still be-
lieved he was a KGB plant. Others thought he was on the level.
Thus the big questions remained unresolved, and to this day,
CIA men—past and present—are bitterly split over who
Nosenko really is.
With the Nosenko case, the CIA's brainwashing programs
had come full circle. Spurred by the widespread alarm over
communist tactics, Agency officials had investigated the field,
started their own projects, and looked to the latest technology
to make improvements. After 10 years of research, with some
rather gruesome results, CIA officials had come up with no
techniques on which they felt they could rely. Thus, when the
operational crunch came, they fell back on the basic brutality
of the Soviet system.

CHAPTER
9
HUMAN ECOLOGY

Well before Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle finished their
brainwashing study for Allen Dulles in 1956, Wolff was trying
to expand his role in CIA research and operations. He offered
Agency officials the cooperation of his colleagues at Cornell
University, where he taught neurology and psychiatry in the
Medical College. In proposal after proposal, Wolff pressed upon
the CIA his idea that to understand human behavior—and how
governments might manipulate it—one had to study man in
relationship to his total environment. Calling this field "human
ecology," Wolff drew into it the disciplines of psychology, medi-
cine, sociology, and anthropology. In the academic world of the
early 1950s, this cross-disciplinary approach was somewhat
new, as was the word "ecology," but it made sense to CIA offi-
cials. Like Wolff, they were far in advance of the trends in the
behavioral sciences.
Wolff carved out vast tracts of human knowledge, some only
freshly discovered, and proposed a partnership with the
Agency for the task of mastering that knowledge for opera-
tional use. It was a time when knowledge itself seemed bounti-
ful and promising, and Wolff was expansive about how the CIA
could harness it. Once he figured out how the human mind
really worked, he wrote, he would tell the Agency "how a man
can be made to think, 'feel,' and behave according to the wishes
of other men, and, conversely, how a man can avoid being
influenced in this manner."
Such notions, which may now appear naive or perverse, did

148    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
not seem so unlikely at the height of the Cold War. And Wolff’s
professional stature added weight to his ideas. Like D. Ewen
Cameron, he was no obscure academic. He had been President
of the New York Neurological Association and would become,
in 1960, President of the American Neurological Association.
He served for several years as editor-in-chief of the American
Medical Association's Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.
Both by credentials and force of personality, Wolff was an im-
pressive figure. CIA officials listened respectfully to his grand
vision of how spies and doctors could work symbiotically to
help—if not save—the world. Also, the Agency men never for-
got that Wolff had become close to Director Allen Dulles while
treating Dulles' son for brain damage.
Wolff’s specialized neurological practice led him to believe
that brain maladies, like migraine headaches, occurred be-
cause of disharmony between man and his environment. In
this case, he wrote to the Agency, "The problem faced by the
physician is quite similar to that faced by the Communist inter-
rogator." Both would be trying to put their subject back in har-
mony with his environment whether the problem was head-
ache or ideological dissent. Wolff believed that the beneficial
effects of any new interrogation technique would naturally
spill over into the treatment of his patients, and vice versa.
Following the Soviet model, he felt he could help his patients
by putting them into an isolated, disoriented state—from which
it would be easier to create new behavior patterns. Although
Russian-style isolation cells were impractical at Cornell, Wolff
hoped to get the same effect more quickly through sensory dep-
rivation. He told the Agency that sensory-deprivation cham-
bers had "valid medical reason" as part of a treatment that
relieved migraine symptoms and made the patient "more re-
ceptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist." He proposed
keeping his patients in sensory deprivation until they "show an
increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure."
Then, he said, doctors could "utilize material from their own
past experience in order to create psychological reactions
within them." This procedure drew heavily on the Stalinist
method. It cannot be said what success, if any, Wolff had with
it to the benefit of his patients at Cornell.
Wolff offered to devise ways to use the broadest cultural and
social processes in human ecology for covert operations. He
understood that every country had unique customs for child

HUMAN ECOLOGY    149
rearing, military training, and nearly every other form of
human intercourse. From the CIA's point of view, he noted, this
kind of sociological information could be applied mainly to
indoctrinating and motivating people. He distinguished these
motivating techniques from the "special methods" that he felt
were "more relevant to subversion, seduction, and interroga-
tion." He offered to study those methods, too, and asked the
Agency to give him access to everything in its files on "threats,
coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation,
torture, 'brainwashing,' 'black psychiatry,' hypnosis, and com-
binations of these with or without chemical agents." Beyond
mere study, Wolff volunteered the unwitting use of Cornell pa-
tients for brainwashing experiments, so long as no one got hurt.
He added, however, that he would advise the CIA on experi-
ments that harmed their subjects if they were performed else-
where. He obviously felt that only the grandest sweep of knowl-
edge, flowing freely between scholar and spy, could bring the
best available techniques to bear on their respective subjects.
In 1955 Wolff incorporated his CIA-funded study group as the
Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, with himself
as president.* Through the Society, Wolff extended his efforts
for the Agency, and his organization turned into a CIA-con-
trolled funding mechanism for studies and experiments in the
behavioral sciences.
In the early days of the Society, Agency officials trusted Wolff
and his untried ideas with a sensitive espionage assignment. In
effect, the new specialty of human ecology was going to tele-
scope the stages of research and application into one continu-
ing process. Speeding up the traditional academic method was
required because the CIA men faced an urgent problem. "What
was bothering them," Lawrence Hinkle explains, "was that the
Chinese had cleaned up their agents in China. . . . What they
really wanted to do was come up with some Chinese [in Amer-
ica], steer them to us, and make them into agents." Wolff ac-
cepted the challenge and suggested that the Cornell group hide
its real purpose behind the cover of investigating "the ecologi-
cal aspects of disease" among Chinese refugees. The Agency
gave the project a budget of $84,175 (about 30 percent of the
*In 1961 the Society changed its name to the Human Ecology Fund, but for
convenience sake it will be called the Society throughout the book.

150    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
money it put into Cornell in 1955) and supplied the study group
with 100 Chinese refugees to work with. Nearly all these sub-
jects had been studying in the United States when the commu-
nists took over the mainland in 1949, so they tended to be dis-
located people in their thirties.
On the Agency side, the main concern, as expressed by one
ARTICHOKE man, was the "security hazard" of bringing to-
gether so many potential agents in one place. Nevertheless, CIA
officials decided to go ahead. Wolff promised to tell them about
the inner reaches of the Chinese character, and they recog-
nized the operational advantage that insight into Chinese be-
havior patterns could provide. Moreover, Wolff said he would
pick out the most useful possible agents. The Human Ecology
Society would then offer these candidates "fellowships" and
subject them to more intensive interviews and "stress produc-
ing" situations. The idea was to find out about their personali-
ties, past conditioning, and present motivations, in order to
figure out how they might perform in future predicaments—
such as finding themselves back in Mainland China as Ameri-
can agents. In the process, Wolff hoped to mold these Chinese
into people willing to work for the CIA. Mindful of leaving
some cover for Cornell, he was adamant that Agency operators
not connected with the project make the actual recruitment
pitch to those Chinese whom the Agency men wanted as agents.
As a final twist, Wolff planned to provide each agent with
techniques to withstand the precise forms of hostile interroga-
tion they could expect upon returning to China. CIA officials
wanted to "precondition" the agents in order to create long-
lasting motivation "impervious to lapse of time and direct psy-
chological attacks by the enemy." In other words, Agency men
planned to brainwash their agents in order to protect them
against Chinese brainwashing.
Everything was covered—in theory, at least. Wolff was going
to take a crew of 100 refugees and turn as many of them as
possible into detection-proof, live agents inside China, and he
planned to do the job quickly through human ecology. It was a
heady chore for the Cornell professor to take on after classes.
Wolff hired a full complement of psychologists, psychiatrists,
and anthropologists to work on the project. He bulldozed his
way through his colleagues' qualms and government red tape
alike. Having hired an anthropologist before learning that the
CIA security office would not give her a clearance, Wolff simply

HUMAN ECOLOGY    151
lied to her about where the money came from. "It was a func-
tion of Wolff’s imperious nature," says his partner Hinkle. "If a dog came in and threw up on the rug during a lecture, he would continue." Even the CIA men soon found that Harold
Wolff was not to be trifled with. "From the Agency side, I don't
know anyone who wasn't scared of him," recalls a longtime
CIA associate. "He was an autocratic man. I never knew him to
chew anyone out. He didn't have to. We were damned respect-
ful. He moved in high places. He was just a skinny little man,
but talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers."
In the name of the Human Ecology Society, the CIA paid
$1,200 a month to rent a fancy town house on Manhattan's East
78th Street to house the Cornell group and its research projects.
Agency technicians traveled to New York in December 1954 to
install eavesdropping microphones around the building. These
and other more obvious security devices—safes, guards, and
the like—made the town house look different from the aca-
demic center it was supposed to be. CIA liaison personnel held
meetings with Wolff and the staff in the secure confines of the
town house, and they all carefully watched the 100 Chinese a
few blocks away at the Cornell hospital. The Society paid each
subject $25 a day so the researchers could test them, probe
them, and generally learn all they could about Chinese people
—or at least about middle-class, displaced, anticommunist
ones.
It is doubtful that any of Wolff's Chinese ever returned to
their homeland as CIA agents, or that all of Wolff's proposals
were put into effect. In any case, the project was interrupted in
midstream by a major shake-up in the CIA's entire mind-con-
trol effort. Early in 1955, Sid Gottlieb and his Ph.D. crew from
TSS took over most of the ARTICHOKE functions, including
the Society, from Morse Allen and the Pinkerton types in the
Office of Security. The MKULTRA men moved quickly to turn
the Society into an entity that looked and acted like a legitimate
foundation. First they smoothed over the ragged covert edges.
Out came the bugs and safes so dear to Morse Allen and com-
pany. The new crew even made some effort (largely unsuccess-
ful) to attract non-CIA funds. The biggest change, however, was
the Cornell professors now had to deal with Agency representa-
tives who were scientists and who had strong ideas of their own
on research questions. Up to this point, the Cornellians had
been able to keep the CIA's involvement within bounds accept-

152    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
able to them. While Harold Wolff never ceased wanting to ex-
plore the furthest reaches of behavior control, his colleagues
were wary of going on to the outer limits—at least under Cor-
nell cover.
No one would ever confuse MKULTRA projects with ivory-
tower research, but Gottlieb's people did take a more academic
—and sophisticated—approach to behavioral research than
their predecessors. The MKULTRA men understood that not
every project would have an immediate operational benefit,
and they believed less and less in the existence of that one
just-over-the-horizon technique that would turn men into pup-
pets. They favored increasing their knowledge of human be-
havior in relatively small steps, and they concentrated on the
reduced goal of influencing and manipulating their subjects.
"You're ahead of the game if you can get people to do something
ten percent more often than they would otherwise," says an
MKULTRA veteran.
Accordingly, in 1956, Sid Gottlieb approved a $74,000 project
to have the Human Ecology Society study the factors that
caused men to defect from their countries and cooperate with
foreign governments. MKULTRA officials reasoned that if they
could understand what made old turncoats tick, it might help
them entice new ones. While good case officers instinctively
seemed to know how to handle a potential agent—or thought
they did—the MKULTRA men hoped to come up with system-
atic, even scientific improvements. Overtly, Harold Wolff de- 
signed the program to look like a follow-up study to the Soci-
ety's earlier programs, noting to the Agency that it was
"feasible to study foreign nationals under the cover of a medi-
cal-sociological study." (He told his CIA funders that "while
some information of general value to science should be pro-
duced, this in itself will not be a sufficient justification for car-
rying out a study of this nature.") Covertly, he declared the
purpose of the research was to assess defectors' social and cul-
tural background, their life experience, and their personality
structure, in order to understand their motivations, value sys-
tems, and probable future reactions.
The 1956 Hungarian revolt occurred as the defector study
was getting underway, and the Human Ecology group, with
CIA headquarters approval, decided to turn the defector work
into an investigation of 70 Hungarian refugees from that

HUMAN ECOLOGY   153
upheaval. By then, most of Harold Wolff's team had been to-
gether through the brainwashing and Chinese studies. While
not all of them knew of the CIA's specific interests, they had
streamlined their procedures for answering the questions that
Agency officials found interesting. They ran the Hungarians
through the battery of tests and observations in six months,
compared to a year and a half for the Chinese project.
The Human Ecology Society reported that most of their Hun-
garian subjects had fought against the Russians during the
Revolution and that they had lived through extraordinarily
difficult circumstances, including arrest, mistreatment, and in-
doctrination. The psychologists and psychiatrists found that,
often, those who had survived with the fewest problems had
been those with markedly aberrant personalities. "This obser-
vation has added to the evidence that healthy people are not
necessarily 'normal,' but are people particularly adapted to
their special life situations," the group declared.
While CIA officials liked the idea that their Hungarian sub-
jects had not knuckled under communist influence, they recog-
nized that they were working with a skewed sample. American
visa restrictions kept most of the refugee left-wingers and for-
mer communist officials out of the United States; so, as a later
MKULTRA document would state, the Society wound up study-
ing "western-tied rightist elements who had never been ac-
cepted completely" in postwar Hungary. Agency researchers
realized that these people would "contribute little" toward in-
creasing the CIA's knowledge of the processes that made a com-
munist official change his loyalties.
In order to broaden their data base, MKULTRA officials de-
cided in March 1957 to bring in some unwitting help. They gave
a contract to Rutgers University sociologists Richard Stephen-
son and Jay Schulman "to throw as much light as possible on
the sociology of the communist system in the throes of revolu-
tion." The Rutgers professors started out by interviewing the 70
Hungarians at Cornell in New York, and Schulman went on to
Europe to talk to disillusioned Communists who had also fled
their country. From an operational point of view, these were
the people the Agency really cared about; but, as socialists,
most of them probably would have resisted sharing their ex-
periences with the CIA—if they had known.*
*Also to gain access to this same group of leftist Hungarian refugees in Europe,

154    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
Jay Schulman would have resisted, too. After discovering al-
most 20 years later that the Agency had paid his way and seen
his confidential interviews, he feels misused. "In 1957 I was
myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that this study was
sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I
would have been associated with it," says Schulman. "My view
is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility for
questioning the sources of funding; and the fact that I didn't do
it at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own
naivete and political innocence, in spite of my ideological
bent."
Deceiving Schulman and his Hungarian subjects did not
bother the men from MKULTRA in the slightest. According to
a Gottlieb aide, one of the strong arguments inside the CIA for
the whole Human Ecology program was that it gave the Agency
a means of approaching and using political mavericks who
could not otherwise get security clearances. "Sometimes," he
chuckles, "these left-wing social scientists were damned good."
This MKULTRA veteran scoffs at the displeasure Schulman
expresses: "If we'd gone to a guy and said, 'We're CIA,' he never
would have done it. They were glad to get the money in a world
where damned few people were willing to support them. . . .
They can't complain about how they were treated or that they
were asked to do something they wouldn't have normally
done."
The Human Ecology Society soon became a conduit for CIA
money flowing to projects, like the Rutgers one, outside Cornell*
For these grants, the Society provided only cover and adminis-
trative support behind the gold-plated names of Cornell and
Harold Wolff. From 1955 to 1958, Agency officials passed funds
through the Society for work on criminal sexual psychopaths
at Ionia State Hospital,^ a mental institution located on the
the Human Ecology Society put $15,000 in 1958 into an unwitting study by Dr.
A. H. M. Struik of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. An Agency
document extolled this arrangement not only as a useful way of studying Hun-
garians but because it provided "entree" into a leading European university
and psychological research center, adding "such a connection has manifold
cover and testing possibilities as well as providing a base from which to take
advantage of developments in that area of the world."
^Professor Laurence Hinkle states that it was never his or Cornell's intention
that the Society would be used as a CIA funding conduit. When told that he
himself had written letters on the Ionia project, he replied that the Society's
CIA-supplied bookkeeper was always putting papers in front of him and that
he must have signed without realizing the implications.

HUMAN ECOLOGY   155
banks of the Grand River in the rolling farm country 120 miles
northwest of Detroit. This project had an interesting hypothe-
sis: That child molesters and rapists had ugly secrets buried
deep within them and that their stake in not admitting their
perversions approached that of spies not wanting to confess.
The MKULTRA men reasoned that any technique that would
work on a sexual psychopath would surely have a similar effect
on a foreign agent. Using psychologists and psychiatrists con-
nected to the Michigan mental health and the Detroit court
systems, they set up a program to test LSD and marijuana,
wittingly and unwittingly, alone and in combination with hyp-
nosis. Because of administrative delays, the Michigan doctors
managed to experiment only on 26 inmates in three years—all
sexual offenders committed by judges without a trial under a
Michigan law, since declared unconstitutional. The search for
a truth drug went on, under the auspices of the Human Ecology
Society, as well as in other MKULTRA channels.
The Ionia project was the kind of expansionist activity that
made Cornell administrators, if not Harold Wolff, uneasy. By
1957, the Cornellians had had enough. At the same time, the
Agency sponsors decided that the Society had outgrown its de-
pendence on Cornell for academic credentials—that in fact the
close ties to Cornell might inhibit the Society's future growth
among academics notoriously sensitive to institutional con-
flicts. One CIA official wrote that the Society "must be given
more established stature in the research community to be effec-
tive as a cover organization." Once the Society was cut loose in
the foundation world, Agency men felt they would be freer to
go anywhere in academia to buy research that might assist
covert operations. So the CIA severed the Society's formal con-
nection to Cornell.
The Human Ecology group moved out of its East 78th Street
town house, which had always seem a little too plush for a
university program, and opened up a new headquarters in For-
est Hills, Queens, which was an inappropriate neighborhood
for a well-connected foundation.* Agency officials hired a staff
of four led by Lieutenant Colonel James Monroe, who had
*By 1961 the CIA staff had tired of Queens and moved the Society back into
Manhattan to 201 East 57th Street. In 1965, as the Agency was closing down the
front, it switched its headquarters to 1834 Connecticut Avenue N.W. in Wash-
ington, the same building owned by Dr. Charles Geschickter that housed an-
other MKULTRA conduit, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research.

156   SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
worked closely with the CIA as head of the Air Force's study of
Korean War prisoners. Sid Gottlieb and the TSS hierarchy in
Washington still made the major decisions, but Monroe and the
Society staff, whose salaries the Agency paid, took over the
Society's dealings with the outside world and the monitoring of
several hundred thousand dollars a year in research projects.
Monroe personally supervised dozens of grants, including Dr.
Ewen Cameron's brainwashing work in Montreal. Soon the So-
ciety was flourishing as an innovative foundation, attracting
research proposals from a wide variety of behavioral scientists,
at a time when these people—particularly the unorthodox ones
—were still the step-children of the fund-granting world.
After the Society's exit from Cornell, Wolff and Hinkle stayed
on as president and vice-president, respectively, of the Society's
board of directors. Dr. Joseph Hinsey, head of the New York
Hospital-Cornell Medical Center also remained on the board.
Allen Dulles continued his personal interest in the Society's
work and came to one of the first meetings of the new board,
which, as was customary with CIA fronts, included some big
outside names. These luminaries added worthiness to the en-
terprise while playing essentially figurehead roles. In 1957 the
other board members were John Whitehorn, chairman of the
psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, Carl Ro-
gers, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University
of Wisconsin, and Adolf A. Berle, onetime Assistant Secretary
of State and chairman of the New York Liberal Party.* Berle
had originally put his close friend Harold Wolff in touch with
the CIA, and at Wolff's request, he came on the Society board
despite some reservations. "I am frightened about this one,"
Berle wrote in his diary. "If the scientists do what they have
laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants. But
I don't think it will happen."
There was a lot of old-fashioned backscratching among the
CIA people and the academics as they settled into the work of
accommodating each other. Even Harold Wolff, the first and
the most enthusiastic of the scholar-spies, had made it clear
from the beginning that he expected some practical rewards
*Other establishment figures who would grace the Human Ecology board over
the years included Leonard Carmichael, head of the Smithsonian Institution,
Barnaby Keeney, president of Brown University, and George A. Kelly, psychol-
ogy professor and Society fund recipient at Ohio State University.

HUMAN ECOLOGY    157
for his service. According to colleague Hinkle, who appreciated
Wolff as one the great grantsman of his time, Wolff expected
that the Agency "would support our research and we would be
their consultants." Wolif bluntly informed the CIA that some of
his work would have no direct use "except that it vastly en-
hances our value ... as consultants and advisers." In other
words, Wolff felt that his worth to the CIA increased in propor-
tion to his professional accomplishments and importance—
which in turn depended partly on the resources he com-
manded. The Agency men understood, and over the last half of
the 1950s, they were happy to contribute almost $300,000 to
Wolff's own research on the brain and central nervous system.
In turn, Wolff and his reputation helped them gain access to
other leading lights in the academic world.
Another person who benefited from Human Ecology funds
was Carl Rogers, whom Wolff had also asked to serve on the
board. Rogers, who later would become famous for his nondi-
rective, nonauthoritarian approach to psychotherapy, re-
spected Wolffs work, and he had no objection to helping the
CIA. Although he says he would have nothing to do with secret
Agency activities today, he asks for understanding in light of
the climate of the 1950s. "We really did regard Russia as the
enemy," declares Rogers, "and we were trying to do various
things to make sure the Russians did not get the upper hand."
Rogers received an important professional reward for joining
the Society board. Executive Director James Monroe had let
him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to
receive a Society grant. "That appealed to me because I was
having trouble getting funded," says Rogers. "Having gotten
that grant [about $30,000 over three years], it made it possible
to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH." Rogers still
feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a funding
"track record," but he emphasizes that the Agency never had
any effect on his research.
Although MKULTRA psychologist John Gittinger suspected
that Rogers' work on psychotherapy might provide insight into
interrogation methods, the Society did not give Rogers money
because of the content of his work. The grant ensured his ser-
vices as a consultant, if desired, and, according to a CIA docu-
ment, "free access" to his project. But above all, the grant al-
lowed the Agency to use Rogers' name. His standing in the
academic community contributed to the layer of cover around

158    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
the Society that Agency officials felt was crucial to mask their
involvement.
Professor Charles Osgood's status in psychology also im-
proved the Society's cover, but his research was more directly
useful to the Agency, and the MKULTRA men paid much more
to get it. In 1959 Osgood, who four years later became president
of the American Psychological Association, wanted to push for-
ward his work on how people in different societies express the
same feelings, even when using different words and concepts.
Osgood wrote in "an abstract conceptual framework," but
Agency officials saw his research as "directly relevant" to co-
vert activities. They believed they could transfer Osgood's
knowledge of "hidden values and cues" in the way people com-
municate into more effective overseas propaganda. Osgood's
work gave them a tool—called the "semantic differential"—to
choose the right words in a foreign language to convey a partic-
ular meaning.
Like Carl Rogers, Osgood got his first outside funding for
what became the most important work of his career from the
Human Ecology Society. Osgood had written directly to the CIA
for support, and the Society soon contacted him and furnished
$192,975 for research over five years. The money allowed him
to travel widely and to expand his work into 30 different cul-
tures. Also like Rogers, Osgood eventually received NIMH
money to finish his research, but he acknowledges that the
Human Ecology grants played an important part in the prog-
ress of his work. He stresses that "there was none of the feeling
then about the CIA that there is now, in terms of subversive
activities," and he states that the Society had no influence on
anything he produced. Yet Society men could and did talk to
him about his findings. They asked questions that reflected
their own covert interests, not his academic pursuits, and they
drew him out, according to one of them, "at great length." Os-
good had started studying cross-cultural meaning well before
he received the Human Ecology money, but the Society's sup-
port ensured that he would continue his work on a scale that
suited the Agency's purposes, as well as his own.
A whole category of Society funding, called "cover grants,"
served no other purpose than to build the Society's false front.
These included a sociological study of Levittown, Long Island
(about $4,500), an analysis of the Central Mongoloid skull
($700), and a look at the foreign-policy attitudes of people who

HUMAN ECOLOGY    159
owned fallout shelters, as opposed to people who did not ($2,-
500). A $500 Human Ecology grant went to Istanbul University
for a study of the effects of circumcision on Turkish boys. The
researcher found that young Turks, usually circumcised be-
tween the ages of five and seven, felt "severe emotional impact
with attending symptoms of withdrawal." The children saw
the painful operations as "an act of aggression" that brought
out previously hidden fears—or so the Human Ecology Society
reported.
In other instances, the Society put money into projects whose
covert application was so unlikely that only an expert could see
the possibilities. Nonetheless, in 1958 the Society gave $5,570 to
social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the
University of Oklahoma for work on the behavior of teen-age
boys in gangs. The Sherifs, both ignorant of the CIA connec-
tion,* studied the group structures and attitudes in the gangs
and tried to devise ways to channel antisocial behavior into
more constructive paths. Their results were filtered through
clandestine minds at the Agency. "With gang warfare," says an
MKULTRA source, "you tried to get some defectors-in-place
who would like to modify some of the group behavior and cool
it. Now, getting a juvenile delinquent defector was motivation-
ally not all that much different from getting a Soviet one."
MKULTRA officials were clearly interested in using their
grants to build contacts and associations with prestigious aca-
demics. The Society put $1,500 a year into the Research in Men-
tal Health Newsletter published jointly at McGill University by
the sociology and psychiatric departments. Anthropologist
Margaret Mead, an international culture heroine, sat on the
newsletter's advisory board (with, among others, D. Ewen Cam-
eron), and the Society used her name in its biennial report.
Similarly, the Society gave grants of $26,000 to the well-known
University of London psychologist, H. J. Eysenck, for his work
on motivation. An MKULTRA document acknowledged that
this research would have "no immediate relevance for Agency
needs," but that it would "lend prestige" to the Society. The
*According to Dr. Carolyn Sherif, who says she and her husband did not share
the Cold War consensus and would never have knowingly taken CIA funds,
Human Ecology executive director James Monroe lied directly about the source
of the Society's money, claiming it came from rich New York doctors and Texas
millionaires who gave it for tax purposes. Monroe used this standard cover
story with other grantees.

