I. Introduction
CIA Mind-Control
Alliance For Human Reserach Protection CIA Mind Control
The covert convergence between CIA and cognitive scientists — psychiatrists and psychologists — who provided the patina of legitimate science to CIA’s outrageous — even depraved — psychological torture experiments. CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” experiments were at first interwoven with chemical and biological weapons tests and radiation experiments; they were conducted on (mostly) involuntary soldiers and prisoners. Beginning in 1950, and lasting to the mid-1970s, the scope of the experiments vastly expanded and so did the human pool of subjects; thousands of unwitting American civilians, including children and pregnant women were victimized.
The inhumane experiments involved not merely powerful psychoactive drugs; they involved brainwashing through the use of isolation, sensory deprivation, psychological torture, and indoctrination in an effort to break the human will. The experiments were designed to develop “psychological warfare” technology and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. The victims were subjected to massive electroshock, psychosurgery, implanted electrodes in the brain, electro-magnetic brain stimulation, remote control radio beams, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, aversive behavioral modification. And they were bombarded with microwaves to erase memory, alter brain functions and disrupt individual behavior patterns.
These sadistic diabolical medical atrocities were conducted by prominent academic-based medical doctors and clinical psychologists who violated the essential moral standards of civilized medical research — decreed by the Nuremberg Code; they did so with impunity under CIA’s iron tight seal of secrecy. None of the collaborators in evil were ever brought to account. These brutal and inhumane brain-damaging experiments sought to destroy the human soul; they led to the codification of extreme forms of psychological torture. None of these atrocities served any medical, scientific or therapeutic purpose. The techniques of psychological torture that were tested and developed during the Cold War era continue to be deployed in covert interrogations to the present day.
In his article “Science in Dachau’s Shadow” (2007) Alfred McCoy, a distinguished professor of history who has fearlessly documented the CIA’s involvement in global drug trafficking (The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,1972) and CIA’s use of torture in several seminal books, the most recent, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (2012) states:
“The Nazi role in the CIA’s research was more than mere metaphor or analogue. Just as the U.S. space program later benefited from the work of Werner von Braun’s rocket scientists at Peenemunde and the Luftwaffe’s medical experiments at Dachau, so this CIA psychological effort continued the research of the Nazi doctors, both their specific scientific findings and innovative use of human subjects.”
(McCoy, Science in Dachau’s Shadow, p. 403)
Nazi medical atrocities shattered long-standing clinical standards and ethical research. However, the impact of the revelations at Nuremberg had contradictory effects. Whereas the world community was horrified and repulsed by the inhumanity at Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen; laying the foundation for explicit ethical standards and restraints — as embodied in the 1947 Nuremberg Code; U.S. intelligence officials and medical scientists were eager to learn the methods and results of those heinous experiments. They were in fact motivated to exploit and expand upon the knowledge gained. Indeed, as former U.S. State Department officer, John Marks wrote in his landmark book, The Manchurian Candidate (1979), “even before the [Nuremberg] verdicts were in, special U.S. teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value.” (Ch. 1)
“Consequently, Washington’s postwar [ ] research was soon infected by the Dachau model, whose methods it mimed across a broad spectrum of Cold War experiments on, literally, tens of thousands of unwitting human subjects — from atomic, chemical, and biological warfare to psychological torture.” (McCoy. Science in Dachau’s Shadow 2007)
“The professional burden of the memory of what transpired during the Nazi Era by the hands of members of the psychiatry profession is great. . .this requires us to grapple with the intrinsic guilt of the profession, and to take responsibility to fix fundamental flaws in how we view patients and their management. A dark side to medicine exists: psychiatry, academia, and science played a key role in the establishment of National Socialism and all that ensued. The experience of psychiatry during the Nazi era provides an example of how science can be perverted by politics and therefore can become vulnerable to misuse and abuse. . . [Yet] little has been published on the subject in mainstream psychiatry journals and even less is part of the formal education process for medical students and psychiatry residents.”
(Rael Strous, MD, Dept. of Psychiatry, Tel Aviv University. Annals of General Psychiatry, 2007)
The Nazi German experience graphically demonstrated in excruciating detail, how an alliance between government and academic medical professionals who engage in covert operations seamlessly devolves into medical atrocities, medical torture and medical murder. The torture experiments at Dachau were the catalyst for CIA’s variously code-named diabolical experiments that sought to subjugate and gain control over human mental and behavioral functions. The guinea pigs in these secret immoral experiments have included prisoners, soldiers, mental patients, handicapped children, deaf and blind people, homosexuals, single women, the elderly in nursing homes, school children, and any group of people considered “marginal” by the elite experimenters.
Recent books shed new light on the CIA’s covert forays aimed at subjugation and total control:
John Loftus, a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor and Army intelligence officer (America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History, 2013);
Stephen Kinzer, a Pulitzer Prize Winner and veteran New York Times foreign correspondent (The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 2013);
Karen Wetmore, an extraordinary documented account by a victim (Surviving Evil: CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont, 2014);
Alfred McCoy, distinguished historian, author of several books about the CIA (Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, 2012);
James Risen, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times (Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, 2014).
This book documents the collusion of the American Psychological Association with the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House, bending the profession’s rules of ethics to permit torture.
In Sept. 2012, McGill University’s Daily student newspaper acknowledged its infamous role as:
“the cradle of modern torture. . . To the patients. . .our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation — an experimentation that destroyed their lives and changed the course of psychological torture forever.”
“The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA. In 1963. . . the CIA compiled all the research into a torture manual called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook. Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing world.”
“The psychological paradigm taken by the CIA would not have been possible without [Dr. Donald] Hebb and [Dr. Donald Ewen] Cameron’s research on sensory deprivation and psychic driving.” (How McGill Pioneered Psychological Torture, McGill Daily (2012)
II. Reference Sources for CIA Torture Experiments
CIA Torture
Marc Ambinder. Inside the Secret Interrogation Facility at Bagram, The Atlantic, May, 2010
Mark Benjamin. “War on terror” Psychologist Gets Giant No-Bid Contract,” Salon, Oct. 14, 2010
Mark Benjamin. Psychologists Group Still rocked by Torture Debate, Salon, Aug. 4, 2006
Gregg Bloche, MD and Jonathan Marks. Doctors and Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, New England SJournal of Medicine, 2005
Erin Brodwin and Lauren Friedman. Horrifying Details Show Doctors’ Role In CIA Torture, Business Insider, Dec. 11, 2014
David Bromwich. Working the Dark Side, London Review of Books, Jan. 8, 2015
Nicholas Brown. A Critical Examination of the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program, The Winnower, July 2014
Steven Brunwasser, Jane Gillham and Eric Kim. A Meta-Analytic Review of PRP’s Effect on Depressive Symptoms, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2009
Krishnadev Calamur. ‘Unknowable’ If CIA Methods Elicited Useful Information, Agency’s Chief Says, NPR, Dec. 12, 2014
Philip Carter. The Road to Abu Ghraib, Washington Monthly, Nov. 2004
Center for Torture Accountability. Archives: Bruce Jessen: The Shrink; James Mitchell
CIA Inspector General Review. “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation (Sept. 2001 – Oct. 2003)”, 2004 (released 2008; 2009)
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou speaks out, Veterans Today, Feb. 10, 2015)
David Cole. Less Safe, Less Free: A Progress Report on the War on Terror: Address to the Terrorism & Justice Conference at the University of Central Missouri
David Cole. Did the Torture Report Give the CIA a Bum Rap? New York Times, Feb. 20, 2015
David Cole. The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers, New York Review of Books, 2009
Robert Collins. Voices from the “Dark Side”: The CIA Torture Debate, Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, Dec. 10, 2014
Constitution Project Task Force. Report on Detainee Treatment, 2013; Ch. 6 Doctors’ and Psychologists’ Role in Treatment of Prisoners in CIA Custody
Katherine Darmer. Waterboarding And The Legacy Of The Bybee-Yoo “Torture And Power” Memorandum: Reflections From A Temporary Yoo Colleague And Erstwhile Bush Administration Apologist, Chapman Law Review, 2009
Defense Department Inspector General DoD Inspector General Review of Detainee Abuse , 2006
DoD Inspector General Report. Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to facilitate Interrogations of Detainees (2009)
DoD Deception Hides Fact SERE Torture Techniques Still Allowed for Interrogations, Daily Kos, May 7, 2014
Katherine Eban. Rorschach and Awe, Vanity Fair, 2007
Katherine Eban. The Psychologists Who Taught the C.I.A. How to Torture (and Charged $180 Million), Vanity Fair, 2014
Kurt Eichenwald. 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, 2012 (Excerpt)
Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilsuk & Stephen Soldz. The Dark Side of “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” Psychology Today, March 25, 2011
Roy Eidelson and Stephen Soldz. “Does Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Work? CSF Research Fails the Test,” Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, Working Paper #1 May 2012
Roy Eidelson. The Army’s Flawed Resilience-Training Study: A Call for Retraction, Psychology Today, June 4, 2012
Sarah Ellison. What Was New York Times Reporter James Risen’s Seven-Year Legal Battle Really for? Vanity Fair, April, 2015
Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and Open Society Foundations (OSF). Columbia University, 2013
Eric Fair. I Can’t Be Forgiven for Abu Ghraib: The Torture Report Reminds Us of What America Was, The New York Times, Dec. 9, 2014
Sheri Fink. Tortured Profession: Psychologists Warned of abusive Interrogations, Then Helped Craft Them, ProPublica, May 5, 2009
Peter Finn and Joby Warrick. Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots, The Washington Post, March 29, 2009
Peter Finn and Joby Warrick. Document Referred to Extreme Duress as ‘Torture,’ Warned of Techniques’ Unreliability, The Washington Post, April 25, 2002
William Fisher. Bush’s “War on Terror” Tactics Make America Less Safe, Less Free, TruthOut, Aug. 2007
Michael John Garcia. The War Crimes Act: Current Issues, Congressional Research Service, Jan. 22, 2009
John Goetz and Britta Sandberg. The Torture Business: CIA Outsourced Development of Interrogation Plan, Des Spiegel, May 2009
Geoff Gray. Weaponizing Psychology, CounterPunch, December 24, 2014
Dwight Green, MD. Ethics Governing the Service of Prisoners as Subjects in Medical Experiments, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 1948.
Guantanamo America’s Battle Lab. Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, 2015
Abraham Halpern, John Halpern and Sean Doherty. “Enhanced” Interrogation of Detainees: Do Psychologists and Psychiatrists Participate? Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 2008
Lauren Harper. The CIA’s Declassified Torture Handbook: How to Create a “World of Fear, Terror, Anxiety, Dread.” National Security Archive, April 15, 2014
Seymour Hersh. Torture At Abu Ghraib: American Soldiers Brutalized Iraquis. How Far Up Does the Responsibility Go? The New Yorker, 2004
Alessandra Hirsch. Modern Day Mengeles, The Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, 2015
Christopher Hitchens. Believe Me, It’s Torture, Vanity Fair, 2008; Video
Scott Horton. APA Grapples with its Torture Demons, Harpers Magazine, 2014
Scott Horton. The Torture Doctors, Harper’s Magazine, 2013
Scott Horton. APA’s Unpredictable Past, Harper’s Magazine, 2010
Mark Hosenball. Report Reveals CIA Conducted Mock Executions, Newsweek, Aug. 2009
International Committee of the Red Cross Report on the Treatment by Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War, 2004
Michael Isikoff. Ali Soufan Breaks His Silence, Newsweek, April 24, 2009
Jeffrey Kaye. Before the EITs: James Mitchell’s Special Invite to FBI/APA Conference at Quantico on “Combatting Terrorism”, Dec. 21, 2014
Jeffrey Kaye. Torture program linked to illegal CIA techniques, AlJazeera America, Dec. 18, 2014
Jeffrey Kaye. Anti-Torture Psychologists Respond To Attack From APA Division Chief, The Public Record,
Nov 8th, 2012
Jeffrey Kaye and HP Albarelli. Cries From the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes, TruthOut, May 23, 2010
Jeffrey Kaye. Obama Interrogation Official Linked to Mind Control Research, The Public Record, 2010
Jeffrey Kaye. NYT Misses Full Story on Mitchell-Jessen, 2009
Jeffrey Kaye. The Torture Memos Are Not Just Sick, They’re Full of Lies: A Closer Look at the Bybee Memo, AlterNet, 2009
Glenn Kessler. Cheney’s claim that the U.S. did not prosecute Japanese soldiers for waterboarding, The Washington Post, Dec. 16, 2014
James Ketchum, MD. Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten, 2006
Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine, 2007
Jonathan Landay. Report: Abusive Tactics Used To Seek Iraq-Al Qaida Link, McClatchy Newspapers, April 21, 2009
Trymaine Lee. Jon Burge, ex-Chicago cop who ran torture ring, released from prison, MSNBC, Oct. 3, 2014
Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye. CIA Psychologist’s Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush’s Torture Program, Truthout, March 2011
Neil Lewis. Interrogators Cite Doctors’ Aid at Guantanamo Prison Camp, The New York Times, June 2005
Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. Doctors and Torture, New England Journal of Medicine, July 29, 2004 p. 415-416
Adam Liptak. A High-Tech War on Leaks, The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2011
Jonathan H. Marks. The Silence of the Doctors, The Nation, December 2005
Jane Mayer. The Dark Side: How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, 2008
Jane Mayer. The Experiment, The New Yorker, 2005
Jane Mayer, Outsourcing Torture, The New Yorker, 2005
Mark Mazzetti. C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations, The New York Times, Dec. 7, 2007
Alfred McCoy. Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, 2012
Alfred McCoy. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006;
Alfred McCoy. Cruel Science: CIA Torture & US Foreign Policy, New England Journal of Public Policy, 2005 Alfred McCoy. Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib, TomDispatch, 2004
Rashed Mian. Prosecution of the CIA Whistleblower Who Revealed Waterboarding to the World, Long Island Press, Dec. 27, 2014
Steven Miles, MD. Psychologists’ collusion with US torture limited our ability to decry it anywhere, July 11, 2015;
Dave Moniz and Tom Squitieri. Lawyers Raised Concerns on Interrogations, USA Today, June 9, 2004
Joshua Partlow & Julie Tate. 2 Afghans Allege Abuse at U.S. Site, The Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2009
Jon Perr. After Destroying Video Evidence, CIA’s Rodriguez Slams Senate Torture Report, Daily Kos, Dec. 6, 2014
Physicians for Human Rights. EXPERIMENTS IN TORTURE: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program, 2010
Physicians for Human Rrights. Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Revealed in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report, 2009
Kenneth S. Pope. Are the American Psychological Association’s Detainee Interrogation Policies Ethical and Effective? Key Claims, Documents, and Results, Zeitschrift Fur Psychologie, 2011
Kenneth Pope and Thomas Gutheil. Psychologists Abandon the Nuremberg Ethic: Concerns for Detainee Interrogations, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol.32, May-June, 2009
Dana Priest and Barton Gelman. U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations, The Washington Post, Dec. 26, 2002
Professional Services Council, White Paper, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers: A Strategic Reassessment for Budget-Constrained Times, June 5, 2012
Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo, The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2004
Steve Reisner. CIA on the Couch: Why There Would Have Been No Torture Without the Psychologists, SLATE, Dec. 2014
James Risen. Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, Oct. 2014
James Risen and Matt Apuzzo. C.I.A., on Path to Torture, Chose Haste Over Analysis, NYT, Dec. 15, 2014
James Risen and Michael Schmidt. 2004 Showdown Shaped Reputation of Pick for F.B.I., The New York Times, June 21, 2013
Collin Ross. CIA Mind Control Doctors from Harvard to Guantanomo, 2013
Scott Shane. Report Portrays a Broken C.I.A. Devoted to a Failed Approach, New York Times Dec. 2014; Scott Shane and Mark Mazzeti. Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations, NYT, Aug. 25, 2009;
Scott Shane. 2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11 Wake, NYT, Aug. 11, 2009;
Scott Shane & David Johnston. US Lawyers Agree on Legality of Brutal Tactic, NYT, June 6, 2009
Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti. U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases, The New York Times, May 2009
Stephen Soldz. The “Black Jail”: Obama’s Afghan Torture Center and the American Psychological Association Counterpunch, May 2010
Ali Soufan. The Black Banner: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, 2011
Ali Soufain. My Tortured Decision, OpEd. The New York Times, 2009
Peter Taylor. ‘Vomiting and screaming’ in destroyed waterboarding tapes, BBC News 9 May 2012
Gordon Thomas. Cheney, Rumsfeld Help Cover up CIA Scientist’s Murder, Globe Intel, 2002
United Nations. Istanbul Protocol: Manual on the Effective Investigation & Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 2004
UK Guardian Series by Spencer Ackerman:
US psychology body declines to rebuke member in Guantánamo torture case, January 9, 2014;
CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation, June 15, 2015
US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 ‘collusion’ July 11, 2015;
Psychologist accused of enabling US torture backed by former FBI chief, July 12, 2015;
Three senior officials lose their jobs at APA after US torture scandal, July 14, 2015
U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General Report: Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees, Sept. 2009
U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Report: Review of FBI Involvement and Observations of Detainee Interrogations at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Dec. 30, 2009
U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Memorandum for Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President. Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C.Sec 2340-2340A, August 1, 2002
U.S. DoJ OLC Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the CIA. Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative, Aug. 1, 2002
U.S. DoJ OLC Memorandum for William Haynes, General Counsel of the DoD. Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States, 2003
U.S. DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report: Investigation into the Office of Legal Counsel’s Memoranda Concerning Issues Relating to the CIA’s Use of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” on Suspected Terrorists, July 29, 2009
U.S. Military Police Brigade. Article 15-6 Investigation. “Taguba Report” On Treatment of Abu Ghraib Prisoners in Iraq, from Nov. 1, 2003 to Feb. 2004
U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Report. Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody (2004) Released 2009
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Executive Summary of the Report of CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, (2009) Released Dec. 2014
Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the U.S., March 14, 2003
Lauren Walker. Remember the Abu Ghraib Torture Pictures? There are More That Obama Doesn’t Want You to See, Newsweek, October 22, 2014
Judge Evan Wallach. “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 2007
Joby Warrick. Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned, The Washington Post, 2008
Joby Warrick and Peter Finn. Internal Rifts on Road to Torment, The Washington Post, July 19, 2009
Bryant Welch. Torture, Psychology, and Daniel Inouye: The True Story Behind Psychology’s Role in Torture, Huffington Post, July 17, 2009; Updated May 25, 2011
Luke Whelan. New Documents Show the US Called Waterboarding Torture During WWII, Mother Jones, Dec. 17, 2014
III. 1941: The term, “psychological warfare” was a Nazi concept adapted and “Americanized”
CIA Mind-Control
The phrase “psychological warfare” is reported to have first entered English in 1941 as a translated mutation of the Nazi term Weltanschauungskrieg, (meaning world view warfare). It was first embraced by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a prominent Wall Street lawyer whom President Franklin Roosevelt appointed as Director of the new U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) who saw “psychological warfare” as a tool for “engineering of consent.”
Donovan viewed an understanding of Nazi psychological tactics as a vital source of ideas for “Americanized’’ versions of many of the same stratagems. Use of the new term quickly became widespread throughout the U.S. intelligence community. . . Donovan was among the first in the US to articulate a more or less unified theory of psychological warfare. . . As he saw it, the “engineering of consent” techniques used in peacetime propaganda campaigns could be quite effectively adapted to open warfare. Pro-Allied propaganda was essential to reorganizing the U.S. economy for war and for creating public support at home for intervention in Europe, Donovan believed. Fifth-column movements could be employed abroad as sources of intelligence and as morale-builders for populations under Axis control. He saw “special operations” — meaning sabotage, subversion, commando raids, and guerrilla movements — as useful for softening up targets prior to conventional military assaults. (Simpson. Science of Coercion, 1994, p. 24)
IV. 1940s: Dr. Ewen Cameron Collaborated with the U.S. Office of Special Services (OSS)
CIA Mind-Control
Cameron was an internationally prominent psychiatrist who was invited as a consultant to the Nuremberg Tribunal. Allen Dulles asked him to evaluate Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, and assess his mental capacity to stand trial. Cameron and two other prominent psychiatrists — Drs. Nolan Lewis, Director of NYS Psychiatric Institute and Paul Schroeder, University of Illinois — diagnosed Hess as suffering from amnesia and hysteria (JAMA, 1946). Hess later confessed that he had faked amnesia. (Wikipedia) [More about Cameron’s activities below]
V. 1945: U.S. Naval Technical Mission, the Genesis for U.S. Psychological Torture Experiments
CIA Mind-Control
The secret US Naval Technical Mission Report described the “interrogation” techniques and mescaline experiments at Dachau; they were conducted by Dr. Kurt Ploetner, one of the most prominent Nazi researchers in this area. The report was based on a cache of secret documents captured in Himmler’s cave depository — those documents have since disappeared. The report was prepared for the US military and intelligence agencies who sought information about the potential use of mescaline as an effective interrogation agent. The mescaline experiments at Dachau were combined with hypnotism; they were conducted in 1942, by Dr. Kurt Ploetner, one of the most prominent Nazi researchers in this area; the SS head of the Institute for Military and Scientific Research. The experiments tested mescaline as a potential interrogation tool on 30 prisoners at Dachau concentration camp. It has been suggested that these experiments stemmed from an assassination attempt on Hitler in 1941; that Heinrich Himmler sought to develop a method by which loyalty and innocence within the Nazi ranks could be tested. (Chris Rudge. Making Madness Before America) The Nazi doctors concluded:
“[It is] impossible to impose one’s will on another person as in hypnosis even when the strongest dose of mescaline had been given.” However “the examining person succeeded in every case in drawing even the most intimate secrets from the P.E. when the questions were cleverly put.” (Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams)
VI. 1945: “Wild Bill” Donovan set up a “truth drug” committee
CIA Mind-Control
The committee was headed by Winfred Overholser, MD, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. Overholser, a Harvard graduate was Chairman of psychiatry at George Washington University, who presided over St. Elizabeths for 25 years. He was elected President of the American Psychiatric Association in 1948. St. Elizabeths was probably the first hospital in the U.S. to have conducted covert psychoactive drug experiments on unwitting patients on behalf of the government. The truth committee tried and quickly rejected mescaline, several barbiturates and scopolamine — as had the Nazi doctors at Dachau. In the spring of 1943, they decided that Cannabis (i.e., marijuana) showed the most promise. A secret testing program in cooperation with the Manhattan Project, the TOP SECRET effort to build an atomic bomb, supplied the first dozen test subjects for interrogation experiments using various routes to administer marijuana. (OSS Report on T.D. Cannabis, 1945)
VII. 1946: Extreme interrogation techniques — torture — were first tested at Camp King in Germany
CIA Mind-Control
The OSS (later CIA) first tested extreme interrogation — torture — techniques in Camp King where the chief physician was General Dr. Walter Schreiber, former medical chief of the Wehrmacht, followed by Dr. Kurt Blome, the former Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich. * Paperclip Rogues Intelligence officials in the military and CIA were obsessed with finding a truth drug or hypnotic method to help in their interrogation of prisoners of war and suspected Soviet spies. They suspected that the Communists had developed new mind-control techniques eliciting confessions from U.S. prisoners and were determined to catch-up by initiating a psychological arms race for which needed scientists who studied the human mind.
VIII. 1947: The CIA, an elitist culture operating in secrecy violating legal and moral precepts
CIA Mind-Control
The CIA was established by President Harry Truman in 1947 as an information gathering agency to apprise the President with accurate up-to-the-minute information in particular about trends and developments in all danger spots in the world. President Truman had not anticipated that the CIA would function as an elitist espionage agency whose leadership was dominated by a group of Wall Street lawyers and bankers whose interests and allegiance were held together by their common backgrounds and privileged position as members of the wealthiest and well-connected families who cast their influence over America’s boardrooms, financial and academic institutions, major newspapers and media, law firms and government.
CIA’s clubby elitism was acknowledged by CIA Director, William Colby in 1978:
Socially as well as professionally they cliqued together, and formed a sealed fraternity. They ate together at the same special favorite restaurants; they partied almost only among themselves; their families drifted to each other, so their differences did not always have to add up. In this way they increasingly separated themselves from the ordinary world and developed a rather skewed view of that world. Their own dedicated double life became the proper norm, and they looked down on the life of the rest of the citizenry. (Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA)
The CIA’s formative years were documented by Burton Hersh (Old Boys: The American Elite And The Origins Of The CIA, 1992; reedited with new preface in 2002). Hersh makes the case that the founders of the OSS and the CIA, were the well-connected “old boys” who came from the country’s prestigious Ivy League universities were considerably less than idealistic. The “old boys” had deep roots in Wall Street’s aggressive law firms; they were motivated by a determination to preserve profitability for their corporate clients — both European and American clients with European interests. In the wake of World War I, the Dulles brothers helped construct the international treaties and legal definitions that shut down efforts to bring mass murderers of that time to justice. Between the wars, both were active in U.S.–German trade and diplomatic relations, particularly in developing ornate corporate camouflage intended to frustrate efforts to increase public accountability of major companies. The old boys’ disproportionate influence succeeded in protecting their clients’ interest throughout the depression, World War II, and beyond.
Allen Dulles was the longest serving CIA director who dominated U.S. intelligence for a generation; his brother John Foster Dulles, served as Secretary of State at the same time. Hersh shed light on the collaboration of the Dulles brothers with Nazi industrialists — for which they received large legal fees. As a result of those collaborations “inevitably remnants of the Third Reich quietly infiltrated our intelligence system.” Prior to his CIA position, during World War II, Allen Dulles headed the operations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland. In the 1930s he served as legal adviser to the delegations on arms limitation at the League of Nations where he met with the world’s leaders including: Hitler, Mussolini, Litvinov. Both Dulles brothers were senior partners in the law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. It is significant that in 1997, when the ClA was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, the CIA put The Old Boys at the top of the list of accurate treatments of its internal history, noting that there was much to be found here ‘not available elsewhere.’ Its own in-house publication, Studies in Intelligence, even acknowledged that The Old Boys “had obviously been justified as to both its particulars and its final judgments. Even the vitality of the style would ultimately be forgiven.”
The years since publication have made the lessons of The Old Boys more relevant than ever. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013) by Stephen Kinzer, a columnist for The Guardian, formerly foreign correspondent for The New York Times, notes that while the Dulles brothers were perceived mostly as exemplars of American virtue while they held all-powerful government positions. Kinzer skillfully depicts the Dulles brothers as Machiavellian power brokers who were narrow-minded in their world view, who set up dummy corporations, planted stories in the press to drum up fears about a much exaggerated Soviet “threat,” a country weakened by war, with a shattered economy, and wide civil unrest. They were utterly detached from the human consequences of their adventures.
Kinzer reveals their dark and sinister side; he shows that the two brothers often used their position of power for unsavory purposes — such as, organizing coups and undermining democracies, all in the name of resisting Soviet ambitions. He concludes that “their reckless adventures palpably weakened U.S. security” and, in the long run, “did not work out well for the United States.” Dulles and high ranking intelligence officials in the State Department and CIA, exerted inordinate influence to shield the Nazi elite for whom they had the highest regard. These were the Reich’s generals, chemists, medical doctors, and engineers whose research and achievements were mostly in wartime technology, racial hygiene, torture, and genocide. Read more **Paperclip*
The CIA considered its objectives and methods to be exempt from moral precepts and U.S. law. The agency’s dubious activities earned the CIA the reputation as a “hotbed of ruthless operators.” The agency’s shield of Top Secrecy and absence of oversight or accountability requirements, allowed the CIA to operate covertly within its own culture of lawlessness and immorality. In OpEd opinion piece published in The Washington Post Dec. 22, 1963 — exactly one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — Truman expressed the uneasy realization that “there is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” He called for limiting CIA’s role to intelligence gathering — as he had intended:
. . .I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. . .this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue — and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
But that was not to be. Allen Dulles, who was fired by President Kennedy after the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, headed the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s assassination. In that capacity Allen blocked inquiry into CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and censored agency records on Lee Harvey Oswald. Allen Dulles stuck to the coda of secrecy and deceit that has eroded public faith in government to the very end. (The Brothers)
McCoy has suggested that the CIA has been able to draw upon both military and civil resources to amplify its reach; and the agency has for a long time concealed its nefarious programs from the executive and legislative review. CIA’s lawless operations relied on deception, perjury, euphemisms for murder — “executive action;” torture — “enhanced interrogation;” and reduced people to — “assets.” Its leaders have lied, promulgated disinformation and destroyed incriminating documents. (2006) CIA’s modus operandi borrowed more than one operational manual from the Nazis.
Intelligence officials in the CIA and Defense Department (DOD) were fixated by fear and suspicion that the Communist powers had perfected mind control techniques and that the U.S. had to catch up. They also feared that double agents had penetrated the CIA and were divulging secret information to the enemy. James Jesus Angleton, who headed CIA’s counterintelligence division, was one of the most influential and divisive intelligence officers in US history who shaped CIA counterintelligence for better or worse for 20 years from 1954 to 1974. Angleton insistently warned that the agency had been penetrated by a Soviet mole and was being deceived by “strategic deception” and his frenzied warnings fed the McCarthy witch hunt hysteria. Following Seymour Hersh’s exposé of CIA’s spying on Americans (1974), Angleton was fired.
IX. 1947–1953: Navy’s Project CHATTER tested drugs for interrogation
CIA Mind-Control
The Naval report about the Dachau mescaline experiments was the catalyst for Project CHATTER which focused on identifying and testing drugs for interrogations and recruitment of intelligence agents. It was headed by Lieutenant Dr. Charles Savage, a graduate of Yale and the Pritzker Medical School at the University of Chicago. Dr. Savage conducted the experiments at the Naval Institute in Bethesda Maryland, using high doses of mescaline; but, like the Dachau tests, the experiment failed to yield an effective “truth serum.” He then tested LSD, selecting “severely depressed” military patients in the knowledge that they would suffer ill effects. He started them on 20 micrograms, and then increased the dose daily up to the point at which psycho-physiological changes were observed. He obtained LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceutical Co.
In one experiment Savage used five “normal” persons and fifteen depressed patients. In his report, LSD-25 a Clinical- Psychological Study (1951), he provided detailed descriptions: Case II was a 20 year old man who was admitted to the hospital with depression. He tearfully told psychologists that his mother was going to lose her home, his sister would lose her job, and he felt useless because he couldn’t help them. He was given LSD, the dosage increased to 100 mcg.; the end result was that the patients suffered from a “schizophrenic reaction.” Savage wrote: “LSD appears to have no specific therapeutic advantage in depression.” Nevertheless, he suggested that hallucinations caused by LSD could potentially be useful in psychotherapy. Dr. Savage had a long career as a mind control researcher for a variety of CIA front organizations causing irrevocable harm to human beings. (Lee and Shlain. Acid Dreams, 1994; Black Legacy Chronicles; Prince Ray. Project CHATTER & The American Betrayal of My Father, 2007)
X. 1948: Brigadier General Charles Loucks Learns about LSD
CIA Mind-Control
Charles Loucks, Chief of U.S. Chemical Warfare in Europe learned about the hallucinogen LSD from Hitler’s former chemist, Richard Kuhn, who described its astounding incapacitating effect. Paperclip RoguesLoucks recognized LSD as a chemical agent with enormous military potential. The US Army definition of “psychological warfare” marked Top Secret in 1948:
Psychological warfare employs all moral and physical means . . . which tend to: destroy the will and the ability of the enemy to fight. . . Psychological warfare employs any weapon to influence the mind of the enemy. The weapons are psychological only in the effect they produce and not because of the nature of the weapons themselves. (Simpson. Science of Coercion, 1994, p. 12)
The CIA sought to establish control over those who were perceived as “undesirable,” “less intelligent,” and untrustworthy. John Marks points out in the Manchurian Candidate (Chapter 1):
“Agency officials and their agents crossed many of the same ethical barriers [as did the SS at Dachau]. They experimented with dangerous and unknown techniques on people who had no idea what was happening. . . 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.”