760    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
grants to Eysenck also allowed the Society to take funding
credit for no less than nine of his publications in its 1963 report.
The following year, the Society managed to purchase a piece of
the work of the most famous behaviorist of all, Harvard's B. F.
Skinner. Skinner, who had tried to train pigeons to guide bombs
for the military during World War II, received a $5,000 Human
Ecology grant to pay the costs of a secretary and supplies for the
research that led to his book, Freedom and Dignity. Skinner
has no memory of the grant or its origins but says, "I don't like
secret involvement of any kind. I can't see why it couldn't have
been open and aboveboard."
A TSS source explains that grants like these "bought legiti-
macy" for the Society and made the recipients "grateful." He
says that the money gave Agency employees at Human Ecology
a reason to phone Skinner—or any of the other recipients—to
pick his brain about a particular problem. In a similar vein,
another MKULTRA man, psychologist John Gittinger men-
tions the Society's relationship with Erwin Goffman of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, whom many consider today's leading
sociological theorist. The Society gave him a small grant to
help finish a book that would have been published anyway. As
a result, Gittinger was able to spend hours talking with him
about, among other things, an article he had written earlier on
confidence men. These hucksters were experts at manipulating
behavior, according to Gittinger, and Goffman unwittingly
"gave us a better understanding of the techniques people use to
establish phony relationships"—a subject of interest to the CIA.
To keep track of new developments in the behavioral
sciences, Society representatives regularly visited grant recipi-
ents and found out what they and their colleagues were doing.
Some of the knowing professors became conscious spies. Most
simply relayed the latest professional gossip to their visitors
and sent along unpublished papers. The prestige of the Human
Ecology grantees also helped give the Agency access to behav-
ioral scientists who had no connection to the Society. "You
could walk into someone's office and say you were just talking
to Skinner," says an MKULTRA veteran. "We didn't hesitate to
do this. It was a way to name-drop."
The Society did not limit its intelligence gathering to the
United States. As one Agency source puts it, "The Society gave
us a legitimate basis to approach anyone in the academic com-
munity anywhere in the world." CIA officials regularly used it

HUMAN ECOLOGY   161
as cover when they traveled abroad to study the behavior of
foreigners of interest to the Agency, including such leaders as
Nikita Khrushchev. The Society funded foreign researchers
and also gave money to American professors to collect informa-
tion abroad. In 1960, for instance, the Society sponsored a sur-
vey of Soviet psychology through the simple device of putting
up $15,000 through the official auspices of the American Psy-
chological Association to send ten prominent psychologists on
a tour of the Soviet Union. Nine of the ten had no idea of the
Agency involvement, but CIA officials were apparently able to
debrief everyone when the group returned. Then the Society
sponsored a conference and book for which each psychologist
contributed a chapter. The book added another $5,000 to the
CIA's cost, but $20,000 all told seemed like a small price to pay
for the information gathered. The psychologists—except per-
haps the knowledgeable one—did nothing they would not ordi-
narily have done during their trip, and the scholarly commu-
nity benefited from increased knowledge on an important
subject. The only thing violated was the openness and trust
normally associated with academic pursuits. By turning schol-
ars into spies—even unknowing ones—CIA officials risked the
reputation of American research work and contributed poten-
tial ammunition toward the belief in many countries that the
U.S. notion of academic freedom and independence from the
state is self-serving and hypocritical.
Secrecy allowed the Agency a measure of freedom from nor-
mal academic restrictions and red tape, and the men from
MKULTRA used that freedom to make their projects more at-
tractive. The Society demanded "no stupid progress reports,"
recalls psychologist and psychiatrist Martin Orne, who re-
ceived a grant to support his Harvard research on hypnotism.
As a further sign of generosity and trust, the Society gave Orne
a follow-on $30,000 grant with no specified purpose.* Orne
could use it as he wished. He believes the money was "a contin-
gency investment" in his work, and MKULTRA officials agree.
"We could go to Orne anytime," says one of them, "and say,
*A 1962 report of Orne's laboratory, the Institute for Experimental Psychiatry,
showed that it received two sizable grants before the end of that year: $30,000
from Human Ecology and $30,000 from Scientific Engineering Institute, an-
other CIA front organization. Orne says he was not aware of the latter group's
Agency connection at the time, but learned of it later. He used its grant to study
new ways of using the polygraph.

162    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
'Okay, here is a situation and here is a kind of guy. What would
you expect we might be able to achieve if we could hypnotise
him?' Through his massive knowledge, he could speculate and
advise." A handful of other Society grantees also served in simi-
lar roles as covert Agency consultants in the field of their exper-
tise.
In general, the Human Ecology Society served as the CIA's
window on the world of behavioral research. No phenomenon
was too arcane to escape a careful look from the Society,
whether extrasensory perception or African witch doctors.
"There were some unbelievable schemes," recalls an MKUL-
TRA veteran, "but you also knew Einstein was considered
crazy. You couldn't be so biased that you wouldn't leave open
the possibility that some crazy idea might work." MKULTRA
men realized, according to the veteran, that "ninety percent of
what we were doing would fail" to be of any use to the Agency.
Yet, with a spirit of inquiry much freer than that usually found
in the academic world, the Society took early stabs at cracking
the genetic code with computers and finding out whether ani-
mals could be controlled through electrodes placed in their
brains.
The Society's unrestrained, scattershot approach to behav-
ioral research went against the prevailing wisdom in Ameri-
can universities—both as to methods and to subjects of interest.
During the 1950s one school of thought—so-called "behavior-
ism,"—was accepted on campus, virtually to the exclusion of
all others. The "behaviorists," led by Harvard's B. F. Skinner,"
looked at psychology as the study of learned observable re-
sponses to outside stimulation. To oversimplify, they champi-
oned the approach in which psychologists gave rewards to rats
scurrying through mazes, and they tended to dismiss matters of
great interest to the Agency: e.g., the effect of drugs on the
psyche, subjective phenomena like hypnosis, the inner work-
ings of the mind, and personality theories that took genetic
differences into account.
By investing up to $400,000 a year into the early, innovative
work of men like Carl Rogers, Charles Osgood, and Martin
Orne, the CIA's Human Ecology Society helped liberate the
behavioral sciences from the world of rats and cheese. With a
push from the Agency as well as other forces, the field opened
up. Former iconoclasts became eminent, and, for better or
worse, the Skinnerian near-monopoly gave way to a. multiplica-

HUMAN ECOLOGY    163
tion of contending schools. Eventually, a reputable behavioral
scientist could be doing almost anything: holding hands with
his students in sensitivity sessions, collecting survey data on
spanking habits, or subjectively exploring new modes of con-
sciousness. The CIA's money undoubtedly changed the aca-
demic world to some degree, though no one can say how much.
As usual, the CIA men were ahead of their time and had
started to move on before the new approaches became estab-
lished. In 1963, having sampled everything from palm reading
to subliminal perception, Sid Gottlieb and his colleagues sat-
isfied themselves that they had overlooked no area of knowl-
edge—however esoteric—that might be promising for CIA op-
erations. The Society had served its purpose; now the money
could be better spent elsewhere. Agency officials transferred
the still-useful projects to other covert channels and allowed
the rest to die quietly. By the end of 1965, when the remaining
research was completed, the Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology was gone.

CHAPTER
10
THE GITTINGER
ASSESSMENT SYSTEM
With one exception, the CIA's behavioral research—whether
on LSD or on electroshock—seems to have had more impact on
the outside world than on Agency operations. That exception
grew out of the work of the MKULTRA program's resident
genius, psychologist John Gittinger. While on the CIA payroll,
toiling to find ways to manipulate people, Gittinger created a
unique system for assessing personality and predicting future
behavior. He called his method—appropriately—the Personal-
ity Assessment System (PAS). Top Agency officials have been so
impressed that they have given the Gittinger system a place in
most agent-connected activities. To be sure, most CIA operators
would not go nearly so far as a former Gittinger aide who says,
"The PAS was the key to the whole clandestine business." Still,
after most of the touted mind controllers had given up or been
sent back home, it was Gittinger, the staff psychologist, who
sold his PAS system to cynical, anti-gimmick case officers in the
Agency's Clandestine Services. And during the Cuban missile
crisis, it was Gittinger who was summoned to the White House
to give his advice on how Khrushchev would react to American
pressure.
A heavy-set, goateed native of Oklahoma who in his later
years came to resemble actor Walter Slezak, Gittinger looked
much more like someone's kindly grandfather than a calculat-
ing theoretician. He had an almost insatiable curiosity about

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM    165
personality, and he spent most of his waking hours tinkering
with and trying to perfect his system. So obsessed did he be-
come that he always had the feeling—even after other re-
searchers had verified large chunks of the PAS and after the
CIA had put it into operational use—that the whole thing was
"a kind of paranoid delusion."
Gittinger started working on his system even before he joined
the CIA in 1950. Prior to that, he had been director of psycholog-
ical services at the state hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. His
high-sounding title did not reflect the fact that he was the only
psychologist on the staff. A former high school guidance coun-
selor and Naval lieutenant commander during World War II,
he was starting out at age 30 with a master's degree. Every day
he saw several hundred patients whose mental problems in-
cluded virtually everything in the clinical textbooks.
Numerous tramps and other itinerants, heading West in
search of the good life in California, got stuck in Oklahoma
during the cold winter months and managed to get themselves
admitted to Gittinger's hospital. In warmer seasons of the year,
quite a few of them worked, when they had to, as cooks or
dishwashers in the short-order hamburger stands that dotted
the highways in the days before fast food. They functioned
perfectly well in these jobs until freezing nights drove them
from their outdoor beds. The hospital staff usually called them
"seasonal schizophrenics" and gave them shelter until spring.
Gittinger included them in the psychological tests he was so
fond of running on his patients.
As he measured the itinerants on the Wechsler intelligence
scale, a standard IQ test with 11 parts,* Gittinger made a
chance observation that became, he says, the "bedrock" of his
whole system. He noticed that the short-order cooks tended to
do well on the digit-span subtest which rated their ability to
remember numbers. The dishwashers, in contrast, had a poor
memory for digits. Since the cooks had to keep track of many
complex orders—with countless variations of medium rare, on-
ions, and hold-the-mayo—their retentive quality served them
well.
*Developed by psychologist David Wechsler, this testing system is called, in
different versions, the Wechsler-Bellevue and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence
Scale. As Gittinger worked with it over the years, he made modifications that
he incorporated in what he named the Wechsler-Bellevue-G. For simplicity's
sake, it is simply referred to as the Wechsler system throughout the book.

166    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
Gittinger also noticed that the cooks had different personality
traits than the dishwashers. The cooks seemed able to maintain
a high degree of efficiency in a distracting environment while
customers were constantly barking new orders at them. They
kept their composure by falling back on their internal re-
sources and generally shutting themselves off from the commo-
tion around them. Gittinger dubbed this personality type,
which was basically inner-directed, an "Internalizer" (ab-
breviated "I"). The dishwashers, on the other hand, did not
have the ability to separate themselves from the external
world. In order to perform their jobs, they had to be placed off
in some far corner of the kitchen with their dirty pots and pans,
or else all the tumult of the place diverted them from their
duty. Gittinger called the dishwasher type an "Externalizer"
(E). He found that if he measured a high digit span in any
person—not just a short-order cook—he could make a basic
judgment about personality.
From observation, Gittinger concluded that babies were born
with distinct personalities which then were modified by envi-
ronmental factors. The Internalized—or I—baby was caught up
in himself and tended to be seen as a passive child; hence, the
world usually called him a "good baby." The E tot was more
interested in outside stimuli and attention, and thus was more
likely to cause his parents problems by making demands. Git-
tinger believed that the way parents and other authority figures
reacted to the child helped to shape his personality. Adults
often pressured or directed the I child to become more outgoing
and the E one to become more self-sufficient. Gittinger found he
could measure the compensations, or adjustments, the child
made on another Wechsler subtest, the one that rated arithme-
tic ability. He noticed that in later life, when the person was
subject to stress, these compensations tended to disappear, and
the person reverted to his original personality type. Gittinger
wrote that his system "makes possible the assessment of funda-
mental discrepancies between the surface personality and the
underlying personality structure—discrepancies that produce
tension, conflict, and anxiety."
Besides the E-I dimensions, Gittinger identified two other
fundamental sets of personality characteristics that he could
measure with still other Wechsler subtests. Depending on how
a subject did on the block design subtest, Gittinger could tell if
he were Regulated (R) or Flexible (F). The Regulated person

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM    167
had no trouble learning by rote but usually did not understand
what he learned. The Flexible individual, on the other hand,
had to understand something before he learned it. Gittinger
noted that R children could learn to play the piano moderately
well with comparatively little effort. The F child most often
hated the drudgery of piano lessons, but Gittinger observed that
the great concert pianists tended to be Fs who had persevered
and mastered the instrument.
Other psychologists had thought up personality dimensions
similar to Gittinger's E and I, R and F, even if they defined them
somewhat differently. Gittinger's most original contribution
came in a third personality dimension, which revealed how
well people were able to adapt their social behavior to the de-
mands of the culture they lived in. Gittinger found he could
measure this dimension with the picture arrangement
Wechsler subtest, and he called it the Role Adaptive (A) or Role
Uniform (U). It corresponded to "charisma," since other people
were naturally attracted to the A person while they tended to
ignore the U.
All this became immensely more complicated as Gittinger
measured compensations and modifications with other
Wechsler subtests. This complexity alone worked against the
acceptance of his system by the outside world, as did the fact
that he based much of it on ideas that ran contrary to accepted
psychological doctrine—such as his heretical notion that ge-
netic differences existed. It did not help, either, that Gittinger
was a non-Ph.D. whose theory sprang from the kitchen habits
of vagrants in Oklahoma.
Any one of these drawbacks might have stifled Gittinger in
the academic world, but to the pragmatists in the CIA, they
were irrelevant. Gittinger's strange ideas seemed to work. With
uncanny accuracy, he could look at nothing more than a sub-
ject's Wechsler numbers, pinpoint his weaknesses, and show
how to turn him into an Agency spy. Once Gittinger's boss, Sid
Gottlieb, and other high CIA officials realized how Gittinger's
PAS could be used to help case officers handle agents, they gave
the psychologist both the time and money to improve his sys-
tem under the auspices of the Human Ecology Society.
Although he was a full-time CIA employee, Gittinger worked
under Human Ecology cover through the 1950s. Agency offi-
cials considered the PAS to be one of the Society's greatest
triumphs, definitely worth continuing after the Society was

168    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
phased out. In 1962 Gittinger and his co-workers moved their
base of operations from the Human Ecology headquarters in
New York to a CIA proprietary company, set up especially for
them in Washington and called Psychological Assessment As-
sociates. Gittinger served as president of the company, whose
cover was to provide psychological services to American firms
overseas. He personally opened a branch office in Tokyo (later
moved to Hong Kong) to service CIA stations in the Far East.
The Washington staff, which grew to about 15 professionals
during the 1960s, handled the rest of the world by sending as-
sessment specialists off for temporary visits.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in Human Ecology grants
and then even more money in Psychological Assessment con-
tracts—all CIA funds—flowed out to verify and expand the PAS.
For example, the Society gave about $140,000 to David Saun-
ders of the Educational Testing Service, the company that pre-
pares the College Board exams. Saunders, who knew about the
Agency's involvement, found a correlation between brain
(EEC) patterns and results on the digit-span test, and he helped
Gittinger apply the system to other countries. In this regard,
Gittinger and his colleagues understood that the Wechsler bat-
tery of subtests had a cultural bias and that a Japanese E had
a very different personality from, say, a Russian E. To compen-
sate, they worked out localized versions of the PAS for various
nations around the world.
While at the Human Ecology group, Gittinger supervised
much of the Society's other research in the behavioral sciences,
and he always tried to interest Society grantees in his system.
He looked for ways to mesh their research with his theories—
and vice versa. Some, like Carl Rogers and Charles Osgood,
listened politely and did not follow up. Yet Gittinger would
always learn something from their work that he could apply to
the PAS. A charming man and a skillful raconteur, Gittinger
convinced quite a few of the other grantees of the validity of his
theories and the importance of his ideas. Careful not to
threaten the egos of his fellow professionals, he never projected
an air of superiority. Often he would leave people—even the
skeptical—openmouthed in awe as he painted unnervingly ac-
curate personality portraits of people he had never met. Indeed,
people frequently accused him of somehow having cheated by
knowing the subject in advance or peeking at his file.
Gittinger patiently and carefully taught his system to his

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM    169
colleagues, who all seem to have views of him that range from
great respect to pure idolatry. For all his willingness to share
the PAS, Gittinger was never able to show anyone how to use
the system as skillfully as he did. Not that he did not try; he
simply was a more talented natural assessor than any of the
others. Moreover, his system was full of interrelations and vari-
ables that he instinctively understood but had not bothered to
articulate. As a result, he could look at Wechsler scores and
pick out behavior patterns which would be valid and which no
one else had seen. Even after Agency officials spent a small
fortune trying to computerize the PAS, they found, as one psy-
chologist puts it, the machine "couldn't tie down all the varia-
bles" that Gittinger was carrying around in his head.
Some Human Ecology grantees, like psychiatrist Robert
Hyde, were so impressed with Gittinger's system that they
made the PAS a major part of their own research. Hyde rou-
tinely gave Wechslers to his subjects before plying them with
liquor, as part of the Agency's efforts to find out how people
react to alcohol. In 1957 Hyde moved his research team from
Boston Psychopathic Hospital, where he had been America's
first LSD tripper, to Butler Health Center in Providence. There,
with Agency funds, Hyde built an experimental party room in
the hospital, complete with pinball machine, dartboard, and
bamboo bar stools. From behind a two-way mirror, psycholo-
gists watched the subjects get tipsy and made careful notes on
their reaction to alcohol. Not surprisingly, the observers found
that pure Internalizers became more withdrawn after several
drinks, and that uncompensated Es were more likely to become
garrulous—in essence, sloppy drunks. Thus Gittinger was able
to make generalizations about the different ways an I or an E
responded to alcohol.* Simply by knowing how people scored
on the Wechsler digit-span test, he could predict how they
would react to liquor. Hyde and Harold Abramson at Mount
Sinai Hospital made the same kind of observations for LSD,
finding, among other things, that an E was more likely than an
I to have a bad trip. (Apparently, an I is more accustomed than
*As with most of the descriptions of the PAS made in the book, this is an
oversimplification of a more complicated process. The system, as Gittinger
used it, yielded millions of distinct personality types. His observations on alco-
hol were based on much more than a straight I and E comparison. For the most
complete description of the PAS in the open literature, see the article by Git-
tinger and Winne cited in the chapter notes.

170    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
an E to "being into his own head" and losing touch with exter-
nal reality.)
At Gittinger's urging, other Human Ecology grantees gave
the Wechsler battery to their experimental subjects and sent
him the scores. He was building a unique data base on all
phases of human behavior, and he needed samples of as many
distinct groups as possible. By getting the scores of actors, he
could make generalizations about what sort of people made
good role-players. Martin Orne at Harvard sent in scores of
hypnosis subjects, so Gittinger could separate the personality
patterns of those who easily went into a trance from those who
could not be hypnotized. Gittinger collected Wechslers of busi-
nessmen, students, high-priced fashion models, doctors, and
just about any other discrete group he could find a way to have
tested. In huge numbers, the Wechslers came flowing in—29,-
000 sets in all by the early 1970s—each one accompanied by
biographic data. With the 10 subtests he used and at least 10
possible scores on each of those, no two Wechsler results in the
whole sample ever looked exactly the same. Gittinger kept a
computer printout of all 29,000 on his desk, and he would fiddle
with them almost every day—looking constantly for new truths
that could be drawn out of them.
John Gittinger was interested in all facets of personality, but
because he worked for the CIA, he emphasized deviant forms.
He particularly sought out Wechslers of people who had re-
jected the values of their society or who had some vice—hidden
or otherwise—that caused others to reject them. By studying
the scores of the defectors who had come over to the West,
Gittinger hoped to identify common characteristics of men
who had become traitors to their governments. If there were
identifiable traits, Agency operators could look for them in pro-
spective spies. Harris Isbell, who ran the MKULTRA drug-test-
ing program at the Lexington, Kentucky detention hospital,
sent in the scores of heroin addicts. Gittinger wanted to know
what to look for in people susceptible to drugs. The Human
Ecology project at Ionia State Hospital in Michigan furnished
Wechslers of sexual psychopaths. These scores showed that
people with uncontrollable urges have different personality
patterns than so-called normals. Gittinger himself journeyed to
the West Coast to test homosexuals, lesbians, and the prosti-
tutes he interviewed under George White's auspices in the San

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT S YSTEM    171
Francisco safehouse. With each group, he separated out the
telltale signs that might be a future indicator of their sexual
preference in others. Gittinger understood that simply by look-
ing at the Wechsler scores of someone newly tested, he could
pick out patterns that corresponded to behavior of people in the
data base.
The Gittinger system worked best when the TSS staff had a
subject's Wechsler scores to analyze, but Agency officials could
not very well ask a Russian diplomat or any other foreign target
to sit down and take the tests. During World War II, OSS chief
William Donovan had faced a similar problem in trying to find
out about Adolf Hitler's personality, and Donovan had commis-
ioned psychoanalyst Walter Langer to make a long-distance
psychiatric profile of the German leader. Langer had sifted
through all the available data on the Fiihrer, and that was
exactly what Gittinger's TSS assessments staff did when they
lacked direct contact (and when they had it, too). They pored
over all the intelligence gathered by operators, agents, bugs,
and taps and looked at samples of a man's handwriting.* The
CIA men took the the process of "indirect assessment" one step
further than Langer had, however. They observed the target's
behavior and looked for revealing patterns that corresponded
with traits already recorded among the subjects of the 29,000
Wechsler samples.
Along this line, Gittinger and his staff had a good idea how
various personality types acted after consuming a few drinks.
Thus, they reasoned, if they watched a guest at a cocktail party
and he started to behave in a recognizable way—by withdraw-
*Graphology (handwriting analysis) appealed to CIA officials as a way of sup-
plementing PAS assessments or making judgments when only a written letter
was available. Graphology was one of the seemingly arcane fields which the
Human Ecology Society had investigated and found operational uses for. The
Society wound up funding handwriting research and a publication in West
Germany where the subject was taken much more seriously than in the United
States, and it sponsored a study to compare handwriting analyses with
Wechsler scores of actors (including some homosexuals), patients in psycho-
therapy, criminal psychopaths, and fashion models. Gittinger went on to hire
a resident graphologist who could do the same sort of amazing things with
handwriting as the Oklahoma psychologist could do with Wechsler scores. One
former colleague recalls her spotting—accurately—a stomach ailment in a
foreign leader simply by reading one letter. Asked in an interview about how
the Agency used her work, she replied, "If they think they can manipulate a
person, that's none of my business. I don't know what they do with it. My
analysis was not done with that intention. . . . Something I learned very early
in government was not to ask questions."

172    SPELLS—ELECTR ODES AND HYPNOSIS
ing, for instance—they could make an educated guess about his
personality type—in this case, that he was an I. In contrast, the
drunken Russian diplomat who became louder and began
pinching every woman who passed by probably was an E. In-
stead of using the test scores to predict how a person would
behave, the assessments staff was, in effect, looking at behavior
and working backward to predict how the person would have
scored if he had taken the test. The Gittinger staff developed a
whole checklist of 30 to 40 patterns that the skilled observer
could look for. Each of these traits reflected one of the Wechsler
subtests, and it corresponded to some insight picked up from
the 29,000 scores in the data base.
Was the target sloppy or neat? Did he relate to women stiffly
or easily? How did he hold a cigarette and put it into his mouth?
When he went through a receiving line, did he immediately
repeat the name of each person introduced to him? Taken as a
whole, all these observations allowed Gittinger to make a rea-
soned estimate about a subject's personality, with emphasis on
his vulnerabilities. As Gittinger describes the system, "If you
could get a sample of several kinds of situations, you could
begin to get some pretty good information." Nevertheless, Git-
tinger had his doubts about indirect assessment. "I never
thought we were good at this," he says.
The TSS assessment staff, along with the Agency's medical
office use the PAS indirectly to keep up the OSS tradition of
making psychological portraits of world leaders like Hitler.
Combining analytical techniques with gossipy intelligence, the
assessors tried to give high-level U.S. officials a better idea of
what moved the principal international political figures.* One
such study of an American citizen spilled over into the legally
forbidden domestic area when in 1971 the medical office pre-
pared a profile of Daniel Ellsberg at the request of the White
House. To get raw data for the Agency assessors, John Ehrlich-
man authorized a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in
California. John Gittinger vehemently denies that his staff
*A profile of Ferdinand Marcos found the Filipino president's massive personal
enrichment while in office to be a natural outgrowth of his country's tradition
of putting loyalty to one's family and friends ahead of all other considerations.
Agency assessors found the Shah of Iran to be a brilliant but dangerous
megalomaniac whose problems resulted from an overbearing father, the hu-
miliation of having served as a puppet ruler, and his inability for many years
to produce a male heir.