XI. 1949 — CIA’s Research in Covert Mind-Control Techniques i.e., Psychological Torture
CIA Mind-Control
In 1949, the Rand Corporation issued a report, “Are Communist Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confession in Public Trials?” The report relied on old Soviet hypnosis experiments conducted in 1923 (which were translated into English in 1932). The Soviets had reported success in implanting memories of crimes hypnotically. The Rand report helped set the stage for the U.S. government intelligence agencies to invoke national security as the rationale for the use of nefarious destructive mind control methods, such as hypnosis, to manipulate individuals into committing criminal acts on command. (Bowart. Operation Mind Control, 1978; Researcher’s edition, 1994)
Beginning in 1949, the CIA initiated a series of Top Secret mind control projects; their names changed as some morphed one into the other. These dubious, often fiendish experiments in “psychological warfare” techniques spanned more than 25 years. Among these: BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MK-NAOMI, MK-SEARCH, PANDORA, MIDNIGHT CLIMAX, and MK-ULTRA, the best known of CIA’s mind control projects. The unconscionable experiments tested the malleability of human consciousness; they were designed to erase memory and cause total amnesia using electroshock. The experiments sought to discover effective methods for manipulating human will and to probe the limits of human a being’s capacity to withstand extreme stress. They were essentially experimental explorations in mental torture.
These were brain damaging experiments; they were conducted on thousands of (mostly) involuntary soldiers, mental patients, prisoners and civilians, including young children who were treated as expendable means to CIA’s dubious ends. The victims of CIA’s diabolical experiments were subjected to a witches’ brew of powerful psychoactive and hallucinatory drugs (e.g., mescaline, sodium pentothal, LSD, ketamine and psilocybin) in the hunt for a “truth serum” (“ego-depressant” drugs). Other techniques used in these grotesque experiments included, rapid induction of hypnosis, multiple high voltage electroshock, electronic brain stimulation (ESB), psychosurgical implanted electrodes in the brain, often combined with psychoactive drugs. The third line of CIA’s experimentation involved extremely stressful psychological “brainwashing” employing sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation in extended isolated confinement, coupled with sensory overstimulation, which induced psychotic hallucinations and mental breakdown. The purpose of these monstrous exercises in torture was to incapacitate human free will and break the human spirit by disorienting, inducing “learned helplessness” and dependency, to enable an interrogator to assume control and take command of a subject’s mind.
“Many Americans have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research — the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects. While these CIA drug experiments led nowhere and the testing of electric shock as a technique led only to lawsuits, research into sensory deprivation proved fruitful indeed. In fact, this research produced a new psychological rather than physical method of torture, perhaps best described as “no-touch” torture.” (McCoy)
For decades the nature of these experiments involving CIA’s vast network of contracted academic scientists — mainly psychiatrists, psychologists and neurologists who provided the “scientific” framework for psychological demolition — remained deeply hidden. The CIA deliberately kept Congress and the American people in the dark about its darkest illegal projects; it is a matter of conjecture how much the President of the U.S. during the 1950s through the mid-1970s knew about the nature of these infamous illegal activities. Most of the documents pertaining to CIA’s nefarious mind control projects were destroyed per instructions by Richard Helms in 1973, prior to a Congressional investigation of CIA’s criminal national activities. Some records were deliberately coded to confuse and others remain classified.
It bears emphasizing that lurking within CIA’s abominable mind- manipulation projects was a strong element of racism. After all, these experiments were following the Nazi blueprint for experimentation on those deemed inferior undesirable outcasts. Nazi doctors and scientists who had been imported to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip carried over their belief in their own racial superiority, their unbridled hatred for Communism and their determination to prepare for a decisive victory in a war against the Soviet Union. They also transported their ruthless and immoral disregard for the rights and humanity of those they deemed inferior. They found sympathetic allies among high ranking intelligence officials within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its successor, the CIA who, like the Nazis held themselves and their mission above moral precepts.
XII. BLUEBIRD (1949–1951) the first integrated CIA mind-control project
CIA Mind-Control
BLUEBIRD was the first structured comprehensive, integrated CIA mind control project involving both domestic and overseas covert activities designed to study enemy techniques and test them on selected individuals, including “potential intelligence agents, defectors, refugees, Prisoners of War and “others.” Under this early program, experimental psychoactive drugs and hypnosis were used; the objective was to prevent secret information from being extracted from CIA’s agents. A CIA document indicated that BLUEBIRD material was “not fit for public consumption.” (Acid Dreams, 1992) American POWs who returned from Korean captivity were subjected to various behavioral modification techniques, experimental drugs, hypnosis, and “special interrogation methods” — the euphemism for torture — at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Walter Reed, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, in CIA’s quest to develop reliable methods for detecting deception. The Army, Navy, and Air Force joined the CIA in Project Bluebird.
XIII. 1950: Soviet Union banned lobotomy
CIA Mind-Control
Soviet doctors concluded that lobotomy was “contrary to the principles of humanity.” Furthermore, they concluded that “through lobotomy an insane person is changed into an idiot.” (Wikipedia). The CIA considered lobotomy as a solution for “disposal” of individuals.
XIX. By 1951, more than 18,608 individuals in America had been lobotomized
CIA Mind-Control
A 1952 CIA memo titled: “LOBOTOMY and Related Operations” discussed the question: Is lobotomy a solution for “disposal” of an individual who might pose a security risk? Lee and Shlain (Acid Dreams) report that a group of CIA scientists entertained the possibility of using an “icepick” lobotomy to render an individual harmless “from a security point of view.” They cite a memo dated Feb. 7, 1952, that refers to an unidentified surgeon in the Washington DC area who performed the operation which involved destroying brain tissue by piercing the skull just above the eye with a fine surgical icepick. This type of psychosurgery had certain advantages in that it resulted in “nervous confusional and amnesia effects” without leaving a “tell-tale scar.” The surgeon, no doubt was Walter Freeman who conducted 3,500 lobotomies between 1936 and his last one in 1967. See The Lobotomist, a PBS Documentary.
In the end, CIA officials decided against ice pick lobotomy, citing surgical risk, “brain damage could be extensive. . . and if discovered that the CIA was mutilating people’s brains for the sake of national security, the information could exploited as a propaganda weapon.” (Acid Dreams, excerpt)
XV. Experimental lobotomies at NYS Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Paul H. Hoch, a psychiatrist who trained in Germany and came to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa, gained immigrant status with legal assistance by John Foster Dulles (future Secretary of State and brother of Allen Dulles). From 1948 to 1955, Hoch served as Director of experimental research at NYSPI. Prior to his appointment to NYSPI, Hoch headed the Manhattan State Hospital Shock Therapy Unit; and was chief medical officer for war neuroses for the U.S. Public Health Service. At NYSPI, Hoch conducted covert brain damaging experiments on unwitting mental patients, subjecting them to injections of high doses of hallucinogenic drugs, such as mescaline and LSD causing an “immediate, massive, and almost shock-like picture with higher doses.” He then lobotomized some of the patients in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psychosurgery. Hoch is quoted stating: “It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value.” (Lee and Shlain. Acid Dreams, 1985) For decades, Columbia and NYSPI denied any CIA connection, but CIA documents refute those denials.
XVI. Prominent Harvard psychiatrists conducted Lobotomies at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Dr. Harry Solomon, Dr. Julius Levine, and Dr. Norman Paul actively promoted bimedial lobotomy in the major journals. The lobotomy studies were funded by the U.S. Public Health Service. Levine, Greenblatt and Solomon reported the “superiority” of bimedial lobotomy over the conventional approach in The New England Journal of Medicine (1951); Greenblatt and Solomon reported “evidence is strong” “the reduction in anxiety, tension, hostility, and impulsivity is dramatic. . .” in the American Journal of Psychiatry (1952). Paul and Greenblatt reported the findings of a 5-year follow-up of 116 patients whom they had lobotomized in JAMA (1956) and the Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease (1956). They claimed remarkably successful results; but the veracity of those claims is unlikely:
“The bimedial procedure gave the best results, in that 54% of these patients were working full time and productively five years after operation. The corresponding figures for the bilateral and unilateral groups were 33% and 29%. These results were striking, since these were all patients whose mental illness had been unremitting for at least 2 1/2 years before surgery and had been refractory to insulin coma, electric shock treatment, and intensive psychotherapy.”
XVII. MK-NAOMI (1949–1969) tested lethal biochemical agents
CIA Mind-Control
MK-NAIMI was a joint project of the CIA and the Special Operations (SO) Division at Fort Detrick. Hank Albarelli quotes an early memorandum in which a bacteriologist articulates MK-NAOMI’s mission: “Our mission was pretty simple and to the point: to provide the CIA with every means possible to maim or kill targeted groups or individuals through the use of toxic and lethal biochemical agents. We worked hard at it and delivered.” And he lists its key objectives: “How to knock off key people . . . knock off key guys . . . make death look as if from natural causes. . . [such as] method to produce cancer . . . and to make appear as heart attack.” The same memorandum cited the case of an imprisoned “Russian . . . who had been subjected to the routine administration of intimidation, bright lights and more severe roughing, followed by insulin shock.” (Albarelli and Kaye. Cries from the Past, TruthOut, 2010)
XVIII. NYPSI an early CIA-contracted academic institution under MK-NAOMI
CIA Mind-Control
Beginning in 1952, both the CIA and Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division (SOD) had formalized a written 2-year $1,000,000 contract with the NYS Psychiatric Institute (1952–53). It was officially referred to as Project MK-NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification projects (ARTICHOKE) and MK-ULTRA. As stated in a Top Secret CIA memorandum dated January 1954 that was uncovered forty-six years later (in 2000) by “cold case” prosecutors in the NYC Attorney General’s office. The memo provides detailed information about contractual relationships, including the fact that the SOD contract with the NYSPI was established for the exclusive purposes of devising biological weapons that could be targeted at “individuals for the purposes of affecting human behavior with the objectives ranging from very temporary minor disablement to more serious and longer incapacitation to death.” (Albarelli and Kelly. A Terrible Mistake, 2001)
In 1953, Henry Blauer, a 42-year old professional tennis player, sought treatment at NYS Psychiatric Institute for depression following a divorce. Without his knowledge or consent, he was used as a guinea human pig in a horrific mescaline drug experiment that killed him. Drs. Paul Hoch and James Cattell subjected Mr. Blauer to multiple injections of massive doses of a mescaline derivative whose ingredients they did not even know. Cattell reportedly told Army investigators, “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.” (Manchurian Candidate, 1979 Chapter 4, footnote )
“Moments after receiving the fifth and final injection on Jan. 8, 1953, according to notes from the experiment, Mr. Blauer began sweating profusely and flailing his arms, his body stiffened and he frothed at the mouth. He lapsed into a coma and died in two hours . . . a doctor’s written report said the injection was for ‘‘diagnostic purposes’’ and failed to mention the experiment.” Government officials covered up the cause of his death for 23 years. (New York Times, 1987)
The 1954 CIA memo provides evidence of collusion and criminal cover-ups by medical doctors and State, City and Federal government agencies. Within 48 hours of Henry Blauer’s death, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi, the Chemical Corps contract officer met with Hoch at NYS Psychiatric Institute and instructed him to conceal the Army’s involvement. The document also reveals that,
Marrazzi prevailed on one of the New York City Medical Examiners with whom he was well acquainted to place all the records (regarding Blauer) in a confidential file in the medical examiners’ office. Thus the Medical Examiner was informed that Blauer’s death was connected with secret Army experiments, but he was also told that this information was not to be disclosed. (Albarelli and Kelly. A Terrible Mistake Excerpt)
This document — which had been concealed for 50 years — further acknowledges:
an incident involving the use of chemical compounds at the New York Psychiatric Institute, which is affiliated with Columbia University. Dr. Paul Hoch was the Institute’s principal investigator. He was carrying out experiments involving the injection of Mescalin [sic] derivatives into patients. In this particular case the patient died. Relatives of the deceased have brought the action. (Albarelli. A Terrible Mistake. . . Excerpt)
Dr. Paul Hoch and Dr. James Cattell exposed unwitting patients to high dose psychedelic drug experiments whose foreseeable risks of brain damage, mental incapacity and death were known. Their maltreatment caused Henry Blauer’s death. Within two years Hoch was appointed Commissioner of Mental Hygiene of NYS (1955) overseeing 28 hospitals and 100,000 patients.
Hoch had led an effort to destroy the career of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, MD who criticized the psychiatric profession for its coercive involuntary interventions. Dr. Szasz is one of the heroes on AHRP’s Honor Roll * Paul Hoch died suddenly of a heart attack at age 62; he was eulogized by the equally monstrous psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron and by Nelson Rockefeller. Mainstream psychiatry continues to be lauded Hoch as:
one of the most respected and honored psychiatrists of his generation. . . The impact of Paul Hoch’s research in psychopharmacology cannot be overestimated. . . a pioneer in the investigation of new psychotropic agents. He was fascinated by hallucinogens, at first believing they might hold a key to the causes of schizophrenia through their induction of a “model psychosis.
A bronze plaque and bust prominently displayed in the lobby of NYS Psychiatric Institute states: “Compassionate physician, inspiring teacher, original researcher, dedicated to scientist, dynamic administrator.” (Sidney Malitz, MD. American Journal of Psychiatry, 1996)
XIX. ARTICHOKE (1951–1973) a major multi-faceted military-CIA project
CIA Mind-Control
Artichoke was launched by Allen Dulles, then deputy director of the CIA to replace and expand Bluebird as the major, multi-faceted military-CIA project. Within weeks, the CIA had acquired secret prisons in the Canal Zone, West Germany, and Japan; Artichoke teams were sent overseas for brutal interrogations with drugs, hypnosis and “psychological harassment” and “special interrogation techniques.” In other words Artichoke is a project for “refining” torture techniques and field testing operations. (McCoy. Torture and Impunity. . .2012). Its objectives were summarized in a 1952 memorandum:
“[e]valuation and development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his will and without his knowledge. . . . Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation?” ARTICHOKE documents
The objective was to subvert a human being’s freedom of thought and action, to enable the government to have total control over its citizens. That objective was the connecting thread for all subsequent covert CIA mind control/ behavior modification projects. The subjects of ARTICHOKE experiments included American soldiers, prisoners in federal penitentiaries, POWs, and suspected counterintelligence agents and mental patients. In one of the rare, surviving official documents from Deputy Director of the CIA Allen Dulles sent a secret memo to Richard Helms and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Frank Wisner regarding the specific kinds of interrogation techniques that would be used:
In our conversation of 9 February 1951, I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science. The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared in my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background. (Jacobsen. Operation Paperclip, 2014 Excerpt)
Camp King was the perfect location to conduct these radical trials. Dulles explained that overseas locations were preferred for Artichoke interrogations, since foreign governments “permitted certain activities which were not permitted by the United States government (i.e. anthrax etc.).” Contrary to the erroneous perception, ARTICHOKE did not meld into the massive nationwide mind-control project, MK-ULTRA (which began in 1953). ARTICHOKE continued and one of its major objectives was to create assassins — Manchurian Candidates.