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM   173
played any role in preparing this profile, which the White
House plumbers intended to use as a kind of psychological road
map to compromise Ellsberg—just as CIA operators regularly
worked from such assessments to exploit the weaknesses of
foreigners.
Whether used directly or indirectly, the PAS gave Agency
case officers a tool to get a better reading of the people with
whom they dealt. CIA field stations overseas routinely sent all
their findings on a target, along with indirect assessment
checklists, back to Washington, so headquarters personnel
could decide whether or not to try recruitment. The TSS assess-
ment staff contributed to this process by attempting to predict
what ploys would work best on the man in the case officers'
sights. "Our job was to recommend what strategy to try," says
a onetime Gittinger colleague. This source states he had direct
knowledge of cases where TSS recommendations led to sexual
entrapment operations, both hetero- and homosexual. "We had
women ready—called them a stable," he says, and they found
willing men when they had to.
One CIA psychologist stresses that the PAS only provided
"clues" on how to compromise people. "If somebody's assess-
ment came in like the sexual psychopaths', it would raise red
flags," he notes. But TSS staff assessors could only conclude that
the target had a potentially serious sex problem. They could by
no means guarantee that the target's defenses could be broken.
Nevertheless, the PAS helped dictate the best weapons for the
attack. "I've heard John [Gittinger] say there's always some-
thing that someone wants," says another former Agency psy-
chologist. "And with the PAS you can find out what it is. It's not
necessarily sex or booze. Sometimes it's status or recognition or
security." Yet another Gittinger colleague describes this pro-
cess as "looking for soft spots." He states that after years of
working with the system, he still bridled at a few of the more
fiendish ways "to get at people" that his colleagues dreamed up.
He stayed on until retirement, however, and he adds, "None of
this was personal. It was for national security reasons."
A few years ago, ex-CIA psychologist James Keehner told
reporter Maureen Orth that he personally went to New York in
1969 to give Wechsler tests to an American nurse who had
volunteered her body for her country. "We wanted her to sleep
with this Russian," explained Keehner. "Either the Russian
would fall in love with her and defect, or we'd blackmail him.

174    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
I had to see if she could sleep with him over a period of time
and not get involved emotionally. Boy, was she tough!" Keehner
noted that he became disgusted with entrapment techniques,
especially after watching a film of an agent in bed with a "re-
cruitment target." He pointed out that Agency case officers,
many of whom "got their jollies" from such work, used a hid-
den camera to get their shots. The sexual technology developed
in the MKULTRA safehouses in New York and San Francisco
had been put to work. The operation worked no better in the
1960s, however, than TSS officials predicted such activities
would a decade earlier. "You don't really recruit agents with
sexual blackmail," Keehner concluded. "That's why I couldn't
even take reading the files after a while. I was sickened at
seeing people take pleasure in other people's inadequacies.
First of all, I thought it was just dumb. For all the money going
out, nothing ever came back."
Keehner became disgusted by the picking-at-scabs aspect of
TSS assessment work. Once the PAS had identified a target as
having potential mental instabilities, staff members some-
times suggested ways to break him down, reasoning that by
using a ratchetlike approach to put him under increased pres-
sure, they might be able to break the lines that tied him to his
country, if not to his sanity. Keehner stated, "I was sent to deal
with the most negative aspects of the human condition. It was
planned destructiveness. First, you'd check to see if you could
destroy a man's marriage. If you could, then that would be
enough to put a lot of stress on the individual, to break him
down. Then you might start a minor rumor campaign against
him. Harass him constantly. Bump his car in traffic. A lot of it
is ridiculous, but it may have a cumulative effect." Agency case
officers might also use this same sort of stress-producing cam-
paign against a particularly effective enemy intelligence
officer whom they knew they could never recruit but whom
they hoped to neutralize.
Most operations—including most recruitments—did not rely
on such nasty methods. The case officer still benefited from the
TSS staffs assessment, but he usually wanted to minimize
stress rather than accentuate it. CIA operators tended to agree
that the best way to recruit an agent was to make the relation-
ship as productive and satisfying as possible for him, operating
from the old adage about catching more flies with honey than
vinegar. "You pick the thing most fearful to him—the things

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM   175
which would cause him the most doubt," says the source. "If his
greatest fear is that he can't trust you to protect him and his
family, you overload your pitch with your ability to do it. Other
people need structure, so you tell them exactly what they will
need to do. If you leave it open-ended, they'll be scared you'll
ask them to do things they're incapable of."*
Soon after the successful recruitment of a foreigner to spy
for the CIA, either a CIA staff member or a specially trained
case officer normally sat down with the new agent and gave
him the full battery of Wechsler subtests—a process that
took several hours. The tester never mentioned that the ex-
ercise had anything to do with personality but called it an
"aptitude" test—which it also is. The assessments office in
Washington then analyzed the results. As with the poly-
graph, the PAS helped tell if the agent were lying. It could
often delve deeper than surface concepts of true and false.
The PAS might show that the agent's motivations were not
in line with his behavior. In that case, if the gap were too
great, the case officer could expect to run up against consid-
erable deception—resulting either from espionage motives or
psychotic tendencies.
The TSS staff assessors sent a report back to the field on the
best way to deal with the new agent and the most effective
means to exploit him. They would recommend whether his
case officer should treat him sternly or permissively. If the
agent were an Externalizer who needed considerable compan-
ionship, the assessors might suggest that the case officer try to
spend as much time with him as possible.^ They would proba-
bly recommend against sending this E agent on a long mission

*This source reports that case officers usually used this sort of nonthreatening
approach and switched to the rougher stuff if the target decided he did not want
to spy for the CIA. In that case, says the ex-CIA man, "you don't want the person
to say no and run off and tattle. You lose an asset that way—not in the sense
of the case officer being shot, but by being nullified." The spurned operator
might then offer not to reveal that the target was cheating on his wife or had
had a homosexual affair, in return for the target not disclosing the recruitment
attempt to his own intelligence service.
^While Agency officials might also have used the PAS to select the right case
officer to deal with the E agent—one who would be able to sustain the agent's
need for a close relationship over a long period of time—they almost never used
the system with this degree of precision. An Agency office outside TSS did keep
Wechslers and other test scores on file for most case officers, but the Clandes-
tine Services management was not willing to turn over the selection of Ameri-
can personnel to the psychologists.

176    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
into a hostile country, where he could not have the friendly
company he craved.
Without any help from John Gittinger or his system, covert
operators had long been deciding matters like these, which
were, after all, rooted in common sense. Most case officers
prided themselves on their ability to play their agents like a
musical instrument, at just the right tempo, and the Gittinger
system did not shake their belief that nothing could beat their
own intuition. Former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline ex-
presses a common view when he says the PAS "was part of the
system—kind of a check-and-balance—a supposedly scientific
tool that was not weighed very heavily. I never put as much
weight on the psychological assessment reports as on a case
officer's view.... In the end, people went with their own opin-
ion." Former Director William Colby found the assessment re-
ports particularly useful in smoothing over that "traumatic"
period when a case officer had to pass on his agent to a replace-
ment. Understandably, the agent often saw the switch as a dan-
ger or a hardship. "The new guy has to show some understand-
ing and sympathy," says Colby, who had 30 years of operational
experience himself, "but it doesn't work if these feelings are
not real."
For those Agency officers who yearned to remove as much of
the human element as possible from agent operations, Git-
tinger's system was a natural. It reduced behavior to a work-
able formula of shorthand letters that, while not insightful in
all respects, gave a reasonably accurate description of a person.
Like Social Security numbers, such formulas fitted well with a
computerized approach. While not wanting to overemphasize
the Agency's reliance on the PAS, former Director Colby states
that the system made dealing with agents "more systematized,
more professional."
In 1963 the CIA's Inspector General gave the TSS assessment
staff high marks and described how it fit into operations:
The [Clandestine Services] case officer is first and foremost, per-
haps, a practitioner of the art of assessing and exploiting human
personality and motivations for ulterior purposes. The ingredi-
ents of advanced skill in this art are highly individualistic in
nature, including such qualities as perceptiveness and imagina-
tion. [The PAS] seeks to enhance the case officer's skill by bring-
ing the methods and disciplines of psychology to bear. . . . The

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM    177
prime objectives are control, exploitation, or neutralization.
These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeu-
tic in their intent.
In other words, the PAS is directed toward the relationship
between the American case officer and his foreign agent, that
lies at the heart of espionage. In that sense, it amounts to its
own academic discipline—the psychology of spying—complete
with axioms and reams of empirical data. The business of the
PAS, like that of the CIA, is control.
One former CIA psychologist, who still feels guilty about his
participation in certain Agency operations, believes that the
CIA's fixation on control and manipulation mirrors, in a more
virulent form, the way Americans deal with each other gener-
ally. "I don't think the CIA is too far removed from the culture,"
he says. "It's just a matter of degree. If you put a lot of money
out there, there are many people who are lacking the ethics
even of the CIA. At least the Agency had an ideological basis."
This psychologist believes that the United States has become
an extremely control-oriented society—from the classroom to
politics to television advertising. Spying and the PAS tech-
niques are unique only in that they are more systematic and
secret.
Another TSS scientist believes that the Agency's behavioral
research was a logical extension of the efforts of American
psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists to change behav-
ior—which he calls their "sole motivation." Such people ma-
nipulate their subjects in trying to make mentally disturbed
people well, in turning criminals into law-abiding citizens, in
improving the work of students, and in pushing poor people to
get off welfare. The source cites all of these as examples of
"behavior modification" for socially acceptable reasons, which,
like public attitudes toward spying, change from time to time.
"Don't get the idea that all these behavioral scientists were nice
and pure, that they didn't want to change anything, and that
they were detached in their science," he warns. "They were up
to their necks in changing people. It just happened that the
things they were interested in were not always the same as
what we were." Perhaps the saving grace of the behavioral
scientists is summed up by longtime MKULTRA consultant
Martin Orne: "We are sufficiently ineffective so that our
findings can be published."

178    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
With the PAS, CIA officials had a handy tool for social engineer-
ing. The Gittinger staff found one use for it in the sensitive area
of selecting members of foreign police and intelligence agen-
cies. All over the globe, Agency operators have frequently
maintained intimate working relations with security services
that have consistently mistreated their own citizens. The as-
sessments staff played a key role in choosing members of the
secret police in at least two countries whose human-rights rec-
ords are among the world's worst.
In 1961, according to TSS psychologist John Winne, the CIA
and the Korean government worked together to establish the
newly created Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The
American CIA station in Seoul asked headquarters to send out
an assessor to "select the initial cadre" of the KCIA. Off went
Winne on temporary duty. "I set up an office with two transla-
tors," he recalls, "and used a Korean version of the Wechsler."
The Agency psychologist gave the tests to 25 to 30 police and
military officers and wrote up a half-page report on each, list-
ing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know
about each candidate's "ability to follow orders, creativity, lack
of personality disorders, motivation—why he wanted out of his
current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the
civilians." The test results went to the Korean authorities,
whom Winne believes made the personnel decisions "in con-
junction with our operational people."
"We would do a job like this and never get feedback, so we
were never sure we'd done a good job," Winne complains. Six-
teen years after the end of his mission to Seoul and after news
of KCIA repression at home and bribes to American congress-
men abroad, Winne feels that his best efforts had "boomer-
anged." He states that Tongsun Park was not one of the KCIA
men he tested.
In 1966 CIA staffers, including Gittinger himself, took part in
selecting members of an equally controversial police unit in
Uruguay—the anti-terrorist section that fought the Tupamaro
urban guerrillas. According to John Cassidy, the CIA's deputy
station chief there at the time, Agency operators worked to set
up this special force together with the Agency for International
Development's Public Safety Mission (whose members in-
cluded Dan Mitrione, later kidnapped and killed by the
Tupamaros). The CIA-assisted police claimed they were in a
life-and-death struggle against the guerrillas, and they used

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM    179
incredibly brutal methods, including torture, to stamp out most
of the Uruguayan left along with the guerrillas.
While the special police were being organized, "John [Git-
tinger] came down for three days to get the program under-
way," recalls Cassidy. Then Hans Greiner, a Gittinger associ-
ate, ran Wechslers on 20 Uruguayan candidates. One question
on the information subtest was "How many weeks in the year?"
Eighteen of the 20 said it was 48, and only one man got the
answer right. (Later he was asked about his answer, and he
said he had made a mistake; he meant 48.) But when Greiner
asked this same group of police candidates, "Who wrote
Faust?" 18 of the 20 knew it was Goethe. "This tells you some-
thing about the culture," notes Cassidy, who served the Agency
all over Latin America. It also points up the difficulty Gittinger
had in making the PAS work across cultural lines.
In any case, CIA man Cassidy found the assessment process
most useful for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section.
"According to the results, these men were shown to have very
dependent psychologies and they needed strong direction," re-
calls the now-retired operator. Cassidy was quite pleased with
the contribution Gittinger and Greiner made. "For years I had
been dealing with Latin Americans," says Cassidy, "and here,
largely by psychological tests, one of [Gittinger's] men was able
to analyze people he had no experience with and give me some
insight into them. . . . Ordinarily, we would have just selected
the men and gone to work on them."
In helping countries like South Korea and Uruguay pick their
secret police, TSS staff members often inserted a devilish twist
with the PAS. They could not only choose candidates who
would make good investigators, interrogators, or whatever, but
they could also spot those who were most likely to succumb to
future CIA blandishments. "Certain types were more recruita-
ble," states a former assessor. "I looked for them when I wrote
my reports.... Anytime the Company [the CIA] spent money for
training a foreigner, the object was that he would ultimately
serve our control purposes." Thus, CIA officials were not con-
tent simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence
agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the PAS pro-
vided a useful aid.
In 1973 John Gittinger and his longtime associate John Winne,
who picked KCIA men, published a basic description of the

180    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
PAS in a professional journal. Although others had written
publicly about the system, this article apparently disturbed
some of the Agency's powers, who were then cutting back on
the number of CIA employees at the order of short-time Direc-
tor James Schlesinger.
Shortly thereafter, Gittinger, then 56, stopped being presi-
dent of Psychological Assessment Associates but stayed on as a
consultant. In 1974 I wrote about Gittinger's work, albeit incom-
pletely, in Rolling Stone magazine. Gittinger was disturbed
that disclosure of his CIA Connection would hurt his profes-
sional reputation. "Are we tarred by a brush because we
worked for the CIA?" he asked during one of several rather
emotional exchanges. "I'm proud of it." He saw no ethical prob-
lems in "looking for people's weaknesses" if it helped the CIA
obtain information, and he declared that for many years most
Americans thought this was a useful process. At first, he offered
to give me the Wechsler tests and prepare a personality assess-
ment to explain the system, but Agency officials prohibited his
doing so. "I was given no explanation," said the obviously
disappointed Gittinger. "I'm very proud of my professional
work, and I had looked forward to being able to explain it."
In August 1977 Gittinger publicly testified in Senate hearings.
While he obviously would have preferred talking about his
psychological research, his most persistent questioner, Senator
Edward Kennedy, was much more interested in bringing out
sensational details about prostitutes and drug testing. A proud
man, Gittinger felt "humiliated" by the experience, which
ended with him looking foolish on national television. The next
month, the testimony of his former associate, David Rhodes,
further bruised Gittinger. Rhodes told the Kennedy subcom-
mittee about Gittinger's role in leading the "Gang that Couldn't
Spray Straight" in an abortive attempt to test LSD in aerosol
cans on unwitting subjects. Gittinger does not want his place in
history to be determined by this kind of activity. He would like
to see his Personality Assessment System accepted as an impor-
tant contribution to science.
Tired of the controversy and worn down by trying to explain
the PAS, Gittinger has moved back to his native Oklahoma. He
took a copy of the 29,000 Wechsler results with him, but he has
lost his ardor for working with them. A handful of psycholo-
gists around the country still swear by the system and try to
pass it on to others. One, who uses it in private practice, says

THE GITTINGER ASSESSMENT SYSTEM    181
that in therapy it saves six months in understanding the pa-
tient. This psychologist takes a full reading of his patient's
personality with the PAS, and then he varies his treatment to
fit the person's problems. He believes that most American psy-
chologists and psychiatrists treat their patients the same,
whereas the PAS is designed to identify the differences be-
tween people. Gittinger very much hopes that others will ac-
cept this view and move his system into the mainstream. "It
means nothing unless I can get someone else to work on it," he
declares. Given the preconceptions of the psychological com-
munity, the inevitable taint arising from the CIA's role in de-
veloping the system, and Gittinger's lack of academic creden-
tials and energy, his wish will probably not be fulfilled.

CHAPTER
11
HYPNOSIS
No mind-control technique has more captured popular imagi-
nation—and kindled fears—than hypnosis. Men have long
dreamed they could use overwhelming hypnotic powers to
compel others to do their bidding. And when CIA officials insti-
tutionalized that dream in the early Cold War Days, they tried,
like modern-day Svengalis, to use hypnosis to force their favors
on unwitting victims.
One group of professional experts, as well as popular novel-
ists, argued that hypnosis would lead to major breakthroughs
in spying. Another body of experts believed the opposite. The
Agency men, who did not fully trust the academics anyway,
listened to both points of view and kept looking for applications
which fit their own special needs. To them, hypnosis offered too
much promise not to be pursued, but finding the answers was
such an elusive and dangerous process that 10 years after the
program started CIA officials were still searching for practical
uses.
The CIA's first behavioral research czar, Morse Allen of AR-
TICHOKE, was intrigued by hypnosis. He read everything he
could get his hands on, and in 1951 he went to New York for a
four-day course from a well-known stage hypnotist. This hyp-
notist had taken the Svengali legend to heart, and he bom-
barded Allen with tales of how he used hypnosis to seduce
young women. He told the ARTICHOKE chief that he had con-
vinced one mesmerized lady that he was her husband and that
she desperately wanted him. That kind of deception has a place

HYPNOSIS    183
in covert operations, and Morse Allen was sufficiently im-
pressed to report back to his bosses the hypnotist's claim that
"he spent approximately five nights a week away from home
engaging in sexual intercourse."
Apart from the bragging, the stage hypnotist did give Morse
Allen a short education in how to capture a subject's attention
and induce a trance. Allen returned to Washington more con-
vinced than ever of the benefits of working hypnosis into the
ARTICHOKE repertory and of the need to build a defense
against it. With permission from above, he decided to take his
hypnosis studies further, right in his own office. He asked
young CIA secretaries to stay after work and ran them through
the hypnotic paces—proving to his own satisfaction that he
could make them do whatever he wanted. He had secretaries
steal SECRET files and pass them on to total strangers, thus
violating the most basic CIA security rules. He got them to steal
from each other and to start fires. He made one of them report
to the bedroom of a strange man and then go into a deep sleep.
"This activity clearly indicates that individuals under hypnosis
might be compromised and blackmailed," Allen wrote.
On February 19, 1954, Morse Allen simulated the ultimate
experiment in hypnosis: the creation of a "Manchurian Candi-
date," or programmed assassin. Allen's "victim" was a secre-
tary whom he put into a deep trance and told to keep sleeping
until he ordered otherwise. He then hypnotized a second secre-
tary and told her that if she could not wake up her friend, "her
rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to 'kill.' "
Allen left a pistol nearby, which the secretary had no way of
knowing was unloaded. Even though she had earlier expressed
a fear of firearms of any kind, she picked up the gun and "shot"
her sleeping friend. After Allen brought the "killer" out of her
trance, she had apparent amnesia for the event, denying she
would ever shoot anyone.
With this experiment, Morse Allen took the testing as far as
he could on a make-believe basis, but he was neither satisfied
nor convinced that hypnosis would produce such spectacular
results in an operational setting. All he felt he had proved was
that an impressionable young volunteer would accept a com-
mand from a legitimate authority figure to take an action she
may have sensed would not end in tragedy. She presumably
trusted the CIA enough as an institution and Morse Allen as an
individual to believe he would not let her do anything wrong.

184    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
The experimental setting, in effect, legitimated her behavior
and prevented it from being truly antisocial.
Early in 1954, Allen almost got his chance to try the crucial
test. According to a CIA document, the subject was to be a
35-year-old, well-educated foreigner who had once worked for
a friendly secret service, probably the CIA itself. He had now
shifted his loyalty to another government, and the CIA was
quite upset with him. The Agency plan was to hypnotize him
and program him into making an assassination attempt. He
would then be arrested at the least for attempted murder and
"thereby disposed of." The scenario had several holes in it, as
the operators presented it to the ARTICHOKE team. First, the
subject was to be involuntary and unwitting, and as yet no one
had come up with a consistently effective way of hypnotizing
such people. Second, the ARTICHOKE team would have only
limited custody of the subject, who was to be snatched from a
social event. Allen understood that it would probably take
months of painstaking work to prepare the man for a sophis-
ticated covert operation. The subject was highly unlikely to
perform after just one command. Yet, so anxious were the AR-
TICHOKE men to try the experiment that they were willing to
go ahead even under these unfavorable conditions: "The final
answer was that in view of the fact that successful completion
of this proposed act of attempted assassination was insignifi-
cant to the overall project; to wit, whether it was even carried
out or not, that under 'crash conditions' and appropriate au-
thority from Headquarters, the ARTICHOKE team would un-
dertake the problem in spite of the operational limitations."
This operation never took place. Eager to be unleashed,
Morse Allen kept requesting prolonged access to operational
subjects, such as the double agents and defectors on whom he
was allowed to work a day or two. Not every double agent would
do. The candidate had to be among the one person in five who
made a good hypnotic subject, and he needed to have a dissocia-
tive tendency to separate part of his personality from the main
body of his consciousness. The hope was to take an existing ego
state—such as an imaginary childhood playmate—and build it
into a separate personality, unknown to the first. The hypnotist
would communicate directly with this schizophrenic offshoot
and command it to carry out specific deeds about which the
main personality would know nothing. There would be inevita-
ble leakage between the two personalities, particularly in

HYPNOSIS    185
dreams; but if the hypnotists were clever enough, he could
build in cover stories and safety valves which would prevent
the subject from acting inconsistently.
All during the spring and summer of 1954, Morse Allen lob-
bied for permission to try what he called "terminal experi-
ments" in hypnosis, including one along the following sce-
nario:
CIA officials would recruit an agent in a friendly foreign
country where the Agency could count on the cooperation of the
local police force. CIA case officers would train the agent to
pose as a leftist and report on the local communist party. Dur-
ing training, a skilled hypnotist would hypnotize him under the
guise of giving him medical treatment (the favorite ARTI-
CHOKE cover for hypnosis). The hypnotist would then provide
the agent with information and tell him to forget it all when he
snapped out of the trance. Once the agent had been properly
conditioned and prepared, he would be sent into action as a CIA
spy. Then Agency officials would tip off the local police that the
man was a dangerous communist agent, and he would be ar-
rested. Through their liaison arrangement with the police,
Agency case officers would be able to watch and even guide the
course of the interrogation. In this way, they could answer
many of their questions about hypnosis on a live guinea pig
who believed his life was in danger. Specifically, the men from
ARTICHOKE wanted to know how well hypnotic amnesia held
up against torture. Could the amnesia be broken with drugs?
One document noted that the Agency could even send in a new
hypnotist to try his hand at cracking through the commands of
the first one. Perhaps the most cynical part of the whole scheme
came at the end of the proposal: "In the event that the agent
should break down and admit his connection with US intelli-
gence, we a) deny this absolutely and advise the agent's dis-
posal, or b) indicate that the agent may have been dispatched
by some other organ of US intelligence and that we should
thereafter run the agent jointly with [the local intelligence ser-
vice]."
An ARTICHOKE team was scheduled to carry out field tests
along these lines in the summer of 1954. The planning got to an
advanced stage, with the ARTICHOKE command center in
Washington cabling overseas for the "time, place, and bodies
available for terminal experiments." Then another cable com-
plained of the "diminishing numbers" of subjects available for

186    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
these tests. At this point, the available record becomes very
fuzzy. The minutes of an ARTICHOKE working group meeting
indicate that a key Agency official—probably the station chief
in the country where the experiments were going to take place
—had second thoughts. One participant at the meeting, obvi-
ously rankled by the obstructionism, said if this nay-sayer did
not change his attitude, ARTICHOKE officials would have the
Director himself order the official to go along.
Although short-term interrogations of unwitting subjects
with drugs and hypnosis (the "A" treatment) continued, the
more complicated tests apparently never did get going under
the ARTICHOKE banner. By the end of the year, 1954, Allen
Dulles took the behavioral-research function away from Morse
Allen and gave it to Sid Gottlieb and the men from MKULTRA.
Allen had directly pursued the goal of creating a Manchurian
Candidate, which he clearly believed was possible. MKULTRA
officials were just as interested in finding ways to assert control
over people, but they had much less faith in the frontal-assault
approach pushed by Allen. For them, finding the Manchurian
Candidate became a figurative exercise. They did not give up
the dream. They simply pursued it in smaller steps, always
hoping to increase the percentages in their favor. John Git-
tinger, the MKULTRA case officer on hypnosis, states, "Predict-
able absolute control is not possible on a particular individual.
Any psychologist, psychiatrist, or preacher can get control over
certain kinds of individuals, but that's not a predictable, defi-
nite thing." Gittinger adds that despite his belief to this effect,
he felt he had to give "a fair shake" to people who wanted to
try out ideas to the contrary.
Gottlieb and his colleagues had already been doing hypnosis
research for two years. They did a few basic experiments in the
office, as Morse Allen did, but they farmed out most of the work
to a young Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota,
Alden Sears. Sears, who later moved his CIA study project to the
University of Denver, worked with student subjects to define
the nature of hypnosis. Among many other things, he looked
into several of the areas that would be building blocks in the
creation of a Manchurian Candidate. Could a hypnotist induce
a totally separate personality? Could a subject be sent on mis-
sions he would not remember unless cued by the hypnotist?
Sears, who has since become a Methodist minister, refused to
talk about methods he experimented with to build second iden-

HYPNOSIS    187
titles.* By 1957, he wrote that the experiments that needed to be
done "could not be handled in the University situation." Unlike
Morse Allen, he did not want to perform the terminal experi-
ments.
Milton Kline, a New York psychologist who says he also did
not want to cross the ethical line but is sure the intelligence
agencies have, served as an unpaid consultant to Sears and
other CIA hypnosis research. Nothing Sears or others found
disabused him of the idea that the Manchurian Candidate is
possible. "It cannot be done by everyone," says Kline, "It cannot
be done consistently, but it can be done."
A onetime president of the American Society for Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis, Kline was one of many outside experts
to whom Gittinger and his colleagues talked. Other consultants,
with equally impressive credentials, rejected Kline's views. In
no other area of the behavioral sciences was there so little
accord on basic questions. "You could find an expert who would
agree with everything," says Gittinger. "Therefore, we tried to
get everybody."
The MKULTRA men state that they got too many unsolicited
suggestions on how to use hypnosis in covert operations. "The
operators would ask us for easy solutions," recalls a veteran.
"We therefore kept a laundry list of why they couldn't have
what they wanted. We spent a lot of time telling some young kid
whose idea we had heard a hundred times why it wouldn't
work. We would wind up explaining why you couldn't have a
free lunch." This veteran mentions an example: CIA operators
put a great deal of time and money into servicing "dead drops"
(covert mail pickup points, such as a hollow tree) in the Soviet
Union. If a collector was captured, he was likely to give away
the locations. Therefore Agency men suggested that TSS find a
way to hypnotize these secret mailmen, so they could withstand
interrogation and even torture if arrested.
Morse Allen had wanted to perform the "terminal experi-
ment" to see if a hypnotically induced amnesia would stand up
to torture. Gittinger says that as far as he knows, this experi-
*Sears still maintains the fiction that he thought he was dealing only with a
private foundation, the Geschickter Fund, and that he knew nothing of the CIA
involvement in funding his work. Yet a CIA document in his MKULTRA suh-
project says he was "aware of the real purpose" of the project." Moreover, Sid
Gottlieb brought him to Washington in 1954 to demonstrate hypnosis to a select
group of Agency officials.

188    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
ment was never carried out. "I still like to think we were
human beings enough that this was not something we played
with," says Gittinger. Such an experiment could have been per-
formed, as Allen suggested, by friendly police in a country like
Taiwan or Paraguay. CIA men did at least discuss joint work in
hypnosis with a foreign secret service in 1962.* Whether they
went further simply cannot be said.
Assuming the amnesia would hold, the MKULTRA veteran
says the problem was how to trigger it. Perhaps the Russian
phrase meaning "You're under arrest" could be used as a pre-
programmed cue, but what if the police did not use these words
as they captured the collector? Perhaps the physical sensation
of handcuffs being snapped on could do it, but a metal watch-
band could have the same effect. According to the veteran, in
the abstract, the scheme sounded fine, but in practicality, a
foolproof way of triggering the amnesia could not be found.
"You had to accept that when someone is caught, they're going
to tell some things," he says.
MKULTRA officials, including Gittinger, did recommend the
use of hypnosis in operational experiments on at least one occa-
sion. In 1959 an important double agent, operating outside his
homeland, told his Agency case officer that he was afraid to go
home again because he did not think he could withstand the
tough interrogation that his government used on returning
overseas agents. In Washington, the operators approached the
TSS men about using hypnosis, backed up with drugs, to
change the agent's attitude. They hoped they could instill in
him the "ability or the necessary will" to hold up under ques-
tioning.
An MKULTRA official—almost certainly Gittinger—held a
series of meetings over a two-week period with the operators
and wrote that the agent was "a better than average" hypnotic
subject, but that his goal was to get out of intelligence work:
The agent "probably can be motivated to make at least one
return visit to his homeland by application of any one of a
*Under my Freedom of Information suit, the CIA specifically denied access to
the documents concerning the testing of hypnosis and psychedelic drugs in
cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies. The justification given was that
releasing such documents would reveal intelligence sources and methods,
which are exempted by law. The hypnosis experiment was never carried out,
according to the generic description of the document which the Agency had to
provide in explaining why it had to be withheld.

HYPNOSIS    189
number of techniques, including hypnosis, but he may redefect
in the process." The MKULTRA official continued that hypno-
sis probably could not produce an "operationally useful" de-
gree of amnesia for the events of the recent past or for the
hypnotic treatment itself that the agent "probably has the na-
tive ability to withstand ordinary interrogation . . . provided it
is to his advantage to do so."
The MKULTRA office recommended that despite the rela-
tively negative outlook for the hypnosis, the Agency should
proceed anyway. The operation had the advantage of having a
"fail-safe" mechanism because the level of hypnosis could be
tested out before the agent actually had to return. Moreover, the
MKULTRA men felt "that a considerable amount of useful
experience can be gained from this operation which could be
used to improve Agency capability in future applications." In
effect, they would be using hypnosis not as the linchpin of the
operation, but as an adjunct to help motivate the agent.
Since the proposed operation involved the use of hypnosis
and drugs, final approval could only be given by the high-level
Clandestine Services committee set up for this purpose and
chaired by Richard Helms. Permission was not forthcoming.
In June 1960 TSS officials launched an expanded program of
operational experiments in hypnosis in cooperation with the
Agency's Counterintelligence Staff. The legendary James An-
gleton—the prototype for the title character Saxonton in Aaron
Latham's Orchids for Mother and for Wellington in Victor
Marchetti's The Rope Dancer—headed Counterintelligence,
which took on some of the CIA's most sensitive missions (in-
cluding the illegal Agency spying against domestic dissidents).
Counterintelligence officials wrote that the hypnosis program
could provide a "potential breakthrough in clandestine tech-
nology." Their arrangement with TSS was that the MKULTRA
men would develop the technique in the laboratory, while they
took care of "field experimentation."
The Counterintelligence program had three goals: (1) to in-
duce hypnosis very rapidly in unwitting subjects; (2) to create
durable amnesia; and (3) to implant durable and operationally
useful posthypnotic suggestion. The Agency released no infor-
mation on any "field experimentation" of the latter two goals,
which of course are the building blocks of the Manchurian
Candidate. Agency officials provided only one heavily censored
document on the first goal, rapid induction.

190    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
In October 1960 the MKULTRA program invested $9,000 in
an outside consultant to develop a way of quickly hypnotizing
an unwitting subject. John Gittinger says the process consisted
of surprising "somebody sitting in a chair, putting your hands
on his forehead, and telling the guy to go to sleep." The method
worked "fantastically" on certain people, including some on
whom no other technique was effective, and not on others. "It
wasn't that predictable," notes Gittinger, who states he knows
nothing about the field testing.
The test, noted in that one released document, did not take
place until July 1963—a full three years after the Counterintel-
ligence experimental program began, during which interval
the Agency is claiming that no other field experiments took
place. According to a CIA man who participated in this test, the
Counterintelligence Staff in Washington asked the CIA station
in Mexico City to find a suitable candidate for a rapid induction
experiment. The station proposed a low-level agent, whom the
Soviets had apparently doubled. A Counterintelligence man
flew in from Washington and a hypnotic consultant arrived
from California. Our source and a fellow case officer brought
the agent to a motel room on a pretext. "I puffed him up with
his importance," says the Agency man. "I said the bosses
wanted to see him and of course give him more money." Wait-
ing in an adjoining room was the hypnotic consultant. At a
prearranged time, the two case officers gently grabbed hold of
the agent and tipped his chair over until the back was touching
the floor. The consultant was supposed to rush in at that precise
moment and apply the technique. Nothing happened. The con-
sultant froze, unable to do the deed. "You can imagine what we
had to do to cover-up," says the official, who was literally left
holding the agent. "We explained we had heard a noise, got
excited, and tipped him down to protect him. He was so grubby
for money he would have believed any excuse."
There certainly is a huge difference between the limited aim
of this bungled operation and one aimed at building a Man-
churian Candidate. The MKULTRA veteran maintains that he
and his colleagues were not interested in a programmed assas-
sin because they knew in general it would not work and, specifi-
cally, that they could not exert total control. "If you have one
hundred percent control, you have one hundred percent depen-
dency," he says. "If something happens and you haven't pro-
grammed it in, you've got a problem. If you try to put flexibility

HYPNOSIS    191
in, you lose control. To the extent you let the agent choose, you
don't have control." He admits that he and his colleagues spent
hours running the arguments on the Manchurian Candidate
back and forth. "Castro was naturally our discussion point," he
declares. "Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they
would go in and get him?" In the end, he states, they decided
there were more reliable ways to kill people. "You can get ex-
actly the same thing from people who are hypnotizable by
many other ways, and you can't get anything out of people who
are not hypnotizable, so it has no use," says Gittinger.
The only real gain in employing a hypnotized killer would be,
in theory, that he would not remember who ordered him to pull
the trigger. Yet, at least in the Castro case, the Cuban leader
already knew who was after him. Moreover, there were plenty
of people around willing to take on the Castro contract. "A
well-trained person could do it without all this mumbo-jumbo,"
says the MKULTRA veteran. By going to the Mafia for hitmen,
CIA officials in any case found killers who had a built-in amne-
sia mechanism that had nothing to do with hypnosis.*
The MKULTRA veteran gives many reasons why he believes
the CIA never actually tried a Manchurian Candidate opera-
tion, but he acknowledges that he does not know.^ If the ulti-
mate experiments were performed, they would have been han-
dled with incredible secrecy. It would seem, however, that the
same kind of reasoning that impelled Sid Gottlieb to recom-
mend testing powerful drugs on unwitting subjects would have
led to experimentation along such lines, if not to create the
Manchurian Candidate itself, on some of the building blocks,
*Referring to this CIA-mob relationship, author Robert Sam Anson has writ-
ten, "It was inevitable: Gentlemen wishing to be killers gravitated to killers
wishing to be gentlemen."
^The veteran admits that none of the arguments he uses against a conditioned
assassin would apply to a programmed "patsy" whom a hypnotist could walk
through a series of seemingly unrelated events—a visit to a store, a conversa-
tion with a mailman, picking a fight at a political rally. The subject would
remember everything that happened to him and be amnesic only for the fact
the hypnotist ordered him to do these things. There would be no gaping incon-
sistency in his life of the sort that can ruin an attempt by a hypnotist to create
a second personality. The purpose of this exercise is to leave a circumstantial
trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular
crime. The weakness might well be that the amnesia would not hold up under
police interrogation, but that would not matter if the police did not believe his
preposterous story about being hypnotized or if he were shot resisting arrest.
Hypnosis expert Milton Kline says he could create a patsy in three months; an
assassin would take him six.

192    SPELLS—ELECTRODES AND HYPNOSIS
or lesser antisocial acts. Even if the MKULTRA men did not
think hypnosis would work operationally, they had not let that
consideration prevent them from trying out numerous other
techniques. The MKULTRA chief could even have used a de-
fensive rationale: He had to find out if the Russians could plant
a "sleeper" killer in our midst, just as Richard Condon's novel
discussed.
If the assassin scenario seemed exaggerated, Gottlieb still
would have wanted to know what other uses the Russians
might try. Certainly, he could have found relatively "expend-
able" subjects, as he and Morse Allen had for other behavior-
control experiments. And even if the MKULTRA men really
did restrain themselves, it is unlikely that James Angleton and
his counterintelligence crew would have acted in such a lim-
ited fashion when they felt they were on the verge of a "break-
through in clandestine technology."

PART
IV
CONCLUSIONS
I'm a professional and I just don't talk
about these things. Lots of things are not fit
for the public. This has nothing to do with
democracy.  It has to do with common
sense.	—gration h. yasetevitch, 1978
(explaining why he did not want to be
interviewed for this book)
To hope that the power that is being made
available by the behavioral sciences will
be exercised by the scientists, or by a be-
nevolent group, seems to me to be a hope
little supported by either recent or distant
history. It seems far more likely that be-
havioral scientists, holding their present
attitudes, will be in the position of the Ger-
man rocket scientists specializing in
guided missiles. First they worked devot-
edly for Hitler to destroy the USSR and the
United States. Now, depending on who cap-
tured them they work devotedly for the
USSR in the interest of destroying the
United States, or devotedly for the United
States in the interest of destroying the
USSR. If behavioral scientists are con-
cerned solely with advancing their science,
it seems most probable that they will serve
the purpose of whatever group has the
power.	—carl rogers, 1961

CHAPTER
12
THE SEARCH
FOR THE TRUTH

Sid Gottlieb was one of many CIA officials who tried to find a
way to assassinate Fidel Castro. Castro survived, of course, and
his victory over the Agency in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs put
the Agency in the headlines for the first time, in a very unfavor-
able light. Among the fiasco's many consequences was Gott-
lieb's loss of the research part of the CIA's behavior-control
programs. Still, he and the others kept trying to kill Castro.
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy re-
portedly vowed to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces. In
the end, he settled for firing Allen Dulles and his top deputies.
To head the Agency, which lost none of its power, Kennedy
brought in John McCone, a defense contractor and former head
of the Atomic Energy Commission. With no operational back-
ground, McCone had a different notion than Dulles of how to
manage the CIA, particularly in the scientific area. "McCone
never felt akin to the covert way of doing things," recalls Ray
Cline, whom the new Director made his Deputy for Intelli-
gence. McCone apparently believed that science should be in
the hands of the scientists, not the clandestine operators, and
he brought in a fellow Californian, an aerospace "whiz kid"
named Albert "Bud" Wheelon to head a new Agency Director-
ate for Science and Technology.
Before then, the Technical Services Staff (TSS), although
located in the Clandestine Services, had been the Agency's larg-

196    CONCLUSIONS
est scientific component. McCone decided to strip TSS of its
main research functions—including the behavioral one—and
let it concentrate solely on providing operational support. In
1962 he approved a reorganization of TSS that brought in Sey-
mour Russell, a tough covert operator, as the new chief. "The
idea was to get a close interface with operations," recalls an
ex-CIA man. Experienced TSS technicians remained as depu-
ties to the incoming field men, and the highest deputyship in
all TSS went to Sid Gottlieb, who became number-two man
under Russell. For Gottlieb, this was another significant promo-
tion helped along by his old friend Richard Helms, whom
McCone had elevated to be head of the Clandestine Services.
In his new job, Gottlieb kept control of MKULTRA. Yet, in
order to comply with McCone's command on research pro-
grams, Gottlieb had to preside over the partial dismantling of
his own program. The loss was not as difficult as it might have
been, because, after 10 years of exploring the frontiers of the
mind, Gottlieb had a clear idea of what worked and what did
not in the behavioral field. Those areas that still were in the
research stage tended to be extremely esoteric and technical,
and Gottlieb must have known that if the Science Directorate
scored any breakthroughs, he would be brought back into the
picture immediately to apply the advances to covert operations.
"Sid was not the kind of bureaucrat who wanted to hold on
to everything at all costs," recalls an admiring colleague. Gott-
lieb carefully pruned the MKULTRA lists, turning over to the
Science Directorate the exotic subjects that showed no short-
term operational promise and keeping for himself those psy-
chological, chemical, and biological programs that had already
passed the research stage. As previously stated, he moved John
Gittinger and the personality-assessment staff out of the
Human Ecology Society and kept them under TSS control in
their own proprietary company.
While Gottlieb was effecting these changes, his programs
were coming under attack from another quarter. In 1963 the
CIA Inspector General did the study that led to the suspension
of unwitting drug testing in the San Francisco and New York
safehouses. This was a blow to Gottlieb, who clearly intended
to hold on to this kind of research. At the same time, the Inspec-
tor General also recommended that Agency officials draft a new
charter for the whole MKULTRA program, which still was
exempt from most internal CIA controls. He found that many

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH    197
of the MKULTRA subprojects were of "insufficient sensitivity"
to justify bypassing the Agency's normal procedures for ap-
proving and storing records of highly classified programs.
Richard Helms, still the protector of unfettered behavioral re-
search, responded by agreeing that there should be a new char-
ter—on the condition that it be almost the same as the old one.
"The basic reasons for requesting waiver of standardized ad-
ministrative controls over these sensitive activities are as valid
today as they were in April, 1953," Helms wrote. Helms agreed
to such changes as having the CIA Director briefed on the
programs twice a year, but he kept the approval process within
his control and made sure that all the files would be retained
inside TSS. And as government officials so often do when they
do not wish to alter anything of substance, he proposed a new
name for the activity. In June 1964 MKULTRA became
MKSEARCH.*
Gottlieb acknowledged that security did not require transfer-
ring all the surviving MKULTRA subprojects over to
MKSEARCH. He moved 18 subprojects back into regular
Agency funding channels, including ones dealing with the
sneezing powders, stink bombs, and other "harassment sub-
stances." TSS officials had encouraged the development of
these as a way to make a target physically uncomfortable and
hence to cause short-range changes in his behavior.
Other MKULTRA subprojects dealt with ways to maximize
stress on whole societies. Just as Gittinger's Personality Assess-
ment System provided a psychological road map for exploiting
an individual's weaknesses, CIA "destabilization" plans pro-
vided guidelines for destroying the internal integrity of target
countries like Castro's Cuba or Allende's Chile. Control—
whether of individuals or nations—has been the Agency's main
business, and TSS officials supplied tools for the "macro" as
well as the "micro" attacks.
For example, under MKULTRA Subproject # 143, the Agency
gave Dr. Edward Bennett of the University of Houston about
$20,000 a year to develop bacteria to sabotage petroleum pro-
*At 1977 Senate hearings, CIA Director Stansfield Turner summed up some of
MKULTRA's accomplishments over its 11-year existence: The program con-
tracted out work to 80 institutions, which included 44 colleges or universities,
15 research facilities or private companies, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal
institutions. I estimate that MKULTRA cost the taxpayers somewhere in the
neighborhood of $10 million.

198    CONCLUSIONS
ducts. Bennett found a substance that, when added to oil, fouled
or destroyed any engine into which it was poured. CIA opera-
tors used exactly this kind of product in 1967 when they sent a
sabotage team made up of Cuban exiles into France to pollute
a shipment of lubricants bound for Cuba. The idea was that the
tainted oil would "grind out motors and cause breakdowns,"
says an Agency man directly involved. This operation, which
succeeded, was part of a worldwide CIA effort that lasted
through the 1960s into the 1970s to destroy the Cuban econ-
omy.* Agency officials reasoned, at least in the first years, that
it would be easier to overthrow Castro if Cubans could be made
unhappy with their standard of living. "We wanted to keep
bread out of the stores so people were hungry," says the CIA
man who was assigned to anti-Castro operations. "We wanted
to keep rationing in effect and keep leather out, so people got
only one pair of shoes every 18 months."
Leaving this broader sort of program out of the new struc-
ture, Gottlieb regrouped the most sensitive behavioral activi-
ties under the MKSEARCH umbrella. He chose to continue
seven projects, and the ones he picked give a good indication of
those parts of MKULTRA that Gottlieb considered important
enough to save. These included none of the sociological studies,
nor the search for a truth drug. Gottlieb put the emphasis on
chemical and biological substances—not because he thought
these could be used to turn men into robots, but because he
valued them for their predictable ability to disorient, discredit,
injure, or kill people. He kept active two private labs to produce
such substances, funded consultants who had secure ways to
*This economic sabotage program started in 1961, and the chain of command
"ran up to the President," according to Kennedy adviser Richard Goodwin. On
the CIA side, Agency Director John McCone "was very strong on it," says his
former deputy Ray Cline. Cline notes that McCone had the standing orders to
all CIA stations abroad rewritten to include "a sentence or two" authorizing a
continuing program to disrupt the Cuban economy. Cuba's trade thus became
a standing target for Agency operators, and with the authority on the books,
CIA officials apparently never went back to the White House for renewed ap-
proval after Kennedy died, in Cline's opinion. Three former Assistant Secretar-
ies of State in the Johnson and Nixon administrations say the sabotage, which
included everything from driving down the price of Cuban sugar to tampering
with cane-cutting equipment, was not brought to their attention. Former CIA
Director William Colby states that the Agency finally stopped the economic
sabotage program in the early 1970s. Cuban government officials counter that
CIA agents were still working to create epidemics among Cuban cattle in 1973
and that as of spring 1978, Agency men were committing acts of sabotage
against cargo destined for Cuba.

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH    199
test them and ready access to subjects, and maintained a fund-
ing conduit to pass money on to these other contractors. Here
are the seven surviving MKSEARCH subprojects:
•	First on the TSS list was the safehouse program for drug
testing run by George White and others in the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics. Even in 1964, Gottlieb and Helms had not given
up hope that unwitting experiments could be resumed, and the
Agency paid out $30,000 that year to keep the safehouses open.
In the meantime, something was going on at the "pad"—or at
least George White kept on sending the CIA vouchers for
unorthodox expenses—$1,100 worth in February 1965 alone
under the old euphemism for prostitutes, "undercover agents
for operations." What White was doing with or to these agents
cannot be said, but he kept the San Francisco operation active
right up until the time it finally closed in June. Gottlieb did not
give up on the New York safehouse until the following year.*
•	MKSEARCH Subproject #2 involved continuing a $150,000-
a-year contract with a Baltimore biological laboratory. This
lab, run by at least one former CIA germ expert, gave TSS "a
quick-delivery capability to meet anticipated future opera-
tional needs," according to an Agency document. Among other
things, it provided a private place for "large-scale production
of microorganisms." The Agency was paying the Army Biologi-
cal Laboratory at Fort Detrick about $100,000 a year for the
same services. With its more complete facilities, Fort Detrick
could be used to create and package more esoteric bacteria, but
Gottlieb seems to have kept the Baltimore facility going in
order to have a way of producing biological weapons without
the Army's germ warriors knowing about it. This secrecy-with-
in-secrecy was not unusual when TSS men were dealing with
subjects as sensitive as infecting targets with diseases. Except
on the most general level, no written records were kept on the
*In 1967 a Senate committee chaired by Senator Edward Long was inquiring
into wiretapping by government agencies, including the Narcotics Bureau. The
Commissioner of Narcotics, then Harry Giordano told a senior TSS man—
almost certainly Gottlieb—that if CIA officials were "concerned" about its deal-
ings with the Bureau involving the safehouses coming out during the hearings,
the most "helpful thing" they could do would be to "turn the Long committee
off." How the CIA men reacted to this not very subtle blackmail attempt is
unclear from the documents, but what does come out is that the TSS man and
another top-level CIA officer misled and lied to the top echelon of the Treasury
Department (the Narcotics Bureau's parent organization) about the safehouses
and how they were used.

200    CONCLUSIONS
subject. Whenever an operational unit in the Agency asked TSS
about obtaining a biological weapon, Gottlieb or his aides auto-
matically turned down the request unless the head of the Clan-
destine Services had given his prior approval. Gottlieb handled
these operational needs personally, and during the early 1960s
(when CIA assassination attempts probably were at their peak)
even Gottlieb's boss, the TSS chief, was not told what was hap-
pening.
•	With his biological arsenal assured, Gottlieb also secured his
chemical flank in MKSEARCH. Another subproject continued
a relationship set up in 1959 with a prominent industrialist
who headed a complex of companies, including one that cus-
tom-manufactured rare chemicals for pharmaceutical produc-
ers. This man, whom on several occasions CIA officials gave
$100 bills to pay for his products, was able to perform specific
lab jobs for the Agency without consulting with his board of
directors. In 1960 he supplied the Agency with 3 kilos (6.6
pounds) of a deadly carbamate—the same poison OSS's Stanley
Lovell tried to use against Hitler.* This company president also
was useful to the Agency because he was a ready source of
information on what was going on in the chemical world. The
chemical services he offered, coupled with his biological coun-
terpart, gave the CIA the means to wage "instant" chemical and
biological attacks—a capability that was frequently used, judg-
ing by the large numbers of receipts and invoices that the CIA
released under the Freedom of Information Act.
•	With new chemicals and drugs constantly coming to their
attention through their continuing relations with the major
pharmaceutical companies, TSS officials needed places to test
them, particularly after the safehouses closed. Dr. James
Hamilton, the San Francisco psychiatrist who worked with
George White in the original OSS marijuana days, provided a
way. He became MKSEARCH Subproject #3.
Hamilton had joined MKULTRA in its earliest days and had
been used as a West Coast supervisor for Gottlieb and company.
Hamilton was one of the renaissance men of the program,
working on everything from psychochemicals to kinky sex to
carbon-dioxide inhalation. By the early 1960s, he had arranged
*James Moore of the University of Delaware, who also produced carbamates
when he was not seeking the magic mushroom, served at times as an interme-
diary between the industrialist and the CIA.