XX. 1951–1960s: Dr. Henry K. Beecher, CIA collaborator in use of psychoactive drugs for torture
CIA Mind-Control
The Dorr Professor of Anesthesiology at Harvard University, whose reputation as a paragon of ethical research rests on his article in the New England Journal of Medicine (1966) in which he listed 50 unethical U.S. clinical trials. The career of Dr. Henry K. Beecher is a cautionary tale. What follows will most likely shock most readers as I was shocked to discover the secret crimes that Henry Beecher concealed throughout his lifetime.
“At home and abroad for over a decade, Beecher pursued this secret military research, testing powerful psychotropic drugs, mescaline and LSD, on unwitting human subjects, and thus drinking deep from Dachau’s poisoned well.” (McCoy, 2007 p.410)
Beecher studied the reports about mescaline experiments conducted at Dachau and others at Mauthausen concentration camps. He then crisscrossed Europe in 1951, consulting with the foremost experts in mescaline and LSD research, including Walter Hoffman at Sandoz in Switzerland. Beecher’s explorations with hallucinatory drugs “went beyond the medical realm”; it crossed over to the realm of torture. Beecher, who was fully aware of the ethical standards mandated by the Nuremberg Code, violated every one of its precepts. At Heidelberg, the immorality of his research was pointed out to Beecher by the Chief U.S. Surgeon for Europe, General Guy B. Denit, who reminded him that: “as a physician under the Geneva Convention he could have nothing officially to do with the use of drugs for the purposes in mind.” By stages, McCoy writes, “Dr. Beecher’s hunt for appropriate collaborators led him full circle back to the Nazi war criminals he had encountered in reading Dr. Ploetner’s report on Gestapo drug tests at Dachau.” (McCoy, 2007, p. 411)
The evidence of Beecher’s collusion is contained in his own documents on file at Harvard. Beecher transferred from the realm of military medicine to Military Intelligence at the notorious U.S. interrogation center in Germany. Oberursel, renamed Camp King after 1948, was the site at which the CIA’s most brutal torture techniques were used; “a staff of ex-Gestapo soldiers and former Nazi doctors, including the notorious deputy Reich health leader Kurt Blome, were employed in inhumane interrogations of Soviet defectors and double agents.” (McCoy, p.411)
The site was used by the CIA and Navy psychiatrist Samuel Thompson and Professor Richard Wend, a University of Rochester psychologist to test dangerous drug combinations on Russian captives under a protocol stating “disposal of the body is not a problem.” At Camp King Beecher discussed possible drug uses for interrogation with staffers including Captain Malcolm Hilty, chief interrogator and Major Hart, head of a “brutal interrogation team” known as the “rough boys.”(McCoy, 412)
Upon his return from Europe, Beecher joined the U.S. intelligence interrogation project with “top secret” security clearance and a Pentagon grant to study “Response of Normal Men to LSD Derivatives” He wrote a secret report warning about LSD’s severe effects, indicating that he planned to intensify his LSD experiments at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. “We need to know the effects of larger doses, prolonged administration of small doses and so on. . .” McCoy writes:
“In his decade of secret drug testing, Dr. Beecher sacrificed his subjects to the cause of national security. During his European travels in 1951–1952, he had sought expendable subjects for secret interrogation experiments. Back home at Harvard, Beecher, though aware of the drug’s painful effects from the Sandoz report, tested powerful LSD and LAE at doses that inflicted the trauma of “paranoid” reaction and “acute panic” on his unknowing human subjects — a “psychosis in miniature” that, he said coolly, “offers interesting possibilities.” (McCoy, p. 413)
Beecher had a thorough knowledge in advance that these drugs cause serious trauma. Indeed he had read a Sandoz report warning that LSD produced “a peculiar personality disturbance similar to ‘split personality,’” and induced a “tendency to pathological reactions (hysterical attacks, trances, epileptic fits).” Nevertheless, he proceeded to put the lives of unwitting patients at risk by giving them dangerous high doses — all in violation of the Hippocratic Oath and the Nuremberg Code. He did so, because in his elitist world view, the human subjects were expendable; whereas the experiment offered “interesting possibilities.” (McCoy cites Beecher)
Beecher found a solution to what he termed the “considerable problem in the use of healthy volunteers [to test] synthetic agents in the mescaline group” — that is, obtaining their consent. He indicated that “we have an almost ideal set-up here” at Massachusetts General Hospital. Beecher was an anesthesiologist; one has to wonder just what the “ideal set-up” at Harvard-affiliated hospitals was /is for physicians to readily obtain unwitting hospital patients as guinea pigs in high risk experimental research with a high likelihood of causing those patients harm.
Back in the U.S. Beecher consulted with Dr. Walter Schreiber, whose experiments on concentration camp inmates “usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.” Paperclip Rogues Schreiber had been Camp King’s chief doctor until he was hired by the Air Force to its School of Aviation Medicine. But in 1952 Drew Pearson exposed his Nuremberg rap sheet listing his crimes, at which point the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency arranged his visa and a job in Argentina. Henry Beecher described Schreiber as an “intelligent and helpful” German physician.
Prof. McCoy notes that Beecher maintained a perfect cover, “minimizing public knowledge of his military research by publishing a single LSD study as third author — and even that was packaged innocuously as last in a series of drug tests.” Beecher insisted on absolute secrecy; at his request, his report on his voyage into the intelligence netherworld (1951), was stamped “TOP SECRET” and not declassified until 1977, months after his death. Throughout his life, Beecher concealed his CIA experiments in torture; all the while, he sat on influential biomedical ethics bodies, such as the National Research Council, setting the U.S. research agenda.
When controversy erupted over LSD tests at Harvard in the 1960s, Beecher demonstrated stunning hypocrisy as he played the moralist; he even condemned Dr. Walter N. Pahnke (one of Timothy Leary’s colleagues), for using the drug to ease the pain of terminally ill patients. Beecher admonished him by stating: “There is an abundance of evidence that LSD can produce, has produced, lasting, serious damage to young people.” (McCoy cites Beecher, 1969, pp. 21–26; Acid Dreams, 1985) Of course the evidence of “serious damage” didn’t prevent Beecher from experimenting on patients without their knowledge or consent, using high LSD doses.
Even exposés of CIA mind control abuses have put him on a pedestal, as a “hero” of medical ethics. His mythological legacy is commemorated with the annual award of the Henry K. Beecher Prize in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. The award’s 1993 recipient, Yale bioethics professor Jay Katz, clearly had no inkling about Beecher’s Cold War activities when he praised Beecher for “the moral passion that punctuated his every word” in that 1966 essay. In 1966 Beecher told TIME magazine that he was “concerned about experiments that are designed for the ultimate good of society in general but may well do harm to the subject involved.” Beecher stated that since World War II, the numbers of patients used as unwitting experimental subjects was increasing at alarming rates and that the increase was causing “grave consequences”; but he declined to name any physicians, hospitals, or universities involved in such experiments.
Here is how his “portrait“ on Mass General Hospital’s website sanitizes Beecher’s medical crimes:
“[After WWII] He became a consultant to the Surgeon General of the United States Army, Public Health Service, Air Force, and Navy, all at different periods of time. Dr. Beecher began his contribution to clinical pharmacology during World War II. It was then that his investigation of the relationship between subjective psychological states and objective drug responses began. In his book Pain in Men Wounded in Battle Dr. Beecher pondered how badly wounded men could not feel pain despite receiving no treatment for hours. In turn, he began to advocate for the placebo effect to be tested in all clinical trials. Dr. Beecher is now considered by many to be the father of the double-blind, placebo controlled clinical trial. After studying the Nazi medical experiments conducted during World War II, Dr. Beecher began to realize that investigational subjects’ rights were also commonly systematically abridged in the United States. In 1966 he published his article. . .”
The medical authorities and commentators writing the literature about ethical conduct in medical research have demonstrated willful ignorance about Beecher’s very dark side; they have chosen to maintain the myth about the man by not probing his files at Harvard which have been available since 1977. For example, an article in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (2001) attributes a “deep Christian faith” as the catalyst for “the most influential single paper ever written about experimentation involving human subjects.” (Harkness, pp. 365–366).
Biographers and historians alike should delve deeper before rushing to canonize cognitive scientists who worked during the Cold War. If we do not investigate this past and the ways that it has shaped our present, then we cannot correct or prevent its reoccurrence. John Marks found that nearly every scientist on the frontiers of brain research and behavioral psychology had been approached by agents from the secret intelligence. Psychiatrists and psychologists were especially eager to collaborate:
they experimented with dangerous and unknown techniques on people who had no idea what was happening. [They] systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects and like the Germans, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose existence they considered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than their own. (Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 1)
XXI. 1951: “Brainwashing” concept embedded in American culture
CIA Mind-Control
The term “brainwashing” was the brainchild of Edward Hunter, a covert CIA propaganda agent who churned out a stream of books and articles warning about the threat of Communist “brainwashing.” In testimony before the House Un-American Committee, Hunter warned:
the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels, [they use] drugs and hypnotism. . . Their ultimate goal was conquering America. The United States is the main battlefield. Brainwashing would make Americans subjects of a ‘new world order’ for the benefit of a mad little knot of despots in the Kremlin. (Weiner. Remembering Brainwashing, NYT, 2008)
The CIA broadened the concept to include effective techniques of persuasion, propaganda and covert methods for “engineering consent.” A massive propaganda campaign fomented Cold War hysteria, fostering fear of an imminent threat of a nuclear war; shelters were built and “take-cover” drills had America’s school children duck under their desks. Suspicion that an international communist conspiracy was penetrating American institutions with the goal of overthrowing the government and installing a totalitarian state resulted in McCarthy witch hunts.
XXII. 1951: CIA’s psychological torture is rooted in experiments at Dachau, Project ARTICHOKE & MK-ULTRA
CIA Mind-Control
In 1951, the Canadian Defense Research Board (DRB) convened a secret meeting in Montreal attended by military officials from the United Kingdom, Canada and two CIA officials. The focus of the meeting was — “brainwashing techniques.” Dr. Donald O. Hebb, chief of DRB Behavioral Research and chair of Psychology at McGill, whose experiments using extreme sensory deprivation laid the foundation for a new paradigm for psychological torture. In March 1951, the CIA initiated a “top secret” research program — ARTICHOKE — to study “all aspects of special interrogation” — CIA’s euphemism for torture.
McCoy reports that according to minutes of the Montreal meeting (1951), Hebb spoke at length, suggesting that: “sensory isolation might lead to some clues” “intervention in the individual mind together with methods concerned in psychological coercion.” Hebb suggested that by “cutting off all sensory stimulation . . . the individual could be led into a situation whereby ideas, etc. might be implanted.” (McCoy, Science in Dachau’s Shadow, 2007, p. 404)
Citing the DRB minutes and CIA’s minutes, McCoy rejects claims that the research was intended for defensive purposes. The Montreal group agreed that there was “no conclusive evidence” that the Soviets had made “revolutionary progress,” dismissing their interrogation methods as “remarkably similar. . .to the age-old methods.” They understood and agreed to develop methods of control over human consciousness for offensive “cold war operations” leading to “ideological conversion and coerced interrogation.” (McCoy, 2007, p. 405)
Three months after the Montreal meeting, the DRB awarded Dr. Hebb a “secret” grant (from 1951 to 1955), for experiment to test a subject’s: (1) tolerance for perceptual isolation, (2) willingness to listen to distasteful dull materials, (3) change of attitude, (4) impairment of intellectual function, and (5) hallucinations and other effects of sensory deprivation. Hebb intensified sensory isolation by having the subjects wear (a) light-diffusing goggles (b) earphones that constantly delivered white noise and (c) cardboard tubes over the forearms. McCoy reports that Hebb was not prepared for the extreme hallucinations — akin to mescaline — resulting from sensory deprivation: “some of them [subjects] were seeing things in the experimental conditions, and feeling things. One felt his head was disconnected from his body, another had two bodies.”
Nor was he prepared for the devastating psychological impact on the subjects, many of who were McGill medical students. Among twenty-two subjects “four remarked spontaneously that being in the apparatus was a form of torture.” McCoy cites Hebb stating, in 1980: “It scared the hell out of us to see how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support.” (p.407). Yet, the knowledge of the profound devastating effects did not prevent medical professionals at premier academic institutions — including the National Institute of Mental Health — from inflicting similar extreme trauma on human subjects.
In his 1952 report, which the DRB “classified,” Hebb indicated that, “the contract is opening up a field of study that is of both theoretical and practical significance” (McCoy, p. 405). McCoy learned that one student suffered a complete breakdown and, without any treatment from McGill, he had not recovered 4 years later; after which contact with him was lost. Hebb admitted that he did not screen his subjects for instability. The DRB praised Hebb as having “the highest regard for the welfare of the volunteer students.” A Canadian inquiry mentioned an “unconfirmed report that one student developed a form of mental illness following the experiment,” but dismissed it as being “incipient to his illness. . .which would have resulted regardless of Dr. Hebb’s experiments.” (McCoy, p. 407).
Four of Hebb’s original student volunteers filed a complaint that they had been tortured. A leaked story in the Toronto Star (Jan. 1954) raised questions in the Canadian Parliament. Though the DRB concocted a misleading cover for the research, Hebb’s Canadian grant was suspended. But Hebb’s research was of particular interest to the CIA and he received funding funneled through a CIA front foundation.
In a congressional hearing (1956) Dr. Robert H. Felix, director of the NIMH criticized Hebb’s research “you can break down anyone with this. . . The testimony received press coverage with “Brainwashing” headlines. Hebb insisted the research was “defensive” in nature. Dr. Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell, co-author of the seminal report contracted by Allen Dulles, about Soviet and Chinese interrogation methods, found Hebb’s isolation paradigm “the ideal way of ‘breaking down’ a prisoner, because . . . it seems to create precisely the state that the interrogator desires: malleability and the desire to talk, with the added advantage that one can delude himself that he is using no force or coercion.” (McCoy, 407)
XXIII. Dr. Donald Hebb’s sensory deprivation research opened a tidal wave of similar experiments
CIA Mind-Control
More than two hundred articles related to the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation were published in major scientific publications. For example, in 1957, Dr. Donald Wexler and three psychiatrists from Harvard University reproduced a similar experiment covertly funded by the secret Office of Naval Research. Seventeen volunteers were put in “a tank-type respirator” with low artificial light “designed to inhibit movement and tactile contact.” After seventeen hours, one subject, a 25-year-old dental student, “began to punch and shake the respirator,” his “eyes full of tears, and his voice shaking.” Four volunteers terminated from “anxiety and panic,” and all suffered “degrees of anxiety.” Only five subjects completed the thirty-six hours experiment and all of the seventeen participants suffered various degrees of anxiety, half of them also reporting hallucinations. The Harvard psychiatrists — Herbert Leiderman, M.D.; Jack H. Mendelson, MD; Donald Wexler, MD; Philip Solomon, MD, concluded that “sensory deprivation can produce major mental and behavioral changes in man” and recommended its capacity to induce psychosis. (Sensory Deprivation: A Technique for Studying Psychiatric Aspects of Stress, AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1958, pp. 225–233 cited by McCoy, 2007)
French scholar Marc-Andre Cotton notes that “behavioral scientists have long been praised for their engagement in dubious experiments aimed at conditioning the human brain.” In a recent article in The Journal of Psychohistory (2013), he cautions about the dire consequences of behaviorism which he calls a “Poisonous Pedagogy.”