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH   201
to get access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at
Vacaville.* Hamilton worked through a nonprofit research in-
stitute connected to the Facility to carry out, as a document puts
it, "clinical testing of behavioral control materials" on inmates.
Hamilton's job was to provide "answers to specific questions
and solutions to specific problems of direct interest to the
Agency." In a six-month span in 1967 and 1968, the psychiatrist
spent over $10,000 in CIA funds simply to pay volunteers—
which at normal rates meant he experimented on between 400
to 1,000 inmates in that time period alone.
•	Another MKSEARCH subproject provided $20,000 to $25,000
a year to Dr. Carl Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer's Agency connection went
back to 1951, when he headed the Pharmacology Department
at the University of Illinois Medical School. He then moved to
Emory University and tested LSD and other drugs on inmates
of the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, From there, he moved to
New Jersey, where he continued drug experiments on the pris-
oners  at  the  Bordentown  reformatory.   An  internationally
known pharmacologist, Pfeiffer provided the MKSEARCH pro-
gram with data on the preparation, use, and effect of drugs. He
was readily available if Gottlieb or a colleague wanted a study
made of the properties of a particular substance, and like most
of TSS's contractors, he also was an intelligence source. Pfeiffer
was useful in this last capacity during the latter part of the
1960s because he sat on the Food and Drug Administration
committee that allocated LSD for scientific research in the
United States. By this time, LSD was so widely available on the
black market that the Federal Government had replaced the
CIA's informal controls of the 1950s with laws and procedures
forbidding all but the most strictly regulated research. With
Pfeiffer on the governing committee, the CIA could keep up its
traditional role of monitoring above-ground LSD experimenta-
tion around the United States.
•	To cover some of the more exotic behavioral fields, another
MKSEARCH program continued TSS's relationship with Dr.
Maitland Baldwin, the brain surgeon at the National Institutes
of Health who had been so willing in 1955 to perform "terminal
experiments" in sensory deprivation for Morse Allen and the
'During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that every radical on the West
Coast was saying that the CIA was up to strange things in behavior modifica-
tion at Vacaville. Like many of yesterday's conspiracy theories, this one turned
out to be true.

202    CONCLUSIONS
ARTICHOKE program. After Allen was pushed aside by the
men from MKULTRA, the new TSS team hired Baldwin as a
consultant. According to one of them, he was full of bright ideas
on how to control behavior, but they were wary of him because
he was such an "eager beaver" with an obvious streak of "crazi-
ness." Under TSS auspices, Baldwin performed lobotomies on
apes and then put these simian subjects into sensory depriva-
tion—presumably in the same "box" he had built himself at
NIH and then had to repair after a desperate soldier kicked his
way out. There is no information available on whether Baldwin
extended this work to humans, although he did discuss with an
outside consultant how lobotomized patients reacted to pro-
longed isolation. Like Hamilton, Baldwin was a jack-of-all
trades who in one experiment beamed radio frequency energy
directly at the brain of a chimpanzee and in another cut off one
monkey's head and tried to transplant it to the decapitated body
of another monkey. Baldwin used $250 in Agency money to buy
his own electroshock machine, and he did some kind of un-
specified work at a TSS safehouse that caused the CIA to shell
out $1450 to renovate and repair the place.
• The last MKSEARCH subproject covered the work of Dr.
Charles Geschickter, who served TSS both as researcher and
funding conduit. CIA documents show that Geschickter tested
powerful drugs on mental defectives and terminal cancer pa-
tients, apparently at the Georgetown University Hospital in
Washington. In all, the Agency put $655,000 into Geschickter's
research on knockout drugs, stress-producing chemicals, and
mind-altering substances. Nevertheless, the doctor's principal
service to TSS officials seems to have been putting his family
foundation at the disposal of the CIA—both to channel funds
and to serve as a source of cover to Agency operators. About $2.1
million flowed through this tightly controlled foundation to
other researchers.* Under MKSEARCH, Geschickter continued
*Geschickter was an extremely important TSS asset with connections in high
places. In 1955 he convinced Agency officials to contribute $375,000 in secret
funds toward the construction of a new research building at Georgetown Uni-
versity Hospital. (Since this money seemed to be coming from private sources,
unwitting Federal bureaucrats doubled it under the matching grant program
for hospital construction.) The Agency men had a clear understanding with
Geschickter that in return for their contribution, he would make sure they
received use of one-sixth of the beds and total space in the facility for their own
"hospital safehouse." They then would have a ready source of "human patients
and volunteers for experimental use," according to a CIA document, and the

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH    203
to provide TSS with a means to assess drugs rapidly, and he
branched out into trying to knock out monkeys with radar
waves to the head (a technique which worked but risked frying
vital parts of the brain). The Geschickter Fund for Medical
Research remained available as a conduit until 1967.*
As part of the effort to keep finding new substances to test
within MKSEARCH, Agency officials continued their search
for magic mushrooms, leaves, roots, and barks. In 1966, with
considerable CIA backing, J. C. King, the former head of the
Agency's Western Hemisphere Division who was eased out
after the Bay of Pigs, formed an ostensibly private firm called
Amazon Natural Drug Company. King, who loved to float down
jungle rivers on the deck of his houseboat with a glass of scotch
in hand, searched the backwaters of South America for plants
of interest to the Agency and/or medical science. To do the
work, he hired Amazon men and women, plus at least two CIA
paramilitary operators who worked out of Amazon offices in
Iquitos, Peru. They shipped back to the United States finds that
included Chondodendron toxicoferum, a paralytic agent
which is "absolutely lethal in high doses," according to Dr.
Timothy Plowman, a Harvard botanist who like most of the
staff was unwitting of the CIA involvement. Another plant that
was collected and grown by Amazon employees was the hallu-
cinogen known as yage, which author William Burroughs has
described as "the final fix."
MKSEARCH went on through the 1960s and into the early
1970s, but with a steadily decreasing budget. In 1964 it cost the
research program in the building would provide cover for up to three TSS staff
members. Allen Dulles personally approved the contribution and then, to make
sure, he took it to President Eisenhower's special committee to review covert
operations. The committee also gave its assent, with the understanding that
Geschickter could provide "a reasonable expectation" that the Agency would
indeed have use of the space he promised. He obviously did, because the CIA
money was forthcoming. (This, incidentally, was the only time in a whole
quarter-century of Agency behavior-control activities when the documents
show that CIA officials went to the White House for approval of anything. The
Church committee found no evidence that either the executive branch or Con-
gress was informed of the programs.)
*In 1967, after Ramparts magazine exposed secret CIA funding of the National
Student Association and numerous nonprofit organizations, President Johnson
forbade CIA support of foundations or educational institutions. Inside the
Agency there was no notion that this order meant ending relationships, such
as the one with Geschickter. In his case, the agile CIA men simply transferred
the funding from the foundation to a private company, of which his son was
the secretary-treasurer.

204    CONCLUSIONS
Agency about $250,000. In 1972 it was down to four subprojects
and $110,000. Gottlieb was a very busy man by then, having
taken over all TSS in 1967 when his patron, Richard Helms
finally made it to the top of the Agency. In June 1972 Gottlieb
decided to end MKSEARCH, thus bringing down the curtain on
the quest he himself had started two decades before. He wrote
this epitaph for the program:
As a final commentary, I would like to point out that, by means
of Project MKSEARCH, the Clandestine Service has been able to
maintain contact with the leading edge of developments in the
field of biological and chemical control of human behavior. It
has become increasingly obvious over the last several years that
this general area had less and less relevance to current clandes-
tine operations. The reasons for this are many and complex, but
two of them are perhaps worth mentioning briefly. On the scien-
tific side, it has become very clear that these materials and tech-
niques are too unpredictable in their effect on individual human
beings, under specific circumstances, to be operationally useful.
Our operations officers, particularly the emerging group of new
senior operations officers, have shown a discerning and perhaps
commendable distaste for utilizing these materials and tech-
niques. They seem to realize that, in addition to moral and ethi-
cal considerations, the extreme sensitivity and security con-
straints of such operations effectively rule them out.
About the time Gottlieb wrote these words, the Watergate
break-in occurred, setting in train forces that would alter his
life and that of Richard Helms. A few months later, Richard
Nixon was re-elected. Soon after the election, Nixon, for rea-
sons that have never been explained, decided to purge Helms.
Before leaving to become Ambassador to Iran, Helms presided
over a wholesale destruction of documents and tapes—presum-
ably to minimize information that might later be used against
him. Sid Gottlieb decided to follow Helms into retirement, and
the two men mutually agreed to get rid of all the documentary
traces of MKULTRA. They had never kept files on the safe-
house testing or similarly sensitive operations in the first place,
but they were determined to erase the existing records of their
search to control human behavior. Gottlieb later told a Senate
committee that he wanted to get rid of the material because of

THE SEARCH FOR THE TR UTH   205
a "burgeoning paper problem" within the Agency, because the
files were of "no constructive use" and might be "misunder-
stood," and because he wanted to protect the reputations of the
researchers with whom he had collaborated on the assurance
of secrecy. Gottlieb got in touch with the men who had physical
custody of the records, the Agency's archivists, who proceeded
to destroy what he and Helms thought were the only traces of
the program. They made a mistake, however—or the archivists
did. Seven boxes of substantive records and reports were in-
cinerated, but seven more containing invoices and financial
records survived—apparently due to misfiling.
Nixon named James Schlesinger to be the new head of the
Agency, a post in which he stayed only a few months before the
increasingly beleaguered President moved him over to be Sec-
retary of Defense at the height of Watergate. During his short
stop at CIA, Schlesinger sent an order to all Agency employees
asking them to let his office know about any instances where
Agency officials might have carried out any improper or illegal
actions. Somebody mentioned Frank Olson's suicide, and it was
duly included in the many hundreds of pages of misdeeds re-
ported which became known within the CIA as the "family
jewels."
Schlesinger, an outsider to the career CIA operators, had
opened a Pandora's box that the professionals never managed
to shut again. Samples of the "family jewels" were slipped out
to New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh, who created a
national furor in December 1974 when he wrote about the
CIA's illegal spying on domestic dissidents during the Johnson
and Nixon years. President Gerald Ford appointed a commis-
sion headed by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller to investi-
gate the past CIA abuses—and to limit the damage. Included in
the final Rockefeller report was a section on how an unnamed
Department of the Army employee had jumped out of a New
York hotel window after Agency men had slipped him LSD.
That revelation made headlines around the country. The press
seized upon the sensational details and virtually ignored two
even more revealing sentences buried in the Rockefeller text:
"The drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to
study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other
studies explored the effects of radiation, electric-shock, psy-
chology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances."
At this point, I entered the story. I was intrigued by those two

206    CONCLUSIONS
sentences, and I filed a Freedom of Information request with
the CIA to obtain all the documents the Agency had furnished
the Rockefeller Commission on behavior control. Although the
law requires a government agency to respond within 10 days,
it took the Agency more than a year to send me the first 50
documents on the subject, which turned out to be heavily cen-
sored.
In the meantime, the committee headed by Senator Frank
Church was looking into the CIA, and it called in Sid Gottlieb,
who was then spending his retirement working as a volunteer
in a hospital in India. Gottlieb secretly testified about CIA as-
sassination programs. (In describing his role in its final report,
the Church Committee used a false name, "Victor Scheider.")
Asked about the behavioral-control programs, Gottlieb appar-
ently could not—or would not—remember most of the details.
The committee had almost no documents to work with, since
the main records had been destroyed in 1973 and the financial
files had not yet been found.
The issue lay dormant until 1977, when, about June 1, CIA
officials notified my lawyers that they had found the 7 boxes of
MKULTRA financial records and that they would send me the
releasable portions over the following months. As I waited, CIA
Director Stansfield Turner notified President Carter and then
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that an Agency
official had located the 7 boxes. Admiral Turner publicly de-
scribed MKULTRA as only a program of drug experimentation
and not one aimed at behavior control. On July 20 I held a press
conference at which I criticized Admiral Turner for his several
distortions in describing the MKULTRA program. To prove my
various points, I released to the reporters a score of the CIA
documents that had already come to me and that gave the
flavor of the behavioral efforts. Perhaps it was a slow news day,
or perhaps people simply were interested in government at-
tempts to tamper with the mind. In any event, the documents
set off a media bandwagon that had the story reported on all
three network television news shows and practically every-
where else.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Senator
Edward Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Re-
search soon announced they would hold public hearings on the
subject. Both panels had looked into the secret research in 1975
but had been hampered by the lack of documents and forth-

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH    207
coming witnesses. At first the two committees agreed to work
together, and they held one joint hearing. Then, Senator Barry
Goldwater brought behind-the-scenes pressure to get the Intel-
ligence panel, of which he was vice-chairman, to drop out of
the proceedings. He claimed, among other things, that the com-
mittee was just rehashing old programs and that the time had
come to stop dumping on the CIA. Senator Kennedy plowed
ahead anyway. He was limited, however, by the small size of
the staff he assigned to the investigation, and his people were
literally buried in paper by CIA officials, who released 8,000
pages of documents in the weeks before the hearings. As the
hearings started, the staff still not had read everything—let
alone put it all in context.
As Kennedy's staff prepared for the public sessions, the for-
mer men from MKULTRA also got ready. According to one of
them, they agreed among themselves to "keep the inquiry
within bounds that would satisfy the committee." Specifically,
he says that meant volunteering no more information than the
Kennedy panel already had. Charles Siragusa, the narcotics
agent who ran the New York safehouse, reports he got a tele-
phone call during this period from Ray Treichler, the Stanford
Ph.D. who specialized in chemical warfare for the MKULTRA
program. "He wanted me to deny knowing about the safe-
house," says Siragusa. "He didn't want me to admit that he was
the guy. ... I said there was no way I could do that." Whether
any other ex-TSS men also suborned perjury cannot be said, but
several of them appear to have committed perjury at the hear-
ings.* As previously noted, Robert Lashbrook denied firsthand
knowledge of the safehouse operation when, in fact, he had
supervised one of the "pads" and been present, according to
George White's diary, at the time of an "LSD surprise" experi-
ment. Dr. Charles Geschickter testified he had not tested stress-
producing drugs on human subjects while both his own 1960
proposal to the Agency and the CIA's documents indicate the
opposite.
*Lying to Congress followed the pattern of lying to the press that some MKUL-
TRA veterans adopted after the first revelations came out. For example, former
Human Ecology Society director James Monroe told The New York Times on
August 2, 1977 that "only about 25 to 30 percent" of the Society's budget came
from the CIA—a statement he knew to be false since the actual figure was well
over 90 percent. His untruth allowed some other grantees to claim that their
particular project was funded out of the non-Agency part of the Society.

208    CONCLUSIONS
Despite the presence of a key aide who constantly cued him
during the hearings, Senator Kennedy was not prepared to deal
with these and other inconsistencies. He took no action to fol-
low up obviously perjured testimony, and he seemed content to
win headlines with reports of "The Gang That Couldn't Spray
Straight." Although that particular testimony had been set up
in advance by a Kennedy staffer, the Senator still managed to
act surprised when ex-MKULTRA official David Rhodes told of
the ill-fated LSD experiment at the Marin County safehouse.
The Kennedy hearings added little to the general state of
knowledge on the CIA's behavior-control programs. CIA offi-
cials, both past and present, took the position that basically
nothing of substance was learned during the 25-odd years of
research, the bulk of which had ended in 1963, and they were
not challenged. That proposition is, on its face, ridiculous, but
neither Senator Kennedy nor any other investigator has yet put
any real pressure on the Agency to reveal the content of the
research—what was actually learned—as opposed to the exper-
imental means of carrying it out. In this book, I have tried to
get at some of the substantive questions, but I have had access
to neither the scientific records, which Gottlieb and Helms de-
stroyed, nor the principal people involved. Gottlieb, for in-
stance, who moved from India to Santa Cruz, California and
then to parts unknown, turned down repeated requests to be
interviewed. "I am interested in very different matters than the
subject of your book these days," he wrote, "and do not have
either the time or the inclination to reprocess matters that hap-
pened a long time ago."
Faced with these obstacles, I have tried to weave together a
representative sample of what went on, but having dealt with
a group of people who regularly incorporated lying into their
daily work, I cannot be sure. I cannot be positive that they never
found a technique to control people, despite my definite bias in
favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipula-
tors. Only a congressional committee could compel truthful
testimony from people who have so far refused to be forthcom-
ing, and even Congress' record has not been good so far. A
determined investigative committee at least could make sure
that the people being probed do not determine the "bounds" of
the inquiry.
A new investigation would probably not be worth the effort
just to take another stab at MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE. De-

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH   209
spite my belief that there are some skeletons hidden—literally
—the public probably now knows the basic parameters of these
programs. The fact is, however, that CIA officials actively ex-
perimented with behavior-control methods for another decade
after Sid Gottlieb and company lost the research action. The
Directorate of Science and Technology—specifically its Office
of Research and Development (ORD)—did not remain idle
after Director McCone transferred the behavioral research
function in 1962.
In ORD, Dr. Stephen Aldrich, a graduate of Amherst and
Northwestern Medical School, took over the role that Morse
Allen and then Sid Gottlieb had played before him. Aldrich had
been the medical director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence
back in the days when that office was jockeying with Morse
Allen for control of ARTICHOKE, so he was no stranger to the
programs. Under his leadership, ORD officials kept probing for
ways to control human behavior, and they were doing so with
space-age technology that made the days of MKULTRA look
like the horse-and-buggy era. If man could get to the moon by
the end of the 1960s, certainly the well-financed scientists of
ORD could make a good shot at conquering inner space.
They brought their technology to bear on subjects like the
electric stimulation of the brain. John Lilly had done extensive
work in this field a decade earlier, before concluding that to
maintain his integrity he must find another field. CIA men had
no such qualms, however. They actively experimented with
placing electrodes in the brain of animals and—probably—
men. Then they used electric and radio signals to move their
subjects around. The field went far beyond giving monkeys
orgasms, as Lilly had done. In the CIA itself, Sid Gottlieb and
the MKULTRA crew had made some preliminary studies of it.
They started in 1960 by having a contractor search all the avail-
able literature, and then they had mapped out the parts of
animals' brains that produced reactions when stimulated. By
April 1961 the head of TSS was able to report "we now have a
'production capability' " in brain stimulation and "we are close
to having debugged a prototype system whereby dogs can be
guided along specific courses." Six months later, a CIA docu-
ment noted, "The feasibility of remote control of activities in
several species of animals has been demonstrated. . . . Special
investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the
application of selected elements of these techniques to man."

210    CONCLUSIONS
Another six months later, TSS officials had found a use for
electric stimulation: this time putting electrodes in the brains
of cold-blooded animals—presumably reptiles. While much of
the experimentation with dogs and cats was to find a way of
wiring the animal and then directing it by remote control into,
say, the office of the Soviet ambassador, this cold-blooded pro-
ject was designed instead for the delivery of chemical and bio-
logical agents or for "executive action-type operations," ac-
cording to a document. "Executive action" was the CIA's
euphemism for assassination.
With the brain electrode technology at this level, Steve Al-
drich and ORD took over the research function from TSS. What
the ORD men found cannot be said, but the open literature
would indicate that the field progressed considerably during
the 1960s. Can the human brain be wired and controlled by a
big enough computer? Aldrich certainly tried to find out.
Creating amnesia remained a "big goal" for the ORD re-
searcher, states an ex-CIA man. Advances in brain surgery,
such as the development of three-dimensional, "stereotaxic"
techniques, made psychosurgery a much simpler matter and
created the possibility that a precisely placed electrode probe
could be used to cut the link between past memory and present
recall. As for subjects to be used in behavioral experiments of
this sort, the ex-CIA man states that ORD had access to prison-
ers in at least one American penal institution. A former Army
doctor stationed at the Edgewood chemical laboratory states
that the lab worked with CIA men to develop a drug that could
be used to help program in new memories into the mind of an
amnesic subject. How far did the Agency take this research? I
don't know.
The men from ORD tried to create their own latter-day ver-
sion of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
Located outside Boston, it was called the Scientific Engineering
Institute, and Agency officials had set it up originally in 1956 as
a proprietary company to do research on radar and other tech-
nical matters that had nothing to do with human behavior. Its
president, who says he was a "figurehead," was Dr. Edwin
Land, the founder of Polaroid. In the early 1960s, ORD officials
decided to bring it into the behavioral field and built a new
wing to the Institute's modernistic building for the "life
sciences." They hired a group of behavioral and medical scien-
tists who were allowed to carry on their own independent re-

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH   211
search as long as it met Institute standards. These scientists
were available to consult with frequent visitors from Washing-
ton, and they were encouraged to take long lunches in the Insti-
tute's dining room where they mixed with the physical scien-
tists and brainstormed about virtually everything. One veteran
recalls a colleague joking, "If you could find the natural radio
frequency of a person's sphincter, you could make him run out
of the room real fast." Turning serious, the veteran states the
technique was "plausible," and he notes that many of the crazy
ideas bandied about at lunch developed into concrete projects.
Some of these projects may have been worked on at the Insti-
tute's own several hundred-acre farm located in the Massachu-
setts countryside. But of the several dozen people contacted in
an effort to find out what the Institute did, the most anyone
would say about experiments at the farm was that one involved
stimulating the pleasure centers of crows' brains in order to
control their behavior. Presumably, ORD men did other things
at their isolated rural lab.
Just as the MKULTRA program had been years ahead of the
scientific community, ORD activities were similarly advanced.
"We looked at the manipulation of genes," states one of the
researchers. "We were interested in gene splintering. The rest
of the world didn't ask until 1976 the type of questions we were
facing in 1965.... Everybody was afraid of building the super-
soldier who would take orders without questioning, like the
kamikaze pilot. Creating a subservient society was not out of
sight." Another Institute man describes the work of a colleague
who bombarded bacteria with ultraviolet radiation in order to
create deviant strains. ORD also sponsored work in parapsy-
chology. Along with the military services, Agency officials
wanted to know whether psychics could read minds or control
them from afar (telepathy), if they could gain information
about distant places or people (clairvoyance or remote view-
ing), if they could predict the future (precognition), or influ-
ence the movement of physical objects or even the human
mind (photokinesis). The last could have incredibly destructive
applications, if it worked. For instance, switches setting off
nuclear bombs would have to be moved only a few inches to
launch a holocaust. Or, enemy psychics, with minds honed to
laser-beam sharpness, could launch attacks to burn out the
brains of American nuclear scientists. Any or all of these tech-
niques have numerous applications to the spy trade.