XXIV. 1950s: Dr. Max Fink is considered the godfather of electroshock therapy in the United States.
CIA Mind-Control
In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a CIA Project Artichoke consultant. In 1951, Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen of CIA’s Security Research Service (SRS) oversaw ARTICHOKE. They worked closely with Fink in New York City to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for interrogations. The CIA was especially interested in the use of standard electroshock machines in producing amnesia, inducing subjects to talk and making subjects more prone to hypnotic control. According to one CIA document, Fink told officials “an individual could gradually be reduced through the use to electroshock treatment to the vegetable level.” (Albarelli and Kaye. CIA’s Shocking Experiments on Children Exposed — Drugging, Electroshocks and Brainwashing, TruthOut, 2010)
XXV. 1950s–1960s: Dr. Ewen Cameron Destroyed Minds at Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal
CIA Mind-Control
Cameron was an internationally prominent psychiatrist who developed torture techniques on his involuntary hospitalized patients — mostly women. His brutal techniques involved a three-stage method for “brainwashing” in order to eliminate the will and establish control: first, “mental depatterning” achieved through drug-induced coma; massive neuroleptic drug cocktails induced extended sleep lasting up to eighty-six days. The second stage involved extreme, high voltage multiple electroshock “treatments” three times daily. Finally, while the person is in isolated confinement, in LSD altered states of consciousness, and deprived of sensory stimulation, adequate food, water, and oxygen, the subject would be bombarded by “psychic driving” by use of a football helmet clamped to the head with taped messages played for hours non-stop “up to a half-million times, messages such as “my mother hates me.” (McCoy, 2007)
Cameron’s techniques have no therapeutic validity whatsoever; they were comparable to Nazi medical atrocities. After his “treatments” patients were unable to function; they had been reduced to a state of infancy. Case of Gail Kastner: “The shock treatment turned the then 19 year old honours student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle and urinated on the floor.” At that point her affluent family abandoned her and she lived in poverty. John Marks observes,
“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. . . In Cameron, the CIA had a psychiatrist, conveniently outside the United States, who was willing to do terminal experiments 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 “brainwashing” to its logical extreme.”
The dehumanizing nature of his methods were published in premier medical journals without any complaints from other psychiatrists; Cameron read papers about “depatterning” with electroshock before meetings of his fellow psychiatrists; and they rewarded him, electing him president of the American, Canadian, and World Psychiatric Associations. The human significance of his dark legacy was brought to public attention when nine of his Canadian victims filed lawsuits in 1980s — twenty-one years after Cameron’s death. Despite the horrific abuse, the American and Canadian psychiatric establishment closed ranks. A Canadian government dismissed the CIA’s role as a “side issue” or “red herring”; Ottawa’s Justice Department denied legal responsibility, offering each victim a nugatory $20,000 “nuisance” payment. (McCoy, 2007)
According to Leonard Rubenstein, an attorney for plaintiffs [Mrs. David Orlikow et al. v USA, 1988] Tom Beauchamp, a leading American bioethicist was an expert witness for Cameron’s estate, arguing that Cameron’s “treatment” complied with the norm and practice of the day. (Rubenstein LS. “Psychiatric experimentation: the lessons or history,” The Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, 1994, Vol. 5, p. 22–27) As a result of the lawsuit, the CIA agreed to pay $750,000, the maximum allowed under U.S. law, to settle a case without conceding liability. (Beyond Nuremburg, ABA Journal March 1997; News accounts of five legal cases at: The Law and Mind Control — Mind Control Through Five Cases)
Donald Hebb and Ewen Cameron were competitors; they did not collaborate, though Cameron incorporated Hebb’s sensory isolation techniques into his own diabolical arsenal of psychiatry’s instruments of torture. What Hebb and Cameron both have in common is their “contribution” in establishing the scientific foundation for CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method. (McCoy, 2007) Indeed, Hebb and Cameron’s “contribution” as “pioneers” who designed the psychological paradigm for torture used by the CIA was acknowledged by The McGill Daily, in 2012.
XXVI. 1952: ARTICHOKE Memo: “Let’s get into the technology of assassination. . .”
CIA Mind-Control
A Memorandum for the Record, dated Jan. 31, 1975, reviews “available file information” about ARTICHOKE, “the agency cryptonym for the study and/or use of ‘special’ interrogation methods that have been known to include the use of drugs and chemicals, hypnosis, and ‘total isolation,’ a form of psychological harassment.” The memo notes that the file provides “fragmentary information.” By 1951 actual interrogations utilizing drugs were conducted by a combined team of Security and Office of Medical Services “but few details were available.” The SRS (Security Research Staff) log (1951–1967) indicated that SRS had been involved in the experimentation and use of hypnosis “from the start. . . SRS has examined and investigated numerous unusual techniques of interrogation including psychological harassment and such matters as “total isolation!”
In 1952, CIA SRS researchers and Scientific Intelligence researchers sought to train 200 CIA operators in the U.S. who “could develop [and command] a unique, dangerous army of hypnotically controlled agents” who would carry out any instructions without reservations. The same year, an ARTICHOKE official wrote: “Let’s get into the technology of assassination . . . figure most effective ways to kill.” (Kaye and Albarelli, TruthOut, 2010)
The 1975 memo notes that in 1952, overall responsibility for Project ARTICHOKE passed from OSI to the Office of Security” but “evaluation of foreign intelligence aspects were to remain with OSI.” The memo refers to Frank Olson and his “peculiar and erratic” behavior following his unwitting ingestion of LSD administered by Dr. Gottlieb: “A few days later, Olson crashed through a window in a New York hotel in an apparent suicide.” It cites a memo dated Dec. 1, 1953 from the IG staff that impounded all LSD after Olson’s death, indicating that Gottlieb had administered LSD without prior approval. * Olson
ARTICHOKE set the diabolical blueprint for torture and assassinations, targeting American and enemy POWs, prisoners in U.S. federal penitentiaries, suspected counterspies and American leaders who defied CIA’s hidden agenda. ARTICHOKE operations continued to function alongside MK-ULTRA for another seventeen years and set the stage for current CIA torture interrogations of prisoners. Kaye and Albarelli cite a 1965 memo by Morse Allen in which he states: “[redacted] believes that somehow or other Martin Luther King must be removed from the leadership of the Negro movement, and his removal must come from within and not from without.”
XXVII. 1953: ARTICHOKE expanded its reach to civilian public health hospitals and institutions
CIA Mind-Control
A memorandum from Paul Gaynor, CIA Security Research chief to ARTICHOKE director, Morse Allen states: “It is imperative that we move forward more aggressively on identifying and securing a more reliable ready group, or groups, of human research subjects for ongoing Artichoke work.” The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was created that year, and the CIA found it remarkably easy to gain HEW’s approval for use of Federal medical facilities as fronts for covert drug and interrogation experiments using unwitting human subjects. Inevitably, nearly all those unwitting experimental subjects chosen for HEW-sponsored projects were African-Americans and persons from immigrant groups and what one Agency document referred to as the “lower classes.”
Additionally, Allen suggests to Gaynor in a memo titled “Artichoke Research Program”:
“There are some four thousand (4,000) American military men who are serving court martial sentences in the federal prisons at the present time. . .offer reduced sentences. . . Artichoke teams secretly working in the prisons could be passed off as “coming from nearby universities or research institutions.” (Kay and Albarelli. Cries from the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes, 2010)
About a week later, Morse Allen amended his September memo to include “federal hospitals and institutions under the control of the [U.S.] Public Health Service.” Within weeks, progress reports were sent to Gaynor about the experiments at three federal prisons, as well as a reformatory were submitted to Gaynor. Other experiments were conducted at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, at a VA hospital in Detroit, and at the Federal Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, KY which was run by Dr. Harris Isbell, a member of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs. The Center was funded by the NIMH and U.S. Navy; the experiments were specifically targeted at African-American inmates, who were considered by Isbell to be inferior to white inmates at the facility.
“The problem exists of ascertaining whether effective and practical techniques exist, or could be developed, which could be utilized to render an individual subservient to an imposed will or control, thereby posing a potential threat to National Security. . .We need to also explore the ‘subtle’ means of making an individual say or do things he would normally not consider through the use of covertly administered drugs, ‘Black Psychiatry’, hypnosis, and brain damaging processes. Dr. Chadwell feels these processes may be tried but they are ‘elaborate, impractical and unnecessary.’” [Marshall Chadwell was CIA’s director of Scientific Intelligence]
Indeed, in their article “Cries from the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes“ investigative reporters Jeffrey Kaye and H.P. Albarelli report that a former CIA official explained the reference to “Black Psychiatry”:
“‘Black Psychiatry’ refers to psychiatric methods used by trained and licensed physicians on subjects. These methods may not be in the best interest of the subject’s mental well-being and health. There was no shortage of or problems recruiting psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s who would willfully, and sometimes enthusiastically, practice ‘Black Psychiatry.’”
They note that various methods of ‘Black Psychiatry’ were provided in a training setting in the 1950s through to at least the 1970s at the CIA’s Butler Health Center facility in Rhode Island, where many physicians, including Dr. Robert Hyde, worked for the Agency. Butler Center also served as CIA’s central site for exposing its own officials and agents to LSD and other drugs. (Kay and Albarelli. Cries Past, 2010)
XXVIII. Dr. Harris Isbell’s experiments
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Harris Isbell’s experiments can only be described as torture — on par with Nazi human experiments. Isbell tested 800 psychoactive chemicals, including LSD, using as his subjects African American male prisoners addicted to heroin. He gave them heroin in exchange for He experimented using very high doses of LSD, and kept 7 of his subjects on the drug for 77 straight days. When they fell asleep, he used electroshock to wake them. (Jim Keith. Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness, 1999) From Healing to Hell (2011), by W. Henry Wall, Jr. an oral surgeon describes how Dr. Isbell destroyed his father’s brain and life with CIA-sponsored LSD experiments. His father was a physician and a former Senator who became addicted to Demerol after a dental procedure; it landed him at the Kentucky Center for drug addiction, a prison.
Daddy had been kept on in Lexington beyond the usual “cure” period. . . The additional time was to allow Isbell to observe and record his behavior following the drug assault. Even when he was finally sent home, having received no treatment of any sort for his drug dependence, Isbell made no provision whatever for psychiatric or medical follow-up. I found it heinous beyond belief that this violated man, still prey to paranoid flashbacks, was simply turned loose to his bewildered family and whatever fate might overtake him. The sudden onset of Daddy’s terror of being driven insane, of the mental derangement persisted as paranoia and “episodes” for years after his release.
The medical profession and the leading academic institutions where mind control research was done have not yet provided a meaningful public accounting, financial or ethical, of this experimentation. This is one of the reasons that the entire medical profession and academic community is implicated in the story.
XXIX. 1953: Artichoke Conference
CIA Mind-Control
Artichoke Conference: “use of criminals and the criminally insane have been very successful.” CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor stated at an Artichoke Conference meeting at Fort Detrick,
All individuals can be broken under mental and physical assaults and by such techniques as denying sleep, exhaustion, persuasion, starvation, pain, humiliation, and sickness. . .The capacity to endure assaults of all kinds varies in individuals. We need to teach the Artichoke techniques to medical officers in the field . . . we also need to combine these techniques with the work carried on at Edgewood Arsenal and at Camp Dietrich [sic] . . . and the special use of ergots, as well as Lysergic Acid. Experiments with new ideas, for example the hypo-spray instrument (owned by the E.R. Squibb Company) using criminals and the criminally insane, have been very successful.
XXX. Dr. Maitland Baldwin, a student of Harold Hebb explored sensory deprivation at NIH
CIA Mind-Control
Maitland Baldwin, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIH), had no moral inhibitions about carrying out CIA’s most radical experimental proposals. He had conducted “a rather gruesome experiment” on an Army “volunteer” who was kept in a box for 40 hours until he kicked his way out after an emotional break down during which he sobbed intensely for an hour. The experiment convinced Baldwin that prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed. John Marks relates that in 1955, Morse Allen, head of ARTICHOKE approached Baldwin about conducting an open ended sensory deprivation experiment to which Baldwin responded stating: “beyond that [40 hr. limit] 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” experiments.”
Baldwin presented his proposal; an experiment that would lock someone up in a lightproof, soundproof box indefinitely — to see what would happen. Mercifully, an NIH medical officer shot down the project as “immoral and inhuman,” suggesting that those pushing the experiments might want to “volunteer their heads for use in Dr. Baldwin’s ‘noble’ project.” (Marks. Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 8)
XXXI. 1953: Dr. John Lilly used electric stimulation to “map” brain locations that control body functions
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. John Lilly was a scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who conducted experimental studies on monkeys in an effort to “map” the body’s 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 discovered 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 continuous orgasms — at least once every 3 minutes — for up to 16 hours a day. (Marks. Manchurian Candidate, Ch. 8)
CIA and other intelligence agency officials requested a briefing. Dr. Lilly agreed only on the condition that the briefing and his work must remain unclassified, completely open to other investigators. The intelligence officials agreed reluctantly to his terms knowing that his openness would ruin the intelligence value of anything learned from him. But Dr. Lilly soon found it impossible to continue his work at the NIH because (a) his security clearance was tangled up in review; and (b) all other scientists at NIH had agreed to have their projects involving government intelligence agencies marked SECRET which meant access would require security clearance.
Furthermore, Dr. Lilly adhered to a personal ethics standard; the first human subject of any of his experiments would be he himself. In 1954, Dr. Lilly experimented with sensory deprivation and invented a special “tank” in which subjects floated in body-temperature water wearing a face mask that provided air but cut off sight and sound. According to his ethics, he and one colleague tested the consciousness-exploring water tank. Again, intelligence officials swooped down; their interest was 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? Dr. Lilly realized that the intelligence agents were not interested in sensory deprivation for any of its potential positive benefits; he concluded that it was impossible for him to work at the NIH without compromising his principles.
Like Aldus Huxley Dr. Lilly found sensory deprivation to be a spiritually integrating experience for him personally. He considered himself to be a scientist who subjectively explored the far wanderings of the brain. Marks writes,
“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 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 professional research community.”
After resigning from NIH in 1958, he worked with dolphins; the movie The Day of the Dolphin with George C Scott is based on Dr. Lilly’s work.
XXXII. April 10, 1953: CIA Director Allen Dulles launches “Brain Warfare” — Technological Fascism
CIA Mind-Control
Allen Dulles, a master propagandist demonstrated his adroit duplicity when he delivered a fear mongering speech about “brain warfare” at a national Princeton alumni conference. He described the “abhorrent” but effective vast Soviet experiment in “brain perversion techniques” when, in fact he launched a massive abhorrent CIA brainwashing manipulation project.
“The target of this “brain warfare” is the minds of men both on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis but responds to impulses implanted from outside. . . The Soviets are now using brain perversion techniques as one of their main weapons in preempting the cold war. Some of these techniques are so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.”
“it is hard for us to realize that [ ] behind the Iron Curtain a vast experiment is underway to change men’s minds. . . the perversion of the minds of selected individuals who are subjected to such treatment that they are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts. Parrot-like individuals so conditioned can repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion from outside.
“Soviet science and ingenuity made rapid strides in the study of mental reactions and in the nefarious art of breaking down the human mind. . . We in the West are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare because there are few survivors and we have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques. . .” (CIA-RDP80R01731R001700030015-9 Released 2003-05-05)
John Marks notes, “even as Dulles spoke, [ ] CIA officials acting under his orders had begun to find the scientists and the guinea pigs. (Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 8) Indeed, three days after this speech, Allen Dulles directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect those very techniques.
XXXIII. *1953: MK-ULTRA was hatched by Allen Dulles and Richard Helms
CIA Mind-Control
In a rare exchange of memos (1953) between the two men Dulles reaffirmed his support for utilizing psychiatry’s “applied medical science” for torture. And in his memo to Dulles (April 13, 1953) Helms (then chief, CIA Office of Special Operations) proposed a program for the “covert use of biological and chemical materials” both for its “offensive potential” to “give us thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential.” He recommended shielding the program under extreme secrecy: “Even internally in CIA, as few individuals as possible should be aware of our interest in these fields and of the identity of those who are working for us.” And he recommended Sidney Gottlieb to head its operations.
Gottlieb was CIA’s Director of its Chemical Division of Technical Service Staff (TSS, the “dirty tricks department”) whose expertise included lethal poisons and creative methods of assassination; some have referred to Gottlieb as the CIA’s sorcerer who attempted to raise assassination of political opponents to an art form. Out of his labs came a poisoned handkerchief designed to do in a Libyan colonel, a bacteriological agent for a Congolese leader and debilitating potions intended for Cuba’s Fidel Castro who escaped dozens of futile assassination attempts.
Sidney Gottlieb personified CIA’s immoral universe; a universe where there was nothing, however evil, pointless or even lunatic, that this unaccountable intelligence agency will not engage in, in the pursuit of its secret wars. These included the frenzied search for “truth serum” drugs for use in interrogating spies; mind control techniques to create unwitting double agents or robot assassins; sought out Nazi scientists who applied their state of the art torture methods for breaking human will, an art perfected on concentration camp victims. * Paperclip Gottlieb is reputed to be the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre and evil “Dr. Strangelove” character played by Peter Sellers in 1964.
Dulles agreed, naming this “ultra-sensitive” clandestine project, MK-ULTRA, which he exempted from normal CIA financial controls, authorizing Gottlieb to start projects “without signing the usual contracts or other written agreements.” (Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 4) The aim of MK-ULTRA was to develop methods for controlling human behavior through psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, radiation, graphology, paramilitary techniques, and various psychological/sociological/anthropological methods. It has been described as “a vast open-field of mind experimentation trying anything that might work, legal or otherwise on willing and unwitting subjects.” (Lendman. MK-ULTRA — the CIA’s Mind Control Program, 2010)
XXXIV. A vast web of clandestine collaborations between medical academics and the CIA
CIA Mind-Control
The CIA and DOD penetrated and compromised the research integrity of 88 non-government American institutions — universities, medical centers, hospitals; and covertly bankrolled substantially all of the post — World War II generation’s research into mass communication and techniques of persuasion, opinion measurement, and interrogation. This alliance between covert intelligence and academia proved seminal in perverting academic medical professionals and undermining the fabric of democracy.
MK-ULTRA quickly grew into a mammoth undertaking that outflanked earlier mind control initiatives, encompassing a wide-range of 149 sub-projects whose overarching goal was to develop covert “mind control” techniques that could alter an individual’s mental state and brain function. An extensive secret network of 185 psychiatrists and cognitive scientists who specialized in, psychopharmacology, psychological behavior conditioning, and behavior modification were recruited at 88 participating academic institutions.
These included: Harvard University and its affiliated, Boston Psychopathic Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital; Cornell Medical School, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Columbia University / NYS Psychiatric Institute; the University of Rochester; the University of Illinois Medical School, the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Lexington Kentucky, Center for Drug Addiction operated under the respectable cover of the Navy; Johns Hopkins, Princeton University, Yale University; Emory, the Universities of Minnesota, Oklahoma, Vermont; and McGill University in Canada.
Even before Sidney Gottlieb was appointed CIA’s chief of TSS Division (1953) to oversee MK-ULTRA mind control projects, he offered medical researchers whose skill and expertise the CIA sought, a golden opportunity since he had a sizable treasure chest to dispense. Funds started flowing secretly through CIA’s conduits — 15 foundations served as money funneling fronts. These included: the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy Foundation, Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Bureau of Social Science Research. (Marks. Manchurian Candidate, 1979; McCoy, Science in Dachau’s Shadow 2006) Government agencies also served as CIA conduits for mind control/ behavior modification experiments. These include: the Departments of Defense, Justice, Labor, Health Education and Welfare (HEW), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Science Fund (NSF), Veterans Administration (VA), Law Enforcement Assistance (LEA), and others. (Glen Yeadon. Nazi Hydra, 2008)
In effect, the CIA gained control of cognitive science, channeling the focus of research toward its dubious goal — to develop a psychological paradigm for mind control, and to perfect “scientific” techniques of torture for use in interrogations (euphemistically described as “effective techniques of persuasion”). The linchpin of MK-ULTRA was LSD whose potential use in psychological warfare and interrogation were extensively explored by CIA officials who sought to develop “extreme interrogation” techniques to effectively incapacitate an individual’s ability to make autonomous decisions, reducing humans to robots who could be controlled.
XXXV. The Secret Nature Of CIA Ties Led Academic Medical Scientists To Don Moral Blinders
CIA Mind-Control
Shielded by a wall of secrecy medical scientist overturned traditional medical ethics, as German academics had done during the Nazi reign. The danger of separating science from ethics and divorcing the medical profession from its humanitarian commitment to heal — not to harm — results in the collapse of democracy and of a civilized society. The covert collaboration between leading American medical researchers at premier academic institutions and government secret service agencies led to the commission of medical atrocities. Individual civil and human rights of thousands of Americans were trampled. Doctors and psychologists who collaborated in abominable experiments that sought to degrade and control the minds and behavior of conscripted human subjects whom they deemed inferior, and, therefore, expendable, bore the greatest moral responsibility. The comparison between the collusion of German doctors with the Nazi regime and the collusion of American psychiatrists and psychologists in government sponsored medical atrocities — including torture of unwitting human subjects and prisoners of war; and their participation in executions — is deplored by legitimate scholars and physicians who never lose sight of the Hippocratic Oath to heal, not do harm.
“State imperatives can corrupt medical ethics. The Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil. American physicians and psychologists employed by the CIA [conducted] unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors, teaches at Harvard Medical School. His latest book, which he edited with Richard Falk and Irene Gendzier is called Crimes of War: Iraq. Dr. Lifton notes that the policies that were dictated to the medical professionals created a psychological environment that made them capable of committing atrocities.
“There’s something about doctors engaging in torture or destructive behavior that strikes people as more dreadful than other groups. Doctors are committed to be healers, and however they may fall prey for money and status and all that, we expect them — we expect ourselves as doctors to remain healers in some primary way. And when instead of being healers, they join in with tortures or killers, that’s a devastating message to any society, and not one that we want to receive in our society.”
“Are doctors acquiescing to the regime if they use the materials supplied by the regime, or identify with the regime? I would say yes. It’s similar to physicians taking part in executions in this country. I can’t think of anything more wrong. A doctor is supposed to heal.” Sebine Hildebrandt, MD, 2012
The lavishly funded psychiatrists and psychologists contracted under MK-ULTRA were unrestrained — neither by peer review, ethical considerations, nor the scientific requirement that a valid experiment must have strict controls. The experiments sought to perfect techniques of physical and psychological torture, euphemistically referred to as “extreme methods of interrogation” which in addition to extracting information, sought to produce complete amnesia in the human subjects and in intelligence agents who had seen or known too much and could no longer be trusted. The diabolical techniques included various methods of hypnosis, verbal and sexual abuse; massive electroshock and psychological “regression” techniques; use of multiple addictive psychoactive drugs followed by sudden drug withdrawal which was known to cause excruciating physical pain; high doses of barbiturates followed by injected stimulants were used to achieve a groggy “the twilight zone” which CIA interrogators favored. They also experimented with psychosurgery and various electronic technologies to erase memory from consciousness and to control mood and behavior through remote electromagnetic means.
Clearly, none of these experiments had any therapeutic intent; they are in the category of sadistic torture. The extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA and ARTICHOKE experiments lasted for nearly 25 years. The subjects in these inhumane, sadistic experiments were “people who could not fight back”; they included soldiers, mental patients, prisoners and civilians, including young children. MK-ULTRA included at least four sub-projects specifically targeting children: 102, 103, 112, and 117. It was a brutalizing demonic program at taxpayers’ expense. (McCoy, 402) Under sub-project 86, radioactive isotopes were either implanted or injected in children. (ACHRE Staff Memo, 1995).
As McCoy states in Science in Dachau’s Shadow,
the human mind became a covert battleground for deployment of new weapons for mass persuasion and individual interrogations. . . the CIA led a massive, secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, with costs for psychological research and operations that reached, at peak, a billion dollars a year. (p. 402)
XXXVI. Dr. Charles Geschickter served the CIA both as researcher and funding conduit.
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Charles Geschickter was an extremely important asset for Gottlieb’s division, with his connections in high places and as a funding conduit. In 1955 he convinced Agency officials to contribute $375,000 in secret funds toward the construction of a new research building at Georgetown University Hospital. (That amount was doubled under the Federal matching grant program for hospital construction.) Marks cites a CIA document indicating that there was a clear understanding with Geschickter that in return for the CIA contribution, he would make sure the agency received use of one-sixth of the beds and total space in the facility for their own “hospital safehouse” and they would have a ready source of “human patients and volunteers for experimental use,” and 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. . .” According to Marks, “this 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. . .” (Manchurian Candidate, p.161)
Under MK-SEARCH, Geschickter continued to provide TSS with the means to assess drugs rapidly. CIA documents show that Geschickter tested stress producing chemicals, knockout drugs, and mind-altering substances on mental patients and terminal cancer patients at the Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. But his principal service to TSS officials was 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. The Geschickter Fund for Medical Research remained available as a conduit for a decade, until 1967. Geschickter testified before the Kennedy committee (1977) that he had not tested stress-producing drugs on human subjects while both his own 1960 proposal and the CIA’s documents indicate the opposite. (Marks, p. 151)
XXXVII. 1954: CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor provided an overview of ARTICHOKE methods
CIA Mind-Control
An Artichoke Conference was held at Fort Detrick at which Gaynor reminded officials that:
All individuals can be broken under mental and physical assaults and by such techniques as denying sleep, exhaustion, persuasion, starvation, pain, humiliation, and sickness. The capacity to endure assaults of all kinds varies in individuals. We need to teach the Artichoke techniques to medical officers in the field . . . we also need to combine these techniques with the work carried on at Edgewood Arsenal and at Camp Dietrich [sic] . . . and the special use of ergots, as well as Lysergic Acid. Experiments with new ideas, for example the hypo-spray instrument (owned by the E.R. Squibb Company) using criminals and the criminally insane have been very successful.
And attendees were advised by Morse Allen and Paul Gaynor that “this type of work must not be overwhelmed and overburdened in a maze of statistics, technical reports and learned academic experimentation since previous experiences along these lines clearly indicate that when this appears the end results are almost always negative.” (Kay and Arbarelli cite a CIA memo in Cries from the Past, 2010) The concerted determination to conceal the nature of these activities by minimizing documentation is prima facie evidence that those involved in designing and testing sadistic interrogation methods that subjected human beings to mental assault weapons aimed at destroying their mental and physical functions were fully aware that such activities were unlawful abominations.
ARTICHOKE Field Missions: beginning in January 1954, the CIA systematically dispatched special top secret Artichoke Teams that included Agency officials and contract physicians who traveled frequently to offshore locations including Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Philippines to CIA and military safe houses and installations, where enhanced interrogations and mind-control experiments were being conducted on defectors, double-agents, and kidnapped foreign agents. The team assignments were marked “EYES ONLY.” By 1961, Kaye and Albarelli report, there were 257 specific such assignments; nearly all would fall under today’s “enhanced interrogation” classification. Urgent field reports to CIA headquarters express concern about serious “disposal problems” that pose security risk: “This A [Artichoke] session involved four subjects all of whom present serious disposal problems after results are produced. . . Subject was given a sedative suppository to increase his resistance to pain, this in order to intensify his ordeal midway through the planned session. . . The urgency of consideration of this case is due to the fact that one of the men is already somewhat stir crazy and has tried to escape twice.” (Albarelli A Terrible Mistake; A Secret Order: Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronization)
XXXVIII. 1954: “Can an individual be made to perform assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?”
CIA Mind-Control
“Can an individual be made to perform assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?” The question was contained in a CIA memo dated Jan 22, 1954. The question was not entirely hypothetical; the memo specified that “the assassination would be against a prominent ** official or if necessary, against an American official. . .” It stipulated that the test would target a foreign national who was once a CIA “asset” but no longer cooperated.
. . . it was proposed that the individual could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party. ARTICHOKE [presumably, hypnosis] would be applied and the SUBJECT induced to perform the act of attempted assassination at some later date. All the above was to be accomplished at one involuntary uncontrolled social meeting. After the attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the SUBJECT would be taken into custody by the [redacted] Government and thereby ‘disposed of.’ . . . Whether the proposed act of attempted assassination was carried out or not by the SUBJECT was of no great significance in relation to the overall project.
The memo concludes that despite the elaborate setup, a hypnotized assassination “probably” could not be undertaken because the subject would be involuntary and unwitting; access to the subject was strictly limited to social engagements; and hypnotism actually provided “[no] or, at the very most, very limited physical control or custody of the subject.” However, despite the limitations it suggests that a “crash course” could be undertaken.
“If headquarters provided greater access to operational plans and gave the order, “the ARTICHOKE Team would undertake the problem in spite of the operational limitations.” A final, handwritten notation at the end of the document reiterated, “This would be made available when and if required.” ARTICHOKE files
XXXIX. 1953: Dr. Wolff and Dr. Hinkle investigate Communist Brainwashing
CIA Mind-Control
Allen Dulles turned to Dr. Harold Wolff, a renowned neurologist, whose expertise was migraine headaches and pain; and, Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, a cardiologist both at Cornell University Medical College to investigate and prepare a report about Communist brainwashing techniques.
Their report (1956) invalidates CIA propaganda about Communists using secret psychoactive “truth drugs” or any advanced interrogation techniques; instead, the report indicates that communist interrogation methods rely on skillful, if brutal, application of police methods — isolation, sensory deprivation, interrupted sleep, and mind deadening routine — no drugs, no exotic mental ray-guns, or any other fanciful machines.
“In no case is there reliable evidence that neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists or other scientifically trained personnel have designed or participated in these police procedures. There is no evidence that drugs, hypnosis or other devices play any significant role in them.”
Wolff and Hinkle concluded that the Soviet technique rested on the cumulative effect of intense psychological pressure and human weakness. The Chinese sought to re-educate prisoners by applying group pressure and repetitive ideological arguments to convince prisoners to conform to the precepts of Marx and Mao. The Hinkle Wolf report (1956) remains the definitive U.S. government document on the subject of the massive political torture and re-education programs in China and the Soviet Union. (Marks. Manchurian Candidate, Ch. 8)
The findings pulled the rug out from those who claimed that the U.S. needed to defend its citizens from a Communist offensive using sophisticated “brainwashing” weapons. It would have been reasonable to assume that projects focused on finding a “magic” drug to elicit the truth, would have been dropped. That did not happen because both the CIA and academic researchers were heavily invested in keeping afloat a vast and elaborate nationwide, brainwashing program. They were deluded by the notion that American ingenuity will discover a “scientific breakthrough” for eliciting truth.
Wolff proposed a partnership with the CIA aimed at mastering the techniques for gaining control over human beings’ thought patterns and behavior patterns. Drs. Wolff and Hinkle obtained permission from Cornell’s President and high University officials to conduct these experiments at Cornell on behalf of the CIA. They continued to test “secret drugs and various brain damaging procedures” on unwitting patients. Wolff claimed sensory deprivation had a “valid medical rationale;” he offered to put it into operational use, claiming it could be part of a treatment that relieved migraine symptoms. Sensory deprivation, he said, made the patient “more receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist.” Drawing on the Stalinist method of breaking prisoner’s will, Wolff proposed depriving his patients of sensory stimulation until they “show an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure.”