212    CONCLUSIONS
While ORD officials apparently left much of the drug work
to Gottlieb, they could not keep their hands totally out of this
field. In 1968 they set up a joint program, called Project OFTEN,
with the Army Chemical Corps at Edgewood, Maryland to
study the effects of various drugs on animals and humans. The
Army helped the Agency put together a computerized data base
for drug testing and supplied military volunteers for some of
the experiments. In one case, with a particularly effective in-
capacitiating agent, the Army arranged for inmate volunteers
at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia. Project
OFTEN had both offensive and defensive sides, according to an
ORD man who described it in a memorandum. He cited as an
example of what he and his coworkers hoped to find "a com-
pound that could simulate a heart attack or a stroke in the
targeted individual." In January 1973, just as Richard Helms
was leaving the Agency and James Schlesinger was coming in,
Project OFTEN was abruptly canceled.
What—if any—success the ORD men had in creating heart
attacks or in any of their other behavioral experiments simply
cannot be said. Like Sid Gottlieb, Steve Aldrich is not saying,
and his colleagues seem even more closemouthed than Gott-
lieb's. In December 1977, having gotten wind of the ORD pro-
grams, I filed a Freedom of Information request for access to
ORD files "on behavioral research, including but not limited to
any research or operational activities related to bio-electrics,
electric or radio stimulation of the brain, electronic destruction
of memory, stereotaxic surgery, psychosurgery, hypnotism,
parapsychology, radiation, microwaves, and ultrasonics." I also
asked for documentation on behavioral testing in U.S. penal
institutions, and I later added a request for all available files on
amnesia. The Agency wrote back six months later that ORD
had "identified 130 boxes (approximately 130 cubic feet) of
material that are reasonably expected to contain behavioral
research documents."
Considering that Admiral Turner and other CIA officials had
tried to leave the impression with Congress and the public that
behavioral research had almost all ended in 1963 with the
phaseout of MKULTRA, this was an amazing admission. The
sheer volume of material was staggering. This book is based on
the 7 boxes of heavily censored MKULTRA financial records
plus another 3 or so of ARTICHOKE documents, supplemented
by interviews. It has taken me over a year, with significant

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH    213
research help, to digest this much smaller bulk. Clearly,
greater resources than an individual writer can bring to bear
will be needed to to get to the bottom of the ORD programs.
A free society's best defense against unethical behavior
modification is public disclosure and awareness. The more peo-
ple understand consciousness-altering technology, the more
likely they are to recognize its application, and the less likely
it will be used. When behavioral research is carried out in
secret, it can be turned against the government's enemies, both
foreign and domestic. No matter how pure or defense-oriented
the motives of the researchers, once the technology exists, the
decision to use it is out of their hands. Who can doubt that if the
Nixon administration or J. Edgar Hoover had had some fool-
proof way to control people, they would not have used the tech-
nique against their political foes, just as the CIA for years tried
to use similar tactics overseas?
As with the Agency's secrets, it is now too late to put behav-
ioral technology back in the box. Researchers are bound to keep
making advances. The technology has already spread to our
schools, prisons, and mental hospitals, not to mention the ad-
vertising community, and it has also been picked up by police
forces around the world. Placing hoods over the heads of politi-
cal prisoners—a modified form of sensory deprivation—has be-
come a standard tactic around the world, from Northern Ire-
land to Chile. The Soviet Union has consistently used
psychiatric treatment as an instrument of repression. Such
methods violate basic human rights just as much as physical
abuse, even if they leave no marks on the body.
Totalitarian regimes will probably continue, as they have in
the past, to search secretly for ways to manipulate the mind, no
matter what the United States does. The prospect of being able
to control people seems too enticing for most tyrants to give up.
Yet, we as a country can defend ourselves without sending our
own scientists—mad or otherwise—into a hidden war that vio-
lates our basic ethical and constitutional principles. After all,
we created the Nuremberg Code to show there were limits on
scientific research and its application. Admittedly, American
intelligence officials have violated our own standard, but the
U.S. Government has now officially declared violations will no
longer be permitted. The time has come for the United States
to lead by example in voluntarily renouncing secret govern-
ment behavioral research. Other countries might even follow

214    CONCLUSIONS
suit, particularly if we were to propose an international agree-
ment which provides them with a framework to do so.
Tampering with the mind is much too dangerous to be left to
the spies. Nor should it be the exclusive province of the behav-
ioral scientists, who have given us cause for suspicion. Take
this statement by their most famous member, B. F. Skinner:
"My image in some places is of a monster of some kind who
wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be
further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want
them to be manipulated more effectively." Such notions are
much more acceptable in prestigious circles than people tend
to think: D. Ewen Cameron read papers about "depatterning"
with electroshock before meetings of his fellow psychiatrists,
and they elected him their president. Human behavior is so
important that it must concern us all. The more vigilant we and
our representatives are, the less chance we will be unwitting
victims.

NOTES
CHAPTER 1
The information on Albert Hofmann's first LSD trip and background
on LSD came from an interview by the author with Hofmann, a paper
by Hofmann called "The Discovery of LSD and Subsequent Investiga-
tions on Naturally Occurring Hallucinogens," another interview with
Hofmann by Michael Horowitz printed in the June 1976 High Times
magazine, and from a CIA document on LSD produced by the Office
of Scientific Intelligence, August 30, 1955, titled "The Strategic Medi-
cal Significance of LSD-25."
Information on the German mescaline and hypnosis experiments at
Dachau came from "Technical Report no. 331-45, German Aviation
Research at tne Dachau Concentration Camp," October, 1945, US
Naval Technical Mission in Europe, found in the papers of Dr. Henry
Beecher. Additional information came from Trials of War Criminals
Before the Nuremberg Tribunal, the book Doctors of Infamy by Alex-
ander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke (New York: H. Schuman, 1949),
interviews with prosecution team members Telford Taylor, Leo Alex-
ander, and James McHaney, and an article by Dr. Leo Alexander,
"Sociopsychologic Structure of the SS," Archives of Neurology and
Psychiatry, May, 1948, Vol. 59, pp. 622-34.
The OSS experience in testing marijuana was described in inter-
views with several former Manhattan Project counterintelligence
men, an OSS document dated June 21, 1943, Subject: Development of
"truth drug," given the CIA identification number A/B, I, 12/1; from
document A/B, I, 64/34, undated, Subject: Memorandum Relative to
the use of truth drug in interrogation; document dated June 2, 1943,
Subject: Memorandum on T. D. A "confidential memorandum," dated

216    NOTES
April 4, 1954, found in the papers of George White, also was helpful.
The quote on US prisoners passing through Manchuria came from
document 19, 18 June 1953, Subject: ARTICHOKE Conference.
The information on Stanley Lovell came from his book, Of Spies and
Strategems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), from inter-
views with his son Richard, a perusal of his remaining papers, inter-
views with George Kistiakowsky and several OSS veterans, and from
"Science in World War II, the Office of Scientific Research and Devel-
opment" in Chemistry: A History of the Chemistry Components of the
National Defense Research Committee, edited by W. A. Noyes, Jr.
(Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1948).
Dr. Walter Langer provided information about his psychoanalytic
portrait of Hitler, as did his book, The Mind of Adolf Hitler (New York:
Basic Books, 1972). Dr. Henry Murray also gave an interview, as did
several OSS men who had been through his assessment course. Mur-
ray's work is described at length in a book published after the war by
the OSS Assessment staff, Assessment of Men (New York: Rinehart &
Company, 1948).
Material on George Estabrooks came from his books, Hypnotism
(New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1945) and Death in the Mind, co-
authored with Richard Lockridge (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1945), and
interviews with his daughter, Doreen Estabrooks Michl, former col-
leagues, and Dr. Milton Kline.
CHAPTER 2
The origins of the CIA's ARTICHOKE program and accounts of the
early testing came from the following Agency Documents # 192, 15
January 1953; #3,17 May 1949; A/B, I, 8/1, 24 February 1949; February
10, 1951 memo on Special Interrogations (no document #); A/B, II,
30/2, 28 September 1949; #5, 15 August 1949; #8, 27 September 1949;
#6, 23 August 1949; #13, 5 April 1950; #18, 9 May 1950; #142 (trans-
mittal slip), 19 May 1952; #124, 25 January 1952; A/B, IV, 23/32, 3
March 1952; #23, 21 June 1950; #10, 27 February 1950; #37, 27 Octo-
ber 1950; A/B, I, 39/1, 12 December 1950; A/B, II, 2/2, 5 March 1952;
A/B, II, 2/1, 15 February 1952; A/B, V, 134/3, 3 December 1951; A/B, I,
38/5, 1 June 1951; and #400, undated, "Specific Cases of Overseas
Testing and Applications of Behavioral Drugs."
The documents were supplemented by interviews with Ray Cline,
Harry Rositzke, Michael Burke, Hugh Cunningham, and several other
ex-CIA men who asked to remain anonymous. The Final Report of the
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence (henceforth called the Church Committee Report) pro-
vided useful background.

NOTES    217
Documents giving background on terminal experiments include
#A/B, II, 10/57; #A/B, II, 10/58, 31 August, 1954; #A/B, II, 10/ 17, 27
September 1954; and #A/B, I, 76/4, 21 March 1955.
CHAPTER 3
The primary sources for the material on Professor Wendt's trip to
Frankfurt were Dr. Samuel V. Thompson then of the Navy, the CIA
psychiatric consultant, several of Wendt's former associates, as well as
three CIA documents that described the testing: Document #168, 19
September 1952, Subject: "Project LGQ"; Document # 168, 18 Septem-
ber 1952, Subject: Field Trip of ARTICHOKE team, 20 August-Septem-
ber 1952; and #A/B, II, 33/21, undated, Subject: Special Comments.
Information on the Navy's Project CHATTER came from the
Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 337-38. Declassified Navy
Documents N-23, February 13, 1951, Subject: Procurement of Certain
Drugs; N-27, undated, Subject: Project CHATTER; N-29, undated, Sub-
ject: Status Report: Studies of Motion Sickness, Vestibular Function,
and Effects of Drugs; N-35, October 27, 1951, Interim Report; N-38, 30
September, 1952, Memorandum for File; and N-39, 28 October, 1952,
Memorandum for File.
The information on the heroin found in Wendt's safe comes from
the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, October 2,1977 and consider-
able background on Wendt's Rochester testing program was found in
the Rochester Times-Union, January 28, 1955. The CIA quote on her-
oin came from May 15,1952 OSI Memorandum to the Deputy Director,
CIA, Subject: Special Interrogation.
Information on the Agency's interest in amnesia came from 14 Janu-
ary 1952 memo, Subject: BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE, Proposed Re-
search; 7 March 1951, Subject: Informal Discussion with Chief [de-
leted] Regarding "Disposal"; 1 May 1951, Subject: Recommendation
for Disposal of Maximum Custody Defectors; and # A/B, I, 75/13, un-
dated, Subject: Amnesia.
The quote from Homer on nepenthe was found in Sidney Cohen's
The Beyond Within: The LSD Story (New York: Atheneum, 1972).
The section on control came from interviews with John Stockwell
and several other former CIA men.
CHAPTER 4
The description of Robert Hyde's first trip came from interviews with
Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Dr. J. Herbert DeShon, and a talk by Max Rin-

218    NOTES
kel at the 2nd Macy Conference on Neuropharmacology, pp. 235-36,
edited by Harold A. Abramson, 1955: Madison Printing Company.
The descriptions of TSS and Sidney Gottlieb came from interviews
with Ray Cline, John Stockwell, about 10 other ex-CIA officers, and
other friends of Gottlieb.
Memos quoted on the early MKULTRA program include Memoran-
dum from ADDP Helms to DCI Dulles, 4/3/53, Tab A, pp. 1-2 (quoted
in Church Committee Report, Book I); APF A-l, April 13, 1953, Memo-
randum for Deputy Director (Administration, Subject: Project MKUL-
TRA—Extremely Sensitive Research and Development Program;
#A/B,I,64/6, 6 February 1952, Memorandum for the Record, Subject:
Contract with [deleted] #A/B,I,64/29, undated, Memorandum for
Technical Services Staff, Subject: Alcohol Antagonists and Accelera-
tors, Research and Development Project. The Gottlieb quote is from
Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research
of the Senate Committee on Human Resources, September 21,1977, p.
206.
The background data on LSD came particularly from The Beyond
Within: The LSD Story by Sidney Cohen (New York: Atheneum, 1972).
Other sources included Origins of Psychopharmacology: From CPZ to
LSD by Anne E. Caldwell (Springfield, 111.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970)
and Document 352, "An OSI Study of the Strategic Medical Impor-
tance of LSD-25," 30 August 1955.
TSS's use of outside researchers came from interviews with four
former TSSers. MKULTRA Subprojects 8, 10, 63, and 66 described
Robert Hyde's work. Subprojects 7, 27^ and 40 concerned Harold
Abramson. Hodge's work was in subprojects 17 and 46. Carl Pfeiffer's
Agency connection, along with Hyde's, Abramson's, and Isbell's, was
laid out by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Memorandum for the Record, 1
December 1953, Subject: Conversation with Dr. Willis Gibbons of TSS
re Olson Case (found at p. 1030, Kennedy Subcommittee 1975 Biomedi-
cal and Behavioral Research Hearings). Isbell's testing program was
also described at those hearings, as it was in Document # 14, 24 July,
1953, Memo For: Liaison & Security Officer/TSS, Subject #71 An Ac-
count of the Chemical Division's Contacts in the National Institute of
Health; Document #37, 14 July 1954, subject [deleted]; and Document
#41,31 August, 1956, subject; trip to Lexington, Ky., 21-23 August 1956.
Isbell's program was further described in a "Report on ADAMHA
Involvement in LSD Research," found at p. 993 of 1975 Kennedy sub-
committee hearings. The firsthand account of the actual testing came
from an interview with Edward M. Flowers, Washington, D.C.
The section on TSS's noncontract informants came from inter-
views with TSS sources, reading the proceedings of the Macy Con-
ferences on "Problems of Consciousness" and "Neurophar-
macology," and interviews with several participants including

NOTES    219
Sidney Cohen, Humphrey Osmond, and Hudson Hoagland.
The material on CIA's relations with Sandoz and Eli Lilly came
from Document #24, 16 November, 1953, Subject: ARTICHOKE Con-
ference; Document #268, 23 October, 1953, Subject: Meeting in Direc-
tor's Office at 1100 hours on 23 October with Mr. Wisner and [deleted];
Document #316,6 January, 1954, Subject: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide
(LSD-25); and Document #338, 26 October 1954, Subject: Potential
Large Scale Availability of LSD through newly discovered synthesis
by [deleted]; interviews with Sandoz and Lilly former executives; inter-
views with TSS sources; and Sidney Gottlieb's testimony before
Kennedy subcommittee, 1977, p. 203.
Henry Beecher's US government connections were detailed in his
private papers, in a report on the Swiss-LSD death to the CIA at p. 396,
Church Committee Report, Book I, and in interviews with two of his
former associates.
The description of TSS's internal testing progression comes from
interviews with former staff members. The short reference to Sid
Gottlieb's arranging for LSD to be given a speaker at a political rally
comes from Document #A/B, II, 26/8, 9 June 1954, Subject: MKUL-
TRA. Henry Beecher's report to the CIA on the Swiss suicide is found
at p. 396, Church Committee Report, Book I.
CHAPTER 5
The description of the CIA's relationship with SOD at Fort Detrick
comes from interviews with several ex-Fort Detrick employees;
Church Committee hearings on "Unauthorized Storage of Toxic
Agents, Volume 1; Church Committee "Summary Report on CIA Inves-
tigation of MKNAOMI" found in Report, Book I, pp. 360-63; and/
Kennedy subcommittee hearings on Biological Testing Involving
Human Subjects by the Department of Defense, 1977. The details of
Sid Gottlieb's involvement in the plot to kill Patrice Lumumba are
found in the Church Committee's Interim Report on "Alleged Assassi-
nation Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," pp. 20-21. The Church com-
mittee allowed Gottlieb to be listed under the pseudonym Victor
Scheider, but several sources confirm Gottlieb's true identity, as does
the biographic data on him submitted to the Kennedy subcommittee
by the CIA, which puts him in the same job attributed to "Scheider"
at the same time. The plot to give botulinum to Fidel Castro is outlined
in the Assassination report, pp. 79-83. The incident with the Iraqi
colonel is on p. 181 of the same report.
The several inches of CIA documents on the Olson case were
released by the Olson family in 1976 and can be found in the printed
volume of the 1975 Kennedy subcommittee hearings on Biomedical

220    NOTES
and Behavioral Resarch, pp.1005-1132. They form the base of much of
the narrative, along with interviews with Alice Olson, Eric Olson,
Benjamin Wilson, and several other ex-SOD men (who added next to
nothing). Information also was gleaned from Vincent Ruwet's testi-
mony before the Kennedy subcommittee in 1975, pp. 138-45 and the
Church committee's summary of the affair, Book I, pp. 394-403. The
quote on Harold Abramson's intention to give his patients unwitting
doses of LSD is found in MKULTRA subproject 7, June 8, 1953, letter
to Dr. [deleted]. Magician John Mulholland's work for the Agency is
described in MKULTRA subprojects 19 and 34.
CHAPTER 6
The CIA's reaction to Frank Olson's death is described in numerous
memos released by the Agency to the Olson family, which can be
found at pp. 1005-1132 of the Kennedy Subcommittee 1975 hearings on
Biomedical and Behavioral Research. See particularly at p. 1077, 18
December 1953, Subject: The Suicide of Frank Olson and at p. 1027, 1
December 1953, Subject: Use of LSD.
Richard Helms' views on unwitting testing are found in Document
#448, 17 December 1963, Subject: Testing of Psychochemicals and
Related Materials and in a memorandum to the CIA Director, June 9,
1964, quoted from on page 402 of the Church Committee Report, Book
I.
George White's diary and letters were donated by his widow to
Foothills Junior College, Los Altos, California and are the source of a
treasure chest of material on him, including his letter to a friend
explaining his almost being "blackballed" from the CIA, the various
diary entries cited, including references to folk-dancing with Gottlieb,
the interview with Hal Lipset where he explains his philosophy on
chasing criminals, and his letter to Sid Gottlieb dated November 21,
(probably) 1972.
The New York and San Francisco safehouses run by George White
are the subjects of MKULTRA subprojects 3,14,16,42, and 149. White's
tips to the landlord are described in 42-156, his liquor bills in 42-157,
"dry-runs" in 42-91. The New York safehouse run by Charles Siragusa
is subproject 132. The "intermediate" tests are described in document
132-59.
Paul Avery, a San Francisco freelance writer associated with the
Center for Investigative Reporting in Oakland, California inter-
viewed William Hawkins and provided assistance on the details of
the San Francisco safehouse and George White's background. Addi-
tional information on White came from interviews with his widow,

NOTES    221
several former colleagues in the Narcotics Bureau, and other know-
ledgeable sources in various San Francisco law-enforcement agen-
cies. An ex-Narcotics Bureau official told of Dr. James Hamilton's
study of unusual sexual practices and the description of his unwit-
ting drug testing comes from MKULTRA subproject 2, which is his
subproject.
Ray Treichler discussed some of his work with harassment sub-
stances in testimony before the Kennedy subcommittee on September
20, 1977, pp. 105-8. He delivered his testimony under the pseudonym
"Philip Goldman."
"The Gang that Couldn't Spray Straight" article appeared in the
September 20, 1977 Washington Post.
Richard Helms' decision not to tell John McCone about the CIA's
connection to the Mafia in assassination attempts against Castro
is described in the Church Committee's Assassination report, pp.
102-3.
The 1957 Inspector General's Report on TSS, Document #417 and
the 1963 inspection of MKULTRA, 14 August 1963, Document #59
provided considerable detail throughout the entire chapter. The
Church Committee Report on MKULTRA in Book I, pp. 385-422 also
provided considerable information.
Sid Gottlieb's job as Assistant to the Clandestine Services chief for
Scientific Matters is described in Document #74 (operational series),
20 October 1959, Subject: Application of Imaginative Research on the
Behavioral and Physical Sciences to [deleted] Problems" and in the
1963 Inspector General's report.
Interviews with ex-CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, an-
other former Inspector General's staff employee, and several ex-TSS
staffers contributed significantly to this chapter.
Helms' letter to the Warren Commission on "Soviet Brainwashing
Techniques," dated 19 June 1964, was obtained from the National
Archives.
The material on the CIA's operational use of LSD came from the
Church Committee Report, Book I, pp. 399-403 and from an affida-
vit filed in the Federal Court Case of John D. Marks \. Central In-
telligence Agency, et. al, Civil Action No. 76-2073 by Eloise R.
Page, Chief, Policy and Coordination Staff of the CIA's Directorate
of Operations. In listing all the reasons why the Agency should not
provide the operational documents, Ms. Page gave some informa-
tion on what was in the documents. The passages on TSS's and the
Medical Office's positions on the use of LSD came from a memo
written by James Angleton, Chief, Counterintelligence Staff on De-
cember 12, 1957 quoted in part at p. 401 of the Church Committee
Report, Book I.

222    NOTES
CHAPTER 7
R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson's mammoth work, Mushrooms,
Russia and History, (New York: Pantheon, 1957), was the source for
the account of the Empress Agrippina's murderous use of mushrooms.
Wasson told the story of his various journeys to Mexico in a series of
interviews and in a May 27, 1957 Life magazine article, "Seeking the
Magic Mushroom."
Morse Allen learned of piule in a sequence described in document
#A/B,I,33/7, 14 November 1952, Subject: Piule. The sending of the
young CIA scientist to Mexico was outlined in # A/B, I, 33/3, 5 Decem-
ber 1952. Morse Allen commented on mushroom history and covert
possibilities in #A/B, I, 34/4, 26 June 1953, Subject: Mushrooms-
Narcotic and Poisonous Varieties. His trip to the American mush-
room-growing capital was described in Document [number illegible],
25 June 1953, Subject: Trip to Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania. The fail-
ure of TSS to tell Morse Allen about the results of the botanical lab
work is outlined in #A/B, I, 39/5, 10 August 1954 Subject: Reports;
Request for from TSS [deleted].
James Moore told much about himself in a long interview and in an
exchange of correspondence. MKULTRA Subproject 51 dealt with
Moore's consulting relationship with the Agency and Subproject 52
with his ties as a procurer of chemicals. See especially Document
51-46, 8 April 1963, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 51; 51-24, 27 Au-
gust 1956, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 51-B; 52-94, 20 February
1963, Subject: (BB) Chemical and Physical Manipulants; 52-19, 20 De-
cember 1962; 52-17, 1 March 1963; 52-23, 6 December 1962; 52-64, 24
August 1959.
The CIA's arrangements with the Department of Agriculture are
detailed in #A/B, I, 34/4, 26 June, 1953, Subject: Mushrooms—Nar-
cotic and Poisonous varieties and Document [number illegible], 13
April 1953, Subject: Interview with Cleared Contacts.
Dr. Harris Isbell's work with psilocybin is detailed in Isbell docu-
ment # 155, "Comparison of the Reaction Induced by Psilocybin and
LSD-25 in Man."
Information on the counterculture and its interface with CIA drug-
testing came from interviews with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsburg,
Humphrey Osmond, John Lilly, Sidney Cohen, Ralph Blum, Herbert
Kelman, Leo Hollister, Herbert DeShon, and numerous others. Ken
Kesey described his first trip in Garage Sale (New York: Viking Press,
1973). Timothy Leary's Kamasutra was actually a book hand-pro-
duced in four copies and called Psychedelic Theory: Working Papers
from the Harvard IFIFPsychedelic Research Project, 1960-1963. Susan
Berns Wolf Rothchild kindly made her copy available. The material
about Harold Abramson's turning on Frank Fremont-Smith and Greg-
ory Bateson came from the proceedings of a conference on LSD spon-

NOTES    223
sored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation on April 22, 23, and 24, 1959,
pp. 8-22.
CHAPTER 8
Edward Hunter's article " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into
Ranks of Communist Party" appeared in the Miami News on Septem-
ber 24, 1950. His book was Brainwashing in Red China (New York:
Vanguard Press, 1951). Other material came from several interviews
with Hunter just before he died in June 1978.
The Air Force document cited on brainwashing was called "Air
Force Headquarters Panel Convened to Record Air Force Position Re-
garding Conduct of Personnel in Event of Capture," December 14,
1953. Researcher Sam Zuckerman found it and showed it to me.
The figures on American prisoners in Korea and the quote from
Edward Hunter came from hearings before the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, 84th Congress, June 19,20,26, and 27,
1956.
The material on the setting up of the Cornell-Hinkle-Wolff study
came from interviews with Hinkle, Helen Goodell, and several CIA
sources. Hinkle's and Wolffs study on brainwashing appeared in clas-
sified form on 2 April 1956 as a Technical Services Division publica-
tion called Communist Control Techniques and in substantially the
same form but unclassified as "Communist Interrogation and Indoc-
trination of 'Enemies of the State'—An Analysis of Methods Used by
the Communist State Police." AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychi-
atry, August, 1956, Vol. 76.
Allen Dulles spoke on "Brain Warfare" before the Alumni Confer-
ence of Princeton University, Hot Springs, Virginia on April 10, 1953,
and the quote on guinea pigs came from that speech.
The comments of Rockefeller Foundation officials about D. Ewen
Cameron and the record of Rockefeller funding were found in Robert
S. Morrison's diary, located in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives,
Pocantico Hills, New York.
The key articles on Cameron's work on depatterning and psychic
driving were "Production of Differential Amnesia as a Factor in the
Treatment of Schizophrenia," Comprehensive Psychiatry, 1960, 1, p.
26 and "Effects of Repetition of Verbal Signals upon the Behavior of
Chronic Psychoneurotic Patients" by Cameron, Leonard Levy, and
Leonard Rubenstein, Journal of Mental Science, 1960, 106, 742. The
background on Page-Russell electroshocks came from "Intensified
Electrical Convulsive Therapy in the Treatment of Mental Disorders"
by L. G. M. Page and R. J. Russell, Lancet, Volume 254, Jan.—June,
1948. Dr. JohnCavanagh of Washington, D.C. provided background on

224    NOTES
the use of electroshock and sedatives in psychiatry.
Cameron's MKULTRA subproject was #68. See especially docu-
ment 68-37, "Application for Grant to Study the Effects upon Human
Behavior of the Repetition of Verbal Signals," January 21, 1957.
Part of Cameron's papers are in the archives of the American Psy-
chiatric Association in Washington, and they provided considerable
information on the treatment of Mary C., as well as a general look at
his work. Interviews with at least a dozen of his former colleagues also
provided considerable information.
Interviews with John Lilly and Donald Hebb provided background
on sensory deprivation. Maitland Baldwin's work in the field was dis-
cussed in a whole series of ARTICHOKE documents including #A/B,
1,76/4, 21 March 1955, Subject: Total Isolation; # A/B, 1,76/12,19 May
1955, Subject: Total Isolation—Additional Comments; and #A/B, I,
76/17,27 April 1955, Subject: Total Isolation, Supplemental Report #2.
The quote from Aldous Huxley on sensory deprivation is taken from
the book of his writings, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the
Visionary Experience (1931-1963), edited by Michael Horowitz and
Cynthia Palmer (New York: Stonehill, 1978).
The material on Val Orlikow's experiences with Dr. Cameron came
from interviews with her and her husband David and from portions
of her hospital records, which she furnished.
Cameron's staff psychologist Barbara Winrib's comments on him
were found in a letter to the Montreal Star, August 11, 1977.
The study of Cameron's electroshock work ordered by Dr. Cleghorn
was published as "Intensive Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Follow-up
Study," by A. E. Schwartzman and P. E. Termansen, Canadian Psychi-
atric Association, Volume 12, 1967.
In addition to several interviews, much material on John Lilly came
from his autobiography, The Scientist (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott
Company, 1978).
The CIA's handling of Yuri Nosenko was discussed at length in
hearings before the House Assassinations Committee on September
15,1978. The best press account of this testimony was written by Jere-
miah O'Leary of the Washington Star on September 16, 1978: "How
CIA Tried to Break Defector in Oswald Case."
CHAPTER 9
MKULTRA subprojects 48 and 60 provided the basic documents on the
Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. These were supple-
mented by the three biennial reports of the Society that could be
found: 1957,1961, and 1961-1963. WoLTs own research work is MKUL-
TRA subproject 61. Wolffs proposals to the Agency are in #A/B, II,

NOTES    225
10/68, undated "Proposed Plan for Implementing [deleted]" in two
documents included in 48-29, March 5, 1956, "General Principles
Upon Which these Proposals Are Based." The Agency's plans for the
Chinese Project are described in #A/B, II, 10/48, undated, Subject:
Cryptonym [deleted] A/B, II10/72,9 December, 1954, Subject: Letter of
Instructions, and # A/B, II, 10/110, undated, untitled.
Details of the logistics of renting the Human Ecology headquarters
and bugging it are in # A/B, II, 10/23, 30 August, 1954, Subject: Meet-
ing of Working Committee of [deleted], No. 5 and #A/B, II, 10/92, 8
December, 1954, Subject: Technical Installation.
The Hungarian project, as well as being described in the 1957 bien-
nial report, was dealt with in MKULTRA subprojects 65 and 82, espe-
cially 65-12, 28 June 1956, Subject: MKULTRA subproject 65; 65-11,
undated, Subject: Dr. [deleted]'s Project—Plans for the Coming Year,
July, 1957-June, 1958; and 82-15,11 April 1958, Subject: Project MKUL-
TRA, Subproject 82.
The Ionia State sexual psychopath research was MKULTRA Sub-
project 39, especially 39-4, 9 April 1958, Subject: Trip Report, Visit to
[deleted], 7 April 1958. Paul Magnusson of the Detroit Free Press and
David Pearl of the Detroit ACLU office both furnished information.
Carl Rogers' MKULTRA subproject was #97. He also received funds
under Subproject 74. See especially 74-256, 7 October 1958, Supple-
ment to Individual Grant under MKULTRA, Subproject No. 74 and
97-21, 6 August 1959, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 97.
H. J. Eysenck's MKULTRA subproject was #111. See especially
111-3, 3 April 1961, Subject: Continuation of MKULTRA Subproject
111.
The American Psychological Association-sponsored trip to the So-
viet Union was described in Subproject 107. The book that came out
of the trip was called Some Views on Soviet Psychology, Raymond
Bauer (editor), (Washington: American Psychological Association;
1962).
The Sherifs' research on teenage gangs was described in Subproject
# 102 and the 1961 Human Ecology biennial report. Dr. Carolyn Sherif
also wrote a letter to the American Psychological Association Monitor,
February 1978. Dr. Sherif talked about her work when she and I ap-
peared on an August 1978 panel at the American Psychological Associ-
ation's convention in Toronto.
Martin Orne's work for the Agency was described in Subproject 84.
He contributed a chapter to the Society-funded book, The Manipula-
tion of Human Behavior, edited by Albert Biderman and Herbert
Zimmer-(New York: John Wiley & Sons; 1961), pp. 169-215. Financial
data on Orne's Institute for Experimental Psychiatry came from a
filing with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Attachment to Form
1023.

226    NOTES
The quote from John Gittinger came from an interview with him
conducted by Dr. Patricia Greenfield. Dr. Greenfield also interviewed
Jay Schulman, Carl Rogers, and Charles Osgood for an article in the
December 1977 issue of the American Psychological Association Mon-
itor, from which my quotes of Schulman's comments are taken. She
discussed Erving Goffman's role in a presentation to a panel of the
American Psychological Association convention in Toronto in August
1978. The talk was titled "CIA Support of Basic Research in Psychol-
ogy: Policy Implications."
CHAPTER 10
The material on the Gittinger Personality Assessment System (PAS)
comes from "An Introduction to the Personality Assessment System"
by John Winne and John Gittinger, Monograph Supplement No. 38,
Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc. 1973; an interview with John
Winne; interviews with three other former CIA psychologists; 1974
interviews with John Gittinger by the author; and an extended inter-
view with Gittinger by Dr. Patricia Greenfield, Associate Professor of
Psychology at UCLA. Some of the material was used first in a Rolling
Stone article, July 18, 1974, "The CIA Won't Quite Go Public." Robert
Hyde's alcohol research at Butler Health Center was MKULTRA Sub-
project 66. See especially 66-17, 27 August, 1958. Subject: Proposed
Alcohol Study—1958-1959 and 66-5. undated, Subject: Equipment-
Ecology Laboratory.
The 1963 Inspector General's report on TSS, as first released under
the Freedom of Information Act, did not include the section on person-
ality assessment quoted from in the chapter. An undated, untitled
document, which was obviously this section, was made available in
one of the CIA's last releases.
MKULTRA subproject 83 dealt with graphology research, as did
part of Subproject 60, which covered the whole Human Ecology Soci-
ety. See especially 83-7, December 11, 1959, Subject: [deleted] Grapho-
logical Review and 60-28, undated, Subject [deleted] Activities Report,
May, 1959-April, 1960.
Information on the psychological profile of Ferdinand Marcos came
from a U.S. Government source who had read it. Information on the
profile of the Shah of Iran came from a column by Jack Anderson and
Les Whitten "CIA Study Finds Shah Insecure," Washington Post, July
11, 1975.
The quotes from James Keehner came from an article in New Times
by Maureen Orth, "Memoirs of a CIA Psychologist," June 25, 1975.
For related reports on the CIA's role in training foreign police and
its activities in Uruguay, see an article by Taylor Branch and John

NOTES    227
Marks, "Tracking the CIA," Harper's Weekly, January 25, 1975 and
Philip Agee's book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London: Penguin;
1975).
The quote from Martin Orne was taken from Patricia Greenfield's
APA Monitor article cited in the last chapter's notes.
Gittinger's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelli-
gence and the Kennedy subcommittee on August 3, 1977 appeared on
pages 50-63. David Rhodes' testimony on Gittinger's role in the abort-
ive San Francisco LSD spraying appeared in hearings before the
Kennedy subcommittee, September 20, 1977, pp. 100-110.
CHAPTER 11
Morse Allen's training in hypnosis was described in Document # A/B,
V, 28/1, 9 July 1951, Subject [Deleted]. His hypnosis experiments in the
office are described in a long series of memos. See especially # A/B, III,
2/18, 10 February 1954, Hypnotic Experimentation and Research and
#A/B, II, 10/71, 19 August 1954, Subject: Operational/Security [de-
leted] and unnumbered document, 5 May 1955, Subject: Hypnotism
and Covert Operations.
The quote on U.S. prisoners passing through Manchuria came from
document # 19, 18 June 1953, ARTICHOKE Conference.
Alden Sears' hypnosis work was the subject of MKULTRA sub-
projects 5, 25, 29, and 49. See especially 49-28, undated, Proposal for
Research in Hypnosis at the [deleted], June 1, 1956 to May 31, 1957,
49-34, undated, Proposals for Research in Hypnosis at the [deleted],
June 1, 1956 to May 31, 1957; 5-11, 28 May 1953, Project MKULTRA,
Subproject 5 and 5-13, 20 April 1954, Subject: [deleted]. See also Patrick
Osier's article in the Chicago Sun-Times, September 4, 1977, "How
CIA 'Hid' Hypnosis Research."
General background on hypnosis came from interviews with Alden
Sears, Martin Orne, Milton Kline, Ernest Hilgard, Herbert Spiegel,
William Kroger, Jack Tracktir, John Watkins, and Harold Crasilneck.
See Orne's chapter on hypnosis in The Manipulation of Human Be-
havior, edited by Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer (New York:
John Wiley & Sons; 1961), pp. 169-215.
The contemplated use of hypnosis in an operation involving a for-
eign intelligence service is referred to in the Affidavit by Eloise R.
Page, in the case John D. Marks v. Central Intelligence Agency et al.
Civil Action no. 76-2073.
The 1959 proposed use of hypnosis that was approved by TSS is
described in documents #433, 21 August 1959, Possible Use of Drugs
and Hypnosis in [deleted] Operational Case; #434, 27 August 1959,
Comments on [deleted]; and #435, 15 September 1959, Possible Use of

228   NOTES
Drugs and Hypnosis in [deleted] Operational Case.
MKULTRA Subproject 128 dealt with the rapid induction technique.
See especially 128-1, undated, Subject: To test a method of rapid hyp-
notic induction in simulated and real operational settings (MKULTRA
128).
A long interview with John Gittinger added considerably to this
chapter. Mr. Gittinger had refused earlier to be interviewed directly
by me for this book. Our conversation was limited solely to hypnosis.
CHAPTER 12
The reorganization of TSS was described in document #59, 26 July
1963, Report of the Inspection of MKULTRA and in interviews with
Ray Cline, Herbert Scoville, and several other former CIA officials.
Richard Helms' recommendations for a new MKULTRA charter
were described in document #450, 9 June, 1964, Sensitive Research
Programs (MKULTRA).
Admiral Stansfield Turner's statement on the MKULTRA program
was made before a joint session of the Kennedy subcommittee and the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, August 3, 1977, pp. 4-8.
MKSEARCH programs and their origins in MKULTRA are de-
scribed in documents #449, 8 April 1964, Revision of Project MKUL-
TRA and #S-l-7, untitled, undated.
Dr. Edward Bennett's work is the subject of MKULTRA subprojects
104 and 143. See especially 143-23,11 December 1962, Subject: MKUL-
TRA Subproject 143. Other information* on the CIA's economic sabo-
tage program against Cuba came from interviews with Major General
Edward Lansdale, Ray Cline, William Colby, Lincoln Gordon, Covey
Oliver, Charles Meyer, Richard Goodwin, Roger Morris, several for-
mer CIA and State Department officials, and Cuban government offi-
cials.
The continued safehouse operation is MKSEARCH subproject 4. See
especially S-12-1, bank statements and receipts of safehouse. The
CIA's dealings with the Treasury Department over the Long commit-
tee's investigations of wiretaps are detailed in documents #451, 30
January 1967, A Report on a Series of Meetings with Department of the
Treasury officials and #452, undated, Meeting with Department of
Treasury Official.
The biological laboratory is the subject of MKULTRA subprojects 78
and 110 and MKSEARCH 2. See especially Documents 78-28, Septem-
ber 28, 1962, Subject: PM Support and Biological [deleted] and S-5-6, 8
September 1965, Subject: Hiring by Chief TSD/BB of [deleted], Former
Staff Employee in a Consultant Capacity on an Agency Contract. The
costs of the Fort Detrick operations came from p. 18 and p. 204 of the

NOTES   229
Church committee hearings on Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents,
September 16,17, and 18,1975. The description of TSS's procedures for
dealing with biological weapons came from Document 78-28 (cited
above) and document #509, undated (but clearly June 1975), Subject:
Discussions of MKNAOMI with [deleted]
The chemical company subproject is MKULTRA subproject 116 and
MKSEARCH 5. See especially 116-57,30 January 1961, Subject: MKUL-
TRA, Subproject 116; 116-62, October 28, 1960, shipping invoice; and
116-61, 4 November 1960, Subject: MKULTRA Subproject 116. Also see
James Moore's subproject, MKULTRA 52; especially 52-53, invoice #3,
1125-009-1902, April 27, 1960.
James Hamilton's work is the subject of MKULTRA subprojects 124
and 140 and MKSEARCH Subproject 3. See especially 140-57, 6 May
1965, Subject: Behavioral Control and 140-83, 29 May 1963, Subject:
MKULTRA Subproject 140.
Carl Pfeiffer's subprojects are MKULTRA 9, 26, 28, and 47 and
MKSEARCH 7. See especially S-7-4, undated, Subject: Approval of Pro-
ject [deleted].
Maitland Baldwin's Subprojects are MKULTRA 62 and MKSEARCH
1. See especially 62-2, undated [deleted] Special Budget and 62-3, un-
dated, 1956, Subject: Re: Trip to [deleted], October 10-14, 1956.
Charles Geschickter's subprojects are MKULTRA 23, 35, and 45 and
MKSEARCH 6. See especially 35-10, May 16,1955, Subject: To provide
for Agency-Sponsored Research Involving Covert Biological and
Chemical Warfare; 45-78, undated, Research Proposal: 1960; 45-104,
undated, Subject: Research Proposal: 1958-1959; 45-95, 26 January
1959, Coninuation of MKULTRA, Subproject No. 45; 45-104,21 January
1958, Continuation of MKULTRA, Subproject No. 45; 45-52, 8 February
1962, Continuation of MKULTRA, Subproject No. 45; S-13-7, 13 August
Subject, Approval of [deleted]; and S-13-9, 13 September 1967, Subject:
Approval of [deleted]. See also Geschickter's testimony before the
Kennedy subcommittee, September 20, 1977, pp. 44-49.
The lack of congressional or executive branch knowledge of CIA
behavioral activities was mentioned on p. 386, Church Committee
Report, Book I.
Amazon Natural Drug's CIA connection was described by an ex-CIA
official and confirmed by the mother of another former Agency man.
Several former employees described its activities in interviews.
Gottlieb's termination of MKSEARCH came from Document S-14-3,
10 July 1972, Termination of MKSEARCH.
The destruction of MKULTRA documents was described in Docu-
ment #419, 3 October, 1975, Subject: Destruction of Drug and Toxin
Related Files and 460, 31 January, 1973, Subject: Project Files: (1951-
1967).
The MKULTRA subprojects on electric stimulation of the brain are

250    NOTES
106 and 142. See especially 106-1, undated, Subject: Proposal; 142-14,
22 May 1962, Subject: Project MKULTRA, Subproject No. 142; and
document #76 (MKDELTA release), 21 April 1961, Subject: "Guided
Animal" Studies.
The list of parapsychology goals was taken from an excellent article
by John Wilhelm in the August 2, 1977 Washington Post: "Psychic
Spying?"
Project OFTEN information was taken from document #455,6 May
1974, Subject: Project OFTEN and Memorandum for the Secretary of
Defense from Deanne P. Siemer, September 20, 1977, Subject: Ex-
perimentation Programs Conducted by the Department of Defense
That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the
Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-con-
trol or Behavior-modification Purposes.
The quote from B. F. Skinner was taken from Peter Schrag's book,
Mind Control (New York: Pantheon, 1978) p. 10.

INDEX

A-bomb, 35
"A" treatment, 40-41, 44, 186
Abourezk, Sen. James, ix
Abramson, Harold, 59-62
LSD psychosis victim, 62n, 64,
68,118, 120, 169
treats Dr. Frank Olson for
accidental LSD dose, 79-82
Abramson, Mrs. Harold, 62n
Acupuncture, 130
Addiction Research Center, 59
Agency for International
Development (AID)
Public Safety Mission, 178-179
Agrippina, 106
Albania, 44
Alcohol, 35, 70, 91-92
"Extender," 58n
Aldrich, Dr. Stephen, 209, 210, 212
Alexander, Dr. Leo, ix, 10
Allan Memorial Institute, 131-132,
136, 139
Allen, Morse, 23-26, 32, 38, 41n,
42-43, 106-108, 111-113, 133,
138, 143, 157, 182-192,
201-202, 209
Allende, Salvador, 197
Altmeyer, Paul, ix
Amanita cacsarea, 106
Amanita phalloides, 106
Amazon Natural Drug Company,
203
American Journal of Pst/chiatrti, 141

American Medical Association,
Archives of Neurology and
Psychiatry, 148
American Neurological Association,
148
American Psychiatric Assoc., 132,
136
archives, 139
American Psychological Association,
158,161
American Society for Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis, 187
American Telephone and Telegraph,
(AT&T), 18
Amherst College, 209
Amnesia, 17, 48, 210, 212
"complete," 133
"differential," 133
induction by drugs, 41
induction by hypnosis, 42, 183,
185, 187-189
produced by electroshock, 23, 133,
140
Amphetamines, 35
Andres, Monica, viii
Angleton, James, 189, 192
Angola, 46
Anslinger, Harry, 89
Anson, Robert Sam, 191n
Anthrax, 76, 78
Anthropology, 15, 147
Army Biological Laboratory.
See U.S. Army

232    INDEX

Army Chemical Corps.
See U.S. Army
Army Intelligence.
See U.S. Army
ARTICHOKE, 29-33, 37-43, 55,
106-108, 133, 138, 143-144,
182-186,202,208-209,212
difficulty recruiting phychiatrist,
30-31
ethical and moral considerations,
32-33
women excluded as experi-
menters, 43
work with Chinese refugees,
150-151, 153
use of college students in tests, 31
Atomic Energy Commission, 195
"Aunt Jemima," 14
Avery, Paul, ix
Azores, 34
Aztecs, 107
Badalamenti, Rosalyn T., ix
Baldwin, Dr. Maitland, 138, 143,
201-202
Barbiturates, 6, 35
Basel, Switzerland, 3
Bateson, Gregory, 120
Baylor University, 67n
Bay of Pigs, 195,203
Becker, Eddie, ix
Beecher, Henry, 67n, 72n
Behavior
"behaviorism," 162
-control, 29, 30
modification, unethical, 213
See also mind-control
manipulation, 147
research, 30
sciences, 147
Bennett, Dr. Edward, 197-198
Benzedrine, 40, 80
Berle, Adolf A.,156
Berlin airlift, 57
Bevis, Penny, viii
Biderman, Albert, 128n
Bio-electrics, 212
Bissell, Richard, 76
Blackmail, 46-47
Blauer, Harold, 67n
Blowback, 48
BLUEBIRD, 22-26, 28-29
renamed ARTICHOKE, 29
Blum, Ralph, 118-119,121
Bordentown, N.J., reformatory, 201

Borosage, Robert, viii
Bortner, Henry, 86, 108-110, 115
Boston Psychopathic Hospital, 53,
54,58,59, 118,169
Botanicals, 109
Botulinum, 74-75
Botulinus toxin, 16
Brainwashing, 28
Chinese credited with, 125-126
CIA investigations, 127-146
methods, 128-130
tested by Dr. D. E. Cameron,
139-141
Branch, Taylor, viii
Brandt, Dr. Karl, 10
Braun, Wernher von, 9
Brothel, 93-96
Brown University, 156n
Brucellosis, 75
Bufontenine, 63
"Bugs," 58
Burch, Neil, 67n
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs. See Federal Bureau of
Narcotics
Bureau of Prisons. See U.S. Bureau
of Prisons
Burke, Michael, 28
Burroughs, William, 84n, 203
Butler Health Center (Providence),
169
*BZ (psychochemical), 102, 110
California Medical Facility
(Vacaville),201
Cal Tech (California Institute of
Technology), 55
Cameras, in tobacco pouches, 55
Cameron, Dr. D. Ewen, viii, 131-139,
145, 148, 156, 159,214
LSD testing, 139-141
Cam Ranh Bay, 144n
Cannabis indica, 6
See also Marijuana
Carbamate poison, 110, 200
Carbon-dioxide inhalation, 200
Carmichael, Leonard, 156n
Carter, Pres. Jimmy, 206
Cass^dv, John. 178-179
CASTIGATE, 37
Castro, Fidel, 17, 74-76, 98, 191,
195, 197, 198
Cattell, James, 67n
Cavanagh, Dr. John, ix
Central Mongoloid skull, 158

INDEX   233

Center for National Security Studies,
viii
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
abuses investigated, 109, 205-207
Army Chemical Corps
Special Operations Division
(SOD) work for, 73-86
ARTICHOKE, 29, 33, 55, 88
auditors, 99
behavioral research, 164, 206-209
BLUEBIRD, 22-26, 28-29
brainwashing studies, 127-146
funding of, 132, 133, 136,
137-138, 141
carnal operations, 95
CASTIGATE, 37
CHATTER, 35-39, 43
Clandestine Services division
(Directorate of Operations),
also "dirty tricks department,"
56-57, 73-75, 101, 103, 164,
176-177, 189, 195-196,
200, 204
Assistant for Scientific Matters,
103
Health Alteration Committee,
75n
cooperation with British and
Canadian governments, 30
Counterintelligence, 145, 189-190
D-lysergic acid diethylamide
(LSD), use of
experiments, 61-73, 119-122,
169, 180
accidental, 70-72
funding of research, 58-59, 79,
111
military services interest, 59
National Institute of Mental
Health interest, 59
testing, 73-86, 87-97, 99-104,
105, 154-155, 164
drugs, use of, 21-33, 34-44
experiments with Mexican
mushrooms, 106-117
use of prison inmates in, 117
Frankfurt base, 35-38
funding of botanical poison
research, 111
funding of Society for the
Investigation of Human
Ecology, 149
General Counsel, 83
human behavior manipulation,
147-163, 164-181
hypnosis experiments. 182-192

informants, 64
Inspector General, 98, 100-101,
102n,176,196
liason With Army, Navy, and
Air Force Intelligence, 30
Mafia operations, 22, 101
material deleted from OSS
documents, 7
medical staff, 29
Medical Office, 102n
methods after World War II, 20
mind-control work, vii, 8-13, 17,
18,21-33,34-44
MKDELTA, 57, 103
MKNAOMI, 57, 73-74
MKSEARCH, 197-200
MKULTRA, 57 et al
Office of Security, 22-24, 29, 30-32,
38, 55,80,82, 108, 150-157
Office of Scientific Intelligence,
21-23,26,28,29,209
Office of Technical Services, 29n
"Operation Midnight Climax," 100
Personality Assessment System, Ix
Research Chairman, 84-85
responsibility in Dr. Frank Olson's
death, 85, 87
Science and Technology Direc-
torate, 144n,196,209
Office of Research and Devel-
opment (ORD) 209, 213
Security Memorandum, 1949, 21
Soviet Division, 28
"Special" interrogation, 22
Technical Services Division. 29n
Technical Services Staff (TSS),
29, 55, 57-58, 61-62, 64-65,
67, 70-72 et al
assessment staff, 172-175, 179
Chemical Division, 55
perjury questioned, 207
tests with dolphins, 144
use of college students in tests, 31
Western Hemisphere Division, 203
with respect to Freedom of
Information Act, 211
work with Navy, 1952, 34-44
"Charisma," 167
CHATTER, 35-39, 43
CIA psychiatric consultants'
report on, 43-44
Chemical and biological warfare
(CBW), 16-17, 55, 57, 74n
Cheshire, Mark, ix
Chestnut Lodge, 81-84
Chile, 197, 213

234    INDEX
China
credited with brainwashing, 125-
126,131,150
use of drugs in, 130
political re-education programs
in, 128-130
Chondodendron toxicoferum 203
Church, Sen. Frank, 206
Committee. See U.S. Senate
Circumcision, effect on Turkish
boys, 159
City College (College of the City of
NewYork,CCNY),56
Civil Service Commission, 23
Clandestine Services, 74-76
Health Alteration Committee, 76n
Clark, Lincoln, 119n
Claudius, 106
Cleghorn, Dr. Robert, 140
Cline, Ray, 28, 56, 176, 198n
Cocaine, 57n
Cohen, Sidney, ix, 119n
Cointreau, 77
Colby, William, 76, 176,198n
Cold War, viii, 9, 11, 125, 128, 148
hysteria, 27
influence on mind-control
experiments, 26-27, 57
use of hypnotism in, 182
Colgate University, 19
College Board exams, 168
Columbia College, 12
Law School, 12
University, 59
Commissioner of Narcotics, 36
Conant, James, 14
Condon, Richard, 9n, 192
Congo, 17,75
Conklin, M. J., ix
Cook, William Boyd, 115n
Cooper, Gary, 34
Cornell University, 13, 127
Medical School, 33, 127-128,
147-153, 154-156
patients used in experiments, 149
Cortez, 107
Corynanthine, 61
Counter-intelligence, 48
"Cover grants," 158
Cuba, 197, 198
missile crisis, 164
Cummins, Ken, viii
Cunningham, Hugh, 28
Curandera (shaman), 112, 115n,
117
Curare, 109, 139