Harold Wolff had absolutely no moral scruples; he even offered to advise the CIA on “terminal experiments” in which subjects were harmed or killed — as long as they were performed elsewhere:
“We expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.” Wolff and every medical professional who conducted behavior control and interrogation techniques for the CIA knew that without the CIA secrecy shield, any professional caught holding human beings prisoner, shooting them full of unwanted dangerous drugs, and subjecting them to torture with the possibility of permanent harm or even death, would be subject to criminal prosecution for kidnapping and aggravated assault. Furthermore, a professional caught in such activities would have been disgraced among his peers. But, “by performing the same experiments under the CIA’s banner, he had no worry from the law, [and] his colleagues could not censure him because they had no idea what he was doing. . . he could take pride in helping his country.” (John Marks. Manchurian Candidate, Ch. 2)
Wolff then requested that the Agency to give him access to all its files relating to “threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing, “black psychiatry,” hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents so that he could study and refine those methods.
Wolff set up CIA’s major front group — Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology — through which funds were funneled with himself as president, on instruction by Sid Gottlieb who sought to distance the CIA from the more abhorrent MK-ULTRA projects. Wolff had absolutely no moral scruples; which qualified him to be President of the NY Neurological Association; later President of the American Neurological Association, as well as editor-in-chief of the American Medical Association’s Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.
XXXX. *1950s–1980: Psycho-electronic brain experiments — surgically implanted electrodes
CIA Mind-Control
The psycho-electronic experiments aimed at controlling individual behavior, ultimately to be used as a means for social control — thereby laying the groundwork for a totalitarian state. Physicians involved in these nefarious experiments include: Dr. Jose Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale University Medical School (1950s); Dr. Robert Heath, chairman of psychiatry at Tulane (1950–1980); Harvard professors: Dr. William Sweet, director of neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Vernon Mark, head of neurosurgery at Boston City Hospital, and psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Ervin; Dr. Louis Jolyon West, chairman Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA (1970s)
XXXXI. 1950s: Jose Delgado, MD, pioneered wireless implanted electrode to control human behavior
CIA Mind-Control
Delgado was the Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale University Medical School who was called a “technological wizard” for his numerous inventions. He invented a miniature electrode implanted in the brain — called a stimoceiver — which is capable of receiving and transmitting electronic signals wirelessly through radio waves. Once implanted, the subject’s emotional and behavioral responses could be manipulated by remote control. Delgado perfected his technique in monkeys and cats and dramatically demonstrated the effectiveness of his stimoceiver in a film clip showing how a fully grown charging bull was stopped in its tracks with a click on the remote box.
In 1952 Delgado co-authored the first a peer-reviewed paper describing long-term electrode implantation in humans. Much of Delgado’s work was funded by the Office of Naval Intelligence, a conduit for CIA funding in the 1950s and 1960s. He implanted a stimoceiver in at least 25 humans — mostly women diagnosed with schizophrenia or epilepsy. The device was heralded as a great scientific contribution in the 1960s and 1970s. In his article in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1968) he stated that “brain transmitters can remain in a person’s head for life.” In 1969, Delgado published Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, in which foresees a new era when humans will undergo “psycho-civilization” by linking their brains directly to machines.
Delgado’s stimoceiver was used clinically to inhibit or incite aggression in patients which Delgado viewed as a humane alternative to lobotomy. Several of Delgado’s experiments were recorded on film. One shows a woman calmly playing a guitar until an electric current remotely stimulates her brain, at which point she jumps up violently and smashes her guitar against the wall. The experiment was repeated three days in a row. (Psychocivilization) Delgado also used non-invasive remotely controlled electromagnetic radiation. He proudly summed up how he has “used electrodes implanted for days or months to block thought, speech, and movement, or to trigger joy, laughter, friendliness, verbal activity, generosity, fear, hallucinations, and memory.”
Delgado’s reductionist views of human psychology and his quest to provide mechanical means for externally controlling human behavior poses a terrifying threat to individual freedom and autonomy. If his mechanical device had proven itself reliable and predictable, it would have provided governments with push-button population control. Indeed, in a 1966 presentation, Delgado acknowledged that his experiments “support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion, and behaviour can be directed by electrical forces and that humans can be controlled like robots by push buttons.”
(cited by Guyatt. Aspects of Anti Personnel Electromagnetic Weapons)
Delgado invented an implantable device — “chemitrode” — to ensure the involuntary intake of psychotropic drugs which were released directly into the brain. [In 2006, the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, began a drug implant experiment on mental patients. The experiment was backed by the University’s Bioethics Center, which in turn is backed by millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies. * https://ahrp.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=7114&action=edit>
Delgado’s 1969 book remains the sole full-length work on intracerebral implants and electronic stimulation of the brain. While subsequent work has long since superseded the techniques described in this book, Delgado’s achievements were seminal. Delgado also embraced the view espoused by Ramon y Cajal, a histologist who inspired him: “knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make man the true master of creation, his most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of his own brain.” (Bartas and Ekman. Psychocivilization and its Discontents, 2001)
Albert Einstein famously observed, “it has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. . . The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” (Albert Einstein, the Taoist, 2013)
Dr. Peter Breggin summed up Delgado’s written statements in his article The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery” which he submitted into the Congressional Record (1972):
We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically manipulated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain
The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain. (Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1972)
Ultimately, after the Congressional hearings Delgado’s experiments on humans were publicly scrutinized and condemned and he was pursued with lawsuits by individuals who accused him of experimenting on them against their will. Delgado retreated to Spain, where the government offered him a job to start a medical school at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
In an interview in Madrid in 2001, when the 85-year old Delgado was asked what therapeutic results came from these experiments, “As a whole, they didn’t result in any methods, except in the case of patients with chronic pain.” Delgado admitted that not one useful application of the stimoceiver has come out of his research. He indicated that the therapeutic benefits of implants were unreliable; specific behavior could not be predicted in humans; results varied widely even in the same patient.
“We knew too little about the brain. It is much too complicated to be controlled. We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didn’t even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate.” Delgado says all of this without a trace of bitterness. (Psychocivilization)
XXXXII. 1950–1980: Dr. Robert Heath: Surgical Explorations in Brain Physiology
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath was the chairman of the Dept. of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University; his invasive surgical brain physiology experiments were at the outer limits of existing neurophysiological knowledge. He surgically implanted electrodes into is psychiatric patients’ brains to test the effects of electrical brain stimulation (EBS). The first 19 patients who were subjected to EBS were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The published reports clearly indicate that the surgical procedures used were unsafe: “four had seizures, six of the nineteen schizophrenia patients developed infections, three had other neurologic sequela, one had acute cardiac failure, and two died from causes related to intracerebral infections.” (Baumeister, 2000)
The CIA and military provided funding for the Tulane experiments; and in 1954, Heath was the principal speaker about electrical stimulation at Edgewood Arsenal. In 1956, he reported that he and his colleagues had discovered a protein they called taraxein in the blood of schizophrenic patients and that when injected into healthy “volunteers” caused symptoms of schizophrenia. His claim received wide public and professional attention. But for forty years no one has duplicated that finding. (Baumeister, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2011)
By 1968, Heath’s team had implanted deep brain electrodes into 52 patients — 42 with schizophrenia, 6 with intractable pain, and 4 with epilepsy. An additional 5 patients underwent the surgical procedure; one developed infection, one had a seizure during stimulation, and one who had been diagnosed with melancholia died six weeks after surgery from brain trauma. Heath claimed these were “harmless.” The experiments were medical travesties. Nevertheless, Heath continued to conduct EBS experiments for 30 years, inflicting pain, brain damage and degrading the humanity of 100 victims whom he turned into living human pincushions. As many as 125 electrodes and small tubes were implanted into the each of these patients’ brains to arouse the emotional core of their subjects. Heath and his team injected a wide variety of drugs directly into the brain tissue including LSD and bulbocapnine. In large doses, bulbocapnine was known to produce “catatonia and stupor.” According to one memo, the CIA sought information as to whether the drug could cause “loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, loss of will power and an increase in toxicity in persons with a weak type of central nervous system.”
The patients’ emotional reactions to EBS and the drugs were observed and documented on film using one-way mirrors. Heath used the films showing patients’ reactions to EBS to illustrate his marvelous advance in neuroscience: ‘His face twists suddenly into a terrible grimace. One eye turns out and his features contort as though in the spasm of a horrible science-fiction metamorphosis. ‘It’s knocking me out. . . I just want to claw. . . I’ll kill you. . . I’ll kill you, Dr. Lawrence.”
Heath justified these cruel and inhumane experiments as being “therapeutic” in nature. The researchers’ “near-evangelical” enthusiasm for their technique falls within psychiatry’s tradition of brutal brain damaging procedures that over the decades have been promoted as “cures” for schizophrenia — e.g., ice pick lobotomies, electroshock, insulin coma, and currently prescribed drug cocktails. Heath’s experiments included lurid electronic sexual stimulation and response. In “Electrical Self-stimulation of the Brain” he described some patients who would self-stimulate 1,000 orgasms an hour. He publicized his work both in the scientific and popular literature. His abominable human experiments were mostly lauded during the first twenty years. And he was elected President of the Society for Biological Psychiatry in 1969. Dr. Peter Breggin reports that in Heath’s presidential address, “Perspectives in Biological Psychiatry,” he attributes all significant advances in psychiatry to be biological, and asserts that so-called mental patients suffer from “inappropriate anxiety” whose “instantaneous” cure is by psychosurgical techniques. As for drug addiction, Heath attributes it to a “neurological defect in their pleasure centers” that can be cured with corrective surgery. (Breggin. Return of Lobotomy, 1982)
XXXXIII. A critical analysis of Robert Heath’s publications by Alan Baumeister (2000)
CIA Mind-Control, Eugenics / Bioethics
Alan A. Baumeister (2000), distinguished professor and the former director of Vanderbilt University Kennedy Center, analyzed Heath’s published reports and concluded that the Tulane EBS experiments refutes Heath’s claims that the experiments were motivated by a therapeutic justification. Prof. Baumeister concluded that Heath’s claim was invalid. The experiments lacked both scientific and ethical therapeutic justification. He notes that Heath and his Tulane team were selective in referring to data that fit their hypothesis. And they knew that EBS was a drastic surgical procedure and its results uncertain. Furthermore, he noted that the Tulane researchers lacked essential knowledge about the specific brain functions and initially lacked surgical expertise.
The experiments appear to have been motivated by scientific curiosity; they were explorations into the unknown without a justifying theoretical rationale — “no sound basis has been advanced for the assumption that schizophrenia is due to specific septal pathophysiology.” Heath and his team justified these physiology explorations in the brains of living human beings, rationalizing that these patients were “hopeless” — in their view, they were expendable. Eugenics and racism are palpable features of experimental medical atrocities.
Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid (2008), states that the subjects of Dr. Heath’s experiments were mostly African American prisoners; “under the guise of treatment, psychiatric experimentation with imprisoned African Americans has spanned the poles of barbarity and sophisticated personality destruction.” (p. 253)
Read The CIA and Tulane which outlines the covert ties between Tulane University and the CIA.
XXXXIV. 1951: Pont-Saint-Esprit — the Devil’s Bread or a Disastrous CIA–LSD Experiment?
CIA Mind-Control
In August, 1951, an outbreak of frenzied hallucinations, delirium and insanity shook the 500 inhabitants of the small French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit. The symptoms resembled descriptions of the malady known as St. Anthony’s Fire which afflicted communities during the Middle Ages. More than 500 people were affected; 7 people died, two committed suicide; 50 persons were interned in a psychiatric hospital and many others were seriously harmed. More than 60 years later, the cause of the catastrophe is shrouded in mystery. It was attributed to ergot poisoning from bread infected with psychedelic mold or mercury poisoning.
TIME magazine reported: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies.” Other newspapers that converged on the scene described people throwing themselves from rooftops, women and men throwing their clothes off and running the streets naked, and children complaining that their stomachs were infested with coils of snakes. (Albarelli. A Terrible Mistake, 2010) One man told doctors he saw his heart explode through his chest. He begged them to put it back in. One girl thought she was being attacked by tigers. Another imagined she had a copper head. In a fit of madness, a young boy attempted to strangle his mother. A town doctor was unable to assist during the pandemonium because for three days, he was unable to speak.
A French documentary, “Le Pain du Diable“ (The Devil’s Bread) was broadcast on Feb. 13, 2010. It reconstructed the tragedy, describing the madness that seized the inhabitants of the village. A postman described his horrific ordeal: “It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms.”
He remembers falling off his bike and being taken to the hospital in Avignon. He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control. “Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly . . . screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down . . . the noise was terrible. I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.”
Hank Albarelli, a journalist whose exhaustive investigation of the CIA’s cover-up of the death of Frank Olson (A Terrible Mistake, 2009) uncovered a CIA document connecting Frank Olsen, U.S. biological warfare scientist with the Top Secret CIA Special Operations Division that covertly conducted a wide variety of chemical warfare experiments, including anthrax. Frank Olsen The CIA document was labelled: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin — tell him to see to it that these are buried.” David Belin was the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission that was created in 1975 to investigate CIA’s lawless actions. This memo raises serious questions about Belin’s covert CIA ties; compromising the integrity of the Rockefeller Commission.
According Albarelli the website of the U.S. Justice Department states that in the early 1950s was “the Sandoz chemical company went so far as to extol LSD as a potential secret weapon of chemical warfare. Its main selling point was that a small amount, added to the drinking water or sprayed into the air could make a whole army of soldiers, disoriented, psychotic and thus incapable of fighting.” Albarelli also found evidence that the CIA and Army scientists had planned to conduct an LSD field experiment in NYC; it was delayed until after the Pont-St. Esprit disaster.
Another CIA memo (1954) obtained by Albarelli reports about a CIA agent’s conversation with a representative of Sandoz (at the time) the sole manufacturer of LSD, who is reported to have stated: “The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all. . . It was not grain ergot.”
The French documentary “Le Pain du Diable“ ends with a question mark as to who is responsible. (Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD? BBC, August 23, 2010)
LSD advocates such as Ralph Metzner, PhD (Harvard) a friend of Timothy Leary (who admitted having collaborated with the CIA), dispute that the drug was involved in the Pont St. Esprit madness. Metzner cites a biography of Albert Hofmann (in German, 2011) in which Hoffman refutes the claims made about both Ergot and LSD in connection with the tragedy at Pont-Saint-Esprit. But Hofmann was not an impartial expert, and hence not a reliable source. He was a Sandoz official, and would have had strong reasons to deny that LSD was used as a weapon and that it caused the horrific communal insanity.
In an interview with Michael Horowitz published in High Times (1976) Hofmann lied when he stated: “Sandoz supplied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who then distributed it in America. Probably that is how the CIA and others got it.” The FDA does not buy, sell or distribute drugs. The key to the mystery of Pont-Saint-Esprit may be buried with Frank Olsen, the most well-known casualty of Project ARTICHOKE.
XXXXV. Nov. 1953: Dr. Frank Olson’s body arrives at the NYC Medical Examiner’s office
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Frank Olson was a high level civilian U.S. biological warfare scientist who worked with CIA’s Top Secret Special Operations Division (SO) which worked as a team with the Army Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick from 1943 until his death in 1953. The mysterious circumstances of his death continue to haunt the CIA as snippets of information surfaced over the next 60 years.
The Chemical Corps conducted a wide variety of covert chemical warfare experiments, including anthrax. His Top Secret work involved developing counter-biological weapons. The CIA sought a biochemical it could use to incapacitate or kil both individuals and large groups of people. The latter were called “field tests”, an example of a disastrous LSD field test is Pont- Saint-Esprit (1951); a small French village where 500 inhabitants suffered terrifying hallucinations; seven died and two committed suicide.