Dachau, 4-6,8-11
Day of the Dolphin, The, 144
"Dead drops," 187
Death in the Mind, 20
Deep Creek Lodge, Md., 73-74, 79
deFlorez, Adm. Luis, 84
Del Gracio, August, 6-7, 88, 93
Delaney, Hannah, viii
Democrat and Chronicle
(Rochester, N.Y.),36n
Department of the Army, 205
"Depatterning," viii, 133-136, 214
DeShon, H. Jackson, 54, 60
Destruction of memory, 212
Dewey, Gov. Thomas, 7n, 90, 93
Dexamyl, 38
Dexedrine, 38, 39, 40, 42
Diarrhea inducers, 99
"Differential amnesia," 133
Dille, James, 67n
Dishwashers, 165-166
D-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)
CIA experiments with, 61-73,
119-122,169,180
accidental, 70-72
CIA funding of research, 58-59
CIA interest peak, 55-58
CIA testing, 73-86, 87-97, 99-104,
105, 154-155, 164
Corynanthine as possible
antidote, 61
discovery of, 3-4, 8-9
effects on Siamese fighting fish
and snails documented, 61
fear of Russian possession, 65
importation to U.S., 54
Kauders' lecture on in Boston, 53
Lilly manufacture of, 66-67
Military services' interest, 59
National Institute of Mental
Health interest, 59
paranoia from, 54
Pfeiffer's test with, 201
practical joke with, 77, 86
dose to Dr. Frank Olson called
"therapeutic," 83
radioactive marker for, 118
reaction of schizophrenics to, 60
scientists' reports published, 61
studies at Lexington Federal drug
hospital, 62-64
use in covert operations, 61
DMT, 110
Dolphins, 144
Donovan, Gen. William "Wild Bill,"
12-18,27, 171

INDEX    235

Doors of Perception, The, 117
Drugs
CIA use of, 21-33, 34-44,
memory destroying, 41
testing, 180
Drum, James "Trapper," 83-84
Dulles, Allen, 27, 48, 56-57, 66-67,
72, 82, 84,87, 127, 131,
147-148, 156, 186, 195, 203n
Eagleton, Thomas, 103
Earman, John, 98, 100
Edgewood Arsenal (Md.), 74n
chemical laboratory, 210
Educational Testing Service, 168
Edwards, Sheffield, 221
EEC tests, 26, 168
Ehrlichman, John, 172
Einstein, Albert, 8, 9
Eisenhower, Pres. Dwight D., 14,
203n
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The, 121
Electric stimulation, 212
Electrodes
experiments with, 142-143,210
"Electro-sleep" machine
danger of temporary brain
damage, 25
Electroshock, 133, 134, 140, 145,
202,214
amnesia from, 25
battery driven, 26
continued treatments, 25-26
EEC tests to determine effects, 26
"excruciating pain," 25
in CIA behavioral research, 164
"Page-Russell" method, 135
Reiter machine, 25
sleep-, 135
Ellsberg, Daniel, 172-173
Emory University, 201
Epidemics, 77
Ergot, 4, 66, 105
Estabrooks, George "Esty," 19-20
"Executive action," 210
Explorations of Personality, 17
EXPLOSIVE, 41-42
Explosive seashells, 55
"Externalizer" (E), 166-167,168,
169, 172, 175-176
Eysenck, H. J., 159-160
False papers, 55
Faust, 179
Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI),8,30

Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 7, 36,
88,89-90,91, 92-93, 199
and Dangerous Drugs, 119-120
Feldman, Ira "Ike," 94, 98
Fiore, Nick, viii
Flagrante delicto, 92
"Flexible" (F), 166-167
Flowers, Eddie, 63-64
Foothills College, 7n
Food and Drug Administration,
67-68, 201
Ford, Pres. Gerald, 85n-86n, 205
Forest Hills, Queens, N.Y., 155
Fort Detrick, Md., 57, 73-79, 85,
199-200
Frankenstein, Dr. 9, 121
Freedom and Dignity, 160
Freedom of Information Act, vii-viii,
7n, 188n, 200,206, 212
Fremont-Smith, Frank, 120
Fried, Frank, Shriver, Harris and
Kampelman (law firm), viii
Gallagher, John, ix
"Gang that Couldn't Spray Straight,"
100n,180, 208
Gardner, John, 18
Gaynor, Paul, 25, 38
Georgetown University Hospital, 202
Germ warfare, 125-126
Geschickter, Dr. Charles, 59, 155n,
202, 207
Geschickter Fund for Medical
Research, 59, 110, 114, 118,
155n, 187n, 202-203
Gestapo, 4, 19
Gibbons, Willis, 57, 83-84
Ginsberg, Allen, 120-121
Giordano, Harry, 199n
Gittinger, John, ix, 18, 20, 94, 100,
130, 157, 160, 186, 187, 188,
190, 191
Personality Assessment System
(PAS), 164-181,196-197
"God's Flesh," 107-111, 112, 114, 115
See also Teonanactl
Goethe, Johann von, 179
Goffman, Erwin, 160
Goldwater, Sen. Barry, 207
Goodwin, Richard, 198n
"Goofball." See Dexamyl
Goldstein, Bonnie, ix
Goring, Hermann, 10
Gottlieb, Dr. Sidney, 17, 20, 55-72,
73-75, 97-98, 100-103, 108,
110, 115,151-162,167,186-

236    INDEX

192, 195-206, 208-209, 212
Graphology (handwriting analysis),
171n
Great Britain, 12
Greenblatt, Milton, ix, 53
Greene, Bob, viii
Greenfield, Dr. Patricia, ix
Greiner, Hans, 179
Gulag Archipelago, The, 128
Gypsies, 5, 10
Haggerty, Julie, ix
Hair, 54
Hallucinogens, 117
Halperin, Morton, viii
Hamilton, Dr. James, 91n, 97
200-202
Hammerstein, Oscar II, 81
Handwriting analysis, 17
"Harassment substances," 100, 197
Harvard, 14, 105, 118, 119, 160, 161,
162, 170,203
Medical School, 53, 72n
Harvey, Laurence, 9n
Hashish, 58
Hawkins, William, 94
Hayward, Lisa Olson, 84
Hebb, Dr. Donald, 137-138, 143n
Heim, Roger, 114-115
Helms, Richard, 13, 17, 20, 44, 48,
56-57,72,87,97,100-101,.
145-146, 189, 196-197, 199,
204-205, 208, 212
Heroin, 35, 62,64, 91,94
Hersh, Seymour, 205
Hidden microphones, 39
High Noon, 34
Hinkle, Laurence, ix, 127-130, 147,
149, 151, 154n, 156, 157
Hinsey, Dr. Joseph, 156
Hillenkoetter, Roscoe, 22-23
Hilton, James, 13
Himmler, He'nrich, 5
Hite Report, The, 94
Hitler, Adolf, 10, 13, 15-16, 17,
18-19,26, 53, 110, 171, 172,
200
Hoch, Paul, 67n
Hodge, Harold, 59, 118
Hofmann, Dr. Albert, ix, 3-4, 5, 8-9,
53-54, 58, 105, 115
Holliday, Billie, 91n
Hollister, Dr. Leo, 120-121
Holmesburg State Prison (Pa.), 212
Homer, 41n
Homosexuals, 170, 175n

entrapment of, 96-97, 173
Hood, William, ix
Hoover, Pres. Herbert, 27
Hoover, J. Edgar, 30, 90, 213
Hsi-nao, 125
Huaulta de Jimenez, 112, 114, 115n
"Human ecology," 147-163
defined, 147
"special methods," 149
Human Ecology Fund, 149n
Human Ecology Society. See Society
For the Investigation of
Human Ecology
Hungarian revolt, 1956, 152-154
Hunt, Howard, 55
Hunter, Edward, 125-126, 128
Huxley, Aldous, 117, 143n
Hyde, Robert, 54, 59-61,64,69, 119,
169
Hypnosis, 5, 11, 18-19, 21, 24, 40-42,
154, 162, 182-192,212
methods, 55
"terminal experiment," 185-187
Institute for Experimental
Psychiatry, 161n
"Internalizer (I)," 166-167, 169, 172
Interrogation techniques, 30
Investigative Reporters and Editors,
Inc., viii
Invisible inks, 55
Ionia State Hospital (Michigan),
154-155, 170
Iguitos, Peru, 203
Isabel!, Dr. Harris, 59, 62-64, 116,
170
Istanbul University, 159
Itching powder, 100
Ivy Leaguer, 91
Jamaica dogwood, 109
Jellinek, Roger, ix
Jews, 5, 10
"Johnny Evans," 20
Johns Hopkins University, 156
Johnson, Pres. Lyndon, 198n,203n,
205
Jones, Janet, 94
Justice Department, 93n
Kamasutra, 118
Kauders, Otto, 53
Keehner, James, 173-175
Keeney, Barnaby, 156n
Kelly, George A., 156n
Kempster, Norman, ix

INDEX    237

Kennedy, Sen. Edward, 93n, lOOn,
180, 206-208
Kennedy, Pres. John F., 14, 100, 145,
195, 198n
Kesey, Ken, 120-121
KGB, 96, 129, 145-146
Khrushchev, Nikita, 161, 164
King, J. C., 203
Kirkpatrick, Gen. Lyman, 82-83, 85,
lOOn,102n
Kistiakowsky, Dr. George, 14
Klee, Gerald, 67n
Kleiner, Elsa, ix
Kleiner, Fred, ix
Kline, Milton, ix, 187, 191n, 195
Knockout drops, 89, 93
Kohan, Jeff, ix
Korean Central Intelligence Agency
(KCIA), 178, 179-180
Korean War, 23, 26, 28, 34, 43, 57,
125-127
Kubie, Dr. Lawrence, 19
Langer, Walter, ix, 15-16, 15-16n,
18, 171
Langer, William, 15
Land, Dr. Edwin, 210
Lashbrook, Robert, 74, 79-83, 85-86,
93, 207
Latham, Aaron, 189
Lauren G., 131-135
Leary, Timothy, 105, 117-118, 122
Lee, Marty, ix
Lenzner, Terry, 63n
LeRosey, 13
Lesbians, 170
Levittown, L.I.,N.Y., 158
Lexington, Kentucky, Federal drug
hospital, 62-64, 89,116,170
Life magazine, 116-117, 118
Lifton, Robert Jay, 128n
Lilly, Eli & Company, 66-68
Lilly, Dr. John, ix, 62, 142-144, 209
Lipscomb, Tom, ix
"Lisetin," 109
Long, Sen. Edward, 199n
Lovell, Stanley, 13-17, 55, 75, 88, 200
LSD. See D-lysergic acid diethyla-
mide
Luciano, Charles "Lucky," 7n, 88, 93
Lumumba, Patrice, 17, 75
Luther, 79
McCarthy, Sen. Joseph, 26, 69
McCone, John, 100-101, 195, 196,
198n,209

McGill University, 132, 138, 159
psychology department, 137
Macy, Josiah J., Foundation, 59,
64-65, 118, 120-121
McQuown, Judith H., ix
Madeleine, 136
Mafia, 7, 22, 74
CIA-Mafia assassination plots,
100, 191
Magnusson, Paul, ix
Malott, Deane W., 127
Manchuria, Japanese use of biologi-
cal warfare in, 77n
Manchurian Candidate
defined, 9, 9n
hypnosis to create, 183, 186-187,
189,191
Mandala, Tibetan, 121
Manhattan Project, 109, 131
involvement with OSS drug
experiments, 6-8, 88
MaoTse-tung, 130
Marchetti, Victor, 189
Marcos, Ferdinand, 172n
Maria Sabina, 112-114, 115n
Marijuana, 6-8, 38, 40, 42, 88, 91,
154
"Mexican grown" in Project
CHATTER, 36
Marin County, 99, 208
Marines, 24
Marrazzi, Amedeo, 67n
Marx, C., 138-139
Marx, Karl, 130
Massachusetts General Hospital,
67n,119n
Massachusetts Mental Health
Center, 53n
Mata Hari, 96
Mead, Margaret, 65, 120,159
Me and Juliet, 81
Medicine, 147
Menninger, Karl, 19
Menninger, William, 19
Menopause, 139
Mescaline, 4-6, 11, 58, 106, 111
forced injections of derivatives,
67n
Messelson, Matthew, ix
Miami News, 125
"Microbioinoculator, non-
discernible," 77
Microphones, 92, 94
Microwaves, 212
Migraine headaches, 127, 148
Mills, Bill, ix

238    INDEX

Mind-control, vii
BLUEBIRD program, 22-26, 28
bureaucratic squabbling and
conflict over, 29, 30
defense against, 23
"gap," 28
rationalizations for, 30-31
research, 13
Mindszenty, Josef Cardinal, 21-22,
28, 125, 145
Mintz, Jim, viii
Missouri Institute of Psychiatry, 67n
Mitrione, Dan, 178
Mitty, Walter, 47
MKDELTA, 57, 103
MKNAOMI, 57, 73-74
MKSEARCH, 197, 198-204
Subproject #2, 199
Subproject #3, 200
MKULTRA, 57-61, 67-69, 71-72, et al
safehouses, 174
Subproject #3 (George White),
92-95,98-104
Subproject #58, 114, 115-116
Subproject #143, 197-198
"Model psychosis," 53  *
Monroe, Dr. James, 128n, 155-157,
159n,207n
Montana State University, 115n
Montreal, Quebec, 132-133, 141, 156
Mont Royal, 132
Moore, Dr. James, ix, 108, 112, 116,
200n
"Morgan Hall," 92
Morgan, J. P., & Company, 111
Morphine, 62
Morrison, Robert, 133
Moscow purge trials of 1937 and
1938,21
Mount Holyoke College, 18n
Mt. Sinai Hospital, 59, 169
Mulholland, John, 80
Murray, Henry "Harry," 17-18
Mushrooms
CIA experiments with, 105-121
"magic," 105-107, 112, 117-118,
200n
Mushrooms, Russia and History,
106, 111
Mycology, 111
Naked Lunch, 84n
Narcohypnosis, 23n
Narcotherapy, 23n, 40
National Institutes of Health, 62, 67,
138, 142-144,201-202

National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), 59, 63, 157-158
Addiction Research Center, 59
National Security Act of 1947, 27
National Security Council, 27
National Student Association, 203n
National Velvet, 132
Naval intelligence, 24, 34-43
Naval Medical Research Institute,
35, 67n
Nazis
experiments with drugs, 5, 8-10
"aviation medicine," 5, 9
war criminals, 10-11
Neff, Walter, 5
Nembutal, 80, 134
Nepenthe, 41n
"Neurosurgical techniques"
(lobotomy-related), 26
New York Hospital-Cornell Medical
Center, 156
New York Liberal Party, 156
New York Neurological Association,
148
New York State Psychiatric Institute,
67n
New York Times, 205, 207n
Newsday, viii
Nicotine, 57n
1984, 96n
Nixon, Pres. Richard, 86, 198n, 204,
205,213
"Nondiscernible microbioinoculator"
(dart gun), 76, 109
Norman, Okla., state hospital, 165
Northern Ireland, 213
Northwestern University Medical
School, 209
Nosenko, Yuri, 145-146
Nti sheeto, 112
See also Mushrooms
Nuremburg trial, 10
code, 10-11,213
Tribunal records, 22
Oaxaca, Mexico, 112
Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
agent network, 16
creation of, 12-13
drug experiments, 6-8, 11-12,55,
89
during World War II, 12-20, 40,
76, 89-90
mind-control research, 13, 16
National Defense Research
Committee, 14

INDEX   239

Research and Analysis, 15
Research, Development, 13, 55
Division 19, 14
testing programs, 17-18
methods used in corporations,
18
"truth drug" committee, 6-7
use of carbamate poison in Hitler
assassination attempt, 110
Of Spies and Strategems, 16n
Ohio State University, 156n
"Old boys," 13
Oliver, Florence, viii
Ololiuqui seeds, 115n
Olson, Alice (Mrs. Frank), 77-78,
79,81-85,86
Olson, Eric, 81-85
Olson, Dr. Frank, 73-86, 87-88, 93,
97, lOOn, 205
"Operation Midnight Climax," 99
Opium, 91n
Orchids for Mother, 189
Orlikow, David, 139
Orlikow, Val, 139-140
Orne, Martin, 161-162, 170, 177
Orth, Maureen, 173-174
Orwell, George, 96n
Osgood, Charles, ix, 158, 162, 168
Osmond, Humphrey, ix
Oster, Patrick, ix
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 145
Overholser, Dr. Winfred, 6
"Page-Russell" method, 135
Paraguay, 188
Parapsychology, 211, 212
Park, Tongsun, 178
Parke, Davis & Company, 108, 109
Pasternak, Walter, 99
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 128
Pecks' Bad Boy, 14, 55
Personality Assessment System, ix
Peterzell, Jay, viii
Petrillo, Joseph, viii
Peyote cactus, 105, 120
Pfeiffer, Carl, 59,201
Pharmaceutical companies, 65
Phenergan, 134
Philby, Harold "Kim," 44n
Piaget, Jean, 65
Picrotoxin, 23
Piule, 106-108
Placebos, 37
Plotner, Dr. Kurt, 5
Plowman, Dr. Timothy, 203
Poison gas, 16

Polaroid, 210
Political warfare, 30
Polygraph (lie detector), 22, 24,
146, 161n
in detection of homosexuality,
24n
in detection of theft of cash, 24n
"super," 25
Powers, Francis Gary, 74
Princeton, 90
Inn,65
Project OFTEN, 212
Prostitutes, 91, 93n, 94-97, 99, 170,
180, 199
Psilocybin, 105,115-116
Psychedelic drugs, 105, 109
Psychiatry, 15
"Psychic driving," 136-137, 140
Psychological Assessment
Associates, 168, 180
Psychology, 15, 147
Psychosurgery, 212
Radar waves, 203
Radiation, 212
Radio stimulation of the brain, 212
Ramparts magazine, 203
Research in Mental Health News-
letter, 159
"Relugated" (R), 166-167
Rhodes, David, 99-100, 180, 208
Richards, Bill, ix
Richardson, Allan, 112-113
Rinkel.Max, 53, 54, 118
Rivea seeds, 63
Robinson, Julian, ix
Rockefeller Commission, 84, 206
Foundation, 132-133, 138, 157
Vice-president Nelson, 205
Rodgers, Richard, 81
Rogers, Carl, 156, 157, 158, 162, 168
"Role Adaptive" (R), 167
"Role Uniform" (U), 167
Rolling Stone magazine, 180
Roosevelt Hotel (New Orleans), 8
Roosevelt, Pres. Franklin D., 12
Rope Dancer, The, 189
Rositzke, Harry, 28
Rubenstein, Leonard, 136-138
Russell, Seymour, 196
Russians, 5
Rutgers University, 153, 154
Ruwet, Lt. Col. Vincent, 74, 77, 79,
81,83-85,86
Sadism, 97

240    INDEX

"Safehouses," 39, 41, 69, 92-94,
101-102, 199-200,202
St. Anthony's Fire, 4
St. Clair, Diane, viii
St. Elizabeth's Hospital, 6
Sandoz drug and chemical empire,
3, 54, 58-59, 65-66, 68, 115n,
116, 119, 143
San Francisco safehouse, 93-99, 101,
102,170-171,174,194,199
Saunders, David, 168
"Saucepan chemist," 13
Savage, Charles, 67n
Schacht, Hjalmar, 75
Scheflin, Alan, ix
"Scheider, Victor," 206
Schein, Edgar, 128n
Schizophrenia,     53, 132-133, 140
induced by hallacinogenic
mushrooms, 114
Schizophrenics
behavior of, 134n
electroshock in treatment of, 133
reaction to LSD, 60
symptoms, 134n, 136
Schlesinger, James, 180, 205, 212
Schulman, Jay, 153-154
Schwab, Dr. John, 74
Scientific Engineering Institute,
161n, 210-211
Scopolamine, 6, 63
Scott, George C., 144
Sears, Alden, 186-187
Seconal, 38, 39, 42, 134
Secretary of Defense, 36
"Seeking the Magic Mushroom," 117
See-through mirrors, 92
"Semantic differential," 158
"Senora sin mancha," 112
Sensory deprivation, 128, 138n, 141
143, 148, 201-202
"Serunim," 72
Sex, 47-48, 93-97
kinky, 200
Sexual entrapment, 173
Shah of Iran, 13, 172n
Shelley, Mary, 9
Shellfish toxin, 74
Sherif, Carolyn Wood, 159
Sherif, Muzafer, 159
Short-order cooks, 165-166
Simon, John J., ix
Sinatra, Frank, 9n
Siragusa, Charles, 99n, 207
Skinner, B. F., 160, 162, 214
"Sleep cocktail," 134

"Sleep room," 134, 135
"Sleep therapy," 134
Slezak, Walter, 164
Smithsonian Institution, 156n
Sneezing powder, 99, 197
Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology, 133n, 137,
139n, 149, 163, 167-168, 170,
171n, 196, 207n, 210
Sociology, 15, 147
Sodium amytal, 23
Sodium pentothal, 40
Sokolow, Richard, viii
Solzhenitzyn, Alexander, 128
Sommer, Andy, ix
Sorbonne, 114
South Korea, 178, 179-180
Soviet Union (Russia), 26-28, 74-77,
101, 129-131, 157, 161,213
behavior-control programs, 28n
behavioral research, 30, 102n
use of drugs in, 130
brainwashing, 129
political re-education programs,
128
"Space-time image," 135
Spanish Inquisition, 130
Speer, Albert, 10
Sputnik, 117
Spy tradecraft
alternatives to physical torture in
obtaining information, 45-49
blackmail, 46-47
entrapment, 47
limited usefulness of physical
torture in obtaining informa-
tion, 44-45
sex, 48
uselessness against well-
intentioned agent, 49
S. S. (Schutzstaffel),4-6
Stalin, Josef, 26, 69, 129, 148
Stanford University, 99, 120, 207
Medical School, 97
Staph. enterotoxin, 75
State Department, 24
Statler Hotel, 81-83
Stein, Gertrude, 120
Stephenson, Richard, 153
Stereotoxic Surgery, 210, 212
Stink bombs, 99, 197
Stockwell, John, ix, 46-48
Stress creation, 17, 174
Struik, Dr. A. H. M., 154n
Suicide pills, 55, 74
Sullivan, Timothy, viii

INDEX    241

Svengali, 182
"Swimmer nullification," 144n
Tabularasa, 133
Taiwan, 188
Taylor, Elizabeth, 132
Taylor, Telford, ix
Technical Services Staff (TSS), 29
Teonanactl, 107
Tetrahydrocannabinol, 38
THIRD CHANCE, 62n
Thompson, Hunter S., 63
Thompson, Dr. Samuel, ix, 34-35,
37-38, 40, 42-43
Thorazine, 134
Thornwell, James, 62n-63n
Times Books, ix
Toughkenamon, Pa., 108
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 93
Transmitters
in false teeth, 55
Treichler, Ray, 65, 86, 99, 207
"Trickle-down phenomenon," 120
Truth drugs, 30, 36, 48, 55, 155, 198
serum, 145
Tupamaro urban guerrillas, 178-179
Turner, Stansfield, 197n, 206, 212
Two-way mirrors, 37, 39
Ultrasonics, 212
Ultraviolet radiation, 211
U.S. Air Force, 67, 128
Psychological Warfare Div., 128n
study of Korean War prisoners,
156
U.S. Army
Biological Laboratory, 199-200
Chemical corps, 58, 65, 67, 74,
109,212
Special Operations Division
(SOD) of biological research
center, 57, 74, 82
clandestine services, 74
Intelligence, 43
studies of brainwashing, 128
THIRD CHANCE, 62n
U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 89
U.S. Rubber, 57
U.S. Senate, 44, 180
Church committee, 76n, lOOn,
102-103,206
Select Committee on Intelligence,
206
Subcommittee on Health and
Scientific Research, 206-207
University of Basel. 109

University of California at Berkley,
18
University of Delaware, 110, 115,
200n
University of Denver, 186
University of Houston, 197
University of Illinois Medical School,
59
Pharmacology Dept, 201
University of London, 159
University of Maryland Medical
School, 67n
University of Minnesota, 67n, 186
University of Nijmegen, 154n
University of Oklahoma, 59, 159
University of Pennsylvania, 160
University of Rochester, 35, 59
University of Washington, 67n
University of Wisconsin, 77, 156
ULTRA program, 57n
Uruguay, 178-179
Venezuelan equine encephalo-
myelitis, 75-76
Verne, Jules, 8-9
Veronal, 134
Veterans Administration Hospital,
Palo Alto, Ca., 120-121
Vietnam War, 122
Wagner, Richard, 120
Warren Commission, lOln
Washington Post, 77, 85, lOOn
Wasson, R. Gordon, ix, 106, 111-117
Wasson, Valentina, 106, 111-112
Watergate, 204-205
Wechsler, David, 165n
Adult Intelligence Scale, 165n
battery, 170-171, 173, 178-180
-Bellevue-G., 165n
digit-span test, 169
intelligence scale, 165
psychological tests, 118
subtests, 166-169, 172, 175
Wendt, G. Richard, 35-43
presumed addition to heroin, 36n
Wendt, Mrs. G. Richard, 42
West, Louis Jolyon, 59
Wheelon. Albert "Bud," 195
White, George, 6-8, 12, 20, 88, 97-99,
102, 170-171, 199-200,207
Whitehorn, John, 156
Whitman, Florence, viii
"Who? Me?," 14-15
Whores. See Prostitutes
Williams College. 13

242    INDEX
Williams, Dr. Fred, 128n	Wolff-Hinkle report, 128
Wilson, Benjamin, 77-78	study, 145
Winkle, Owen, 93	World Psychiatric Assoc., 132
Winne, John, 178, 179-180
Wiretapping, 55, 199n	Yage, 203
Wolfe, Tom, 121
Wolff, Harold, 33, 127-130, 147	Zuckerman, Sam, ix