Olson travelled widely to places where these deadly chemicals were tested; he met surreptitiously with Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel. Between 1950 and 1953 he worked closely with British Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down. (Albarelli, 2009) Secret Chemical & Biological Experiments on U.S. Soldiers
Dr. Olson was involved in CIA’s Projects BLUEBIRD, MK-NAOMI and ARTICHOKE, the controversial interrogation programs first conducted at Camp King in Germany. In 1953, he travelled to Europe and visited biological research facilities in London, Paris, Norway and West Germany’s Camp King where he witnessed brutal interrogations in which the CIA committed murder using biological agents that he had developed. (Bloomberg News, 2012) What he witnessed reportedly horrified him. A colleague stated in a German documentary (in 2001) that Olson was morally distraught about what he had witnessed. He indicated that “the experiments at Camp King reminded him of what had been done to people in concentration camps.” (Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, 2013). Olson considered leaving his job and contemplated a new career.
Upon his return from Germany, Olson and the other Special Operations scientists spent a week at a CIA retreat known as Creek Lake where Sidney Gottlieb, director of CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) laced their drinks with LSD to test whether the drug would produce the same results if given surreptitiously to CIA agents as those produced at Camp King. According to Albarelli, after ingesting LSD Olson was led to a separate building, where he was subjected to an intense interrogation for the next two days to determine whether he was a security risk. It seems that someone had reported that Olson breached security and talked about Pont-Saint-Esprit to several people. Pont-Saint-Esprit
Following his ingesting LSD and being subjected to an interrogation, Olson suffered a mental breakdown, whereupon CIA research scientist Dr. Robert Lashbrook escorted Olson to New York, ostensibly for treatment. Olson was seen three times by Dr. Harold Abramson, head of Mt. Sinai’s allergy clinic; and an assistant professor of Physiology at Columbia (until 1958) who was a major researcher and promoter for the CIA and Army from 1951 through to at least the late 1960s. Abramson “treated” Olson with bourbon and the sedative Nembutal — a known dangerous combination. Olson spent the last night in a New York hotel with CIA agent Robert Lashbrook. Abramson went on to organize six internal LSD conferences. (Manchurian Candidate, Ch. 5)
For twenty-two years, the Olson family was kept completely in the dark about the circumstances of Frank Olson’s death; they were told that he committed suicide by leaping from a window in his 13th floor hotel room in New York at 2:30 in the morning. His death was officially declared a suicide (but publicly kept secret). His family didn’t buy the “suicide” story. In 1975, twenty-two years after his death, the mystery would begin to unravel. But it would take another twenty years — forty years in all — after his death before the truth about Dr. Olson’s death would be revealed.
Olson’s death seems to have been achieved using the method recommended in CIA’s secret Assassination Manual issued in 1953, which recommended disguising murder as an accident or suicide; and it suggested drugging the person, hitting him in the temple with a blunt object and then causing “a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.” (Moreno. Undue Risk (2000) cited by Lederer; Bloomberg News, 2012)
In 1994, Olson’s sons took legal action alleging that the CIA murdered one of its own agents and then attempted to pass it off as a suicide. In 2013, a federal judge dismissed the family’s lawsuit while acknowledging that: “The public record supports many of the allegations that follow, farfetched as they may sound.” (Judge’s decision, 2013) University of Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno quotes Eric Olsen:
The moral of my father’s murder is that a post-Nuremberg world places the experimenters as well as the research subjects (my father was both simultaneously) at risk in a new way, particularly in countries that claim the moral high ground. Maintenance of absolute secrecy in the new ethical context implies that potential whistle-blowers can neither be automatically discredited nor brought to trial for treason. Nor can casualties arising from experiments with unacknowledged weapons be publicly displayed. The only remaining option is some form of “disposal”. This places the architects of such experiments in a position more like that of the Mafia dons than traditional administrators of military research. The only organizational exit is a horizontal one. In the face of this implication the CIA enforcers of the early 1950s did not flinch, though historians along with the general public have continued to see the state decked out in all its finery. (Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, 2001)
XXXXVI. Nov. 1953: Dr. Frank Olson’s body arrives at the NYC Medical Examiner’s office
CIA Mind-Control
Dr. Frank Olson was a high level civilian U.S. biological warfare scientist who worked with CIA’s Top Secret Special Operations Division (SO) which worked as a team with the Army Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick from 1943 until his death in 1953. The mysterious circumstances of his death continue to haunt the CIA as snippets of information surfaced over the next 60 years.
The Chemical Corps conducted a wide variety of covert chemical warfare experiments, including anthrax. His Top Secret work involved developing counter-biological weapons. The CIA sought a biochemical it could use to incapacitate or kil both individuals and large groups of people. The latter were called “field tests”, an example of a disastrous LSD field test is Pont- Saint-Esprit (1951); a small French village where 500 inhabitants suffered terrifying hallucinations; seven died and two committed suicide.
Olson travelled widely to places where these deadly chemicals were tested; he met surreptitiously with Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel. Between 1950 and 1953 he worked closely with British Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down. (Albarelli, 2009) Secret Chemical & Biological Experiments on U.S. Soldiers
Dr. Olson was involved in CIA’s Projects BLUEBIRD, MK-NAOMI and ARTICHOKE, the controversial interrogation programs first conducted at Camp King in Germany. In 1953, he travelled to Europe and visited biological research facilities in London, Paris, Norway and West Germany’s Camp King where he witnessed brutal interrogations in which the CIA committed murder using biological agents that he had developed. (Bloomberg News, 2012) What he witnessed reportedly horrified him. A colleague stated in a German documentary (in 2001) that Olson was morally distraught about what he had witnessed. He indicated that “the experiments at Camp King reminded him of what had been done to people in concentration camps.” (Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, 2013). Olson considered leaving his job and contemplated a new career.
Upon his return from Germany, Olson and the other Special Operations scientists spent a week at a CIA retreat known as Creek Lake where Sidney Gottlieb, director of CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) laced their drinks with LSD to test whether the drug would produce the same results if given surreptitiously to CIA agents as those produced at Camp King. According to Albarelli, after ingesting LSD Olson was led to a separate building, where he was subjected to an intense interrogation for the next two days to determine whether he was a security risk. It seems that someone had reported that Olson breached security and talked about Pont-Saint-Esprit to several people. Pont-Saint-Esprit
Following his ingesting LSD and being subjected to an interrogation, Olson suffered a mental breakdown, whereupon CIA research scientist Dr. Robert Lashbrook escorted Olson to New York, ostensibly for treatment. Olson was seen three times by Dr. Harold Abramson, head of Mt. Sinai’s allergy clinic; and an assistant professor of Physiology at Columbia (until 1958) who was a major researcher and promoter for the CIA and Army from 1951 through to at least the late 1960s. Abramson “treated” Olson with bourbon and the sedative Nembutal — a known dangerous combination. Olson spent the last night in a New York hotel with CIA agent Robert Lashbrook. Abramson went on to organize six internal LSD conferences. (Manchurian Candidate, Ch. 5)
For twenty-two years, the Olson family was kept completely in the dark about the circumstances of Frank Olson’s death; they were told that he committed suicide by leaping from a window in his 13th floor hotel room in New York at 2:30 in the morning. His death was officially declared a suicide (but publicly kept secret). His family didn’t buy the “suicide” story. In 1975, twenty-two years after his death, the mystery would begin to unravel. But it would take another twenty years — forty years in all — after his death before the truth about Dr. Olson’s death would be revealed.
Olson’s death seems to have been achieved using the method recommended in CIA’s secret Assassination Manual issued in 1953, which recommended disguising murder as an accident or suicide; and it suggested drugging the person, hitting him in the temple with a blunt object and then causing “a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.” (Moreno. Undue Risk (2000) cited by Lederer; Bloomberg News, 2012)
In 1994, Olson’s sons took legal action alleging that the CIA murdered one of its own agents and then attempted to pass it off as a suicide. In 2013, a federal judge dismissed the family’s lawsuit while acknowledging that: “The public record supports many of the allegations that follow, farfetched as they may sound.” (Judge’s decision, 2013) University of Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno quotes Eric Olsen:
The moral of my father’s murder is that a post-Nuremberg world places the experimenters as well as the research subjects (my father was both simultaneously) at risk in a new way, particularly in countries that claim the moral high ground. Maintenance of absolute secrecy in the new ethical context implies that potential whistle-blowers can neither be automatically discredited nor brought to trial for treason. Nor can casualties arising from experiments with unacknowledged weapons be publicly displayed. The only remaining option is some form of “disposal”. This places the architects of such experiments in a position more like that of the Mafia dons than traditional administrators of military research. The only organizational exit is a horizontal one. In the face of this implication the CIA enforcers of the early 1950s did not flinch, though historians along with the general public have continued to see the state decked out in all its finery. (Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, 2001)
XXXXVII. 1983: CIA “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual”
CIA Mind-Control
This CIA interrogation manual, “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual” (1983) is an updated version of KUBARK manual (1963) incorporating sections of KUBARK. The 1983 CIA training manual allocates considerable space to the subject of “coercive questioning” and psychological and physical techniques and recommends: “manipulate the subject’s environment to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception.” It sought to teach foreign agents ways to extract information from people without extracting fingernails, advising against physical torture as counterproductive. Instead, it discussed using intense fear, deep exhaustion, solitary confinement, unbearable anxiety, and other forms of psychological duress against a subject as ways of ”destroying his capacity to resist” his interrogator. [A highly redacted version of KUBARK was released in 1997 in response to a FOIA request by The Baltimore Sun; a less redacted version was released in Feb. 2014 in response to a FOIA request by investigative reporter, Jeffrey Kaye]
The threat of violence and deprivation are among the prisoner interrogation techniques recommended:
“The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources“
Under the subheading, “Threats and Fears,” the CIA authors note that “the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.” In subheading “Pain,” the guidelines discuss the theories behind various thresholds of pain, and recommend “pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance… if a subject is ”required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time, the immediate source of pain is not the ‘questioner’ but the subject himself.”
A section on sensory deprivations suggests imprisoning detainees in rooms without sensory stimuli of any kind, “in a cell which has no light,” combined with “persistent manipulation of time” for example, “ ‘questioning’ of a resistant subject should be done on a varying schedule so as to disrupt his sense of chronological order.” The KUBARK manual concludes: “An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective.” (National Security Archive)
In 1989, the CIA sent a report to Congress stating “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” (Scott Shane. A Broken CIA Devoted to a Failed Approach, The New York Times, 2014
XXXXVIII. “Radium Women” Dial Painters: Unwitting Experimental Subjects, 1920 – 1990
U.S. Radiation Experiments
Radium lit clockBackground: In the early part of the twentieth century, radium was a symbol of science, medicine, and technology; power and wealth. Radium was a luminous vehicle for progress, publicly displayed for a week at the Public Health Exposition in Grand Central in New York (1921) to which medical students, physicians and nurses were invited as there was great medical interest in the its potential uses. World War I created a huge demand for a variety of radium-treated devices. Radium was a highly valued investment for the dial painting industry which by 1920 had sold more than 1,000,000 illuminated watches and clocks. (RE Rowland. (Radium in Humans. A Review of U.S. Studies, 1994)
The first major American manufacturer was Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in New Jersey (renamed U.S. Radium Corp in 1919) which hired young women (mostly teenagers) to apply radium paint to the tiny figures and numbers on clocks, watches, speedometers, compasses, barometers, and dashboard instruments of airplanes, and submarines – so that these instruments would glow in the dark.
Glowing paint containing radiumThe girls put the paint brushes containing radium-226 between their lips in order to maintain a fine pointed brush tip. As a result, they wound up swallowing a minimum of 125 mg of radioactive fluid each day. The first report of disfiguring jaw necrosis suffered by a 20-year old “dial paint woman” was in December, 1922. After surgical removal of parts of her jaw bone, blood transfusions, and the onset of lung disease, she died in 1923.
One after another, the dial painters began to fall ill. Their teeth fell out, their mouths filled with sores, their jaw bones rotted; the frequency of horribly disfiguring cancers of the upper and lower jaw were particularly frightening to women and the cosmetics industry which used radium in some of its products. By 1924, nine dial painters were dead. They were all young women in their 20s who had been healthy, happily painting tiny bright numbers on delicate instruments.
Radium Girls Tragic deaths
Early example of collaboration by elite academic medical institutions with industry
The U.S. Radium Corp hired academic physicians to provide “scientific evidence” to vindicate the company from liability. Hundreds of young dial painters suffered from a variety of acute disintegrating bones and died painfully. The company hired a doctor from the Industrial Hygiene section at Harvard Medical School (1924) who found no direct cause of harm; the cause was identified as “occupational poisoning.” However, an independent physician, Dr. Frederick Hoffman, named the new disease, “Radium Necrosis” in a paper he delivered at the American Medical Association in May 1925. A New Jersey county medical examiner then conducted an extensive examination of the women; he performed autopsies and described the symptoms, etiology, and pathology of the disease.
A series of law suits followed that were settled out of court for paltry sums. The radium dial industry denied culpability; U.S. Radium Corp hired yet another medical doctor, this time from the Industrial Section of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, who “based on the scientific data acquired [by] Dr. Frederick Flinn [who] reached the conclusion that there was no industrial hazard in the industry.” (A.E. Rowland. Radium in Humans: A Review of U.S. Studies (1994, p. 14)
The tactics used by the radium industry in its legal defense presaged the tactics and strategies of the tobacco industry and the pharmaceutical industry in commissioning academic-affiliated physicians to provide “scientific evidence” denying the severe adverse medical effects of their products. While the radium dial painters were outwitted by industry’s legal and medical team, their plight aroused considerable public outcry and led to the establishment of standards for industrial exposure to ionizing radiation. Under pressure from the New Jersey Consumer’s League, the U.S. Public Health Service finally recommended safe practice radium guidelines in 1933.
Radium GirlsThe radium dial painters became unwitting human experimental subjects
The death of a wealthy steel manufacturer in 1932 who ingested a popular radioactive tonic, called “Radithor,” prompted Robley Evans, a physicist at California Institute of Technology to investigate the safety of radium and to attain expertise in radium safety. Evans was commissioned by the U.S. Army to conduct the first of a series of epidemiological follow-up experiments on the long- term effects of radioactivity in human beings using the women dial painters as his subjects at the Radioactivity Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1934-1950).
The second phase experiments (1950-1970) were conducted on behalf of the Atomic Energy Committee (AEC) which studied the health risks of atomic tests. The research involved measuring the amount of radium in the women’s bodies; an arduous, repetitive process which Evans’ assistant described as “tough not only on the subject, but it’s tough on the researcher…you have to keep repeating the experiment all over again…” (Dept. of Energy Report, 1995 cited by Maria Rentetzi, 2004) The third phase of research that began after 1970, focused on research by the center for Human Radiobiology at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and the University of Chicago. Eventually all of the radium case studies were centralized at Argone.
In standard medical literature, the radium experiments on the “radium women” are described as an occupational hazard, a “most valuable accident” which has subsequently contributed invaluable information, contributing to the establishment of safety radiation standards. For the researchers, the women were considered a “valuable” means to an end; which was the accumulation of scientific information. This is an immoral utilitarian view that is pervasive among researchers. R.E. Rowland, the author of several ANL human radium studies (1978) and the final review (1994) states in his article posted on the web, Radiaum Dial Painters – What Happened to Them?:
“By the time the final radium study was terminated in 1993, 3,161 radium dial painters had been identified and 1,575 of them had been seen and studied. A total of 6,675 people containing radium had been identified and 2,403 of them had been located and measured.”
Rowland states that the two studies confirmed that dial painters who were employed after 1926, following instructions NOT to tip brushes in on their lips, “was all that was necessary to reduce markedly the amount of radium acquired by these dial painters.” In his Radium in Humans: A Review of U.S. Studies (1994) Rowland cites a report by Schlundt et al, published in 1933, describing an experiment conducted on 32 patients with dementia praecox (i.e., schizophrenia) at Elgin (Illinois) State Hospital who were subjected to radium administered intravenously. As our chronology of medical atrocities amply demonstrates, it was the norm and practice of American physicians to exploit such patients’ vulnerability and use them as human guinea pigs.